(The writer answers the editor’s questions)
— Happy New Year, dear Hrant. May ’91 be kind and fruitful in your personal life. I wish you peace of mind and an enduring urge to create. Do you think your activity as a member of parliament compensated for your temporary barrenness as a writer?
— I return your New Year wishes, dear Felix, to you and your editorial staff, to my Grakan Tert, which has passed through a severe ordeal and will continue to sift the light of knowledge and faith down upon its many thousands of readers; which lays down the laws of the world’s greatest science in our Armenian-language world; which, in our anxious times, will be the last to feel alarm, or will never betray that it too is alarmed. There, I have begun to enter the territory of your questions…
Parliamentary activity, especially today and still more tomorrow, is work to which one must devote oneself completely. Otherwise, instead of the heights of power, the same vast barrenness will spread before you. But I could not and cannot forget who I was, what my calling was, where I could develop most fully. In parliament I could have done this, this and this, and also this and this; but I was pleased to notice that so-and-so, and many others, could and did do that, that and that, and also that and that. So one could not take the work out of the “children’s” hands. Outside parliament, however, I had this particular work, wholly mine, which no one today, though everything is disputed, can call into question.
There were and are also things to prevent, to prohibit, to make taboo. Here the presence of a supreme national instinct is needed, an instinct a people either has or does not have. Apparently we do not. If we had it, a scream would already have torn one of us apart. It has not: we act, we are public figures, we are political scientists, we strip and clothe—the parliament, the parties; we secretly see to our own affairs or silently roast in our grievous pains—the people.
Once or twice I was deceived. I sensed mortal peril, or fate—and felt relieved to see that these were provocations. I say relieved because a provocation, however complex and tangled, is a human invention and therefore can be unravelled. Being deceived slowed me down. I am one of the “slow” deputies, perhaps the slowest. But do not smile if that lazy, slow-thinking man, unable to distinguish intrigue from fate and therefore attributing the power of fate to miserable provocateurs, says: “I am your lightning conductor”, or “I am your fuse: if I do not burn out, your whole fabric will unravel.” This is the truth about me, or a statement about the need for such a being in our national body. When I feel that there is such a person in parliament, I shall gratefully leave him the honour of sacrifice, of burning, of crying out, and withdraw myself.
For now there is no such person, but for now everything is also okay for him: fate is passing him by. The President prevents fratricidal and suicidal wars; the Catholicos puts an end to the deputies’ political hunger strike, and so on. It is as though the nation possesses that circumspect old man who has withdrawn from the open arena and, discreetly stroking or mildly reproaching parliament’s managers, gives lessons for the coming day.
— 1990 is a historic year in our people’s life. An Armenian parliament has been formed, Armenia’s Declaration of Independence adopted, and Armenia has embarked upon the road to independence. What do you say about all this, and how do you envisage our people’s path branching away from the empire’s course?
— The joy of the Declaration of Independence—and of songs, of history as impartial as possible, of cherished names—to those who rejoice; the worries once again to us, just as the worries of release from serfdom were ours. The soldier’s readiness that, say, Harutyunov had before Stalin, that responsibility Levon Ter-Petrosyan must now have before himself. Is it possible? Those times have remained among the people in one phrase: there was order. Let us not descend to Khrushchev’s times. Yerevan was last clean some five years ago: we had cleaned it for Yegor Ligachev. Will we clean it for ourselves, before ourselves? Faced with gifts, crony ties and threats, the republic’s territory shrank. The highest court for the republic’s rulers was the Centre: here they could retreat, then attack or complain at the Centre. Now there is no Centre, and there will be none. Will we be able not to retreat here, to be clean before ourselves, to fear the republic’s prosecutor, to be wary of the Armenian reader and spectator? And most importantly, in becoming independent, becoming solely people of this land and water, not to lose our fleeting grandeur as citizens of the empire?
Several times I have caught myself being more attentive to texts I write for the Centre than to those I write for my Armenian language. Caught myself—one whose sole idol of our freedom and independence is Hovhannes Tumanyan. For it is his conversation with Russian and world cultural and political thought that is a conversation of equals. Everything else testifies to relations between benefactors and the grateful, masters and subjects, masters and petitioners, masters and rebels. Forgive me, sunlit Saryan, Saroyan, Khachaturian… And forgive me, Charents, for those dragon-like coils of our national pain in your work.
Will we, the incomplete, will I, incomplete, following his example, be able to make our past and future our sail, and become and remain citizens of our Armenian empire? Just as many of our own were citizens of high standing in the service of others, just as all of us without exception, young and old, were citizens of high standing in a truly great country: we proudly bore its honours, voiced its commanding word… We failed to imbue it with our pain; we took offence and stood aside. God grant that we have lost only it. God grant that with it we do not also lose our power of royal speech and deeds worthy of royalty. God grant that we do not become petitioners, rebels, slaves by our very nature.
Across the whole country we shall break up the three-hundred-million-strong crowd into three hundred million individuals, drive those individuals from the squares into their solitary homes, and no prophet will be able to gather them again, rise above their mass and still stretch out his hand: “People!” And then—tomorrow, two years from now—the question of our path parting from the empire’s course will assume an entirely different, strange appearance, because the empire’s substance will be different. The prophets and knights of the ideological empire were masters only over me—the Uzbek, the Armenian, the Russian; before a Dutch shopkeeper they were already apprentices and beggars.
— You deputies are called upon to express the people’s will. Do you think the connection between the people and parliament is direct?
— Yes, we deputies must return the people’s will to them as law, return it to the people after making it law. There have been and will be moments of flattery before the people, and therefore of parliamentary demagoguery, whose nationwide damage we shall reckon later. There have been and will be moments of coercion, and in those cases the West and the Centre will manage to wrest the people from us.
There can be no doubt about the popular composition of parliament: all, or nearly all, are men who left their buttons behind in bread queues. The pain is not the absence of a connection with the people. The pain is that the country of disaster, of Artsakh, of Beirut, of forced displacement, a landless, plundered country, sends parliament the throbbing of every fold of its sick body and receives answers—our decisions and laws—that do not answer its questions at all, but seem to answer entirely different ones.
Parliament does indeed live in two realities: that of its people, silently waiting, silently enduring, trusting and distrusting parliament and all kinds of governments, silently struggling; and that of the calls of world democracy, meaning Western democracy. Do not look for any promise or message in the world of those calls: it is our own tale of a good life, woven by ourselves. It gives us wings; we want to soar, we want to fly… But we are grown men, and have no right to detach ourselves from this delirious reality.
At other times, a thousand times, I have thought that we are not playing our own game, not living our own life, not following our own road; that at the head of this parade-like procession, or procession-like parade, we hold aloft the image of a god not our own, and so on. But this is the reality; there is no other reality. Could we have refrained from playing this game, lived another life, followed another road, been led by the image of another god?… This is what there is.
— Our present parliament is an expression of democracy. But how is democracy expressed within parliament?
— Sadly, not yet in full voice. Later perhaps it will speak in full voice, but perhaps that too is only my wish.
Not in full voice, because…
With the communists’ defeat, paralysis divided the chamber in half. Some of the “people” in the paralysed half are now slowly coming to their senses: they object, propose, are rejected, take offence and withdraw from the work, then return to it with a proprietor’s right… And, incidentally, it turns out that a fairly concerned, knowledgeable, serious-minded “people” has left the arena. That paralysis has diminished parliament’s collective strength.
Had things gone the other way, I think the loss would not have been so great. The communists would not have torpedoed the new forces: they would have met them halfway, renewed themselves through their energy, worked themselves and put the others to work. Whatever the case, it no longer matters. What matters now is that the partners do not become a hostile force, do not assault yesterday’s “ancestral estates” with an “army of Hagarenes”, estates that are their and all our last refuge. And also, in their own words: “Let us bring this virgin land under cultivation together.”
— Your conduct seems to place the Communist Party under your protection. Is your understanding of the Armenian Communist Party’s role different, or is this a response to some deputies’ intolerance towards various forms of social coexistence?
— A saying has survived from the great French Revolution: “Do not greet the man who greets him—the deposed king; kill the man who stones him.” I greet our deposed rulers. They were always being beaten between our anvil and Moscow’s hammer, yet they did what would earn them neither a blessing from the Centre nor a curse from us. The Armenian Communist Party is now our “national minority”. If we look askance at it, the Centre will take it under its protection, rather than us. In reality it will protect neither it nor us; in reality it will secure its own presence here as prosecutor. That is how Artsakh is protected, how Abkhazia and the Gagauz are protected… And not without a sense of justice. Be so good, Moldova, as not to oppress your own people of other nationalities: I am not going to turn an ear that way.
It would be wise for the republic not to raise a hand against its deposed princes, and for the Armenian Communist Party, for the sake of its republic rather than narrow party interests, “not to be oppressed”. Especially since we do not know, cannot even guess, which party, which group of people, which phenomenon tomorrow will be the Centre’s bridgehead here in the life-and-death struggle between Centre and periphery—between centres and peripheries. Perhaps it will not be the Armenian Communist Party; perhaps it no longer is; perhaps we are already a periphery of somewhere other than Moscow.
This homeland belongs to us all, and we are all its defenders. We all know that its fall is the fall of all of us: rich and poor, freeloaders and labourers… And its life is our eternity.
— Freedom of thought and conscience, and democracy, were to become bread upon the people’s table, but so far they have not. Is this actual hunger an expression of an objectively determined process? How will the sense of ownership be restored, how will the estrangement between land and human being be overcome?
— Our reality is not yet as black as the sky of speech. For several years now, a black maw has opened out of its past and raved pure truths over our days. Why do you invite me to the same black work?
Neither defeat nor death itself is terrible. What is terrible is to lose one’s mind. Mad, you slide through circumstances and people that once were your life. You almost grasp them again, almost attach yourself to them, but it does not happen, does not happen: down the slippery slopes of understanding you tumble to your mad foothills, to drunkenness, foul speech, fear and theft.
Why do you tempt me into foul speech? I do not know the answers to your questions; I know them, I do not give them.
Before answering, I swore not to be wholly sincere even before you. Confession is confession, and literature is confession; but what are you to do when the spoken word takes flesh? Then you are obliged to rein yourself in, restrain your word, imprison the genie, not join the other voices, not release your witches into this Walpurgis Night, which is the web of slander spun by others who came before you. I swore at least to remain silent until hypocrisy, “theatre”, “brotherhood”, tolerance, making do together, and all the other unforgivable sins assumed for me the image of a real enemy, and sincerity that of a real friend. But they do not assume those images, do not become them. And perhaps they never will, since yesterday, woven of that hypocrisy, that “political science” and those other deceits, was nevertheless a human, at least bearable, life; whereas today, with its many sincerities, is very ugly: bestiality, hatred, murder and robbery walk openly through the squares.
I do not want to soil the face of the dawning day with my black words.
I shall answer your remaining questions later.
Grakan Tert, 1 January 1991.