The guest of A. Vardanyan, editor of Droshak, is
Hrant Matevossian
As a people, we are living through a time of great hopes and bitter disappointments: dream and reality have mingled, and with them jubilation and grief, freedom and hunger, building and plunder, pride and departure from the homeland. Armenian political thought faces a challenge that demands its utmost strength. Armenia and the Armenian people are seeking a way out: we have no right to fail this second ordeal of the twentieth century. The challenge is addressed above all to the senior custodians of our national wisdom, the foremost members of our intellectual community. What path does Hrant Matevossian, a witness to the Armenian character, see? Though lengthy, this conversation thoroughly deserves to be read in one sitting.
— There have been great upheavals; much has changed in our part of the world, and we now find ourselves in a new condition of life. What defines this particular day? What does Hrant Matevossian, the chronicler of our journey, see and consider important? What do we have, and what do we lack? Can we set out with these resources? What must we do to have our own place in the world, so that others do not tell us where we belong?
— Only yesterday I could answer those questions of yours a little more easily, because there was something rather like God, figuratively speaking. Moscow was responsible for answering those familiar questions, and, thank God, there were people to deliver those weighty questions to the right destination at once: the Cheka, informers, and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, we considered ourselves, I considered myself, one of the empire’s citizens. I could reproach it, feel hostility, raise fundamental issues, criticise, and I had the hope that someone was there to answer: God existed, in a word. And that is how we spoke. To put it loosely, I spoke as though looking back over my left shoulder: they will hear and do something. God’s absence today, the empire’s ground beneath my feet—or beneath my thought—on which I could reason, speak and criticise: that ground has gone from under our feet, and I feel something like nausea and dizziness. It is a very difficult condition to be in.
All right, even if I find an answer to the questions, will I be able to say: here, the answer exists? Is it possible to say that? Even if, say, I sing My Cilicia—all right, to what end? Raise questions of history—to what end? I entered this new time with difficulty. It was hard to understand that truly no one would answer my questions for me. It is mine, this is what there is, and I, I myself, am answerable for my questions: I must resolve them for myself and decide my future course accordingly.
That, then, is the story of the questions. If I put it briefly, if I keep it short, what will I say? Your valleys have been taken from you. That word, “valleys,” reminds me: during an interview in Austria I said, may God keep you long in this valley, this Danube valley; you came into being here, your history unfolded here, you are here, you exist. Our valleys have been taken from us, the valleys and plains have been taken, and what remained of the people was driven onto the tops of these mountains. There is no people in the world living in such density, in such cramped conditions. This is not really a country. There is land, a people, a state. There is simply no land. If, in a brief stretch of history, in a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, so many people gathered and lived here, it does not mean they sprang from this land, or that this land can nourish so many flowers, sustain so many people. It was simply part of an empire, and it lived. Now, separated from the empire, reality, brute reality, makes things plain; to quote the ancients, “From the goats, a king of the Armenians.” Indeed, just as wild goats were driven out of their valleys, driven until they ended up in rocky mountains, we are in the goats’ position, driven into our citadel. We can boast that these mountains are our fortresses, that they are now impregnable, but there is no country so tragically cut off, isolated, surrounded by hostility, and also without riches—without land. That is its defining condition. That is the actual situation.
What are we to do? Whenever I return to that question, I know: war is war, battles are battles, bravery is bravery, memories are memories; put national spirit and the future to one side, but ultimately this people, this country, can live on this land only through interconnected, integrated economies, through trade and relations with neighbouring countries. It may even have a mission among the less developed countries around it. Let us say these are Eastern Anatolia—Western Armenia—Iran, Georgia, even Azerbaijan, and so on. Thus, only an economy integrated with those of our surrounding countries can keep these three to three and a half million people here. The situation is especially difficult because, in today’s circumstances, isolation from the world is ruled out, absolutely ruled out: psychologically, mentally or physically. Even in thought, separation from the world is impossible. History has imposed a very bitter fate on you, yet, strangely, what draws you away, what draws the Armenian away from here, is not that bitter fate but the images of American life, Russian life, life in powerful countries: you want to live well. In other words, you are simply buried in poverty, in a lack of prospects and all the rest. Even if we had taken a different path, if we could, say, like the Chechens brought up in Islam, or others, form a closed space—one people, one fist—and truly isolate ourselves, which is impossible, it would still be very difficult. For people of our kind, that option is ruled out. Remember the diaspora alone. Although every time too great a role was assigned to the diaspora, the illusion immediately revealed itself as an illusion, we are nevertheless a people spread across the world: half outside, half inside. We could not create a Chechnya for ourselves; we could not shut ourselves away.
And there it is. That is the condition: a difficult one, in fact. But everyone knows this; saying it is futile. I cannot blame the people for leaving; I cannot deliver an indictment. Though I know that this, too, is deceptive in some way, sometimes the fighter rises up in me, the soldier rises up and says: hold your ground! But what is to be done? Crush the enemy, win—and then? All right, then what? What is the image that draws me on, that leads me?
— You say there is no land, no country. Liberating living space so that the nation can continue is one way; perhaps conquest, too, is a way.
— Even if we conquer no territory, refusing to give up Karabakh has already become a way of life. At the very least, not giving it up is imperative. And there were those half a million refugees available to you, whom you lacked the foresight and strength to shelter in Artsakh, to make Karabakh their homeland in which they actually lived. Here are the interests of those half a million displaced people; this, too, can be raised now, or should have been acted on immediately then. At once those very people should have been turned into an army and told: I am not a refugee camp; you have land there, and come to my home with your land. Right? Come with your land. You had property there, and they drive you out like that, naked as the day you were born… For centuries, for years, they built the place alongside the others; they founded the Baku fortress together. The Armenians buried Tsitsianov’s body in their cemetery. His head had been cut off and sent to the Persian shah. There: the village exists, the fortress exists. The Armenian village existed then. They were natives, rightful owners. There: their share, their territory. I do not know—my Armenia is not a lavish, splendid, immensely wealthy mother who says: here, come, flee, come, weary gulls, or whatever it is, you persecuted people, come. No. Come with your property; you have land there, come and stand up for your land, and I will protect you. The phenomenon of refugees is itself one of the world’s problems. The Russians have taken them in—why have they taken them? What is this? Why have they, the Russians or the Americans, created refugee status? What is it? Shall I call it a narrowness of human thought, or what? In that case I can think that massacres, great migrations, are deliberately engineered, as Shah Abbas or Sultan Suleiman did; perhaps this, too, is a way of taking peoples away, appropriating peoples: in one case by organising migrations, in another by inciting massacres.
— So international refugee status may also have that side to it?
— It may have that side too. Ultimately, if those people have gone to build up central Russia, I must think it was apparently organised, because before that articles were saying that the black-earth belt had become deserted and people had poured into the south.
Now they say: you should just see the construction going on there. They are making a country flourish. And your own country… When the opportunities existed, we should have been able to be a country—Israel, or whatever—and stand up for those people. We should have turned them into an army and, through them and through ourselves, defended those people’s right to their own land.
— Israel’s experience was there. There was the example of its particular policy towards people arriving in the country after it became a state, while we learn no lessons even from our own history, let alone from others. But let us not look out of the window and judge from above; let us record our spiritual and moral condition. That is, by naming your state of mind, let us try to characterise our present condition.
— To put it briefly, I do not want us to tell history; that stage has passed. Yesterday we were citizens of a great power, and again we postponed the fundamental questions—call it narrowness or laziness of national thought—ultimately we did not do what we had to do. And apparently now, taking responsibility for the new circumstances, for the degeneration and transformations within us over these five years, we must reason, make sense of things and work from those circumstances. We are thinking anew: such an expression would not have come out of my mouth then. The people of Baku are my compatriots; you would not have said that then, now you will: it is a new condition. This is not a shelter, not a refugee camp. Please, come with a weapon in your hand, come, let us fight together for you. Come with your land. I am not that rich. Come with your land. I do not admit the naked into my home.
— Yes, but at least to begin with, a comprehensive statement defining this condition must be made. In the beginning was the Word… You wrote it yourself: once the word is spoken, it will be fulfilled; action cannot fail to follow. Or have you realised and exhausted yourself within the empire? Today you do not want to take on the courage to name things. You named yesterday; what is today’s name, what is the record of today’s fact?
— I know the deformities of yesterday’s condition. It was that same Armenian, stripped of individuality, motionless, timid in judgement, without initiative, who lived under yesterday’s conditions and could not give the situation its proper name, formulate it, and pursue the day’s politics on the basis of the day’s circumstances. I am not so much in love with yesterday’s condition.
— All your work bears witness that you are not.
— And constantly, consciously, I strive never to lose sight of that whole picture of yesterday. That laziness, that failure to work. In one of my speeches I made the comparison very clearly: the Armenian here and the Armenian there. Mine, with the same diligence, the same industry, nevertheless on the brink of poverty. I would stamp victory on both their foreheads: one is a wealthy American, the other the son of some peasant of ours, there he is in his one pair of torn trousers. A critical attitude to yesterday has existed in me and will remain, and God forbid that there should suddenly be a movement backwards. My back simply prickles when I see this people flowing towards yesterday. I try to judge today; the images that lead me belong to today; my boys love me, whether a minister, a soldier or a blind young man. Ultimately they are blind boys, blind eagles. Blind people. For the first time they are coming up against harsh reality, for the first time truly alone, face to face with history. Perhaps only once before, in the past, have I seen people before such grave circumstances: in the summer of 1914, at the eighth congress of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, I saw Rostom and the others standing crushed and oppressed by history’s grave fundamental questions. I felt that kind of physical solitude when my wife and I went to the border near Ani. Our sole protector was an eighteen-year-old Russian boy who, I think, did not even have a pistol. We stood beneath our magnificent ruins: such defencelessness, such terrifying absence of protection. I do not know. Let us say it was yesterday’s man who stood there.
My speech breaks off; it will not come out. I would not want a return. Yesterday’s return is just as dreadful. Nor will it happen, truly it will not; that is atavism, what do I know, necromancy, I do not know. But perhaps something else could bring these unfortunate people to their senses a little, and the good that really did exist yesterday, that was a reality and gave something towards the unfolding of the individual—perhaps that could bring them round, I do not know. Yet, on the other hand, the awareness that mechanisms must be created for implementation constantly makes your effort, your struggle to think, seem pointless. Those mechanisms can either be brought about by long stretches of time, arise over long stretches of time, or fall into the hands of adventurous and self-interested forces. Then you can become some kind of instrument, a mass. Part of a military formation, part of a party, part of a crowd. It is a very frightening place. And on the other hand, perhaps it is a great failing of our character that I am so helpless at devising mechanisms, means of implementation, and in fact cannot organise the work of two people, or even, simply to develop this thought, inspire five journalists, five writers, five capable young people so that this idea spreads. Even in that sense I am incapable.
— Clearly, Hrant Matevossian is not going to create mechanisms. But Hrant Matevossian will speak the word. Let us return to the past: if we had had activity with defined aims then, had not been so lazy, had not felt so secure, we would have that foundation today and would not be in this condition. In other words, Hrant Matevossian must speak the word, while those who create mechanisms will come, will exist, a hundred years later, fifty years later, ten years later—I do not know. Hrant Matevossian must speak his word. Now, where that word will lead, what they will turn it into, how they will exploit it, what they will do—that is no longer his problem. He has no right not to speak his word; he cannot leave it unspoken. He is responsible for the word; by speaking it, he justifies his existence.
— Perhaps there is also a wearing doubt within me, which is why I remain silent. You are silent because you are not certain of the truth of your words. Then doubts really do wear you down. At other times it seemed there was simply no need for words there: it was a time for quiet, practical work. That is why I speak of mechanisms. Later, the seemingly intelligent ways out I proposed were bypassed, left to one side, and looking back you saw that they were not ways out either. That too, then, was an illusion, not a way out. To give a crude example: how could it have happened that the Soviet army, the Russian army, was not withdrawn from Europe in just that way? An army must have an enemy. An army is taught to gnash its teeth, invent enemies, arm itself against enemies, and continually play the part of the attacker. How can it have no enemy and yet keep the army? Take the enemy away from an army, and it becomes a dead body deserted by its spirit. Why should the tanks have stayed in Germany when Germany was a friendly country? Nor could they have been withdrawn slowly. Say, two tanks and a hundred soldiers a year. The idea, the ideology, had been destroyed, and along with the ideology the body had to be destroyed. And this collapse, this panic, these misfortunes we speak of, had to happen in precisely the way they did. In that case, once you have found this truth, you can no longer blame anyone. Not Gorbachev, not the democrats, not Reagan, not anybody. It had ripened slowly, and this was how it had to be.
— The question of a nationwide structure. Is such a thing possible? How do you envision it? Because what have we had? We have had a church as a structure embracing the whole nation; today it does not, and cannot, serve as a comprehensive means of organising the nation. But is such a thing possible, some nationwide structure—not necessarily a body, but some shared unifying element? Is there a need for it, a necessity? What is your vision? And if there is a need, what prevents it? Look, today we speak of differences between Armenians in Armenia and Armenians in the diaspora: psychological, economic, social. In a certain sense they are even different peoples. I was going to Athens, and Ruben Hovsepyan put it well. “Aghvan,” he said, “aren’t you afraid that you’ll go to Greece and become a diaspora Armenian, then come back here and become an akhpar?” So the differences exist, even to that extent. But if we have a conception of a nationwide structure or a force that organises the nation, what are today’s obstacles, what gets in the way? Are we not reducing those possibilities still further? The Jewish example is tempting. Admittedly it is not our model, but can we find our own?
— It is a tempting example indeed, but let us not consider it the Jews’ monopoly, because all great nations, all nations that have truly established themselves, have that. There is no tribe or nation without its own word that nevertheless has its own economy, its own economic power. It has its ideology, its national ideology, and with it its economy. Often in conversations we too think and formulate this: our people give themselves to the shoe trade, to accumulating material goods, to prosperity; they do not give themselves to the world of the Word. And that is why we are nobody in international information, why no one knows our history, no one is acquainted with it. There it is. And in such cases you wonder: is it intellectual backwardness or failure to understand? Or is it like David of Sassoun in the epic, who first reached for gold, not for fire? Eh? But the storyteller guides his hand to the fire, there, to save him. He ought, it seems, to have reached for the gold. And in this sense it seems there is a little work to be done with the nation.
But what am I saying now? In fact, when the struggle against fascism, the struggle against Germany, was made absolute, our nation was among the first to devote itself: for Soviet Armenia, against fascism. Propaganda certainly mattered there, international solidarity certainly mattered, but let us not exaggerate all that; perhaps propaganda and deception were present. Everything is being discussed now, values reassessed, every sort of nonsense uttered, but let us really take that rational core, that irrational-rational element that truly belongs to our nation. Danger hung over their motherland: the whole diaspora came together and gave itself to saving, to helping its motherland, Stalin’s Armenia. There. That was also tribute to the powerful force called the Soviet Union. And it belonged to its time: the idea of communism, violence, the threat of fascism—all this had made the country something very conspicuous, with many eyes fixed upon it, and Armenia was a part of it. Nevertheless, it was tribute to power. I say this with great pain; coming from my mouth it sounds like outright sacrilege, but the stirring of Armenians worldwide at the time of the earthquake was nevertheless tribute, a procession, a pilgrimage to the feet of Reagan and Gorbachev. The powerful! There: Reagan turned his face this way, towards Gorbachev, and Armenians worldwide turned towards Gorbachev. This is the truth. It is very painful: we are, then, a deficient nation if without coercion we cannot grasp what an immense loss the disappearance, the absence of Armenia, even Soviet Armenia, would be for every diaspora Armenian, for every Armenian. Do they not know that they will not exist if we do not exist? This is not about connections, not about material exchange. It is that our presence sustains them. They would be different in our absence. Without a motherland they would be entirely different. I do not know what they would be like. Perhaps in solitary reflection I shall find the answer to my question more precisely. And this awareness must reach us all, and work really must be done. If this too is to be an illusion, the entire world is an illusion, all poetry is an illusion. Beginning with Scripture, all the spoken word. All of it is error. If we now give ourselves to this error, if we preach this illusion, it will not be so great a deception compared with all the world’s other deceptions. Perhaps it is worth devoting ourselves, giving ourselves to it. And then that illusion may create real values, truly great values. It will not be error, not something very far from God’s truth; as it is, we do not know what truth is. It will not be far from truth. And giving ourselves to the existence of a great national idea will not be far from that human, higher, great thing people strive towards, from that self-existent spirit, nirvana, that great truth. Because if you leave your Armenian shell, if you leave your Armenian ghetto, there is no such thing, that thing called the universal, to which you can give yourself. There is nothing greater than yourself. There is no greater thing than the nation, the national structure, to which you can give yourself. Perhaps there is something above? Say, Shakespeare. Say, a nation of Shakespeares. Say there is such a thing, but as a structure, as an abstraction, an abstraction of God, no other such thing exists. When you leave your own home, will you give yourself to a Black ghetto? A Korean ghetto? Japanese? German? To whom? To which ghetto will you give yourself, which tribe will you enter?
— In other words, their ghettos exist. They have their national ideologies.
— They exist, they have them. They are already inclined not to take you in. They are inclined to remain closed within themselves. And the right thing would be for you to return to your own, find your own, preserve your own. It has been so for two thousand years, and will be so for another two thousand.
— Here I am obliged to recall the passage in the president’s speech two days ago (this conversation took place in Yerevan on 27 April 1994) in which he rejects national consensus and national ideology, calling them false concepts.
— That, too, can be answered: even the most comprehensive ideas can never gather the whole nation into one and the same structure. Always, even beyond the ideologies of the most broad-minded parties, beyond the reach of the most liberal parties, vast masses remain outside, giving themselves to nothing national.
— But what he means is that our purpose, the means of carrying out our programmes, are universal human values and ideas, what is common to everyone and has no national specificity.
— The universal human is realised precisely through the national. As an Armenian, as a human being, you go towards humanity as a nation; as a human being you exist as a nation. Your name as a human being is Armenian; as a nation you exist as a human being. It seems we have found the formulation. Then there is something else: that grey horror, that non-national character in general, the loss of nationality, may lighten your human burden, but in any case humanity, everyone, like a child afraid to jump into a cold river—humanity does not want to go there. You must take account of that. That greyness. Yesterday the Russians were more afraid of our becoming Russian than we were of becoming Russian ourselves. Who needs that greyness? Who needs a world without diversity? Who needs turquoise to be absent, colours ruled out, and uniform, homogeneous, monolingual greyness spreading across the whole world?
— Let us not say monolingual; let us say governed by a single idea. Years ago, in 1990, when I was working at Hayk, I wanted to ask you this: well, what is this people, what is this thing called the Armenian people, how is it different, what is within it, from the epic and formed long before it? Let us put external influences and circumstances aside: what is it? Does the concept of “our unique type” exist? Unique in the sense that it differs from its neighbour; that neighbour too is unique, and the next one too, each in its kind. What are its foundations, cultural and existential; how is it formulated and summed up? And again, to be a little more specific: the rejection of national ideology, in fact the rejection of the nation as a concept, which is a tendency, an idea—what danger does it contain? Should an equivalent response be given? From his position, the president of the republic universalises values and formulates a supranational ideology. He knows his strength, has his levers today, says it easily and moves on.
— Easily, but they are the superficial words of a decisive man. Indeed, it is very difficult for us now to find other formulations closer to the truth. Denying the national is also easy. It is thought taking flight, fleeing from the knowledge of truth, from national destiny. In fact, the president also relies upon internationalism. That is beautiful, understandable. And I know his predicament too. I also know that even our most decisive people, our most committed nationalists, in grave circumstances, when the enemy had simply cornered you and was destroying you as an Armenian, again gave themselves to the international and sought a human being within it. If this now arises from the pressure of that same predicament, to that extent I understand. But it is far from the truth.
What is called the Armenian people… You say it is the words and deeds of our great figures. I follow that path too; I do not know, I take a strange route through the best of that history and literature, through the people’s centuries of labour, which have made us what we are, created us cell by cell in their own image and likeness. Here we are, people facing the same circumstances, we have met. He was the Kyrgyz, I the Armenian. We are both writers of equal strength. We stand before the same situation: what he did and I did not do. Why did I not do it, while he did? Or why did I do it, while he did not? His national shell held him within its pressure so that he did it, and my national covering restrained me from doing certain things. I write through comparisons, which require long work and are not the subject of our conversation. But where could The Modest Girl have come into being? Only here. How was David of Sassoun to differ from all the other epics? Ours, the most humane among the world’s most humane epics. What is that? Your tale, your people… Sometimes I also think: put little girls, small children who have received absolutely no upbringing, into a room rich in colours. See what the child takes away. Yours, it seems, will find one colour and leave with it in hand; the Persian will leave holding another. Or is it a question of upbringing? I have doubts, but no! No, nevertheless: from the beginning until now. Shall I call it a Christian upbringing, or what? But from the beginning until now, over fifteen hundred years, things have been laid upon the same ground which have repeated one another identically, while other nations have not done so. Our Georgian neighbour has not. We have; we have done it this way. How does Georgian cinema differ from yours? Why is there continually some lie, some falseness in their cinema? Yours is the people mourned, yet their films always end in lamentation. Look, I have stopped at a concrete question. The tragedy belongs to your people, but look at its manly restraint today, its masculine restraint: that is one trait. Yours does not lament, does not set up that kind of wailing. Yours is a slightly different people, a little different. Different from its neighbours, from the Russians, from everyone. In public speeches I have given my mother’s example a couple of times. A woman who happened to be there entirely by chance, with a thousand things to do, knowing not a word of Russian, saw someone come to the village and open a sleeping bag to sleep. And my mother, as though she were the mother of the whole village, would not leave that stranger, whether a spy for America and Turkey or whatever else, lying in the village, sleeping practically in the street: she would bring him home. She gave him my bed, put supper before him, and in the morning made up a bundle with food. She knows only one Russian word, “poshyol,” meaning “get lost,” and said, “Poshyol.” Only a woman of my people can do that. Can I imagine any Russian woman doing it? That was a little insulting to the kindly Russian peasant woman present in our ideas, in our thought. But it is a fact. Mine are different, mine are kind. Our Armenian woman is like the mother of the world. Mndzuri has a wonderful observation: when he must pass by the river, how do the bathing women greet a man who suddenly appears before them? How do the Kurdish women, the Turkish women, rush at him, hissing like geese, while the Armenian women shrink back bashfully, ashamed to be naked? But the Turk, the Turkish woman, rushes straight at you naked. To kill! Comparing these traits of character shows your differences. And this can be done in very, very many things. I do not know.
How many times has my painter, through talent and daring, stood on the verge of the avant-garde, about to transform himself into Salvador Dalí? Salvador Dalí’s life was no more tragic than my Martiros Saryan’s. He should have painted Civil War. Saryan seems to paint the world being caressed. How often have my people stood on the verge of discovering the avant-garde, and how often have they drawn back? Where must he restrain himself, and where must he be cynical? In fact, I do not have that cynicism. I have no such things in my national character. Arshile Gorky, who stood at that crossroads of art—even he drew back when it concerned his mother, his sister and the others. When you compare his avant-garde and surrealism with others’ surrealism, there is that Christian restraint within him. Ours is a kind of lordly race, itself possessing nothing. Let me say something else: I shall take Sholokhov’s four-volume novel and four volumes of Armenian literature, and list the words by their frequency of use. How often does he write “cut,” “hew,” “spill blood,” and how often will you find them in your literature? In your literature about equally critical periods, apparently two or three people may or may not be killed. Yours is different. Caught within empires, we were a tribe, a nation of idealists. This individualism of ours: perhaps the absence of our own statehood became a kind of national quality, so that the sultan called us anti-authoritarians, anarchists, in his diaries. But let us not go into that. The fact is that within empires, within enslaved countries, we were not slaves. From Peter and Ivan the Terrible until today, Russian serfs existed and exist, and Turkish serfs in their own country, to this day. Between armies, nations and states, we have preserved our individuality. What Hamo Sahyan formulated as the nobility of the Armenian peasant. Now individualism truly becomes a national tragedy, and we need a collective effort, through union and unity, to stop this horror, to withstand today’s grave ordeal, to be together, to become a force. Your watchword should have been unity, while your tempering is individualism, and it seems it will not come together. But these are apparently independent judgements—or perhaps not independent? I do not know.
What has been called, or at least judged to be, the Armenian spirit of enterprise has been the individual, and perhaps among us, compared with neighbouring nations, there has been the least domineering, arrogant attitude towards the fallen or the lowly. After all, I do not want to make too many mistakes. On the one hand I see, remember, those types of yesterday who said, “I support five people.” They had been born and begun from equal positions, and then one presumably organised a business and said, “I support five people, I support fifteen, I employ two thousand five hundred workers.”
Let me think. You have come when I am bewildered and ask the most difficult questions. Truly, the ideal, what I raised, what I tried at least a little to speak of in my literature, or wanted to convey in judgements outside literature, outside experience, was to be individuality, its protection from totalitarianism, in fact from the pressure of totalitarian ideology. Human individuality was being fettered, and here is the result. Perhaps I saw the person against the background of seventy years, of those times. It would be right to answer your questions in writing and at length, but, drawing examples from literature and quoting myself, let me say: what did I cherish? The Modest Girl, Tigranuhi, Mndzuri’s characters. And that is what is being trampled today. Now, say, we have reconciled ourselves to this condition, to war, to frost, cold, hunger, buying and selling, under this deformity, within this hostile encirclement… Now should I consider it destruction, or not regard the human being as so helpless and, imbued with American ideology, say that humanity is indomitable? That too is an equally powerful ideological machine, with its many films and its culture. Perhaps it has already seduced us with its world? Here too I am truly afraid of being mistaken. But an immense loss is taking place. Shall we call it degeneration? Shall I call it human survival, flight, a revolution within human psychology? It is difficult for me to admit, and sometimes I see that I am an old man: the new word will concern them, belong to them, the young generation, writers, those for whom this is a natural condition and who do not have much of a biography in yesterday. Specifically, today I was reading Levon Khechoyan’s work and very often envied him: things I would have to guess, only guess at, are the alphabet to him. Things I would joyfully discover are quite ordinary truths to him. Before my eyes all this collapsed upon the figures I cherished, one of whom was my father, my poor village, and that is why I really almost become simply a mourner for the traditional Armenian village. Which, to tell the truth, had died earlier.
— You named it, recorded it.
— Each time, even though I thought I was writing about today, my relationship was nevertheless with the Middle Ages. With age-old figures. It was upon this figure that the collapse came. His signs existed in today, today’s people existed. There are people who understand nothing of today’s changed world: simply consider them a living creature that has landed in a slaughterhouse. But there is a people which, dreadful as it is, does not understand all this symbolism: these symbols, this bravery, this slaughter, this smell of blood, this destruction, this dispossession, this indifference… For them it is simply utterly incomprehensible. Indeed, upon the head of the figure I cherished, from whom I was trying to cast my god, the collapse came, lightning simply struck. That is it. That was my human being; that human being was destroyed.
— If we pursue a national aim but do not value the individual as a value in himself, send people by the hundred to die, direct them by the hundred thousand out of the country, do we not neutralise that very aim, abolish it, give it the opposite meaning? If we want to fulfil ourselves, to come into being as a people, by assigning no value to one individual of that people, do we not close the path to that very fulfilment of the nation? To what extent is the human being a value in Armenian thought?
— The fact is that the time of suffering has burst upon us. Disaster has struck the people, each one of us, and, it seems, those in charge of affairs, the rulers, too. In fact, things are being done to us rather than by us. Willingly or unwillingly, your mind reconciles itself to this thought: what has happened has happened, and blessed is the one who endures. In acceptance you say: this too is human, this too is history, this too must happen, and blessed is the one who endures, who emerges from these circumstances. And let us not put ourselves in the place of the master, the ruler, the king, almighty God. Let us say it exists, it is absolute truth: in the beginning is the Word; nevertheless, let us not put ourselves in the place of almighty God, of generals and princes, and the people in the place of merely our flock. There, then: we pity them. Let us not deprive them of their individuality so utterly. Ultimately, through centuries of labour, which includes war, politics, suffering and conquest, peoples have secured territories for their generations, secured geographical positions, and exist in the world today in more or less better circumstances than ours. More or less without so many national complexes.
— I do not remember who, but someone put it aptly: “The ultimate result of history is geography.”
— Yes, very precisely put: it is the centuries of peoples’ labour; they have done it. Turkish statecraft, military thought, has done it: they have secured geography for themselves and exist. Can you blockade them? Now disaster has struck us, and we must endure, work. The same work is placed upon my grandson, upon the generations, upon every one of us. That is it. It has happened. History has imposed it; we must get through it. I think: if being Armenian were truly advantageous for everyone, if being Armenian were something like security. As being English is genuinely advantageous to an English person. There, let us really think of something so that being Armenian is advantageous; I do not know how it should be done. More precisely, we ought not to harm one another. Now people leave; what shall I say? You have plundered and gone, not only my property, but also our work poured into you yesterday. You are also a part of me, not only a part of your own body, but how can one explain?
— The question of responsibility. As an Armenian, a civil servant, an official, a worker, a writer, a journalist, a politician, a doctor, a member of parliament, whatever you like, do I not put my personal security first, set myself apart, give myself the right to refrain from participating while supposedly taking part? Is this how a nation is organised, how we shall become a state?
— Ultimately there is a guiding thought and a group of people who lead. It can begin with philosophers and end with major organisers. There will always be losses. You cannot take the whole river into one channel and drive it along. But after organising thought committed to doing all this, after bringing that thought to the awareness of us all, the losses too will be minimal. And there will be returns. It is another matter that today, in the midst of battle, being at your side is truly imperative, your being strong is imperative; but in the course of things, over a long time, this is a mature thought for all of us called to the work of thought, to organisational work. A mature idea. Then they, the forces that organise the nation, can bring all or almost all national energy into circulation.
All right, what am I to do? Say he is a sewer worker or the owner of a poor little shop who barely manages his daily bread, or can build up a small reserve, say six months’ security ahead: why should I want to strip him of all his property? He is a truly poor citizen who knows nothing of national consciousness; how can I coerce him? Yet it was not so wrong that, during discussions of the Fund, the phrase “national tribute” was heard several times, I think from the Catholicos. National tribute: you are Armenian, pay the price of your head. You used to pay, you paid such a head tax to Genghis Khan, to the Arabs, to the sultan; you paid the price of your Christianity. Now pay for your belonging, affirm it with money, truly pay your price. To what extent is this coercion? Let us not put on angels’ wings: it is not coercion at all, it is a mature idea, but there is still work to be done and a clear formula to be made. Your human form, your form of existence, is being Armenian, your nationality.
— Tens of thousands of Armenians demand and receive Russian citizenship. They live in Armenia but are foreign nationals. England stands up for its citizen in any country in the world, guarantees that citizen’s security. I would like to hear you say: should our state bear that responsibility towards Armenians abroad?
— If we can formulate the exceptional condition, without precedent; our exceptional condition is our dispersion across the whole world. Strength has always been respected. Strength is always respected: Machiavelli’s words. Even divine ideas have been instilled into people directly under the threat of arms: the Mosaic faith, Alexander’s ideas, Napoleon’s, and so on and so forth. If strength is truly used, if we truly constitute a force. And we do: if we are not among the world’s great peoples, neither are we among its small ones, in either capacity or numbers. Nor is your nationality persecuted as such. There is nothing to fear; you must simply stand up for your identity in a thousand ways. Russians lose themselves abroad; the French do not, I think the Turks do not; they assimilate to some extent, or do not assimilate. There will be losses.
— Neither in a week nor even in a hundred years will we all fit into those 29.8 or 50 thousand. Armenians abroad will remain. Should Armenian statehood take on that responsibility?
— That is how I have thought of it: I have not thought that the communities would break up and come and fill this place. Perhaps also because I have not wanted to touch their modest prosperity. If the situation in Ethiopia arises, as it arose for the Israelis in Ethiopia: tragedy broke out, and they stood up for their people, their community there, and invited them home. This homeland should be something like that sort of guarantor. With real strength or assumed strength, let it exist. And that is precisely how I see the communities too. Nevertheless, national unity must exist, and we must still divide the functions. Armenian publishing houses need not necessarily be here, say, if we have serious paper problems here. Armenia’s ambassador need not necessarily be someone sent from Armenia. There are different ways.
— You accept the conception of a large structure and are discussing its details.
— I see the details of a large structure: here, send your children to camp here in the summer; let them come from Turkey too. There are things to do for one another. That is, let us not be in the position of petitioners and them of masters: they are to come and build me a house and then write their names on the front of my house. We too have things they do not. We can make up what each other lacks.
— We can. A good specialist goes to America, finds no work for months, turns to trading, pumping petrol, sweeping streets. A Jew finds him and says: but you are a philosopher, a good physicist, an engineer; come here, work in your profession with me, be paid according to your worth. And the Armenian left the Armenian world, expressed himself within a Jewish setting and for Jewry. But surely we ought to do this.
— We should, but even if we cannot, let us try to keep him Armenian while working for a Jew too; or in Argentina, say, someone has integrated outside the Armenian community and has great capabilities: let us keep that person Armenian too, without cutting him off from his surroundings.
— Say you can place an Armenian with a Jew and give him work, but you should do it, and he should maintain the connection, fulfil himself as an Armenian even while working for a Jew.
— A very intelligent thought, and it must be developed. Look at what the Jew does. Jews can be the generals of two opposing armies, against one another, and both fulfil themselves as human beings. One as a fascist, the other as an anti-fascist. Both can exist as human beings, neither is oppressed. They simply recognise one another by scent; there is an element of mutual tolerance, which accounts for the appearance of their unity.
— Take the film about the genocide of the Jews which won twelve Oscars this year. A great director, who should have received an Oscar long ago, but they held off, delayed, until he addressed that theme, and then twelve Oscars at once. That film’s screenwriter is Armenian: an Armenian won an Oscar by addressing the Jewish genocide. The Armenian fulfilled himself within that theme. Let it be! But will a Jew win an Oscar for a work portraying the Armenian genocide?
— And that is why I often blurt out: let us learn courage from the Jews. That courage comes from intellectual strength: they are gatherers, they gather the world’s thought and have courage, have an inquisitor’s capacity to examine and re-examine, dismantle everything, test it—you are no saint—test it again, like doubting Thomas: your wound is false. That is so, is it not? There is constant questioning of faith. That daring, that questioning, exists within them, and it is something uniquely enviable, a rare boldness. Saroyan brought us that pain, that boldness, when he said: let us remove fear from the eyes of the Armenian child. Let us give him not insolence, not an ignoramus’s insolence, but knowledge and courage. The Armenian who conceals his nationality, who fears himself, is dreadful, terrifying. This must be crushed, and Saroyan has wonderful expressions. This was a theme discussed among them, among our brave boys and people abroad, and they have precise formulations. Do you remember what he said about Michael Arlen? “A man who denies his nationality cannot be a great artist.” Because nationality is part of your truth, your truth. If you deny that, where are you going? What does concealment mean? It is part of you: as a Black person, how do you conceal your blackness? You do not conceal it, it cannot be concealed; how do you conceal that you are Armenian?
— In other words, we are Armenian to the same extent that a Black person is black.
— Yes! It is an attribute. Yesterday, when my skin, my perceptions in general, were still untouched, I took it as very hurtful: my Moscow friend Valentin Yezhov would say, “Marietta Sergeyevna Shaginyan is teaching us Russians Russian.” In other words, why have you come to teach us Russian? Tell us about yourself. You will not find a Jew pretending to be Russian. Both the Jew who writes on purely Jewish themes, Sholem Aleichem, and the others who do not write on Jewish themes are Jewish. The Jewish theme is simply courage.
— All right, let us come to the most difficult thing. It is our war, our liberation struggle, our right; we must defend it to the end. But what does this conflict, this continuing and expanding hostility, deprive us of, cut us off from, and how does it affect our character, our prospects?
— My dear Aghvan, it deprives us of a great deal. We simply fall a hundred years behind the world. Even later, God grant that peace comes, we will keep a hundred killers among us. People who have tasted blood, disabled people, and so on and so forth. It is dreadful. But it is imposed; it could not have been otherwise. And what are they doing to us? Even supposing, say, that the people of Karabakh are Caucasian Albanians, Turks, not Armenians: it has unjustly been part of Azerbaijan for a hundred years; let it unjustly be part of us for a hundred years too. Can there be such a great violation, such a provocation against a nation? It is simply the destruction of a human type. They destroy your type, insult your human type. Look what enslavement it would be if our boys abroad, in free conditions, did not stand up for their type, but avoided it. Here people are ashamed to say we are Armenian; in fact they are ashamed. How can it happen that participants in an internationalist movement emerge from among them? It is simply disgraceful, shameless. And they still accuse you outright of being a ghetto, of being backward. They insult your type, insult your mother’s womb that bore you. In Syria, wherever it was, she saved you through those deserts and brought you into the world so that you could go and renounce your type, condemn your type? What is this? Before our eyes: being deprived, deprived, deprived… But what else? During my student years, the wonderful Morus Hasratyan, a man from Sisian, a great scholar, a friend of Aksel Bakunts and Charents who came from those times, could see that vile ideological, supra-ideological, extra-ideological course of events. And observing that course, he was already saying then that the Armenian is a town people, the Turk a village people. The Turk, with ten children, in the mountains; the Armenian with scientific and technological progress. These things have existed, exist. But truly that living space, the minimum, the biosphere necessary for your cell, has been taken from you entirely. This is simply imposed, simply a necessity. That dehumanisation, that thing. Karabakh cannot be given away. It simply means: go, cease to exist, end. That same Turk, if you concede to him, will not greet you; he will laugh at you. In one case he will hate you, in the other laugh at you. Is laughter better or hatred? And I shall say: in every Turk, every Azerbaijani, beyond politics there is also the awareness that Karabakh is yours, not his. We are not speaking of Nakhichevan yet; Nakhichevan can be disputed. Yesterday it was mine, and he remembers that very well. It is simply cowardice, laziness, when we say that such a fundamental question does not yet exist. But Karabakh will unconditionally bring us face to face with different circumstances tomorrow, and then we shall sing songs about war with the Turk and songs about friendship too.
I know what a great, immense loss it has been; I know why it happened. I had brothers in Azerbaijan, truly had brothers. But not at Karabakh’s expense. I know it is an immense loss, but Karabakh would be a much greater loss. Then your nation simply will not be here to be a friend or an enemy. It will simply not exist. Now at least you exist as an enemy, whereas then you will simply not exist. You exist for the world as an inhabitant of Armenia. I had the arrogance, at a meeting in the Writers’ Union, to say: some writers from the Soviet Union had been published abroad; a map was printed on the book’s cover, with the authors marked on it by numbers: 1, 2, 3… 7… The first could be the Belarusian, the second the Russian, the third was to be me. On Belarus it said “1. Vasil Bykov,” on Russia “2. Valentin Rasputin.” My 3 was written not on the map of my small Armenia, where there was no room, but on Azerbaijan.
I gave that example and said: through my literature I show the world Armenia’s place. But in fact it is not so. Armenia shows my place. Armenia showed us all our place. If Armenia does not exist, no one will look at our faces.
— There are absolutely no differences between your understanding and mine. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation says the same things, defends the same values. What would you say about preserving, generalising and spreading those values? How can their distortion be prevented? There is a major propaganda campaign against the Federation from outside. There is also the problem of the “Soviet” psychology of those of us who have become Dashnaks.
— Are there other understandings of the national? My initial attitude, unchanged today—because at this age one is ultimately conservative—is this: in my opinion there should have been only one party, and I am astonished that the Hunchaks can be one party and the Dashnaks another. An Armenian national party: I understand no other party. The Ramgavars, the others… Perhaps there are differences in tactical means, or whatever there is; nevertheless, I have neither looked nor read any programme to the end, perhaps except the Federation’s programme, which was very comprehensible in both its socialist and its national ideology. The Armenian ought precisely to be only a Dashnak. I have understood nothing else, and in certain communists what I valued was precisely their being secret Dashnaks. It could not have been otherwise. Or perhaps the communists’ conduct—the conduct of a Chekist, an informer, an opportunist—told me something entirely different, and again I did not understand that an executioner sat within that Armenian, not a Dashnak. That naivety also existed. That is it. But on the other hand, do not make the Federation an idée fixe; live as a free person so that we lose as little as possible of our national substance. Narrow party-mindedness never enters my head. Narrow party-mindedness beginning with secret meetings, secret bureau decisions. Perhaps they are necessary, but even if they separate from me, go off as their faction, whisper and return, my skin prickles. I know each one individually, each is dear to me, but when I see three together—there they go, drawing apart—I simply shudder at those narrowings. What a great distance there is from narrow party-mindedness to broad national substance. The communists set that terrifying great force, that immense inheritance, national energy, aside and pursued purely orthodox communism. They set aside national heritage, past, future, the whole of national existence. And when I see such things in the Federation, I am simply horrified. The great national substance… Nikol Aghbalyan, Simon Vratsian, the others. Here is the Nikol Aghbalyan–Charents connection, the Federation in its later period: while Charents was persecuted here, they published even his anti-Dashnak speeches there, his fiercely anti-Dashnak speeches. That is broad-mindedness. Surely it is national substance, a national value, work accomplished: in the same territory something living has stirred again; it is not a dead desert. One must not be narrow-minded. I shudder when they say Gurgen Mahari’s work is forbidden among us. You know, it is forbidden to you. Well, very good, and then? Pornography is forbidden too, yes? And one should look at pornography too. First of all, a person is deprived of one of the sources. There must be circumspect, broad-minded people, a single national party, imposed by history rather than self-generated. Your nation has a mission. It is another matter that they can say, like poison, like a brand, that all our monstrosity comes from Sultan Abdul Hamid’s monstrosity, because my violated culture, my nation, each of us, are born blackened with rancour, born embracing the enemy. But we have a mission imposed by history: our Armenianness. History has imposed it; we must carry it out. Is it a good quality or a bad one? But my name is Gypsy, Roma, and my procession goes through history in this way. That is it. I am responsible for my nation. There, if you are responsible for the nation, please, take it, be broad and take it. Tumanyan was not wrong when he was a Dashnak; Tumanyan was not wrong when he was not a Dashnak. Let us leave him free. Let us consider the Federation wrong when it does not consider Tumanyan a Dashnak. If it does not consider Hripsime a national temple, if it does not consider General Andranik’s surge its own. Let it be so; that will be right. The party needs tolerance, so that, considering Charents its own, it gives him the freedom to write Elegy Written in Venice and does not coerce him. No tyrant should stand over him and say: here, that is not written in the rules, what are you doing? Literature is freedom. It is something more complex than nuclear physics.
— That is, the party should give the individual, within and outside itself, broad freedom of self-expression, consider him its wealth, and guarantee a shared atmosphere of nationwide tolerance.
— Yes! I consider, say, the condemnation of Shahnur’s work in the diaspora disgusting; I also consider disgusting the condemnation of Mahari, anti-Mahari attitudes, narrow party-mindedness, when they seem deliberately to narrow their possibilities, fill their great substance with something else. A broad approach is needed. So this must be the aim: he writes Shamil. The most imperialist Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, whose imperial ambitions equal the tsar’s, describes Shamil, Russia’s enemy number one, with an eagle’s gaze from above: Shamil is truly a lofty mountaineer, a Muslim and a knight of the mountains. And he has described his own monarch. His palace and the other palace. The palaces are contrasted: one’s officials and the other’s practical purpose. Shamil is an eagle; he has made his own tsar a monstrosity. But Tolstoy’s unearthly gaze upon things and phenomena has given the Russians something magnificent: Russian substance, by which Russian literature is called Russian literature. He has enriched his nation through it. Do we call this broad-mindedness, or what? So our literature too needs that capacity and freedom, so that national thought is endowed with greater substance. Imagine: if Hripsime’s architect had not had that freedom, what would he have built? Let us take more tangible things, what do I know: if that freedom does not exist, how will a cow calve, a woman give birth, conceive? Natural things are needed. And I do not accept that intolerance of the Armenian National Movement, particularly Levon’s intolerance. Nor did I ever understand its source. On the other hand, I do not understand the party’s intolerance either. What was this, where did it begin? And if we come to analysis, someone will necessarily be accused, if we come to precise analysis. But there is this admission: before these freedoms, ideas and parties flowed along one channel, real life along another. They seemed to have missed one another, seemed not to help one another. And it was with roughly that inner mixture that I entered these days. In that sense, the ANM, which became not a party but a movement, to refine itself as it went, seemed right to me. I also liked that yesterday in Beirut the Dashnaks had gone towards reassessing their views, in a word were in motion. In a word, not to become mould-bound: not only traditions, but also current life and continuity. But to put a thick partition between one another… Then it turns out to be a faction, yes? Some group’s personal interests, with exclusive and particular hostility towards a certain party. Then their real substance may be something else.
— At first the Movement reflected such great national substance, but what happened afterwards, what did they do? And now it is apparent that it was a myth: foreign forces, through their now exposed agents, had planted the seed of disintegration in the leadership and the Movement from the very beginning. The national substance was an outward appearance.
— I can also think that it has its own substance and, independently of that, is an arrow that has taken its direction, an arrow released, though I do not know whether it is something of its own, someone else’s, something outside the nation. How many valuable things sank and were lost, how much could have been saved. But let me go a little further: we were giving the example of the army in Germany; perhaps it had to be like this. Once they simply flung it in my face, a very clear formula for them. “Go,” I said, “make a revolution in your America.” It was still early, in 1989. He was Jewish and said: that revolution will not happen in America, because there is a revolution in America every day. So he was saying: you have become mould-bound, you have not moved, and revolution will happen where you are.
— I judge by myself, and am certain you are in the same condition. Whatever happens happens without your participation; you have no means of influencing it. True, you enjoy universal respect, there is awareness of your worth from government to parties and people, but all the same your presence changes nothing. What do you live by? What is your purpose today? Your thinking, consciousness, ideas, professed values and morality ought to have been something that guided the rulers, the president, and are not.
— No, let us not give ourselves to romanticism. There will be no such thing. Neither Pushkin for the tsar, nor Charents for Myasnikyan, to whom he would send Mahari: “Gurgen, run and bring some money.”
— For Khanjyan?
— No, not for Khanjyan either. Those in power do not have that. Ultimately, for them the writer, the intellectual, is put in the proper place, exactly as in classical tales: the bard is always at the ruler’s feet.
— We recalled the president’s speech. He thinks that way about national unity and national ideology, you think this way. You are also a value to him. What are you in this situation? What is your purpose?
— No, truly, there is an awareness of being superfluous. We can say: here we are, filling the space with idle delirium. On the other hand, you want simply to move to action, reach for the sword, or the ploughshare, what do I know. You do neither one nor the other. And again all that remains is to put your hope in God and turn towards reality, towards the images to come. There is so much work begun and unfinished that you truly do not want to leave this world unnoticed; you want to finish what you have done, what you promised ten years ago, and only then go. That question has been asked before, again from your circles. Perhaps you consider your circles yours, while I, like a fool, still consider them mine too. He asked it with hostility; I do not know why. But that did not answer your question.
— It did not, no.
— All right, let me consider myself the president and you Hrant Matevossian. Even father and son. My father and I. He does not follow what I say. That was an illusion. In many cases, and in the most practical cases, there were, in my opinion, precise proposals, and I saw that no one listened to me. Everyone does his own thing. In general people have no capacity to listen, beginning with my brother Hamo Matevossian and ending with Levon Ter-Petrosyan and the others. We have lived in illusions. It seemed that you were Isahakyan, that you would go to Arutyunov… The Arutyunovs do not listen. If Vano were not my younger fellow writer but simply my own brother, he still would not listen to me. On the contrary, once or twice he would say, more familiarly, “Stop bothering me.” They do their work. Perhaps there are other ways to influence them. That is how my isolation comes about.
But something else may also have deceived us: there, Solzhenitsyn became the architect of a Russia being reshaped, yes? And Yeltsin and the others listen to him. Now he will come, and Russia will be rebuilt democratically under his supervision. That is false. Do not think it is so. It is not Solzhenitsyn; it is the imposition of international imperialism. Solzhenitsyn himself was simply the executor, the draughtsman.
— I have no illusions. But your purpose?
— My friends have expressed my feelings at different moments in different ways: invective, brotherly criticism, invective again, analysis. To a greater or lesser extent, those attitudes have appeared in the press, in Yerkir and other newspapers. I will not say they were alien to me: they were my attitudes, and to that extent acceptable to me. Nevertheless, I considered the most necessary thing not criticism, even in cases of the grossest errors, but to make a small, complete statement, create a structure, secure a corner where there is purity, which is an example of building, of construction rather than destruction, before the eyes of the opposition and those in power, those deaf and blind people, and this astonished, terrified people alike. And I do not want to fill the air, the atmosphere, with delirium again. Again with my own delirium. Shall we have the strength, shall we be able to give an example of building? Will my incomplete, restrained words, distorted within me, not become part of the general delirium? Or, if delirium is imposed, you too should be delirium; that is, act, fulfil yourself. Fill it with your suffering, your cry, your protest. I fill it—what am I to do? It is an illusion, but it seems a person of my age and achievements has no right to be that madman and fill the air with madness again.
— Neither poisonous criticism nor delirium. All around is an atmosphere of not hearing, not grasping. Let me give, if not in deeds, at least in words, the example of that structure, that building; let me say it. Let me express what I envision: they will not listen, will not be affected, but let me leave what I envision at least in words. We have no illusions, but let me give what I see a name, turn it into words, formulate it. Do precisely your work. Name it: I see it this way, I see my distinct nation with its system of national values and ideology, its national aims, its national structure. That is, let me not surrender the irrational opportunity allotted to me to change something, build something; let me try to justify my existence as a person who came into being Armenian, and then come to an end.
— Yes! Try to describe the subject, describe the real condition. Then this conversation was an attempt to do that too. Let us consider it so.
Droshak, 11–24 August 1994.