(The writer answers the editor's questions)
- Happy New Year, dear Hrant. May the 91st be kind and fruitful in your personal life, peace of mind to you and a lasting drive to create. Do you think that your temporary barrenness as a writer was compensated by parliamentary activity?
- I return your New Year's wishes, dear Felix, to you and your editorial office, to my "Literary Newspaper", which has passed the hard test and will continue to spread the light of knowledge and faith on its many thousands of readers, which is the world's greatest legislator of science in our world of the Armenian language, which in our times of alarm will be the last to be alarmed, or will not betray at all, or even itself. alarmed. Here, I began to enter the boundaries of your questions...
The parliamentary activity, especially today and tomorrow, is a task to which you should dedicate yourself, otherwise, instead of the heights of power, the same large-scale barrenness will spread against you. But I could not and cannot forget who I was, what my calling was, where I could expand to the maximum. I could do this-this-this, also this-and-this in the parliament, but I noticed with pleasure that so-and-so, also such-and-such things can and do so-and-so and many others. So it was not possible to take the work out of the hands of the "children". But outside the parliament I was on such and such a business, which was purely mine, that no one today, although everything is disputed, can doubt.
There were and still are things to prevent, forbid, and taboo, and there the presence of the highest national instinct is needed, which a people either has or doesn't have. Apparently we haven't. If we had, the scream would have torn anyone by now. It is not torn, we act, we are figures, we are political scientists, we undress and dress (parliament, parties), we secretly see the fat on our heads or we fry silently in our heavy pains (the people).
I got fooled a couple of times. I felt an ordeal or fate - with lightness of heart I saw that it was a provocation. I say it with a light heart, because the provocation, no matter how complicated and complicated, is a human invention and therefore can be determined. And that deception slowed me down, I am one of the "slow" MPs, perhaps the slowest. But don't smile if that lazy, slow-witted person who doesn't distinguish a plot from fate and therefore ascribes the power of fate to pitiful provocateurs says: "I'm your blackmailer" or "I'm your protector, if I don't burn, your tissue will be completely charred." This is the truth about me and is a statement about the need for such an existence in our national body. When I feel that there is that person in the parliament, I will gratefully leave the honor of being a victim, of being burned, of being ridiculed, and I will leave.
For now, there is no such person, but for now everything is okay for him, fate is bypassing him for now - the President prevents fratricidal and suicidal wars, the Catholicos stops the political hunger strike of the deputies, etc., the nation seems to have that circumspect old man drawn from the open arenas, who, by gently patting or lightly scolding the leaders of the parliament, teaches lessons for the coming day.
- 1990 is a historical year in the life of our people. The Armenian parliament was formed, the declaration of independence of Armenia was adopted, Armenia has taken the path of independence. What do you say about all this and how do you imagine the crossroads of our people from the course of the empire?
- The joy of the Declaration of Independence (both the songs, and as impartial a story as possible, and the cherished names) is for the rejoicing, the sorrow is for us again, just as the sorrow of the abolition of slavery was ours. The willingness of a soldier that Arutyunov had before Stalin, Levon Ter-Petrosyan will now have that responsibility before himself. Is it possible? Those times remained among the people in one word: there was order. Let's not go back to Khrushchev times, the last time Yerevan was clean five years ago, we cleaned it for Yegor Ligachev. For us, are we going to clean up in front of us? The territory of the republic was shrinking before the peshkesh, kirvai, threat, the upper echelon of the rulers of the republic was the Center, they could be defeated here, the Center could already be attacked or complained. The center is not there now and will not be, will we be able not to step here, be clean in front of us, be afraid of the prosecutor of the republic, beware of the Armenian reader, the audience, and most importantly, by becoming independent, just becoming a person of this land and water, without losing our fleeting greatness as a citizen of the empire.
Several times I caught myself on the fact that I pay more attention to my texts for the Center than to my Armenian texts. I caught myself, before whom our unique idol of freedom and independence Jov. It is Tumanyan, because this conversation with Russian and global cultural and political thought is a conversation of equals - the rest is a testimony of the relationship between the grateful and the grateful, masters and subjects, masters and complainers, masters and rebels. (Bless the sunny Saryan, Saroyan, Khachatryan... and Charents for his dragon coils of our national pain).
Will we, the imperfect ones, I, the imperfect one, be able to make a sail for ourselves, our past and future, by his example, and become and remain the citizens of our Armenian empire, just as many of ours were the high citizens in the service of a foreigner, just as we were all the high citizens of a truly great country - we carried its honors with pride, we voiced its commanding words... We didn't overwhelm him with our pain - we rioted and stood aside. God forbid that we lose only him, God forbid that we do not lose with him also our power of royal words, royal deeds, God forbid that we do not become complainers by ourselves, rebels by ourselves, slaves by ourselves.
We will divide the crowd of 300 million throughout the land into 300 million individuals, we will drive the individuals from the squares to their homes, and no prophet will be able to gather them again, touch them on the mass and still reveal the hand, people! And at that time already (tomorrow, two years from now) the question of our crossroads from the course of the empire will look completely different and strange, because the content of the empire will be different. The prophets and knights of the ideological empire were lords only over me, Uzbeks, Armenians, Russians - they were already apprentices and beggars before the Dutch shopkeeper.
- Your MPs are called to be the representatives of the people's will, do you think the connection between the people and the parliament is direct?
- Deputies, yes, we will make the people's will as a law, we will make it the people, we will make the people a law. There were and will be moments of coddling in front of the people and therefore the mob rule of the parliament, the nationwide damages of which we will calculate later, and there were and will be moments of violence, and in those cases the West and the Center will succeed in taking people away from us.
There can be no doubt about the popular composition of the Parliament, all or almost all of them are boys who left their buttons in the bread lines. The pain is not the lack of contact with the people, it is a pain that the disaster-Artsakh-Beirut-deportation-landless-robbed country sends the trope of all the folds of its sick body to the parliament and receives answers (our decisions and laws) that are not at all to its questions, but as if they are the answer to completely different questions.
The parliament really lives in two realities - silently waiting, silently patient, whether or not it trusts itself, the parliament and all kinds of governments, the reality of its people, and the reality of the calls of global, i.e. the West, democracy. Don't look for any promise or message in the world of those calls - it's our own fairy tale about the good life, it gives us wings, we want to run, we want to fly... but we are grown boys, we have no right to disappear from this delusional reality.
Other times, out of a thousand, I have thought that we are not playing our game, we are not living our life, we are not going our way, or we are holding the image of our god at the head of this parade-like procession or procession-like parade of ours, etc., but this is the reality, there is no other reality. Could we not play this game, could we live a different life, walk a different path, be guided by a different image of god... This is it.
- Our today's parliament is an expression of democracy, and how is democracy expressed in the parliament?
- Unfortunately, not yet in full voice, maybe later he will speak in full voice, but maybe this is also my wish.
Not out loud because...
With the defeat of the communists, paralysis divided the hall, some of the "people" of the paralyzed part are now slowly coming to their senses, objecting, proposing, being rejected, offended and withdrawing from the work, they are coming back with the right of their master... and, by the way, it turns out that quite a kind, knowledgeable, serious "people" has left the arena. From that paralysis, the general power of the parliament decreased.
Otherwise, I think the loss would not have been so great, the communists would not have torpedoed the new forces - they would have met them, renewed their energy, defeated them and defeated them. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter anymore. Now it is important that the partners do not become an opposition force, do not attack their "farming estates" of yesterday with an "army of scumbags", which is the last refuge for them and all of us, but also, in their words, "let us raise this farm together".
- With your behavior, it is as if you are taking the Communist Party under protection. Is your conception of the role of Haycomkus different, or is it a reaction to the intolerant attitude of some deputies towards various social entities?
- One word is left from the great French revolution. "Don't salute the one who salutes him (the deposed king), kill the one who stones him." I salute our dethroned people, they were always beaten between our plate and the Moscow hammer, but they did what they would not receive a blessing from the Center and a curse from us. Haikomkus is now our "national minority", if we deport him, the Center will sponsor him and not us. It's not actually going to protect him or us - it's actually going to ensure the prosecutor's presence here. That's how Artsakh defends itself, that's how Abkhazia and the Gagauz defend themselves... and not without justice. Be kind to yourself, Moldova, not to oppress your foreigners, I'm not the one to turn my ear to that side.
It would be smart for the republic not to raise a hand on its dethroned princes, for Hykomkus, for the sake of his republic and not narrow party interests, not to be "oppressed". Especially since we don't know and we don't even guess which party or which group of people, or what phenomenon will be the platform of the Center in the life-and-death struggle between the Center and the outskirts (centers and outskirts) tomorrow, maybe Haykomkus won't be there, maybe it won't be, maybe we're already on the outskirts of Moscow.
This motherland belongs to us all, and we are all its defenders, and we all know that its fall is the fall of us all, rich and poor, scavengers and cultivators... and its life is our eternity.
- Freedom of thought, conscience and democracy were going to become bread on the people's table, but they are not yet. Is this actual famine an expression of an objectively reasoned process, how will the sense of ownership be restored, how will the gap between land and people be overcome?
- Our reality is not as black as the sky of words. For several years now, a black buck has opened up about his past and is raving about our days with pure truths. Why are you inviting me to the same black business?
Neither defeat nor death itself is terrible, it is the disillusionment that is terrible. Crazy, you slide through situations and people that were once your life, you almost get to perceive and connect again, but it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen, you fall down the slippery slopes of knowledge, your crazy feet, drunkenness, blasphemy, fear and theft.
Why do you tempt me with blasphemy? I don't know the answer to your questions, I know I don't.
Before I answered, I swore not to be completely honest, even to you, because a confession is a confession and literature is a confession, but what do you do when the spoken word takes flesh, and then you must restrain yourself, restrain your speech, restrain the genie, do not join other voices, do not release your witches on this Walpurgis night, which is the web of slander of others before you. I swore to at least keep silent until hypocrisy, "theatre", "brotherhood", tolerating, getting along and other and other unforgivable sins took the form of a real enemy and sincerity a real friend for me. But they don't take it, they don't become it. And perhaps they will never become, if yesterday, which was woven from that hypocrisy, "political science" and other deceptions, and yet it was a human life, at least bearable, and today of many sincerity is very ugly - brutality, hatred, murder, robbery are walking openly in the squares.
I don't want to pollute the face of the opening day with my black words.
I will answer the rest of your questions later.
"Literary Newspaper", 01.01.1991