Hakob Demirchyan was born a hundred years ago, in October 1886. His literary name Mndzur, which sounds a bit strange to our ears, is a loan from the native Mndzur mountains, which the dictionary of synonyms says is "shattered, shriveled, ashen, ashen". By the way, from his stories, which are characterized by him as "landscape" or "landscape", from those wonderful landscapes, carved mountains emerge, fruits of the dry and hot country grow in his gardens, and his wives, his brides, pick the grass handful by handful and eat from the old, worn, carved, stony slopes.
One of the books with a total volume of about one thousand pages published during his lifetime was named after his native village Armtan, which is "the Armatana of Khayasa or Hayasa mentioned in the Hittite pnakits in the second millennium BC, Mndzur, Muzuri, also mentioned in the same pnakits". The name of the other book "Blue Light" does not even have an approximate relationship with the colors and symbols of any literary-artistic trend, it is the name of their mountain. The third collection of those picture-stories "Krunk, why are you Kugas" already directly mentions the homeland of the songs of longing and sojourn, the homeland of Kuchak, the Khokhojun Armenian dialect, the natives, the homeland of Metsarents. "The Turkish name of my province is Guruchai, we say Guruchai. Ghuruchai is a province with deep sandy valleys on the left bank of the Euphrates between Kemakh and Akna, it has sixty-six villages, the most famous of which are the two Armtans... Now the trains of steam trains coming from Tivrike will cross the opposite bank of the bridge over the Euphrates, even though the village that gave birth to Metsarents is Lichk under Binkyan, i.e. Ilyich was built in front of my native plateau and its station is there. They will go to the lakes of Kemakh, Yerznka, and Kars."
The province is a sunny valley of good harvest and clean life, if we are to judge by the Armenian villages. even the light of writing and education shines on this valley and the surrounding areas, the children's backpacks are filled with primers along with bread. Ancestor of thirst and always a fan of the future light, writing and knowledge, these villages from the last grades are just tearing the still khaki Sanasarians of Erzurum. and it is a valley of filth, cesspools, bottomless poverty, if we go by the image of Kurdish and Ghazlbash villages. These images, juxtaposed in the same field in the same good river valley, do not oppose Mndzuri, they are opposed by history, and the reason is not at all that the community of the natives was founded on fertile lands from the beginning, leaving the waterless drylands to the future neighbors. that is the reason why the ruling ideology of military-feudal rule has reserved only the right of hard labor to the indigenous community and has given its Turkish community exclusively the privilege of striking power to conquer and rule. This discrimination had to be there in order for the warrior state to have a stable tax payer and to have a permanent strike force.
Of course, the privileged community is not yet an army, and it is certainly not only the pashas in the army, especially the non-Turkish, Kurdish and Ghazlbash groups of the community are not like that, but the immediate presence of the subject community imposes on them the situation of the army and the pasha, and the pasha himself sits in the common behind the village farthest from the residence of the sultan and the pasha, and all these pashas together are the sultan's. they are the undrafted army, they will form an army at the first sign that of course it will not be the army of the worldly master of the country, but the army of the spiritual master, but the spiritual and worldly masters, the caliph and the sultan, are here embodied in one and the same Turkish monarch, the caliph raises his community against the infidels, the sultan "restrains". The corrupt here is not called to hide, nor to hide its nature - to dominate and rule, and here is the result. In its part of the subject community, the same river has become a canal for mills and a water tank, in the part of the ruling community, it has been lost in the ravines. one and the same valley turns into a garden, step by step, apron by apron, and with the borders of the rulers, it becomes a rocky place. The community of subject Armenians fills its granaries in such a way that it can enter even an eleven-month winter without worries and need will not knock on its door - and the "legal" owner of those granaries, the fourth army of Yerznka, looks at those granaries with satisfied satisfaction, and the "semi-legal" owner of the dispossessed owner looks at them with open hostility, the privileged community, the caliph's army, the same: the undrafted army of the sultan. looks at the deprived with insult, because, as Mndzuri testifies, "the first and second looters did not enter our villages. in the first, the Bakhdiars and Gureshans came and sat down on the banks of the Euphrates with flintlock guns and sharp swords. gave gifts to their chiefs, they also repelled the enemy until Yerznkaye's cavalry arrived. The following fall, Akn, Binkyan, and our five villages did not suffer a second robbery, because our gaimagam, who was a cousin to the commander of the fourth army, Zeki Pasha, ordered cavalry to be brought in advance.
For now, they got by with gifts: "thirty silver mosques, rupees, mahmuti jewelry, canvas, clothes, henna, aprshum", for now they restrained themselves and went to a peaceful neighborhood to ask for acid or sour water for their patient, henna for their mother, to be hired as a farmer and herdsman in the subject community... but the times of rushing and beating with bells and whistles will still come and its evil signs have been sealed on the face of the earth for a long time: "ghzlbash villages with Armenian names", abandoned monasteries, Armenian villages without men, only women and children.
Mdzuri testifies. the government could not collect taxes in kind. the country had no roads, if it was to be collected, the mule tracks of the hilly country could not bring so much food to the seashore, taxes were collected in drams, and the province had no drams because it had no buyers. After that dram, the village sent its man to the city: to Polis, Europe, Odessa, distant America, when from Gurucha to the port of Kirasso - the way was seven-day portage, carpentry, in general, such jobs that a village man can do in the city. The people of Armtans were bakers, they had bakeries in Polis, they ran mills and bakeries. The hardships of many people were fully rewarded, and a couple of images of the return with a porter have commemorated Mndzuri, some were already famous in the state and empire, and a couple of images are also remembered from their victory parties, many of them remained hostage to the city for generations, they gave their entrepreneurship, their fresh energy of the province to the city, they made the city shine, they made the city alive, but they themselves they did not become residents of the city either, because the city was not their homeland. Their homeland was the distant village and house, their part of the river, a couple of fields, two pieces of garden, a goat with tan ears, a red ox the color of red bands.
Sons of a nation that lost its statehood, they saw their homeland, their country, their statehood in their community, their village, their home was their state, they lost their feet in foreign cargo stations and markets, but they kept the home of that distant country. From their place of cultivation in the city, they hired a farmer in the village, they were a city garbage collector, coal worker, stable keeper - they were at a lower job than their farmer in the village, they probably earned less than they paid to that farmer who threshed their land and mowed their fields in the village, but they threshed, but they let them mow. Perhaps it would be expedient to move the upper class to the city, the mental and physical suffering would be less, but they did not do that - the village should be the house, it was the homeland, they were the sons and owners of that homeland, without that homeland, they would have been bourgeois or mass, Khuzhan, lumpen-proletarian, the Turkish military elite would have been called jingyana, gypsy, bosha, and so they are Armenians who have migrated, distant The care of the motherland makes moral knights out of them.
"If you have castles or villages in your country and you are their landlord or prince, do not surrender yourself to the dreams of positions and wealth or to the temptation of high royal gifts, do not give your land to the king in exchange for his gold, and instead do not take over the management of royal dominions, even if they are four times as far from your borders. And vice versa. no matter how small and insignificant it is, stick to your homeland, which, by raising you to the status of a sovereign lord, makes you close to the king, rather than reducing him to the class of even rich servants and subordinates. Of course, this instruction of the Greek general was sent to other people, but over the ruined castles and bowed princely heads, it is now in a vicarious call with completely different people from the 11th century, the settled Armenians, who have not even heard the names of Bagratunis, Artsrunis or Kilikian Rubinians, and do not even know that they are their fragments, but their behavior, their attitude towards the world, has perceived the lesson of history. it is the behavior of a prince.
At the very least, it is interesting that neither they nor their fathers and grandfathers, who had become gold and "right" from their sojourn, did not reserve the right to own a house, they did not give them the right to sell or bequeath, they did not consider themselves to be the owner of the house, but the guardian appointed over those houses from the past and future generations. Word by word, this is how they answer the sometimes "cocky" fathers who reserve their rights. "Who will you throw out of the house?" What is the house, the fields, the fields, the goods, the goods? to our grandfathers, who knows how many hundreds of years ago our grandfathers have drawn us, you say to me, you earned and earned." And yet, the whole village, "country", their colony of sojourners turned their backs on the one who behaved like that, as a robber who stole from their homeland, from their future grandchildren and long-gone grandfathers and handed it over to other owners. And in the country of the caliph and sultan, the monarch, and then the slogan "Turkey to the Turks", this rigid union of the motherland and the sons was to be destroyed, of course, not by the "temptation of royal gifts" - only by destroying the native houses and breaking the heads of the sons.
Rich and poor all together, all relatives and friends of all, every time they gathered at a port cafe to welcome those coming from the country and see off those returning to the country. They received a thousand messages and letters from those who came, and sent a thousand orders and surprises with those who left. One of the lucky ones who departed called "father" for a couple of lines, the source of which Mndzuri does not consider ancient Ani, nor the author Kuchaki - those natives were the muttering of their brides in the village.
That's how that colony of Guruchchaitsi, that unnamed patriotic union, received twelve-year-old Hakob in the port of Pols and maybe his grandfather Melkon traveled to the country on the same steamship, the grandfather and the grandson changed places like that, the grandfather went to take the place of the man of the village house and the grandson came to stand next to the baker father, as before, the bakery was going to be run by the father. If life goes on in its old way, this move of grandfather and grandson will be repeated years later. Grandfather Ignatius will go to the village and grandson Melkon will bake bread with his father Hakob, who is involved in literature and the literary name of Mndzur.
Those places of baker, porter, cobbler, coal seller, grocer, stable keeper on the one hand and man of the village house on the other are not equivalent. all or almost all the work in the village is done by the women, there is a unique matriarchy here, and the grandfather who comes to the village, especially if he came with merit, is actually called to the honorary presidency, while the grandson brought to the city is forced to work for sixteen-eighteen hours, but it is a set order, the upper class has endured in this order and thanks to it for a full hundred years, the family grows up just like that, hardworking and hardy girls and boys. Otherwise, those girls would have gone out of their marriage houses to beg, and those boys would have become rich in their porters, and so, with this temper, they are the mistresses of the hearths and the creators of the natives, they beat carpets and rugs, harvest the fields, milk cows, plaster the roof with moon soil and sympathize with those who have come out of the caves of winter. to the poor, because they are wealthy and can empathize. Isn't it beautiful that the baker's grandson sent his son to a French private school along with the Central Preschool, to add to his hard work as an assistant, studies in French and then also studies in English? "My French was very strong, my English was not as good as it, I will prove it, I would understand it like reading an Armenian book without a dictionary." Isn't it beautiful that that baker's student and that same student of Robert College extinguishes the coal in his father's house, sells it and gives the dram to books: Hippolyte Ten, Flaubert, Renan, Zola, Goncourt, rushes to the Armenian student library in all his free hours to simply devour Tiflis' "Mushak", "Murch", Paris' "Anahit", to browse the Anglo-American in the college library. literature, "I would take it down... William Faulkner's America did not exist yet, there were not even seeds in the soil." he finds a new "mine" of books - old, read books of Jewish antiquarian dealers, collected in a pile from the hands of people of different preferences and tastes, accessible to the pocket of a "coal merchant student", and reads so much that he can already read by choice. Of course, it is a familiar story, of course, it is a repetition of the difficult youth of many, many writers who came out of the common people.
"For two or three weeks, when I would collect twenty ghurush, Hisare seventy, Pepeke was fifty fathoms to the bridge, I would get Pepeke on a boat, and I would kill them in Galtrem. If I were to buy a book, cross a fence, or take a ship with me, I would often choose the land route. My first stop was the trees at the foot of Kyumush. Those places were not for resting, but I used to take the books to read a page or two. I didn't care. When I was eleven-twelve years old, didn't they let me hunt with donkeys, twice a day?" - He reads, and along with it, as if through the white margin of the book, a stream of familiar rural images flows. - Grigor of Tsornik crossed the Euphrates bridge, reached the villages of Akna, gave his barirkun and stood among the people at the door of the church. the Armenian Christian community will do the rest. they will take them, they will give them bread, they will ask about the country and the purpose, they will consult among themselves and they will find an orphan for this invalid, rejected in all the villages of Ghurucha, "forty-hundred but not thirty-five." etc. Are those images that make the pages that remind them of them noticeable in that one-page book? Does that big book of thousands of pages separate, line, color and stabilize those images from the daily life of the village?
Those natives, that Armenian language, that laughter and compassion of the Armenians, that beautiful beauty of the Ghzlbash girls, that laughter and happiness, that longing and satisfaction, the secret rebellion and silent acceptance, those brides and mothers, the fields, the gardens, the calls, the plowed land, the donkeys, the snakes, the crows, the sweet and salty waters had always been, were, still were, in the mind of their son, their apostle, their very effort to exist and last, their senseless meaning, that image of self-existence without beginning and fearless, was pulled aside from the parade of great culture as a procession of heathens, did not enter the Greek marble and the magnificent robe of words and clothes of great tragedians, and vice versa. like a thirsty aspen in the desert, as a desert aspen, manna from the sky, he absorbed the little that was about him or almost about him from the world culture, "Flaubert, everything made me very much, he made me," writes Mndzuri in the brilliant introduction of his "Balance" of clear definitions, which was worth making a preface to this collection as well. ("This summer, these three months, I didn't even write a line. My illness woke me up. I lived a vegetative life. I became like a statue that was placed on its pedestal." that's how the introduction begins, no more, no less, a ninety-year-old man, when even in his country, at the age of forty-five or fifty, they hand over the house to their sons and move on to the peaceful conversations of old age).
If we forget all the plans and developments of his "revolutionary" time and consider only the fact of the existence of the "Ittihad ve Teraki" party, a party that idolized the German iron chancellor Bismarck and set a goal to create a homogeneous-monolingual country like Germany from a multinational-multilingual-multireligious country, it will be clearly visible again. or the young author, who has already managed to publish a couple of pictures of the village, why was he giving the opportunity to "compose his army", "take me" in the culture of the whole world to the French culture and to Flaubert in that literature as well?
The culture of that people, which had burned its idols with the blood of its own multitudes and armies in its centuries-long inter-religious and intra-religious, international and intra-national fanatical wars, now dissolved the multitudes into units and nurtured the noble vibration of existence in every creature. In the pages of his language and song, in the handling of his brush, pen and breeches, the provincial woman and the priest of the parish church, even if they did not reveal the characteristics of steel cardinals, knights of the revolution and bewitched virgins, the indefatigable humanity of a vulnerable and wounded person from birth made them bearable again, for that culture it was already precious between a verbal god and a lazy human animal. that very dim vibration will exist. If not to love the person, then at least to tolerate that worldview, with the daily bloody effort of the people, sought to get a stable structure of law and social order, to become the internal and external policy of the government, it was still a country of a people, which did not tolerate the autonomous existence of foreign nations and small countries of its nation around it, and whose culture tolerated the coexistence of opposing ideologies and perceptions within it.
And the view of Mndzuru, like the entire Western Armenian intelligentsia of his time, towards that culture and country, is a view from a country that had not tolerated any small country or government around it for centuries, for which the erosion and complete elimination of the religious and cultural differences of the dominant nations and peoples, the identification and destruction of everything that is the wealth of humanity in the world, was only a matter of time and from its suffocating constraint of every nation and nationality. during the liberation, every attempt to be governed by their own national law within the borders of the empire was met with sharp hostility not only from him, the padishah, and from the oppositional Turkish groups, but also from the "true orthodox" of the latter, as if the liberated were taking away their freedom, as if they were being deprived of their peasant estates, their autonomy was as if they were dishonoring their person and family. Respect for one's fellow man, compassion for one's fellow man, tolerance for one's fellow man, the light of God called conscience, which is originally placed in every human being and should have blossomed and expanded in conditions of a little prosperity, is condemned here not to emerge, to drown in hopeless darkness, because the very source of well-being, the free work of each and everyone, is blocked.
The intellectual and material poverty of his community became a burden even on the shoulders of the king, who writes in his diary. "The root of all evil is that no Ottoman works to create material value, the Ottoman is used to being a gentleman and leaving the work to others; our young people think that they cannot be anything other than an official and an officer", i.e. they are born with a shoulder strap ingrown and a seal in their hands - but the Padishah himself knows very well that this evil is good for him, without this evil, his military power would not have such a reliable support. The source of the community's well-being was planted by the Padishah himself, so that the human unit does not become an individual, does not have a name-family-property, and an autonomous state in the monarch's power does not become that human unit and does not turn its back on the flag of pan-Turkism that the monarch has revealed. Universal poverty has always ensured the success of conscriptions, and the main, final, joint mobilization of the Turkish army and the Turkish militia will still take place here. The progress of the active European and all his national countries is a dream shore for the Sultan and the Turk, but Turkey can reach those shores only by cutting seas of blood. When the multi-religious-multilingual country will be mono-religious-monolingual, then the flourishing of each individual will become the flourishing of Turkey, just like the flourishing of a German or a Frenchman, the flourishing of Germany and France. Those will be happy times, but until then we must go through the hell of our time, we must suffocate the divine ability of man indiscriminately in everyone, suffocate Mozart in everyone and everyone, as long as the people's activities show a non-Turkish face, as long as a person writes and a non-Turkish song flourishes, writes a story and a non-Turkish story is written, speaks and speaks in a non-Turkish language, is proud and threatens, and in the horizons of time, the homelands of foreigners are mixed. Here is ordered from the beginning. "Any pasha who worships his god worships our same god, because God is one, and let him worship, but when this same pasha gives in to the desire to serve the Cilician kingdom, he must be expelled."
In the summer of 1907, Mndzuri came to the village and did not want to become Polis. Sila is apparently the conversion, the vacation of pilgrims. they returned with drams from government duties and home trade and did not leave their homeland until they were in need. "What was I supposed to do in Polis? Bakery?" Give them bread to eat, and then wait for them to give money." According to Hovhannes Tumanyan's notes in "Borchalvum" and Mndzuru's indirect notes, the condition of the rural Armenian teacher was not the best among the Polish bakers, roughly: "teach so that they will learn, and then wait for the parents to send the fee." But Mndzuru's "situation" here is different from usual. Mndzuri is a teacher in his Armtani, he has a household-economy, he works in the fields and gardens for seven months from April to October, he is a villager and teaches during the months when the village people fill their idle days with conversations and eating. Apparently, he was a good pedagogue, however, the children of the village listened to a young man with great knowledge for seven years from October to April, who loved them very much. That love is spread over trees and birds, sows and pigs, Armenians and Kurds, women and men, everything and everything, but that love that reaches to the mother's heart does not take its warm look at anyone and anything like children, and it should at least be interesting to sit and listen to a person who had been a fairy tale in Istanbul for many years, knew literature in four languages in four cities and was one of them, he was the uncle of two, the sister of another, the third's grandmother and the teacher's grandmother were sisters, he could imitate the words and movements of all the Kurds and Armenians of the valley, and the children would immediately recognize him and laugh. The villagers would certainly not remain unanswered. he was an avid reader, he would "read and read" on a donkey or a mule. he had a donkey that was afraid of everything, Molla Eomer had brought him, he was especially afraid of his image in the spring - for hours it goes back and forth near the water, but the rider does not notice, he is absorbed in reading.
Those were lucky years or ordinary years of days full of worries, anxieties and hopes of a young Armenian intellectual and peasant, but the future life darkened so much that those distant seven years seemed like a sunny valley from the height of ninety years. Here, for example, (Melkon) is standing in front of the grandfather, and his Metsarents, Srvandztiants, Khrimyan Hayrik, French and Flaubert have no value for the grandfather. "Tso Akob said, you don't have greed for cattle, you don't have greed, you don't love cattle, you don't have desire, they are lost, they are rolls, they are broken somewhere, they are sick, it is not your soul." The grandmother is second from the head of the table, next to the grandfather. "Come with your mother, look and come", and in front of the grandparents, both the college graduate and Artashes Harutyunyan's literary student, who already has a wife and three children, and the mother of grandchildren, son-in-law and daughter-in-law are just children. They set out on the journey of the Motherland, enter the valleys, climb the hills, ask from slope to slope and mountain to village in Armenian, Kurdish, Ghazlbash. "The place of Armtan's barn - the place of the barn - Armtani-Armtani!" and his "learned foot" treads the native fields in a new way, his essence of a young writer is filled with the native edge in a new way, from those heights that Metsaturyans' Binkyan and gardens left in the blue mists below, may his soul be a lion demarcates the period that Metsarents' poem did not enter and Srvandztiantsi's ethnography also avoided, that only Hakob Demirchyan will depict. In any case, these seven years were a time of thorough assimilation of rural life. With closed eyes, he can tell from which flowers this fragrance is woven, looking at the laundry on the far bank, he can tell who are bathing there, Armenian women, Kurdish women, Ghazlbash women, although the supplier of all colors and fabric is the same Aleppo and Arabkir, if, as if by chance, his path led the bathers to their river bank, as if a man appeared on their border. they would accept - the Armenian women, blushing silently and lowering their eyes, the Ghazlbash women, tied up in a herd like noisy geese, driving at you, the Kurdish women, sharp, sharp as a knife, looking straight into your eyes. He may be the exact cartographer of a whole province, he may also, after a little training, be the geologist of the same province; the scope and depth of his knowledge can provide him with the position and place of the chief agronomist, chief veterinarian, construction engineer, dialectologist, ethnographer, historian, zoologist-botanist, and mapper of popular sentiments of the same province. The conquering states establish an institution for mapping-ethnography-botanography-zoology in the conquered country. what plants grow, how long the summer lasts, which trees become a forest, what waters are there, what signs of wealth the subsoil shows, what open and hidden animosities and connections are there in clans and between clans, etc. - in the military-economic attack, for every surprise, that institution stands to answer before the state. A young writer named Hakob Mndzur can replace such an institution, especially since his handsome thirty-year-old standing in front of such a reliable client as the future of Armenian culture, the future of Armenians, and more broadly, the future of the peoples of the Peninsula.
What that future of Armenians would be, no one knew exactly, but that it would be a purely national future was clearly visible to everyone - the Armenians themselves, the Turkish rulers of the country, the German-French-English directors of Middle Eastern affairs. at least six million people forming a national union broke away from the Middle Ages and from Egypt to Paris and from London to Spaha faced the twentieth century with a full front. Some of them were artisans and industrialists, some were doctors and engineers, some were workers and peasants, some were religious, teachers, lawyers, military leaders, some were Persian subjects, some were Turks... and all of them were Armenians, even if they didn't want it or didn't want it, so that they wouldn't be deprived of the real benefits of Pasha due to the "desire to serve the Cilician throne", even if they were in a different linguistic and religious shell, their nationality, all the same, united them and was Armenian. sealing, it was their revealing characteristic of man. Some of them pretended to think that they are the parents and not the birth, that is, the powerful march of six million towards self-knowledge begins with them, and therefore they will be able to rule over that force, just as the enemy thought so and looked for sinners and found sinners, just as the so-called friendly forces thought so, whose interests were leading them along with that march of Armenia, everyone thought that they would give a day to that popular awakening, everyone thought this or that. in such a way, by restraining or encouraging, they will be able to manage that march of the people.
It is very possible that this national union would also be a constraint for a person tomorrow, as an old shelter on his way for millennia, a person would also leave this union, but that was a question for tomorrow. On the way of their progress, these individuals today came to national unity, which demanded a form of national autonomy, and that form was not someone's will or whim - it came from the nature of the phenomenon, it was the recognition, acceptance and acceptance of the law of the development of society. That form of the national state, until the action of man took him to completely different, completely new and unfamiliar spheres, even if it did not help, at the very least stopped, distorted, defiled, changed, diverted the course of man, in all cases a thousand times less than the rule, which poisoned the tribesmen of the rulers with the disease of authority and the foreigners with servitude, if they were not even such by their economic condition. In such a country, instead of a civil war, social protest escalated into ethnic massacres. This dominion, which has cut seas of blood for centuries, has never seen the pure blood of a class war. The eternal hatred of the peasant for the craftsman and the merchant became here the hatred of the Turk for the Armenian, in the suburbs of his affection for the village and the peasant, the city had always settled the Kurds in this country and allocated the work of gallows and burial to the Gypsies, of course reserving the pure works of the court and the death sentence only to itself.
There was that Motherland that held back and above the distortion of human self and human relations. it didn't have its own border and border guard, nor did it have a state or constitution - the border was the same Ottoman, the border guard was the Hamidiye detachments, the leaders were the Sultan and the Effendi - but that Motherland was there, its sons were the citizens of that state, their culture was there. That Motherland was in every one of his sons: the Cilician, the Thracian and the Easterner, the city dweller and the village dweller, the bourgeois and the farmer, the intellectual and the revolutionary, the conservative and the independent, the weapon worshiper and the weapon abhorrer. In all of this, the real presence of the sons of the Fatherland was the truest.
Then it happened that it took the overwhelming power of a great power to extract, find out, tell and especially to force the world to hear and see from the secrets of the peninsula state - volumes of documents and testimonies, historiography, literature and art, press, radio, diplomacy - the work of a hundred thousand people for a hundred years, and behind all that, an army of not at all white angels. In the conditions of our rich national press, our "world press" became the blackboard of a guy named Angut Grigor, who was the wall of the Armenian church in Aleppo and gave news from the exiles to the exiles, our diplomacy sat and waited in the halls of the Lausanne-Berlin negotiations, and our army of one or two guys suddenly touched and went crazy.
But it was written from the beginning that our people will carry their own cross to Golgotha, no memorandum or embassy will remove our executioners from under their gallows, and the will of the king and the light of the poet will be scattered among us in one and the same individual: a Mkhitar Sebastasi, a Hovhannes Tumanyan, a Zohrap, a Saroyan or Saryan, a... thousands and thousands. Names are the definition of the anonymous. here in us and in the Diaspora, in the Armenian language of Armenians and in the English-French-Italian language of Armenians, in painting and music, in all regions of human activity that can and cannot have a national stamp, for seventy years and thus forever, nothing has happened or been done to indicate the absence of the old Motherland among its sons.
Hakob Mndzuri, no, he could not share the fate of his seniors, nor of the ordinary people. He was not in the village in the summer of last year, in order to be displaced with his mother, the same mother, his 47-48-year-old daughter-in-law, with whom they drove their red ox to theory, his grandfather, his wife, three children, his school students, Demurchens and non-Demurchens, the province, the entire Armenian people, removed from the eyes of the Ghazlbash and Kurdish population of Darazi and given to the mouth of obsession. Ghazlbash and other Kurds, and it was not a name or a party, to be kidnapped in front of the eyes of the Polish embassies, as if to be tried, to be sent to the battlefield tribunals and to be secretly killed on the way as one of the "Armenian" Chets. It was so. A Turkish friend would not touch the hair of an Armenian friend, and a Turkish village would not bind a neighboring Armenian village - their property and blood were haram for these true Orthodox. in the holy war, the Turkish friend paid off his sacred debt to the nation by shedding the blood of his non-Armenian friend, and the Islamic villages, unleashed by war and poverty, poured their mania on the non-neighboring Armenian emigrants, torn from their countries, enemy and frightened caravans on these foreign roads.
The worst happened to Mdzuru. The dying were freed, far from the borders of the peninsula, the soul of the living became black with anger - Mndzuru was destined neither to be among the dying, nor among those who clenched their teeth impotently from their Yerevan, Paris, American, Arab distances. Mndzuri didn't have the chance to do that and didn't even have the ability to make a move. For another sixty-four years, he lived in Polis, only Polis, he never left that city, he became a baker, a hotel accountant, a grocer, a church illuminator, he saw the drying up of a once-building and great colony, the collapse of especially cultural Polis.
He was saved by accident. He writes that on August 14, he came to Polis for an operation on his tonsils, in twenty-two-twenty-four days he was going to be Armta again, but conscription and enlistment bound him there. But it is not so. he had a handwritten novel, he wanted to show it to Artashes Harutyunyan, "the most balanced writer of our pre-war Western Armenian literature, a literary scholar by European standards", but he couldn't tell at home that Polis was carrying a handwritten novel, it would have been a shameless request in that August of the village, if the mother and wife had agreed silently like they did, the grandfather would have angered the head of the house. "Tso Akob, you don't have any love for your wife, you have dragged your affairs to the bride, so what are you going to do in Polis?" And the young writer chose inflamed tonsils as the reason. Armtan - Shapingarahisar, - Hey guide Andranik, Toromanian Toros, Aram Haykaz, - Tamzara - Saarjugh of the Greeks - Kirason on the road, which was the road of his consecutive return during the years of his first sojourn and now he saw it for the last time and will see it again with his returnees, he did not tell any of the people he met that he was carrying a handwritten novel in a bread bag to the City of Armenian poets. "My butt, my tonsils," he said. His soul of a poet saved his body, and that body of a hardy, hardworking, long-lived Ephrat made Mndzur serve that soul of a poet.
Wrote his opportunity to relate to morality in the conditions of the still warm hatred and scorn of the enemy. It is impossible to understand otherwise the long silence around the name of Hakob Mndzur of the Armenian Diaspora, the beloved, unbreakable, indestructible Diaspora, whose massacre and displacement was able to turn it into a migration and even take away both the caress of cultural pioneers and the cherishing of new songs, which is often an extravagance even for great powers. That difference was the enmity with the rock-broken and distorted Polis, which had crushed its children, Varuzhan and others. Mndzuri was also affected by that enmity, Mndzuri was in two states at the same time: its enmity of yesterday and, on the other hand, Polis was the mast that was closed by the colorful fringes of the homeland after the match.
Ignatius' father was there, perhaps they never looked into each other's eyes, or maybe they looked and kept silent about the village, the house, the country, the past and the present. Sometimes a Kurdish boy would show up saying that he was the son of Maro of Taghlu, Hakob was his uncle, Taghluen were a branch of the Demirchyans, their Maro had escaped from the Kurds in the year of the first robbery. From the group of Turkish boys who came from the eastern provinces to work on the construction of the city, in Teyaran, sometimes one would play the violin and play the "long and melancholic and eastern Urfa", which was sung by Misak from Tivrik at Nuhbek's table in the country. Sometimes it was the cleaners of the sidewalks and porches who talked to "Akob Usta" in their Kurdish and eastern "temporary Turkish", often the bakers, who - "they had no other material. they would talk about the earth, the past. Polis, the current life was not interested in us, the present did not exist as if for them. Every night, the old people would revive the old days, telling them like fairy tales, which really were fairy tales. One would finish, the other would start. The illusion was their reality. Sometimes they would even sing. Standing on long troughs, on one row, as they used to do in their villages, on harvest days, they would knead the dough and sing."
They are his friends. These are all that are left of Ormanyan's, the luminary Zohrap's, parties, benefactors, patriotic unions, newspapers, printing houses, and theaters. This is the reality that does not allow him to confuse his opportunity as an Armenian with the opportunities of others and indulge in idle dreams, self-defeating curses or threats, but also forces him to look reality in the eyes. For Armenians, the whole world is actually a city, but only Istanbul represents the state of affairs with clear ruthlessness. This "contribution" of the Turks to Armenian literature and the thought of all Armenians is really tangible.
It is unimaginable to imagine a culture without its people, it is unimaginable to imagine a hearth fire without its owners. Tumanyan's poem is renewed every day on the language of an Armenian child, the diamonds of Teryan's "Yerkir Nair" shine again with every renewed Armenian, and the most native, most Armenian monastery without the foot of an Armenian pilgrim sinks and ends, as if it stood not on pillars and arches, but on smoking candles. It is unimaginable, but one can somehow imagine - as if, here, written, printed, recorded, dozing in some library, built, standing silently in the wilderness somewhere; were written and recorded from the mouth of the people. they were built for pilgrims and caravans, the people are gone, but the culture is there. What Hakob Mndzuru did is unimaginable.
After the genocide, he confidently chose the name of a literary Mndzur, trained himself in a genre and wrote after the dirty, draining work of a grocer and baker without having a reader, spoke as if in deserted rooms, ignored his condition of the bride who came to the village with a forklift and the village is gone, displaced, his confusion of the messenger who brought the news of the auxiliary forces, but the camp is abandoned and destroyed. to write as if Armenian-Kurdish-Ghzlbash brides from the distant Euphrates did not come to Istanbul to see their one and only husbands, but to see them, as if the Armenian Polis is not the past, but the future, as if the manuscript will show Artashes Malkaratsi, as if the great future of Armenian literature is yet to come, as if the great Armenian reality requires the most detailed research of its culture in all its fields and regions - this is of course equal to a feat. it's crazy. When Mkhitar Sebastasi raised his Venetian torch, he knew that six and sixteen million believers would find his light at least in a hundred years. Let's not draw parallels, they don't enter the same water twice, but here is one and the same spirit of resistance.
He lived a long time in Mndzuri, about a hundred years, and died in 1978 in Poland. Let's not say that his life left the times of natural economy and rushed to the times of astronomy - he only had one time - of genocide. During the great period of his life, 1890-1970, man's animalistic fear of his own kind, suspicion of his own kind, intolerance of other language, other religion, rotted in Tajikistan and the red sultan flourished, this gave birth to the "Ittihad ve Teraki" party, from this came Mustafa Kemal, and from this came the "gray wolves" strike force. squads. With all their tyrannical efforts, the country was cleansed of Armenians, then Greeks, Tajikistan became Turkey, a monolingual-homogeneous dream country, like Germany in Germany and France in France. Turkey banished the memory of other languages and peoples from the Turkish language. It was a glorious progress that even the great cynic of Machiavelli predicted. "It will be difficult for any conqueror to attack the Turks, the subjects are prisoners of the monarch there, the conqueror cannot count on their rebellion against their monarch. but in case of victory, it will be easy for the conqueror to rule that country, because those same subjects should not rebel against him either. Here they are among themselves, and all together in the pan-Turkish magnetized field of chauvinism, they conquered one by one, carrying out their "revolutions" each time with one hundred to one hundred and fifty gallows, and more than easily ruled the country, because the possibility of rebellion provided by the greatest conqueror, civilization, was crushed and expelled by the Armenians. The country had been turned into an indivisible homogeneous mass, where dissidents, instead of the fluid understandings of "traitor to the motherland" and "enemy of religion", were assimilated into the clear stigma of "traitor to the nation".
This hell of genocide and nation-building does not exist in Mndzuru's work - in the work of the one who would at least be the most authentic witness. What is this, devouring the scream with the victim?
Without your knowledge of all this, the work of this humble cultivator of the peaceful lands of the great Armenian culture is an ode to the goodness of the human existence.
With your knowledge of all this, Hakob Mndzuru's strong legacy is in your hands an accusation against the domineering ambitions that oppose peoples, destroy peoples and poison peoples with the disease of nationalism.
Hakob Mndzuri, Erker,
"Soviet Writer" ed., 1986.