- To me, "Lit. "Gazeta" employee, invited to an interview the reading of your novel "The Lord" ("Druzhba Narodov", October 1987). At first, that "royal" WE seemed unusual and an end in itself: "We said", "We kept our horse's head", etc., then it seemed necessary, especially after such an explanation. "In June of the year 18, a stormy and rainy day, an Andranik soldier passed through these mountains, with the whole of emigrant Armenia clapping behind him. that "we" say: we want, sacrifice, to see ourselves as Andranik Zoravar, but we neither have a people coming behind us, nor our predecessors, the enemy of the Turks. Isn't it outdated, can we say that your Rostom Mamikonian considers our days as alarming as that distant "thunderstorm-rainy June" and accordingly seeks the ancient union of the people and the leader, the leader's words, the leader's behavior.
- In the life of our people, that "iron flood", yes, it happened, and it happened and is happening more than once, and there is no place where it happened during the years of the uprising. The Republic of Armenia, that is, we, me and all or almost all the Armenians you know, were brought by those caravans, the entire diaspora of Armenians from Australia to America was saved by those caravans. The people put their leaders, often the poor priests of the parish, often one of their own, in front, and they themselves flowed behind them to the coast of salvation, to the shore of salvation, to the Khanayun of Tabriz, to the Syrian desert, to the sea, where there should be a warship of any law-abiding power, to the Russian Empire, to "national" Muslimization. This is how it was told in the holy book and it was and still is in the life of our people, and those poor leaders were obliged to make Moses out of themselves, they were obliged to make themselves the popular ideal of a leader, they were obliged to carry the people's protest and anger, hope and faith, mourning and curse, longing for existence and abandonment, morals and promiscuity, all vibrations of life in their ears and eyes. to climb the mountain of God, to assimilate the rules of existence from all those voices and images of the people and to make the people as God's messages. Anyone and everyone among that people could be a thief, could be unjust, not divide the bread equally between their child and their brother's child, could secretly and openly commit adultery, secretly give birth and marry - they did not have the right to do so, they were the personification of the bright and stable that is in all sinners and broken ones.
What was said about Andranik, I may have a few words on other pages, and a few words may find their place in my future pages, is purely historical reality. The people followed behind, swelling and not diminishing, even though typhus held many back, the Armenian villages on the road gave shelter to some, from Tumanyan's Dsegh flowed through the Dilijan Valley and the Sevan mountains to Nakhichevan and Tabriz, hoping that Asia Minor would break through and reach the Mediterranean coast, where there was still a strong Armenian population. In the wet, heavy spring of 1918, from all the caves, from all the villages and barns, all the paths brought orphans and widows to Andranik, when he did not know the way out either, but he also could not leave his people, he stood before his people on a white steed as the embodiment of hope and victory, when his only hope was God.
I am not telling this in the union square to be proud of our "neighborly behavior", the proud native descendants would not have so much anxiety about the future, nor do I start my poor attack "for the sake of the motherland" from the cemetery of ancestral memories, although this last one always and everywhere, in the Middle Ages, today, in Europe, in Asia, in political struggle, in personal career, leads to an impure but also unconditional result. I remembered that escape, those caravans, those leaders simply because that escape is also a phenomenon of today and here, I'm afraid, of much more tomorrow.
Let me remind you that the people who are leaving their homeland are those who entered a huge list of 500,000 people who came to Armenia right after the war, and only a small part of them were able to come. We should also inform the reader that this mass of half a million or more was resurrected in the countries of the Middle East in 1915-22. after emigrating from the so-called Turkish Western Armenia and during that quarter of a century, despite the most brotherly attitude of the Arab and Persian peoples, they did not make their countries their homeland, that is, when they came to Armenia, they came to their homeland. Let's say again, and is it worth talking about in a publication that has not done anything and heard nothing about your story during these seventy years and you don't know what position it will take in front of your pain, that throughout the war that mass helped the victorious country of the Soviets with all possible and impossible means, no, also the defeated country, helped on June 22, 1941 and helped on May 9, 1945, helped in the distant twenties and loved and helps even now in 1987.
These and their descendants are leaving us. I won't say if they live better than us on distant shores. In order for an Armenian child to be in an Armenian school at 9 o'clock, that six-seven-year-old child must be standing on the sidewalk of Athens, Istanbul or Los Angeles waiting for the school bus at 6 o'clock. It is, but they are leaving. We can ask that by leaving, they deprive us of themselves, impoverish us, we can make fun of them, we can hinder them, which is our most successful way so far, we can call it self-awareness, we can restrict them with ranks and positions, but they leave without leaving. The homeland as such did not exist for them, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia did not become their homeland, they did not become the owners of Armenia.
- What, will they feel at home in Athens, Istanbul or Los Angeles, will they make America, Turkey or Greece their homeland?
- Never. A bit of socio-political upheaval, a sly look from the natives, and they're always bound, always ready to throw themselves into their suitcases.
- But today's great peoples were created from small peoples, those natives are just yesterday's newcomers, today's newcomers will be natives tomorrow in a more or less peaceful country.
- Maybe it is so, but maybe it is not. I don't think so, but even if it is, it is a very precise attack on a certain culture of certain people in the name of an uncertain future. Call it a peaceful attack or call it aggression, it doesn't matter. The insoluble problems facing humanity today, which may still cost the Earth dearly, have accumulated from yesterday's small mistakes, petty injustices, minor mistakes of the same humanity. If we resolve this issue today, tomorrow's generation will face only the mistakes of the grandfathers. The American fantasist has a sweet story about it. A time traveler inadvertently stepped on a butterfly there in the past, and here in the present, the election has put the leader of the Furies behind the presidential desk.
Today, here, in my presence, something is being crushed, and my whole body of an Armenian, Soviet-Armenian writer is indescribably aching with shame - it's about this. It is a shame to be the son of the house from which your brothers run away, and those brothers of yours run away, who for centuries have lamented songs of longing and return, and whose path has always brought home for centuries and through different countries. I want to shout "help", but I don't believe in anyone's rescue help and I remain silent, but I also doubt that fate has programmed it this way, so that my body changed from its suffocating and painful mold to "non-national" striving for freedom. It may be reasonable in its universal-global scale, but, I say again. it causes me unspeakable pain that the Armenian village itself is emptying all over Transcaucasia, the Armenian lake itself is drying up, the Armenian school itself, the 1500-year-old Armenian school, is diminishing, that the Armenian culture itself is fading and being abandoned, the language itself in all its manifestations, that the women of my mother's class and my daughter's age, following the example of their husbands and brothers, become a ring and go to collect potatoes from the Armenian villages. they leave their homes for thousands of miles and long months to other regions, where there is land and crops, but no harvester. What, it was going to be in the distant GFA, so that we could begin to understand that being a Turk in a foreign country is hard with the help of a publicist-mediator? or would they be Russians of unconditionally difficult times, that with the intervention of Russian writers we would begin to see that we are completely and finally crushing our women and that this is an attack on the very basis of our human life? no, they are not in distant Germany and not in distant war times. all that drama unfolding right in my time, right around me, and right next to my heart.
- Which of those phenomena would you like to elaborate on: the desolation of schools, culture, lakes, villages... Maybe you would still talk about the fading of Armenian culture, yes?
- Culture is culture, and Matenadaran is my national pride, the school is a school that was even under Delyanov's ban and operated secretly, but the most painful for me is our attack on the "women's society". Of course, there was no such attack from our side, we are not so barbaric or unaccountable, but what if the retroactive force of all our goals and actions falls on them, undermines their home and family, distorts them, manifests itself on their small "domains" as a direct attack on those "domains".
Matenadaran, Matenadaran, but they are living people, I can't stop thinking about those "potato farmers". They pay for their nights and days abroad with drams and go to the shops to resell them and put their house in order when they return home, or with potatoes to find an expensive market in a huge country. In other words, we put them on the market and report them to the law enforcement agencies, then that girl-woman, who became the basis of the village and clan with my great-grandfather, gave birth and nursed, milked and cultivated, spun, worked and patched, held the edge of the saw with her husband, laid bread in front of the forest chief: the bread she baked, the yogurt we made, the agar she pulled, the universal man to give birth and feed her. the singular time is spent sitting in some work colony sewing very bad work clothes.
- You yourself remembered modern Russian writers. All or almost all of those problems were discussed and are widely discussed in today's conditions, if not in all Russian and Soviet literature, then in public literature. It means that these are all-Russian-Soviet issues, so why do you say "right here?"
- Those generalities of national misfortunes only make me happy. it means that we will look for the reasons together, and if not me and my Moldovan or Georgian friends, the direct descendants of Chekhov will definitely find it. In all cases, before the reasons, however irreparable they may be, I will not be afraid, because I will not be alone. What scares me are the differences in outcomes, and the differences are large and substantial. Here I am alone and no one, even if they want to, can replace me, i.e. put themselves in my place.
In the difficult post-war years, a problem was set all over the country, according to which every region and every republic had to provide itself with bread. It's a matter of morality before the economic one, right: don't go to your neighbor's door to beg? This land of Armenia could not feed its children, because not all of them were of its birth, one out of every two was an immigrant from Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, different countries of the world, that is, the land of the republic was overpopulated. But those "newcomers" and deportees could not be expelled from the homeland even now. They came to the slopes of the mountains, in the most impossible places, to the source of a spring or completely waterless, they became villages, gathered and raised cities. He could not, could not provide, but he provided for a couple of years or did something similar to providing. He plowed and sowed all possible and impossible places, up to the mountain tops. The consequences are now well known. middle Russia is now trying to resettle, and it is not a hopeless task, because the living layer of black soil is drowning under the clay, but it has not left, it is there in middle Russia, in the "non-black soil zone", and the land of mountainous Armenia is no longer here, the floods have taken it to the seas, ninety percent of the fields, grasslands, pastures have been eroded, half of this ninety percent is hopelessly an irreplaceable pedigree cow of 20-20 liters becomes a "goat" after a generation in these pastures.
And this soil is now us, when it is tired of us, it is disgusted with us, it is in deep need of a thousand-year rest, it is again trampled, again turned over, again plucked, again brought to consciousness by chemistry, so that we can not feel that it was destroyed in our time and by our hands.
No, I don't want to be impressed and I don't want to feel like a horse in my turn to speak. The words of the Armenian people of Cilicia, to be exact, the people of Musaler, say: "He was on a horse, he forgot God, he was taken off the horse, he forgot the horse." I have not forgotten God now and I know that I and "LG" are not the saviors of that land.
That land is no longer a production unit, it no longer withstands the economic calculation, such land is discarded by the economies from their funds, and in order to deceive ourselves that we did not hand over those once flourishing slopes to the black desert, we think that individual effort would have saved those slopes. We will not save, because the land no longer requires unpaid work, and no one will make such a sacrifice.
In a similar situation, Lake Sevan was released from the mountains, in a similar situation, the necklace of chemistry was wrapped around the neck of the republic, and in the same conditions, the "Armenian" atomic plant was placed in the center of the republic.
I don't blame anyone, I don't resent anyone, it all seems to be the way it should be. It seems that in the spring of 1918, when Vehib Bey...
- Who is that Vehib Bey?
- Viewed from the top of the Moscow Kremlin, another rank and file of the Turkish army. After the peace of Brest, the fulfillment of the fourth point of the agreement on the Russo-Turkish front, the horror of 1918 for the Armenians as seen from the bottom of our Ararat valley. Please forgive me that I fall into the times of the people again. if there is one person in the world who does not want to fall into those times, does not want to face the image of the destruction of his people, it is the Armenian writer. but even in the most childish, most altruistic, most utopian dreams, it is impossible to avoid those times. In that spring, when Vehib Bey was driving the rest of the Armenians from the East of Asia Minor to this Ararat Valley, with the remote view of a Turkish soldier from the height of the Armenian Par Mountains, he probably saw this future of that remnant and thought that nothing more needs to be done, the rest will be independent, the people and their space have been reduced to the minimum that is "harmful to the progress of humanity" (such a thought of their ideology and was in politics, had been at that time for about fifty years).
The rest happens by itself. It was not possible without the nuclear power plant, it is impossible with the nuclear power plant. "What if it crashes?" "What if it doesn't crash?" If there is no accident, so many people from the republic will have jobs, so many families will work and live.
- Was it really possible not to have the nuclear power plant?
- It was possible if the government of the republic could tell the union government at the time. "We prefer poverty to an accident, poverty can be managed, an accident cannot." But can you imagine what answer the republican government would get? "What, other regions are rich and you are going to live poor?" In short, the nuclear power plant is there. If there is an accident, the people of the republic will migrate for thirty years or five years. But one should not become a burden on the necks of our numerous peoples, who would not completely disappear in the event of a similar accident. You can't, it's really immoral. So what? So the fact that each nation will have to pull its own yoke. "The nuclear power plant should not crash" is really a friend's wish. We don't believe in an accident either, we don't believe in an accident more than anyone, even if they see their destruction, they don't believe. But that relative (I don't know if he is a department or a person) who says "it shouldn't crash" and knows that it happens, that nuclear power plants crash, that it happens, he... let him find his own name, his exact nature is known only to him.
Even if he sends his daughter or son to work at our ("our") nuclear power plant, he is still dishonest, because he will do it (he won't do it, don't doubt it) not to dispel his doubts about the nuclear power plant's reliability, but only to silence the grumbling of our locals, the only form of complaint of a people who cannot (it's immoral) make an argument for its... uniqueness.
I said that and felt bad. It is not said, it is not written, it is not clearly formulated in complaint letters - it seems immoral. But look. I don't know who (the department or the person who has fenced himself off with departmental and national interest) took the pencil and counted. a possible accident puts 0.7 percent of Soviet citizens at risk, those two million people of 0.7 percent should keep their suitcases tied, and did not count, did not take into account that that 0.7 percent of them is exactly 70 percent of Armenians living in their homeland, that their migration puts a cross on a people once and for all.
The true name of this is only indifference to our national destiny, and it would be too heartbreaking for us to look for evil intent here. Also, it is not necessary to see cooperation between this department and the department that is called to control and regulate the internal movement of peoples (which is a real scourge for us), which publicly describes the attachment of this people to the last edge of the homeland as immovable conservatism and which should already nod with a sense of satisfaction to those departments, with the conscious and unconscious efforts of which peoples are being torn from their centuries-old places. The real name of this is indifference or even concern, but what do you do when it would be impossible to attack the people's confidence in their homeland and their future in this way even with an even more evil intention, and what do you do when this work and experience of native institutions... was recorded neither today nor here - in 1869 in Fuat Pasha's will. "The most permanent provision in the constitutions of the present powers is the great assimilation."
It seems that the old accounts could not be brought into the middle, it seems that the old bones could be left alone. It would be possible if they would leave us alone, if they did not change their places and forms and times, leaving unchanged the object of their eternal concern, us. The former politician is sitting here and writing a letter to his Sultan. "However, any Serbia, any Armenian kingdom... are nothing but inevitable spoils of new world rulers, harmful elements threatening the progress of the human race and world peace." This is just a letter, it is not known whether the Sultan will read it or not, the figure himself has two months to live, he has left the political arena, so he cannot put on a Bismarckian helmet and pick up a bayonet. But this is the same imperialist who wants to do something good in the name of the progress of humanity and does two bad things - he spoils first me, a Serb or an Armenian, secondly his people, and it is not known who he is spoiling much more. This is the same imperialist who eternally wants to do something great: open seas, divert rivers, migrate peoples, and only spreads evil. This is the great proofreader of nature and history, which corrects the small errors of nature and history, small beliefs and small languages, and if he has already made your faith and language his own, he will not love your color, and if you could change your color, he will hate your origin.
And would the pan-Soviet-world fraternity of writers be able to become an equally strong, equally united bulwark in front of this united march of science and social science braggarts? "It's not the end of the world, what are you doing? We still have to live and work side by side."
- It's difficult, but let's get back to literature. What are you working on?
- After the end of the novel, after closing the novel by force... I find it difficult to call it a novel, the clear rule of the genre does not satisfy it, we have reserved the right to write a novel with Bitov, an accurate literary critic, perhaps only Rasputin from our generation... I would write a drama about a thoughtful motherland, for a person like me who is unorganized, whimsical, not satisfied with little and beautiful and does not achieve much and big, yet again disobedient genre work. A peasant, again a peasant and always a peasant, because for me she is the land and the motherland itself, the woman in her safe and peaceful home suddenly, from some extraneous sign on the radio or TV, I don't know, she gets worried, suddenly alarmed, feels robbed, loses someone dear. In the distant city of Yerevan, a family of repatriates ties up their luggage and goes back abroad, among the luggage there is an insignificant (or even expensive) thing that belonged to that peasant woman or her mother, grandmother, aunt, her (Gospel? Silver belt? I don't know) who wandered in the odyssey of the Armenian people in all Armenian and non-Armenian worlds and times and is now leaving the country. Here I want to depict the meeting and separation of that woman and that family. I will not attack that family, which will definitely have its own ideology of escaping, leaving, leaving this homeland, no. They are all mine. the girl who carries an oral poem from Vahan Teryan with her, the grandmother who started her life on the migration journey and will end it on the journey, all those who are on the transatlantic route and in Turkey, who are French-speaking and Russian-speaking, who are on the Iraqi front and the Iranian front, they are all mine. Our Armenian star has exploded and is scattered in all directions, and those departing fiery fragments are mine as long as they are seen. They drain my strength and life. Thus, if possible, the crucified body would look after the dying soul. Will they look back, will it become their homeland, according to Tumanyan's phrase: "This is the country where our soul aspires"... It has no meaning for a certain soldafon who wants to imagine himself as a pure religious, orthodox crusader, because his image of a rude and ignorant person still takes on some kind of halo of an idea warrior, for him it is a shame that is completely unnecessary for the construction of the pyramid of his department. But I don't even expect an answer from him, let him successfully close his dead pyramid and deliver his Pharaoh's ninja to the uninhabited deserts. I expect my answer from Russian intelligentsia and Russian living literature. will he encourage the future of his language, culture, family, human-unit, in short, the living homeland, will he worry about today, will he deserve, will he be able to deserve the love and respect of the whole world - we will also strive for the same regarding our homelands.
We are facing a difficult, difficult problem, it's a question of being or not, and man, humanity in general, is an egoistic and suspicious being, in front of your tragedy, he thinks first of all: what harm will he do from that tragedy or, oh, what will remain to him from your burnt house. Will we be able to bring this person and humanity to the consciousness that the decayed soil of the Armenian Republic is the wounded skin of one and the same organism of the Earth, that the Earth cannot be called healthy as long as our wound is on it?
It is difficult to find a true answer, and those who will lighten the question, I'm afraid, still have a second homeland in their mind, like those who quietly work near the "Armenian" nuclear power plant, but still keep an untouched fuel cylinder... And for me, this is the only land where I can live, the only language in which I can work, and beyond them is my death.
- Of course, it is impossible not to sympathize with your anxiety about the future of the country and people, but now I am asking you not as a person with a sharp conscience, but as a professional writer. Don't you sometimes feel overwhelmed by the awareness of your absolute powerlessness in the face of those exciting problems, the solution of those difficult problems that have become the content of your life, or rather, their intractability? Don't you often think that you and people would be needed much more in another business, let's say farming, animal husbandry, beekeeping?
- So we don't write for nothing, yes? In other words, for two thousand years, the greatest monument of literature has been urging passers-by not to kill, not to commit adultery, not to steal, but we kill, commit adultery, and gloriously steal, yes? During the existence of Tumanyan, there was a riot, in the presence of Tolstoy in his own province, a black hundred massacre of a peaceful popular demonstration. Fascism rose in the Germany of great literature, and Pinochet proliferated in anti-dictatorship quasi-serial novels, yes? Why do we write when the master is again the brute force, yes?
All those thousands of wars, millions of murders, billions of thefts, everywhere and everyday adultery, it happened like that. history remembers it that way because it happened that way. And how many people does that anti-dictatorship novel kill, how many people's mouths are filled with spit and curses against the dictatorship, how many codes of the biblical "do not kill" entered and how many were saved from the sin of killing and being killed, how many sinful love was smothered by "do not commit adultery", how many tons of gold was spent on prisoners of war, compassion for the prisoner - history does not remember this and does not need to. there is no one to remember, they remember the past. the entire world today, the life of people and even the life of the land and seas, is the object image of the entire literature of the world, the defects and imperfections of that image accurately point to the defects and flawless aspects of the literature of the world.
You say, should I say at least culture-culture? First of all, the entire culture itself is an expression of literature. I don't want to reach out to the authorities, I don't want to remind you that the matter was from the beginning. "Children don't beg in China, our children are begging, it means there is something wrong in our culture." when this thought of an Indian intellectual reached me, I saw that he had found the answer to the question that tormented me. Let's spread his thought to all countries, and that "something wrong" will appear in their literature. Every time new generations see that mistake in life and rush to correct that flaw in literature.
- This, of course, also applies to your generation of the "sixties".
- That generation of the sixties, although the volume of its work is small (the entire collection of the entire Union can be mastered in less than a month, including cinema, theater, painting, song), still had a fundamental service to life. changed the attitude of literature towards man, instead of yesterday's role of an interpreter of the country's ideology, he tried to win for himself new positions as a researcher of life itself, and this, bursting, revolutionary, categorically withdrawing from yesterday's attitude of literature. It was a difficult task. from the resistance of the Tatar-Mongol invasions to the defeat of the German invaders, yesterday's attitude to the vocation of man was sanctified, and from "Igor's Ask" to "Komkus Manifesto" and even the popular speech about the broom were the hymns of those old and future victories by common efforts.
But it was equally and even more obvious that the universally said, that yearning and powerless century sufferer wanted to live his personal life today and here, he wanted a place to lay his crowned head: cover, wife (husband), child, earnings, expansion of abilities in the way he wanted, the little thing that sustains the fire of human existence in our short life, and without which we, no matter how much we collect ourselves in a military corset, are like raw clay. we are coming to a stage. Our generation of the sixties stood and stands in the position of this man.
He doesn't leave the "scene of the incident", he doesn't surrender himself to the world of the fairy tale-fable, and from the actual places of the events, he gives an alarm with love and pain, passion and despair: he hurts, sinks, dies, does not believe, leaves, gets drunk, gasses, distorts, destroys, is destroyed. So much or again many and many things that can be called a cry of the soul or a lamentation of the people in one word. It seems that it is not enough to be called full literature, but isn't it? It seems to have reflected an unbiased picture of the country, and that is enough. If that is enough, let's be satisfied with the current state of the country, but the current state of the country is not comforting, so the state of literature is not comforting, first of all.
It seems to me that our generation of the sixties got confused and confused at a crucial point, the place of which only they know. he said: he steals, he destroys himself, he does not open, distorts, spoils, but he did not say: he steals, because he does not consider it his own and does not belong to him. destroys himself because he considers himself his enemy; does not open because he is tired of giving and not receiving. it spoils and spoils, because the owner himself is not. distorted beyond recognition because he does not live in his natural human element, but surrenders to some regime alien to him.
Our literature was confused and retreated before the imaginary image of the desires, imagination, initiative, originality, self-leadership, manifestation of all and all characteristics of those at least 250 million people. And in that confusion, that indecision, that silence, there was an element of well-disguised dishonesty, selfishness. it was silently assumed that this loss from the moral description of each and everyone, this deprivation of each and everyone is perhaps compensated by the union and power of the "Soviet nation", which would be impossible to "weld" in the social order of the individual, is compensated once and for all, that is, the loser is one or two generations, the winner is the eternal march of future generations. Again the same religion, again for the sake of future generations the denial of today's and here generations.
Many of us, many, many of us, until now and forever, will be of the opinion that even if we have not made progress for twenty-five years - we have ruled 250 million people for a quarter of a century, we have kept them in public, otherwise they would not be ruled, otherwise they would have scattered. Do you remember the emperor of Haji Murad? "Da, chto be bela bez menya Rossiya. It's not Russia, it's Europe." "What would those 250 million be without us?" We say this in the rhyme of an emperor, although we are not an emperor at all.
Without us, they would have done what they would have done without us, what else would they have done? They would cut off our hands, they wouldn't allow us to spend tens and tens of millions of their property and lives in such a royal way, as we always and now spend. With their 250 million will and ability, they would search all the nooks and crannies of the economy, science, and social science, and today we would have the thoughts and deeds of 250 million people in the public square, and not the acute lack of thoughts and deeds that is suffocating us today.
It is difficult for me now to say "betrayal" after the words "dishonesty" and "profiteering", but that's how it happened. the generation betrayed the interest of literature, subordinated the interest of literature to its national, class, regional interests, used literature as a higher purpose, turned literature into an executive body from the legislature and was severely punished - literature as such ceased to exist. It is a sin that even Shakespeare is not forgiven and God himself is not forgiven, then let's not remember what a distance we are in, how far God is from us, when sometimes a Jew looks behind the figure of Christ. It is a sin in the face of truth, and our share of sins is directly proportional to the contribution of our literatures to our multi-national-multi-lingual literature in Soviet speech.
It's absurd, isn't it, that we wanted to provide the most immediate help to our closest people, but only thirty years have passed, and the life of the country today takes help over our heads from the literature of the distant twenties and even more distant times and countries and languages. What will be left of us in fifty or a hundred years?
You say that it is time for literature to renew itself with new mouths, for new boys and girls to appear in the square. You say there are none? God forbid. Even if it is so, you shouldn't believe it, you shouldn't accept the fact, you should spend five years on some fifty gifted people, free them from the clutches of poverty, which our youth has not suffered much, and wait for the exact result. The absence of the new would mean the death of literature - not only the death of the living aspirations of the people and the eternal effort of self-renovation, but also the end of the entire classical heritage, because the immortality of the classic is ensured only by the new. Without the new, without Likhachev, Tarkovsky, Sevak, Vysotsky, Shukshin... the classic would be glorious, but only a pantheon. Saryan appeared in all its splendor in the decade when he discovered the East and the art of the East, and again in the sixties when the showrooms were Minassin. Minas became Saryan's not only a birth, but also a revival, without Minas and Hakob Hakobyan, Saryan would have been a dead idol. The same about Tumanyan and his generation, who awakened the entire medieval Armenian poetry, from epic and Narekat to Sayat-Nova.
Those new ones, who should have been and are not, probably consider the work of the "sixties" to be enough. If so, it is better not to come and they are doing well not to come. And if they are going to come anyway, let them start from the place where we were noble and stopped. let those at least 250 million lives seek equal company and never subordination or power.
Interview commissioned by "Literaturnaya Gazeta" in 1987. conducted by Irina Tosunyan in October
"Literary Newspaper", 01.07.1988.