— Reading your novella The Master prompted me, a member of the Literaturnaya Gazeta staff, to seek this interview (Druzhba Narodov, October 1987). At first that “royal” WE — “We said”, “We held our horse’s head”, and so on — seemed unusual and an end in itself; later it seemed necessary, especially after this explanation: “In the rain-flooded June of eighteen, General Andranik passed through these mountains of ours, all refugee Armenia surging and surging behind him. When we say ‘we’, my dear, we want to see ourselves as General Andranik, except we have no people following us and no Turkish enemy before us.” Is that an anachronism? Can one say that your Rostom Mamikonyan considers our days as troubling as that distant “rain-flooded June” and accordingly seeks the old unity of people and leader, of the guiding word and guiding conduct?
— That “iron flood” has indeed existed in our people’s life, and not just once: it has happened and happens, and in the years of genocide it did not occur in only one place. The Republic of Armenia, meaning us, me and all or almost all the Armenians you know, was brought by those caravans. The entire Armenian diaspora, from Australia to America, was saved in those caravans. The people set their leaders before them, often poor parish priests, often someone from among themselves, and flowed behind them to every corner of the earth towards a shore of salvation: the Khanate of Tabriz, the Syrian desert, the sea where some law-abiding power’s warship ought to be, the Russian Empire, conversion to Islam “as a whole people”. That is how it was told in Holy Scripture, and that is how it happened and happens in our people’s life. Those poor leaders were obliged to forge themselves into Moseses, to become the people’s ideal of a leader. With the people’s protest and anger, hope and faith, lament and curse, longing to exist and abandonment, morality and debauchery, every tremor of life in their ears and eyes, they were obliged to climb their God’s mountain, cast rules of existence from all those voices and images, and return them to the people as God’s commandments. Every person among that people, all of them, could be thieves, could be unjust, fail to divide the bread for the road equally between their own child and their brother’s, fornicate secretly or openly, secretly give birth and bury. The leaders had no such right: they embodied the light and steadfastness that also exist within all the sinful and broken.
What I said about Andranik — perhaps I have a few more words on other pages, perhaps some words will find their place on future pages — is a purely historical reality. The people surged behind him, swelling and never diminishing, though typhus left many behind, though Armenian villages along the way gave some shelter. From Tumanyan’s Dsegh they flowed through the Dilijan gorge and Sevan’s mountains towards Nakhichevan and Tabriz, hoping to break through Asia Minor and reach the Mediterranean coast, where there was still a dense Armenian population. In the wet, heavy spring of 1918, from every cave, village and barn, every path brought orphans and widows towards Andranik, when he himself did not know the way out, yet could not abandon his people. On a white steed he stood before them as the embodiment of hope and victory, when his own only hope was God.
I tell this not to boast of our “lives of the fathers” on an all-Union platform. The heirs of a homeland to be proud of would not have so many anxieties before the future. Nor am I launching my poor assault “for the homeland” from the cemetery of ancestral memories, though this latter tactic always and everywhere, in the Middle Ages, today, in Europe and Asia, in political struggle and personal careers, produces a tainted but unquestionable result. I recalled that flight, those caravans, those leaders only because that flight is also a phenomenon of today and here, and I fear, far more of tomorrow.
Let me remind you that those leaving the homeland are the people who, immediately after the war, put their names on an enormous list of five hundred thousand wishing to come to Armenia, of whom only a tiny fraction could come. We did not have room for so many and were poor, without the means. Let us also tell the reader that this population of half a million and more had risen again in the countries of the Middle East after being expelled in 1915–1922 from so-called Turkish, Western Armenia. During that quarter-century, despite the most brotherly attitude of the Arab and Persian peoples, they did not make those countries their homeland: coming to Armenia meant coming home. Let us say again — and is it worth speaking on a platform that in these seventy years has done nothing for your history and heard nothing of it, when you do not know what position it will take before your pain? — that throughout the war this population helped the country of the Soviets by every possible and impossible means. The victorious country? No, the defeated country too. They helped on 22 June 1941 and on 9 May 1945; they helped in the distant twenties and love and help even now, in 1987.
It is these people and their descendants who are leaving us. I will not say they live better on distant shores than we do. For an Armenian child to be at an Armenian school at nine, that six- or seven-year-old must be standing on a pavement in Athens, Istanbul or Los Angeles at six, waiting for the school bus. That is how it is, yet they leave. We can plead that by leaving they deprive us of themselves, impoverish us. We can ridicule them, obstruct them — so far our most successful method — appeal to their self-awareness, bind them with ranks and posts. All the same, they leave even without going away. The homeland as such has not come into being for them; the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic has not become their homeland; they have not become Armenia’s masters.
— Will they feel themselves masters in Athens, Istanbul or Los Angeles, then? Will they make America, Turkey or Greece their homeland?
— Never. The slightest social or political fluctuation, a single hostile glance from a native, and they will rush for their suitcases, always packed, always ready.
— But today’s large peoples have grown from small ones. Those natives are merely yesterday’s newcomers, and today’s newcomers will themselves be natives tomorrow in a more or less peaceful country.
— Perhaps that is so, perhaps not. I think it is not quite so. Even if it is, this is a very definite assault on particular people’s particular culture in the name of an uncertain future. Call it a peaceful assault or aggression; it makes no difference. The insoluble problems facing humanity today, which may yet cost the Earth dearly, have accumulated from humanity’s little slips of yesterday, petty injustices, insignificant mistakes. If we resolve today’s question today in good conscience, tomorrow’s generation will face only their grandfathers’ mistakes. An American science-fiction writer has a lovely story about this: a traveller entering the past in a “time machine” accidentally crushes a butterfly there, and here in the present the elections place the leader of the enraged behind the presidential controls.
Today, here, in my presence, something is being trampled, and my whole body as an Armenian, Soviet Armenian writer aches unbearably with shame. That is what I mean. It is disgraceful to be the son of a house from which your brothers flee, and the brothers fleeing are those who for centuries lamented in songs of longing and return, whose road through centuries and different countries always led home. I want to cry “Help!”, yet I believe in no one’s saving help and remain silent. I also suspect that perhaps fate planned precisely this: for my “national” body to seek a painless, “non-national” freedom from its choking, hurting mould. On its universal, worldwide scale that may be sensible, but I say again: it causes me unspeakable pain that throughout Transcaucasia it is precisely the Armenian village that empties, the Armenian lake that dries, the Armenian school that dwindles, the fifteen-hundred-year-old Armenian school; that Armenian culture fades and is abandoned, the language in all its manifestations; that women of my mother’s generation and my daughter’s age, following their husbands’ and brothers’ example, form work teams and leave Armenian villages to gather potatoes. Thousands of versts from home, for long months, they leave for other regions where there is land and a crop but no one to gather it. Must this happen in distant West Germany before, at a journalist-intermediary’s prompting, we begin to understand how hard it is to be a Turk abroad? Or must they be Russians of hard times before Russian writers’ intervention makes us see that we are crushing our women completely and finally, and that this is an assault on the very foundation of our human life? No, they are not in distant Germany or distant wartime. This entire drama unfolds in my own time, around me, right beside my heart.
— Which of these phenomena would you like to discuss in more detail: schools, culture, the lake, villages becoming deserted?.. Perhaps we should speak about the fading of Armenian culture after all, yes?
— Culture is culture, and the Matenadaran is my national pride; school is school, existing and working secretly even under Delyanov’s ban. But what hurts me most is our assault on the “society of women”. Of course we have launched no such deliberate assault; we are not so barbarous or heedless. Yet what can be done if the recoil of all our aims and actions falls upon them, undermines their homes and families, distorts the women themselves and manifests itself in their little “domains” as a direct assault on those “domains”?
The Matenadaran is the Matenadaran, but they are living people; my thoughts cannot leave these “potato workers”. They are paid for their days and nights abroad in money and rush into shops, to resell their purchases on returning and put their homes in order, or in potatoes, to find a high-priced market across the vast country. We thus send them into the marketplace and into dealings with law-enforcement bodies. Then this girl, this woman, who with my great-grandfather became the foundation of the village and clan — who bore children and fed them, milked and cultivated, spun, wove and mended, held the other end of the saw with her husband, set bread before the forest warden, bread she baked, yoghurt she cultured, spirits she distilled — this all-capable person spends her unique time for bearing and nurturing children sitting in some labour colony, sewing very poor work clothes.
— You yourself have recalled contemporary Russian writers. All or almost all these issues have been raised and, in today’s conditions, are being widely raised, if not throughout Russian and Soviet literary fiction, then in public writing. That means they are all-Russian, all-Soviet problems. Why, then, do you say “right here”?
— Those shared national misfortunes only encourage me: it means we will search for causes together, and if my Moldavian or Georgian friends and I do not find them, Chekhov’s direct heirs certainly will. In any case, I will not be afraid before the causes, however irreparable they may be, because I will not be alone. What frightens me is the difference in consequences, and the differences are substantial in both scale and substance. Here I am utterly alone, and no one, even if they wish to, can replace me, put themselves in my place.
In the hard post-war years, a task was set throughout the country: every region and every republic must provide its own bread. Before being an economic matter, it is a moral one, is it not? Not to go begging at a neighbour’s door. This soil of Armenia could not feed its children, because not all had been born of it: one in every two was a newcomer from Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan or various countries of the world. In other words, the republic’s land was overpopulated. But one could hardly expel those “newcomers”, those already expelled, from their homeland too. They came, clung to mountain slopes in the most impossible places, at a spring’s source or entirely without water, became villages; they gathered and expanded cities. The land could not provide for them, was unable to, yet for a couple of years it did, or did something like it. It ploughed and sowed every possible and impossible place, up to the mountain summits. The consequences are now widely known. Central Russia is trying to repopulate, and that is not hopeless, because the living layer of black soil, though suffocating under clay, has not gone away; it is there in central Russia, in the “Non-Black-Earth Zone”. But mountainous Armenia’s soil is no longer here: torrents have carried it to the seas. Ninety per cent of cropland, hayfields and pastures is eroded, and half of that ninety per cent is hopelessly beyond restoration. A pedigree cow weighing half a tonne and giving twenty litres of milk becomes a “goat” on these pastures within a generation.
And this soil, tired of us, disgusted with us, profoundly in need of a thousand years’ rest, we trample again, turn over again, strip again, revive again with chemicals, so that we can avoid feeling that it was destroyed in our time and by our hands.
No, I do not want to indulge in impressions or feel myself a horseman when my turn comes to speak. The Armenians of Cilicia, specifically those of Musa Dagh, say: “On horseback he forgot God; taken off the horse, he forgot the horse.” I have not forgotten God now, and I know that neither I nor Literaturnaya Gazeta is the saviour of that soil.
That soil is no longer a productive unit; it can no longer sustain cost accounting. Farms remove such land from their assets. To deceive ourselves that we have not surrendered those once-flourishing slopes to a black desert, we think individual effort would save them. We will not save them, because the land now demands unpaid labour, and no one will make such a sacrifice.
In precisely such circumstances Lake Sevan was released from the mountains; in similar circumstances the necklace of chemical industry was wound around the republic’s neck; under the same conditions the “Armenian” nuclear power station was placed in the republic’s very centre.
I blame no one, resent no one. It seems all this had to happen exactly as it did. It seems that in the spring of 1918, when Vehib Bey...
— Who is he, this Vehib Bey?
— Viewed from the heights of the Moscow Kremlin, another officer of the Turkish army. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the executor of its fourth clause on the Russian-Turkish front. Viewed from the lowlands of our Ararat valley, the terror of the Armenians in 1918. Forgive me for returning to the years of genocide. If there is one person in the world who does not want to enter those years, stand before the picture of his people’s destruction, it is the Armenian writer. Yet even in the most childlike, altruistic and utopian dreams, it is impossible to bypass those years. That spring, when Vehib Bey drove the remnant of the Armenians of eastern Asia Minor into this Ararat valley, from the heights of the Hayots Par mountains, with a Turkish soldier’s far-seeing gaze, he probably saw this future of the remnant and thought that nothing more need be done; the rest would happen by itself. The people and their territory had been reduced to a minimum that was “harmful to humanity’s progress”. Such a notion existed in their ideology and policy; even then it had existed for some fifty years.
Here is the rest happening by itself. Without the nuclear station it was impossible; with the nuclear station it is impossible. “What if there is an accident?” “What if there is not?” If there is not, so many people of the republic will have a workplace at a machine, so many families will work and live.
— Was it truly impossible to do without the nuclear station?
— It was possible, if the republic’s government had managed in its time to tell the Union government: “We prefer poverty to an accident. Poverty can be managed; an accident cannot.” But can you imagine the answer the republican government would have received? “What, the other regions are to live richly and you poorly?” In short, the nuclear station exists. If an accident occurs, the republic’s people will emigrate for thirty years or five, if they have time, of course, and that is the end of this republic, the end of this people. But we cannot become a burden around the necks of our more numerous peoples, who would not disappear entirely in a similar accident. We cannot; it really is immoral. What then? Then every people must pull its own yoke. “There must be no accident at the nuclear station” is indeed a friend’s wish. We do not believe in an accident either, more than do not believe, just as no one believes in his own destruction, even when he sees it. But that friend — I do not know whether it is a department or a person — who says “there must be no accident” and knows that it happens, that nuclear stations have accidents, that such things occur, he... Let him find his own name; only he knows his exact essence.
Even if he sends his daughter or son to work at our (“our”) nuclear station, he is still dishonest, because he will do it — he will not, have no doubt — not to dispel his own doubts about the station’s reliability, but merely to silence the grumbling of us locals, the sole form of complaint available to a people that cannot, because it is immoral, make an argument of its... uniqueness.
There, I have said it and felt bad. It is not spoken, not written, not clearly formulated in letters of protest: it seems immoral. But look: this whoever it is, department or person who has made departmental and state interests his protective wall, has taken a pencil and counted. A possible accident threatens 0.7 per cent of Soviet citizens. Those two million people, that 0.7 per cent, must keep their suitcases packed. He has not counted, has not taken into account, that his 0.7 per cent is exactly seventy per cent of the Armenians living in their homeland, that their migration wipes out a people once and for all.
Its true name is merely unconcern for our national fate, and looking for malicious intent here would be needless heartache for us. Nor should we see collusion between this department and the one charged with controlling and regulating the internal movement of peoples, a genuine scourge for us; the one that publicly labels this people’s attachment to its last native shore immobile conservatism, and ought by now to be nodding with satisfaction at those departments whose conscious and unconscious efforts uproot peoples from their age-old places. Its true name is unconcern, or even concern. Yet what can one do when not even the most malicious intent could strike such a blow at a people’s faith in its future in its homeland? What can one do when this work and practice of our own institutions was recorded not today and not here, but in Fuad Pasha’s testament of 1869: “The most stable principle in the constitutions of present powers is great assimilations.”
It seems one could leave old accounts alone, let the bones of the old rest. One could, if they would leave us alone, if they did not change their places, forms and times while leaving unchanged the object of their eternal concern: us. Here sits the former statesman, writing to his sultan: “Yet any Serbia, any Armenian kingdom... are nothing but inevitable spoils for ever-new conquerors, elements harmful to the progress of the human race and threats to the world’s peace.” It is merely a letter; it is not even known whether the sultan will read it. The statesman himself has two months to live and has left the political arena, so he cannot put on a Bismarckian helmet or take up a bayonet. Yet he is the same imperialist who wants to do something good in the name of humanity’s progress and does two bad things: corrupts first me, the Serb or Armenian, and then his own people, and it is unknown which of us he corrupts more. He is the same imperialist who forever wants to do something great, open seas, divert rivers, relocate peoples, and spreads only evil. He is the great proofreader of nature and history, correcting their little errors, little faiths and little languages. Once he has made your faith and language his, he will cease to like your colour; if you manage to change your colour, he will hate your origin.
Could the all-Soviet, worldwide brotherhood of writers become an equally solid, equally united barrier before this united procession of the vain men of science and social science? Will such unity of writers arise at all, or will everyone’s national egoism prevent anyone from stepping onto the long-vacant square of internationalism and crying: “It is not the end of the world! What are you doing? We still have to live and work side by side!”
— It is difficult, but let us return to literary matters nevertheless. What are you working on?
— After finishing the novel, after forcibly closing the novel... I find it difficult to call it a novel; it does not satisfy the genre’s clear rules. Bitov, a precise literary scholar, and I have reserved the right to write novels in our generation perhaps for Rasputin alone... I would write a drama, a reflection on the homeland: for someone like me, disorganised, capricious, not content with a little and the beautiful, yet failing to attain the much and the great, another work in an unruly genre. A peasant woman, again a peasant woman, always a peasant woman, because for me she is the soil and homeland themselves, suddenly grows uneasy in her secure, peaceful home, perhaps at some incidental signal from radio or television, I do not know. She suddenly feels alarm, feels she is being robbed, losing someone dear. In distant Yerevan, a family of repatriates has packed its belongings and is going back abroad. Among the belongings is an insignificant, or precisely a precious, object that belonged to this peasant woman, or her mother, grandmother or paternal aunt: an object, a Gospel or a silver belt, I do not know, that wandered with the Armenian people’s odyssey through all Armenian and non-Armenian lands and times and is now leaving the country too. It is the meeting and parting of that woman and that family I want to portray. I will not attack that family, which will certainly have its ideologue of flight, departure, shaking off this homeland. No. They are all mine: the little girl taking a Vahan Teryan poem with her by heart; the grandmother who began life on the roads of exile and must end it on the roads; everyone on the transatlantic route and in Turkey, the French-speaking and Russian-speaking, on the front in Iraq and on the front in Iran, all are mine. Our Armenian star has exploded and scatters in every direction, and as long as those departing fiery fragments can be seen, they are mine. They carry away my strength and life. That is how, if possible, a crucified body would look after its departing soul. Will they look back? Will their homeland become, in Tumanyan’s words, “That land towards which our soul strives”?... None of this matters to some martinet who wants to imagine himself a puritanical, orthodox crusader, because that way his appearance as a coarse, ignorant man nevertheless acquires some halo of a fighter for an idea. For him it is needless anguish, of no use in building his department’s pyramid. But I do not expect an answer from him. Let him successfully seal his dead pyramid and entrust his pharaoh’s sleep to unpeopled deserts. I expect my answer from the Russian intelligentsia and living Russian literature. Will it cherish the future of its language, culture, family, individual human being, in a word, its living homeland? Will it worry over today, make it worthy, be able to make it worthy, of the whole world’s love and respect? We too will seek the same for our homelands.
We face a difficult, heavy problem, a question of to be or not to be. Human beings, humanity in general, are selfish and suspicious by nature: before your tragedy, they first consider what harm it does them, or, God forgive us, what will be left for them from your burned house. Can we bring home to those people and humanity that the Armenian republic’s damaged soil is the ulcerated skin of the Earth’s single organism, that this Earth cannot be called healthy as long as our ulcer remains upon it?
Finding a truthful answer is difficult, and those who make light of the question, I fear, nevertheless have a second homeland in mind, like those who work calmly beside the “Armenian” nuclear station while still keeping a reserve cylinder of fuel... For me, this is the only soil on which I can live, the only language in which I can work, and outside them lies my death.
— One cannot, of course, fail to share your anxiety for the future of the land and its people. But I am asking you now not as a person with an acute conscience, but as a professional writer: are you sometimes overcome by a sense of absolute helplessness before the resolution, or rather irresolvability, of these troubling questions, these heavy problems that have become the substance of your life? Does it often seem that you would be far more useful to yourself and others in another occupation, say farming, animal husbandry or beekeeping?
— In other words, are we writing in vain, yes? For two thousand years the greatest monument of literature has urged us passers-by not to kill, not to commit adultery, not to steal, yet we kill, commit adultery and steal splendidly, yes? Genocide occurred while Tumanyan lived; in Tolstoy’s presence, in his own province, a Black Hundred massacre of a peaceful popular demonstration. Fascism arose in the Germany of great literature, and Pinochet sits enthroned among an almost serial succession of anti-dictatorial novels, yes? Why do we write when brute force is once again the master, yes?
All of it, those thousands of wars, millions of murders, billions of thefts, adultery everywhere and every day, happened that way. History remembers it that way because that is how it happened. But in how many people does an anti-dictatorial novel kill a tyrant, how many mouths does it fill with spit and curses against dictatorship? How many codes has the biblical “Thou shalt not kill” entered, how many saved from the sin of killing and being killed? How many sinful loves has “Thou shalt not commit adultery” stifled, how many tonnes of gold has compassion spent on prisoners of war? History does not remember that, nor need it. What is past is remembered. The whole world today, people’s lives and even the life of land and seas, is the materialised image of all the world’s literature. That image’s flaws and flawlessness point precisely to the flaws and flawless aspects of world literature.
You ask, should I at least say culture? First of all, culture itself is an expression of literature. I do not want to reach for authorities or recall that in the beginning was the Word. “Children in China do not beg; our children beg, which means there is something wrong in our culture.” When this spoken thought of an Indian intellectual reached me, I saw that he had found the answer to the question tormenting me. Extend his thought to every country, and that “something wrong” will appear in their literatures. Each time, new generations see that error in life and throw themselves into literature to correct the flaw.
— That applies, of course, to your generation of the “sixties” too.
— Although the volume of that generation’s work is small — the whole Union’s combined collection can be absorbed in less than a month, including cinema, theatre, painting and song — it nevertheless rendered life a fundamental service. It changed literature’s attitude towards the human being. In place of yesterday’s role of illuminating the country’s ideology, it tried to win a new position as an investigator of life itself, in a surge, revolutionarily, categorically stepping back from literature’s attitude of yesterday. It was a heavy task: from resisting the Tatar-Mongol invasions to defeating the German invaders, that earlier attitude towards humanity’s calling had been sanctified. From The Tale of Igor’s Campaign to The Communist Manifesto and the folk saying about the broom, all were hymns to those old and future victories through collective effort.
Yet it was equally and even more evident that this blood-drained, exhausted sufferer of centuries, called the communal human being, wanted to live a personal life today and here. A place to lay his crowned head, shelter, a wife or husband, a child, earnings, the unfolding of abilities in the form he wished: the little that keeps the flame of human existence alive in our short lives, without which, however tightly we gather ourselves into a military corset, we collapse like wet clay. Our generation of the sixties took and holds the position of this human being.
It does not leave the “scene of the incident”, does not surrender to the world of fairy tale and parable, and from the very sites of events, with love and pain, passion and despair, sounds the alarm: hurts, grows alienated, dies, disbelieves, leaves, gets drunk, turns savage, becomes distorted, destroys, is destroyed. All this and much, much more that can be called in one phrase a cry of the soul, or a lament for the people. It seems no small thing to be called full-fledged literature, but is it not too little? It seems to have reflected an impartial image of the country, and that is enough. If that is enough, then let us be content with the country’s present condition. But that condition is not comforting, so first of all literature’s condition is not comforting.
It seems to me that at a decisive point, whose location only it knows, our generation of the sixties grew confused and retreated. It said: he steals, destroys himself, does not open up, becomes distorted, deteriorates. But it did not say: he steals because he does not consider it his, and it is not his; destroys himself because he regards himself as his enemy; does not open up because he is tired of giving without receiving; deteriorates and spoils things because he is not the master; becomes distorted beyond recognition because he does not live in his natural human element but has surrendered to some alien regime.
Before the hypothetical picture of the expression of at least two hundred and fifty million people’s desires, imagination, initiative, individuality, independence and every other quality, our literature grew confused and retreated. In that confusion, indecision and silence there was also a well-concealed element of dishonesty and self-interest. It was silently assumed that perhaps this loss from the moral character of each and all, this loss of identity, was nevertheless compensated by the unity and strength of the “Soviet nation”, impossible to “weld” in a society of individuals. Compensated once and for all: one or two generations lose, the eternal procession of future generations gains. Again the same religion, again the negation of today’s, here-and-now generations for the sake of future ones.
Many, very many of us still believe and forever will that even if we made no progress in twenty-five years, we governed two hundred and fifty million people for a whole quarter-century, kept them in society. Otherwise they could not have been governed, would have scattered. Do you remember the emperor in Hadji Murad? “What would Russia be without me? What would not Russia alone, but Europe, be without me?” “What would those two hundred and fifty million be without us?” “They would perish without society.” “Outside the community they would be lost.” “What would they be without us?” We say this in the emperor’s tone, though we are no emperors.
Without us they would do what they would do without us. What else would they do? They would cut off our hand, not allow us to squander their property and lives by tens and tens of millions so royally, as we always have and still do. With their two hundred and fifty million wills and abilities they would search every corner of economics, science and social science, and today we would have the thought and work of two hundred and fifty million people before us, rather than the acute shortage of thought and work that is choking us.
It is hard for me now, after the words “dishonesty” and “self-interest”, to say “betrayal” too, but that is what happened. The generation betrayed literature’s interests, subordinated them to its national, class and regional interests, made literature serve supposedly higher purposes, turned it from a legislative body into an executive one, and was cruelly punished: literature as such ceased to exist. That sin is not forgiven even to Shakespeare, even to God himself. Recall the alienation that overtakes us, how far God recedes from us, when a Jew sometimes looks out from behind the figure of Christ. It is a sin before truth, and our shares of sin are directly proportional to our literatures’ contributions to our so-called Soviet, multinational, multilingual literature.
Absurd, is it not? We wanted to offer those closest to us the most immediate help, yet scarcely thirty years have passed and the country’s life today reaches over our heads for help from the literature of the distant twenties and still more distant times, countries and languages. What will remain of us in fifty or a hundred years?
You say it is time literature renewed itself with new mouths, that new ranks of young men and women should appear. You say they are absent. God forbid. Even if that is so, we must not believe it, must not accept the fact. We must spend money for five years on some fifty people with a measure of talent, release them from poverty’s grip, which tore our own youth apart, and await a definite result. The absence of newcomers would mean literature’s death: not only the death of the people’s living aspirations and eternal striving for self-renewal, but also the end of the whole classical inheritance, since only newcomers secure the classics’ immortality. Without newcomers, without Likhachev, Tarkovsky, Sevak, Vysotsky, Shukshin... the classics would be a splendid but mere pantheon. Saryan appeared in his magnificent greatness once in the nineteen-tens, when he discovered the East and Eastern art, and again in the sixties, when the exhibition halls belonged to Minas. Minas became not only Saryan’s offspring but his renewer. Without Minas and Hakob Hakobyan, Saryan would have been a dead idol. The same applies to Tumanyan and the generation who awakened all medieval Armenian poetry, from the epic and Narekatsi to Sayat-Nova.
Those newcomers who ought to exist but do not probably consider the work of the “sixties” sufficient. If so, better that they not come, and they are right not to. But if they do come, let them begin where we were timid and stopped. Let them seek the equal companionship of those at least two hundred and fifty million lives, never subordination or power.
Interview conducted by Irina TOSUNYAN in October 1987 for Literaturnaya Gazeta.
Grakan Tert, 1 July 1988.