— Your last two books, The Hangover and The Master, appeared almost simultaneously last year with the publishers Sovetsky Pisatel and Khudozhestvennaya Literatura. It is difficult to call them new: apart from Metsamor, appearing in Russian for the first time, the other works were already known to Russian readers—for example, The Master was published in Druzhba Narodov in 1987. Clearly the material in these two collections is not accidental: it is the result of your silence, rather than the editors’ ill will. How long did your silence last this time, and what filled it?
— For a long time now I have written nothing, to the delight of my ill-wishers. That is no life for a writer. Probably, even to describe one’s own death, a person must feel healthy and write in conditions tolerable for creation: have a minimum of peace, a minimum of comfort, the possibility of solitude. Yes, yes, to describe one’s own malignant tumour, one must first be healthy.
— What kind of health do you mean?
— Every kind. But in this case, the health and peace of the whole society. If peace were established throughout the country now, I would breathe a sigh of relief. Alas, we grumble and show impatience as before, demand decisive measures and decisive changes, do not tolerate or want to hear another’s opinion, and, most incomprehensibly, crave not goodness but revenge and blood. This was to be expected. When you encounter the prosperity of other countries, it becomes clear that it has been achieved through a policy of reconciliation and tolerance. Let us call things by their names: poverty, with all its characteristic complexes, commands the parade in our country today. And poverty inevitably brings blood, blood and blood.
— How can bloodshed be avoided?
— A sick person tries to hide his sores and pains, avoid contact with others so as not to infect them inadvertently. We have not yet reached that delicacy and exacting care in our relations with one another, in our relations with peoples. Yet one can restrain something within oneself, show generosity, even humility if necessary, forgive another what one would not forgive oneself. We do not try to forgive, do not even try to listen to our neighbour. We live in a vacuum of ideas about one another. For instance, what does the average Soviet philistine know today about Assyrians or Azerbaijani Jews, Black Tatars or the Central Asian republics, Georgia or Armenia or the Baltic states? He makes no distinction between a Latvian and an Estonian: to him they are all Balts, whom the same philistine envies and treats warily, yet respects, sometimes feeling his own weakness before them or something similar. And Transcaucasians, in that same philistine’s view, are, in a word, hucksters: what relations can there be with them? Because of journalists’ irresponsibility, the image of extremists and Blackshirts grows stronger day by day, and those whom yesterday they called Georgians without distinguishing nationality have today, without even noticing it themselves, been renamed Armenians. In this atmosphere of ignorance, only very large national communities can assert themselves. Naturally, in this situation I feel complete sympathy with each Baltic republic’s centrifugal aspirations: they cannot make sense of all this and therefore reach towards their northern neighbours, hoping for a calmer and more dignified life than here. Clearly, if I were a Balt and saw that the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict could not be settled, that no road could be cleared for truth and justice, civilisation and humanity, I would try to protect myself from that headache. Everyone seeks his own road to salvation.
— Once, asked why many prose writers and playwrights fell silent at the height of glasnost, Vladimir Arro replied: probably to make sense of what was happening…
— Frankly, I would answer differently. I do not know how much I am poeticising what was said, but in Andrei Rublev, one of my favourite films, there is this episode: how Rublev begins work on The Last Judgement. Imagine a wall prepared for a fresco: painting can begin, but Rublev does not touch the wall. It seems to me Tarkovsky wants to say that Rublev does not paint The Last Judgement lest it become reality. That is, through silence he tries to prevent what might happen. Yet despite his silence, the Last Judgement takes place. I think all Soviet literature now resembles Rublev struck dumb: by not embodying today’s events in words, we fear that blood and the demonic force of evil may come into the world in the word’s wake. We fear that Last Judgement in our books, because there truly is great humanity in silence, in leaving unsaid, in concealment. If you reveal every layer of truth, you will have to destroy all life. I am a conservative. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I belong to a people that has seen too much blood, been deprived of the possibility of an independent state, suffered persecution, pursuit and massacres for centuries up to this day, and therefore I truly value every opportunity to preserve life’s traditional course so that there are as few upheavals as possible. For that we must be tolerant of our own and others’ sins, try to understand and forgive one another. I fear revolutions, fear maximalist slogans. I think the person calling for the most destructive revolution has no daughter who might be raped in the street by militant rioters, no family that might be deprived of a roof, or his family is somewhere in America while he holds forth here about his thought’s intellectual flight.
Recently, in an American auditorium, I met compatriots representing the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. The Soviet press always accused them of terrorism and other sins and presented them as a bogeyman. During the meeting I unexpectedly understood that these people were conservatives just like me, that they feared anarchic moods in the Soviet Union as much as I did. It is time we too finally realised that the state needs not revolution, not a coup, but unhurried, painstaking, difficult work of transformation.
— Almost as in Mandelstam: “But the victims do not want a blind sky; // Work and constancy are preferable.”
— For how many years we have eaten bread unworthily; now we must hunger with dignity. We deserve this poverty, and now have only one way out: return to peaceful labour, to fill the emptiness we ourselves helped create.
— We are talking now, while the inner editor, the writer’s first enemy, weighs things disgustingly within me: “This will pass, but they will hardly print this even in our times”… Habit. Have you noticed in yourself someone who stifles your own words? Has there not been too little sincerity in Armenian literature over recent decades, because we clipped our own wings?
— Eventually, through the efforts of those who wished us well, the inner censor appeared. You begin playing cat and mouse with yourself. You write a particular work with a certain drama, passions flaring, an explosion. Say one character is Armenian, another Turkish, each with his own problems. But the inner censor insists that this is no place for the Turk, nor is the Armenian with his problems needed at that moment. And now the story is on the brink of ruin, and you involuntarily turn to Aesopian language. As a result you have written something, yet seem not to have written it. Nevertheless, I think artistic perfection is the beauty before which even an ill-wisher’s hand retreats. If someone still wants to correct your writing, perhaps you yourself provide that opportunity through the imperfection of your words. Yet we know that in such unnatural conditions genuine, solid literature has been written and created. As for Armenian writers, I think subconsciously we have never felt ourselves full masters of this country and therefore none of us opposed regression on global questions, leaving that right to Russian intellectuals. Say, a Solzhenitsyn could not have arisen among us, if only because he would not have been expelled from the country but simply physically destroyed.
— The situation in literature has changed radically. We have learnt many new names. But mainly Russian writers have overcome the zone of silence. The impression is that no one in the republics had unpublished work.
— That is a complicated question. Practically all our republics have found themselves in a condition in which their own Berdyaevs and Gumilyovs have yet to emerge. Only after returning to their own literatures and establishing themselves can those writers return to the all-Union reader. Besides, after Solzhenitsyn a great many works suddenly lost their value and meaning.
As for Armenia, the tragedies of recent years have thrown us back several decades. We must recover what has been lost not only in the economy but in culture too. True, the Armenian diaspora abroad has created a sufficiently interesting and distinctive cultural layer in historiography and several fields of art; many works have entered international circulation. But even here in our republic, let alone throughout the country, we are practically deprived of the opportunity to engage with that wealth. We find ourselves in a mysterious situation in which Armenia’s history exists on two planes: one in the Soviet interpretation, the other, undistorted, known to the whole world. We have been served so much substitute truth that we have grown poor not only materially but spiritually.
— What were your relations with editors like?
— We are all Tolstoys and accordingly want our own Makovitskys as editors. Here an editor is, as a rule, your worst enemy, beginning with yesterday’s little girl who imagines herself either censor or editor, protecting me from my own text. I am not merely disappointed in my editors; thinking about them was unpleasant to me. An editor is called to uncover the Mozart hidden within you, not to be an executioner in the guise of a semi-literate lady on literature’s fringes or those young women who have appeared in countless numbers at publishing houses.
— With the abolition of censorship and editorial arbitrariness, lies did not disappear. And for now we are in no way protected from them. In Aksyonov’s apt expression, “As the sphere of discussion expanded, so did the sphere of lies.” In practice the enormous country is deprived of full information about everything. How can one live amid that lying? I understand this is not the best subject for a conversation about literature, but returning to silence, I think silence in this situation is better than the untruth presented as truth.
— That next lie will again create counterfeit literature which by tomorrow—no, today—no one will need. The literature of the not-so-distant past, which demanded considerable effort, was called upon to replace genuine culture. Alas, before us is a blinding emptiness. Heaps of novels have been written that have become waste paper today. And today too half-truth, falsification, is being created. I do not even know how to fight such falsification and imitation. Shall we create a new alphabet, a device to catch truth? Are we not even able to distinguish truth from lies?
— Oh no, we know everything perfectly well…
— And if we do not? It is one thing to know and remain silent, another to know and speak. The word lays bare the true extent of our knowledge. Do we really know everything? I do not think so. I simply hope that we Armenians are not the very last among peoples. They may continue obstructing, frightening and forbidding us, but Armenia has seen worse and, as we know, has survived and will live. And our connections with the outside world will widen, however, I repeat, possible friends or ill-wishers may obstruct them; there are many in all sorts of offices. One acts so without malice, automatically, in the good old tradition, because he cannot do otherwise; another has quite far-reaching aims and barely conceals his hostility. It may be some official of our own, a kindred soul in the rotten apparatus, settled there like a lazy, slobbering cat in a warm corner, who cannot be driven from that corner at any price. But where would he go, what is he good for, if power is his only chance to snatch his share, and he will not yield his power to anyone under any circumstances? Often I plainly feel another resistance, that of the central government, which evidently finds it difficult to understand our problems, for which we are a little soldier in a great political game, and that little soldier can be sacrificed. I did not want to speak of this, but perhaps must: those who possess power have one logic—he is subordinate, so guilty of something. For it is the guilty who can be subjugated. They do not need a crowd of angels; they need sinners, idlers, traitors, embezzlers. These are easy to govern. Especially since cause and effect can always be exchanged. Guilt will be found if there is someone guilty. Over the past two years we have often encountered such facts.
The tragic events in Georgia shocked everyone. But the first staging, in which the role of the guilty was assigned to the people, was at our Zvartnots airport. Unfortunately, no commission was created to investigate the “disturbances” at Yerevan airport, but even without it the single script is clear, according to which troops either arrive late or hurry excessively to provide help. And the young man filming what happened was killed. I am certain there would have been neither the Meskhetian Turks’ problem nor the mass killings in Baku and Sumgait if those in power had not needed to prove their indispensability. Look, they say, what anarchy will reign in the country if you remove us from power.
— Do you remember, a few years ago you were brought the notes of an eyewitness to the Turkish massacres of 1915, which struck you by their naturalness? Could you ever have imagined becoming a witness to something similar? Though it is not your subject at all, you have your own world, and suddenly… As a writer, will you ever describe everything we have lived through in this time?
— I have addressed the realm of social catastrophes in my books, but I confess I did so with the greatest distaste, because the smell of decay continually struck my nose and made me shudder. I imagined my later life not beside my former characters but in a much earlier past. As for describing today’s upheavals, perhaps there will be younger writers with stronger nerves than mine. Recently Samvel Shahmuradyan’s documentary book about the Sumgait tragedy was published, and, thank God, he remains strong as before.
— And have you never wanted to turn to pure public commentary? One so wants to cry out, ring every bell so that people hear the truth.
— For me, prose is a natural condition. In my latest novella I described a particular situation; I thought it was only a slight departure to one side, a retreat aside, a small excursion into the past from which I would quickly move to my own subject. But because even in passing I did not want to be superficial, imprecise or approximate in the details, that excursion accumulated detail. There was murder too—the events took place in the summer of 1918, during the Young Turks’ campaign led by Vehib Bey—and suddenly, without wishing it, I became a prophet, predicting today’s disasters. While working on the novella I did not want to lay bare in words what stood before my eyes. And I saw cowardice, betrayal, all the human filth one can imagine. But as soon as I reached the description of murder, I put the pen down; I physically could not write it, my hand literally refused to hold the pen. Speaking of Rublev, of how in the beginning was the WORD, I meant myself too… The events of Sumgait overtook me. Now I want to continue the novella again, but this time, unfortunately, as a “herald-historian” I can scarcely keep up with the Azerbaijani–Armenian events.
— What way out do you see at this moment for the republic and the people?
— What I shall say may seem absurd, but the way out lies precisely in this impasse in which we find ourselves. Life goes on; the people will come to their senses, stand on their feet, attend to their affairs. Many negative things will surface; everything will happen, buying and selling, various schemes. Those leaving will leave—I am certain emigration will rise sharply—those staying will stay. Necessity will compel us to clear not only the ruins but every kind of rubbish. Before our eyes is the prosperous example of today’s civilised world, which will not allow a return to the past, either to Stalin or to Mao. Whatever we say, our life seeks to adopt that experience, first as a substitute that irritates us with its impoverished forms and possibilities, then as an independent civilised life. May God give us health so that we can participate in all this.
Interview conducted by R. YEGHIAZARYAN
Literaturnoye Obozreniye