I am convinced that if, in a world where anything can happen, a paper-eating pest suddenly appeared—just as a pest arose in elm trees and dried out the world’s elm forests—if such a pest came into being and devoured every library in the world, nothing would have happened to our Tumanyan’s work. All of us Armenians, grandfathers and grandchildren, mothers and children, fathers and sons, would gather for a mejlis in a hall as large as the Ararat Valley or the Lori plateau, and each would say what he knew about Tumanyan or from Tumanyan.
The children would ring out “Hey, Green Brother”; the scholars would piece together the unfinished Thousand-Voiced Nightingale; the reciters would tell David of Sassoun; those who wrest Homeric laughter from a despairing reality would tell Brave Nazar and A Drop of Honey. The very youngest would take red and green pencils and draw pictures: there a girl and a lamb are walking along a road, there a father and son are walking, there a deer is fleeing… And those children’s pictures would be the truest contribution.
Sos Sargsyan would celebrate Requiem like a liturgy, and I:
From the great thoughts of my kindly heart,
From the boundless depths of those great thoughts,
My mighty spirit willed it and arose
To look from on high upon God’s world.
…It saw the world—beautiful, endless,
And the narrow homelands within it,
And their various gods,
And the stern saints, partial and cruel,
It saw that everyone devours everyone,
Each homeland its own children…
And we would say what the unfinished masterpiece The Thousand-Voiced Nightingale was to have been: a tale of our song’s healing role before the mother of us all, this wounded world, this earth scarred by evil, this accursed paradise. We would speak, talk, converse, and line by line, hour by hour, the immensity of his work and life would rise again in its fullest form.
There would certainly be errors, but before we brought the picture to its final, finished, perfect form, those very inaccuracies would announce that they were errors, that they were not Tumanyan’s word,
that Tumanyan’s breath had never caressed them.
A Mozart, a Verdi, a Bach, any fragment of classical sculpture, and, in the natural sciences, every formula, contains the possibility of such a complete deciphering of the whole. But in the art of the word it is the destiny of the rarest of the rare.
In this imagined revival and reconstruction I have allotted myself a slightly greater role. Yet I am convinced each of us would do the same, because Tumanyan is our one figure whose life and work each of us knows a little better than the next.
Let us not, however, set a pest loose among the books. They already have many enemies, first among them Oblivion, which suffocates books and entire authors on library shelves. If right now, at this very hour, we asked ten or a hundred random families or people of any language and nation to revive orally, from memory, their national Shakespeare, Goethe, Ferdowsi, Pushkin, Tumanyan, our Tumanyan would be the most complete. No author in the world belongs so wholly to everyone: young and old, book-lover and illiterate, the emotional and the reasoning, patriot and parasite—all who inhabit the world of their mother tongue. He himself said of Shakespeare: “The English race has grown, expanded and scattered across the whole world, from Great Britain to America, Africa, India, Australia and very distant islands. In many places it has even established independent governments. No king can now gather the English race beneath his sceptre. The only king who can extend his rule over the entire dispersed English race and preserve its national wholeness everywhere is Shakespeare.” He said it of Shakespeare, but essentially it is about himself. The native country torn apart and divided like Christ’s garment; the people driven to the four corners of the earth and still without a final refuge: no force, alongside the instinct of collective self-preservation, can bring Armenians, torn by political, geographical and economic borders, under one and the same allegiance except the power of the mother tongue, and within the mother tongue, above all, Tumanyan.
Like the patriarch Moses’s road from Pharaoh’s captivity to the Promised Land, the fifty-four years of his life precisely repeat the half-century of Armenian national life in his time:
birth into the princely Mamikonian family, withdrawn into the Koshakara mountains beneath a shepherd’s felt cloak and the family name Mehrabyan-Tumanyan, an origin to be proven by the noble lustre of his conduct and work. The child’s ringing voice glorifying the deeds of the fathers, prompted by the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 and, on the Caucasian front,
the brilliance of the Armenian Loris-Melikov… Descent from the trees and flowers of the native country—in one poem he has thirty flower names: oregano, tsnkatsaghik, St John’s wort, shar-sharurik, jasmine, mignonette, adonis, horot-morot, corn spurrey, tuberous pea, rye brome, kurd, chicory, harsnatsaghik, golden-flower… Yes, he sprang from the native country’s trees and flowers, its words and speech; from a peaceful father, village priest and poet, ploughman and mower; from a shepherd mother, a shepherd’s daughter. An eagle’s gaze encompassing at once the universe and the universe within himself, surprisingly attested by one of his family’s names too: Ghuzghunents, meaning “the Eagles”.
the city, contact with books, beginning and ending almost with one name: issues of Hyusisapayl, typeset twenty years earlier by Aghayan and published by Nazaryan, whom Abovyan had drawn towards education, and Abovyan had been taught by Alamdaryan… A little effort and, name by name, it would become clear who gave Alamdaryan the lamp of self-knowledge, and who gave it to that man, and to that man, back into the depths of centuries, to the Bagratunis’ Ani and further, to Sahak, Mesrop and Vramshapuh, and higher and earlier still, to the holy lamp of Aragats: this people’s unfaltering flight towards light and beauty.
contact with his like, and the fully armed band is ready to fly “towards Taron, towards home”. He fell ill during Raffi’s nationwide funeral procession; the grave illness left him behind his flock, which went on to be torn apart in the joint trap of Cossacks and Hamidiye forces. Like his dead friends, he had thought the Cossacks his rear guard, and now it emerged that he had none. Everyone was openly hostile to your national strengthening; we Eastern Armenians were not the rescued in Russia but hostages of Western Armenians, while the Armenians of the Homeland were hostages of Caucasian Armenians in Turkey. And nevertheless, at the decisive moment he would say: “We have said and repeat: even in the Golitsyn years most unfavourable to us Caucasian Armenians, the Caucasus received forty thousand Armenians fleeing the Turkish sword.”
during the years of Armenian-Tatar clashes he went from village to village, mountain to mountain, raising the flag of peace. Wherever he set foot, no dagger flew from its sheath, no evil word from a mouth, no bullet from an ambush. His word hovered over the hostile positions: “If we are strong and fight, we are without conscience; if we are weak and fight, we are without sense.”
his band of armed, mounted emissaries was not a group of petitioners for peace in our common Caucasian home, but a detachment imposing peace. And yet the only shot fired by the detachment was his, Tumanyan’s, into the ceiling of a hospitable house in a border village, into an oak beam, to mark the successful conclusion of the peace mission. That bullet exists; it remains.
during the clash between the Armenian and Georgian republics, it was again Tumanyan’s tall figure that stood erect between the brother peoples.
during the years of mutual coldness between Russian officialdom and the Armenian people, years of severe inquisition for this people that had sealed its loyalty in blood, Tumanyan’s image, tempered by national dignity and a sober assessment of the situation, again rose before Russian nationalist thinking. Here: “But who are you to wish to put us to the test? We have come and are coming towards Great Russia, towards the great Russian people, and if we have loved and joined anyone, it is them, not you and your kind. When were we united with you or separated from you, that today we should return to you again and you should still test us? Step back; today is not your day. Let the one come forward who can reveal Great Russia through greatness of soul and goodness of heart, the one who, while conquering countries by his strength, conquers peoples’ hearts by his virtues.”
He speaks as though he has bronze-forged regiments at his back, when he has nothing but a flock of nonexistent angels. His only ally is “God’s light called conscience”, presumed to be in the heart of everyone, everyone, even the enemy.
he was imprisoned and stood before a court in Petersburg. A Drop of Honey was written in prison and sent out tucked inside the clothing of a babe in arms:
And while the fighting had not ceased,
Famine came everywhere.
Famine came, and with it sickness;
The blossoming country was laid waste…
then he was in Etchmiadzin, among the multitude of dying orphans; then Van; then Karakilisa, where the battle of May 1918 was gathering; then his native Dsegh. He comforted our defeated commander, the village comforted the refugees. At night the defeated commander and the poet of a shattered nation walked among the multitude of orphans sleeping in delirium. Then he was everywhere, plugging with himself the cracks in the Armenian fate, suffering. They were no longer cracks: the dam of our history and hopes had burst, its contents escaped, dispersed and dried up. Then Yerevan, amid the suicidal strife between Armenians and Armenians. Next he was returning through the torn country to Tiflis. The train was Turkish, the destination Georgian; he had been received into the carriage under a Turkish diplomat’s protection and invitation. In his native country he was a stranger, and others were the masters. It is terrible to imagine the silence that had settled heavily in the carriage.
What did they speak of? Did they find words? Perhaps he had withdrawn into himself, was seeing again the oak-clad slopes of his childhood, where he wanted a shelter, to sit among books and ponder the Thousand-Voiced Bird.
He regarded that chance escape in his youth as a sin and atoned for it with his whole life, placing his young son’s life too upon the altar, bringing his entire great clan and great family to the front line of national disaster.
His life, yes, repeats precisely the fifty-year life of his people, but his work repeats his people’s life in every sphere and every century, from the age of myths to centuries yet to come. Standing amid chaos, he was clarity itself: whatever he told to “be” became clear and existed, once and for all. Like his traveller of eternity—I know that there it is not a traveller of eternity but a mysterious old man—like his traveller of eternity, he passes through this land of people. Wherever he sets foot, Armenian spaces and times open up, an Armenian seal is placed upon nature, animals, people and events. Sayat-Nova and the hermit of Narek Monastery, Khorenatsi and Abovyan, Charents and the Epic test their Armenian character by his national spirit. With his seal the Armenian painter and musician, architect and theatre people seal the Armenianness of their line, colour, accent and modulation. From within the shell of a foreign language, Armenian sons and daughters of other nations affirm their spirit’s Armenian belonging through his spirit. A golden measure of the humanity of art, by which authorities and people of culture in general test the authenticity of their work, and events and reality test their naturalness and their transcendence.
He brought nothing new. The sources of Towards Infinity are the glaciers of Indian nirvana; Brave Nazar is a Kurdish, Moldavian, German, Armenian folk tale; A Drop of Honey comes from Gosh’s fables; The King and the Peddler is drawn from Davrizhetsi’s history; The Dog and the Cat is a Lori tale; behind David of Sassoun stands the benefactor Garegin Srvandztyants. Anush is both a Dsegh tale—so much so that they still show the path of the lovers’ flight and Saro’s grave there—and a retelling of Proshyan’s Sos and Varditer, Raffi’s Sara and Mirakyan’s The Hunt on Lalvar, and an adaptation from Goethe. The Monastery of the Dove takes shape from Chamchyan’s History, and so on and so on. All of this, encompassing almost the entirety of Tumanyan’s work, testifies to one thing alone: to say “people”, even great individuals, even names belonging to the whole world, is not enough. Nations, peoples and cultures labour to create a genius. He is the product
of their effort and suffering, their striving to become clear, to be perfect, their upward movement towards seeing themselves as a god. Just as the entire environment of Tumanyan the man laboured to consecrate the moral greatness of its chosen one: the grey-haired Aghayan and the young Zoryan, Princess Mariam and Dr Zavriev, the glorious Andranik and an unnamed man from Mush, industrialists and labourers, editors and the barely literate, party-political figures and those who bypassed parties.
He, yes, brought nothing new, just as the rising sun, the spreading light, brings nothing to the earth and its people: it merely draws our world of animals, people and plants out of darkness. So, in the great world he opened and unfolded, only the light is his, Tumanyan’s; only the entire new day is his.