A stork of the Ararat valley came from Egypt in the spring, circled over the valley, but the poplar was not there, the stork landed on the pole of the high voltage transmission line. now the stork's nest is on the pole of the transmission line at Araks station. At the same moment, under the same sky, the satellite floats, the donkey brays. A spade of today's water drops into the thousand-year-old clay and meets Menua's wine bowl under the earth...
I purposely bring so many examples in order to pressure them to force me to share Vardges Petrosyan's concern about the creation of an average national image, and it seems that I am concerned. Really, what should be done in order for the image I have drawn to contain the pride of this people in its antiquity, the pride of the great people, the modern socialist view of looking at the world brightly, the attitude towards the growth of the world population, chemical fishing, the theft of production alcohol from the polyvinyl acetate factory, a thousand and a thousand things. The character of a person is shaped by events. At one time, the character of a person was shaped by the events taking place in such and such a limited space. Now information has reached a furious speed, with that speed, the world has become a handful around a person, and a person is now being formed in the chaos of world events. And it seems that Vardges Petrosyan is right when he writes: "How can I bring together the physicist Alikhanyan, the mountaineer Ashot Melkonyan, our villager Grandpa Atanes, the musician Arno Babajanyan, the pilot Edik Bakhshinyan, the writer Perch Zeytuntsyan, the writer Hrant Matevosyan?" How should I add, what should I divide by, so that the average national image of today's Armenian is obtained in the calculation? Is the question fictional or is there really such a question? The point is that Alikhanyan, Bakhshinyan, Zeytuntsyan, Atanes pap and others are not as opposite qualities as Petrosyan thinks, and there is no need to add them together and separate them to get an average national image. Alikhanyan already has Atanes pap, Perch Zeytuntsyan, Arno Babajanyan. The revelation of the character of Pope Athanasius is also the revelation of all other individuals. And if that's not the case, the satellite flies under the same sky, and the donkey bucks, and it is necessary for them to be gathered and separated, then they are already gathered and separated in an experimental station called a writer, whose literary output is the answer to any number of Vardges Petrosyan. Reality already has the law of generalization. That law has even more literary reality. The author of the "Crane" song did not measure the longings of so many pilgrims and received the "Crane" quotient of longings for them. The author of the song "Crane" measured the longing that is the longing of all the pilgrims of the world.
Literature is the expression of the writer's self, and if you are a human being, a writer, an Armenian writer of the second half of the twentieth century, if you are really a writer, or your writings are sprinkled with the slightest sincerity, then it cannot happen that the people you gave birth to are Swedes of the seventeenth century. And if you are not a writer, then add and divide all the physicists, shepherds and miners, and in the calculation you will get a physicist-pastor accurately reflecting the second half of the Armenian reality of the twentieth century, but it will not be a person, but it will be addition, division and the answer to the calculation.
Here is the non-literary answer to a non-literary question. Why was the question invented? The question was invented in opposition to ancient literature. Life here, especially in the last fifty years, has made enormous progress, an illiterate Armenia has become a poet and an engineer Armenia, a backward peasant country has become a country of cities, the new boys don't eat barbecue, but drink cocktails, the new boys don't tell fairy tales, but dance the sheik, the new shepherds don't carry a goatee on their shoulders, but a transistor type radio receiver, and, therefore, they must have undergone changes. also the national characters, and so-and-so's writings smell of the countryside of Proshyan's time, and criticism praises that old-fashioned and does not praise the new-fashioned about boys who don't eat barbecue. Fighting against the smoke and barbecue, Vardges Petrosyan fights for new smoke and barbecue: transistor and cocktail. Fighting against old exoticism, Vardges Petrosyan fights for new exoticism. Vardges Petrosyan proposes a non-philosophical attitude against the ancient philosophical attitudes. Against old men who give advice, child-old men who don't give advice. Not "stretch your leg the size of your blanket", but existentialism. Not "one horseshoe hits one nail", but eclecticism. Not traditional rain, but not traditional rain during funerals. Not kochari, but twist. Not wine, but coffee.
In spite of the shortcomings of ancient literature, this is how a new incomplete literature and the theory of that literature are created, which take food from their supposedly unloved "desirous" father, not so naively think that they are a completely new quality, submit an application to enter the center of literature and beg for praise on the grounds that they are not landings brought down from foreign books and films, but stand on the pedestal of Armenian reality. Citing the Armenian argument of urbanist lifestyle, both Arshakyan and Petrosyan forget a very important thing. in every way, the work of a writer is the realization of that writer's worldview and philosophy. the writer is not a narrator of events, but one who explains or tries to explain the world in his own way. Remarque's Women is anchored on the author's deep knowledge of Freudianism and the homogenous foundation of Freudian worldview. Flawed or not, it is a complete world. cases and touched are different branches of the same logical fabric; the main characters and characters come to make sense of the events. it turns out, beautiful or not beautiful, a complete life seen from a certain point of view. And what is vital and persuasive for Remarque, becomes absurd, unconvincing, illogical, detached from life in us, because the Christian beginning and process require a Christian end, the Gothic foundation and walls imply a Gothic dome, the Petrosian or Arshakian tendency and story require a Petrosian or Arshakian logic of the choice of story and material to the end. it is the first necessary condition of artistic persuasiveness and the violation implies the imprecise but generally correct charge "it is a lie, it is false, it has nothing to do with life".
Petrosyan writes: "This may even seem inhumane, but I must not curse civilization for the loss of every fragment of folk color. In the end, of course, life and time will do their thing. even vineyards can be destroyed to build a radiophysics institute or an airport, and many national traditions will be destroyed. And here, in this difficult situation of transition, I want to see where my contemporary writer looks towards, in the end, what perspective he prefers for his people."
The transition between "Iliad" and "Odyssey" refers to the times half a millennium before the birth of that epic. In our epic, David and Melik fight each other not earlier than the invention of gunpowder and guns, while the backbone of the epic's fabric refers to the times half a millennium before the invention of gunpowder. Haji Murad became "Haji Murad" fifty years after the Shamil uprising, "War and Peace" was written fifty years after the war, "Peaceful Don" is about a fresh yesterday, but today and yesterday are separated by such an irreversible gap that consigned Cossacks to the depths of a thousand years of history; to tell the examples a thousand times that it evokes feelings much more yesterday, because yesterday's valley of memories is inhabited by desirable or hated incidents and faces, which are the golden deposit of our memories, which can become literature. In any case, I am now waiting for real cases of the pre-Egyptian, Hovhannes Tumanyan, Egyen, revolution, collective economy construction, World War II materials, because the events are happening in reality, are revealed, and then only told with regret, anger, hatred, pride, attitude. Isn't it clear that the attitude to those cases will no longer be the attitude of a contemporary and a village writer, but will be a philosophical understanding of hindsight?
What are Petrosyan and Arshakyan doing? because we have a great tradition of village history, that is why most modern writers write about the village; because we do not have a tradition of urban studies, only a few people are engaged in urban studies. those who practice agriculture are imitators, those who practice politics are prize-winners. But among them, is rural geography or urban geography more difficult, Vardges Petrosyan asks. Politics. Because political writers are searchers, rural writers are imitators of Proshyan and Bakuntsi.
Which is difficult? both are difficult. writing is a pain in general. But let's understand the question in its initial nakedness. there is an Armenian village history, there is no Armenian civil history. The current Armenian village history, apart from the Armenian village history, has the "support" of the Armenian literary reality, and the current Armenian city history, due to the non-existence of the Armenian city history, has no support. Whose job is easy? The downward arrow of the scheme leads to an abyss. the work of village surveying is easy because "village surveying is armed with the experience of previous village surveying". However, Tumanyan's life experience belongs only to Tumanyan. if I don't create my uncle Khechan with my own means, but because my uncle is the life version of uncle Khechan, I will create it with Tumanyan's means, then will I have written a new story or will I have copied Tumanyan's "Uncle Khechan"? I will copy it. If I start writing a novel about Khachatur Abovyan tomorrow, how will Abovyan himself help me with his novel, Yeghishe Charents "To the Liver Masis", Axel Bakunts "Khachatur Abovyan" to pull my Abovyan out of me? with a generally beneficent influence, an influence that rural geography can also have on political writers. Why? War and Peace is The War of 1812 plus Leo Tolstoy, more precisely, Leo Tolstoy's War of 1812. If he writes a novel about the war of 1812 again, Tolstoy can't help him in any way, Martiros Saryan can't help the new painters in Armenia in any way. But who needs these famous truths? Petrosyan and Arshakyan completely ignored the writing style, they turned the writer into a documenter, a reflector, a reporter, a musician-performer, an actor, a hustler, a restorer, but never an organizer of events, a composer, an architect, an artist. hence the next wrong step was taken. village writers have assistants, city writers do not. The truth is that the first Armenian writer Mesrop Mashtots was alone and unarmed against the unknown, 1500 years after him Khachatur Abovyan was again alone against the unknown and after them, with the presence of the great Armenian culture, every writer sits alone at the desk in front of a white paper. It is difficult for every writer. Bakunts does not help any writer, and if it helps any rural writer, it can also help political writers, because neither the village and the city are opposite social poles, nor the villager and the citizen are humanly opposite qualities, nor are times emptied of old content and filled with new content so quickly that the next generation does not understand the previous generation, and literature still remains at the heights of its old anthropological title. Every writer stands in an empty plane and becomes the height of that plane, and there is no need to pretend to be without a pedestal, but also to declare himself a victim and a pedestal for some future true politics, as Vardges Petrosyan does.
In his future literature, Vardges Petrosyan has pardonably given a place to rural history. "Aspirational" literature will survive as an addition to "aspirational" reality and will not be satisfied with the elimination of "aspirational" reality. "But the sad thing is that the writers who have mastered the principles of traditional village history... time will make its verdict of oblivion," G. adds. Arshakyan. Is this agriculture-agriculture sociologism or not? In the United States of America, four percent of the national population is engaged in agriculture, maybe four percent of the total number of writers are engaged in agriculture, maybe only four percent of the total literary output is agriculture? I don't have exact data - because no one before our smarts thought of dividing the literature into two different wings with two different foundations and reporting the data of correspondence or inconsistency of the foundations and wings - but for a thousand reasons this is unlikely to be the case.
In case of a new war, 500,000,000 people will be drafted. the earth's 500,000,000 army will set the calculating machines in motion. the marshals will be the henchmen of the counting machines. and there, far before our dates, the young commander-leader of the great world of Babylon assembled donkey-riding regiments, marched regiments into the great world of Assyria, gave a great battle and captured fifty soldiers, a herd of donkeys, fifty cows and seven sacks of grape wine, and recorded the victory in a lithographic inscription. In all military maps, my village, our house, my apple tree, Tsamak Dzor are accurately depicted, in the military records the semi-fitness of my father for military work, my fitness, the reserve fitness of my twelve-year-old brother, the number of our shovels, the length and thickness of our dog's chain - civilization has discovered them from the darkness of uncertainty and fed them into the mouth of the calculating machines - and passionate anger arises: to stick like a bat into an unlit hole of civilization and close the door. I don't want to be a part of this civilization, cries Charles Chaplin.
While not wanting to be a part of that civilization, Chaplin pushes that civilization forward. Life goes on its way, and the naturalistic bent of literature remains.
The naturalism of literature appears in the guise of rural history, because it is not possible to bring back the mythical king of Babylon, nor to turn a blind eye to the invention of the atom, but some part of nature and the village still remains, there are still those who feel sorry for the bee, who open the hive cover late in the long summer days so that the bee does not open too much, there are still farmers who make room for the seedling in the soil with their fingers only. nature worship is anchored here.
Ruralism in us and everywhere has always been a description of rural darkness and misery with an internal or overt demand for social humiliation. In the countries of leading literature, this issue was slandered in various ways, right or wrong underestimation of slanders, right or wrong awareness of the intractability of a social issue, focusing on more important or seemingly important issues, in different ways, but it was pushed out of the agendas, and rural geography jointly acquired a new content, the content of nature worship. The good old works are deprived of the author's intended content with our new look and acquire the content we have sent. Tumanyan's "Anoush" is no longer an "encyclopedia of Armenian life of the 19th century", but our worship of nature in the second half of the 20th century. Of course, worshiping nature is not a way out of the tragic fate of humanity, but it is a search for a way out. And if it is a search in the wrong direction, let it be a mistake. wars do not break out from the mistakes of art, because art is always stuck in the soil of humanity. And if that search does not end with any great outcome, let it not end. search is already an art. Grigor Narekatsi was looking for God, but did he find it? His search for God is a "Book of Tragedy" for us today. It is like this now. none of us has seriously cursed civilization, but if they do, it will be a curse in favor of civilization, and civilization will be enriched by that curse.
There is no need, there is no need to threaten agriculture in the name of civilization. Agriculture is the birth of civilization, agriculture is civilization, it can be boldly claimed that agriculture is agriculture, agriculture cannot curse itself.
It is said that literature is longing. Literature is longing for the past, longing for the future, freedom, nature... everything! Longing for what was and what was not, what is and what is impossible, good longing. If there is good, the longing for better. Literature is in opposition to life, even if it is better than good life. otherwise he would lose his endlessly revolutionary character, cut off his connection with life and die. Now, when human reason has been released from restraints and is going on an absolute triumph, when it seems that the world has reached the faraway dreams of literature, does literature contain life? Not at all. Literature is looking for the monumental man. Why?
A hundred million Khunweibins with their own heads wave above their heads Mao's collection of quotations, which reads: "This bridge connects this side of the river to the other side of the river." and the temple of Hephesus will be set on fire by many more. and the genius human skull gave birth to the idea of genocide only recently. and the bureaucratic apparatus, which does not work and eats, swells hour by hour - and literature is looking for the man of God. He is looking for the pristine state of man. A person is born naturally, writes Martiros Saryan, then the civilization deposits layer by layer in a person, the person is distorted.
Literature searches for the undistorted man and undistorted relationships, on the one hand exaggerating the distortion of man and relationships to the point of abstraction, on the other hand, showing the pristine, pure, natural, even primitive state of human relationships; this is a universal phenomenon in all art. on the one hand abstractionism, on the other hand primitivism and back-excursions to primitive painting. on the one hand modern symphonies, on the other an absolute parade of Negro folk song. on the one hand, urbanism, on the other hand, rural history and commemoration of the forms and often the content of fairy tales and myths. Picasso's "Guernica" does not deny the primitivist Pirosmani's "The Fisherman". the first is the painting's aversion to fascist reality, the second is the presentation of an equally anti-fascist dream. What did Franz Kafka do? there is no guilt, there is no guilty party, there is no accusation, there is no accuser, there is only a lawyer, but the person is accused and sentenced to death "Trial". This is the portrait of the 20th century. The 20th century must have a different portrait. there is a monstrous crime, there is a monstrous criminal, and there is a profound indifference to crime and crime. The literature of our time will also provide a counter-portrait of the 20th century with this plot. there is a sin, there is a guilty party, there is an accusation, and in three minutes the battlefield trio discovers the guilt, finds the culprit, presents the accusation, and after three minutes the accused turns into a handful of ashes.
The counter-portrait of the suicides due to currency, stock market, bankruptcy, bankruptcy would be the story of how the wheat they reaped with their hands were taken to exchange load for load with the salt they mined with their hands. The description of "one village-one year-one deceased" would be the opposite of Auschwitz, Der-Zor and the Japanese multi-story aluminum-glass cemetery. Anyway, from the same root of dissatisfaction grew Kafka's "The Transfiguration", Kafka's abhorrence of the conditions that degrade man and the diminishing man, and Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea", Hemingway's admiration for the man who grows into a god in suffering. Man-monument against man-block. Kafka's "The Trial" and Hamo Sahyan's "The Pope" were fed from the same root of dissatisfaction.
Here is a strait, here I breathe hard, says one part of the literature, and the other part says, where is the person not breathing hard? The discovery of the Spanish land by Hemingway's work.
Was Armenian literature nominally going to find Spanish soil, so that it would not be called rural literature, but urbanist literature?
It is said that when the head of the flock is turned, the lame sheep fall forward. our literature does not keep pace with the literature of the world. philology here and there finds out that the natives, those medieval songs of love and nature, are the songs of Anace craftsmen. still the work of Varuzhan and Tumanyan was steeped in a conscious worship of nature and a deep longing for the simplicity of man and relationships. the prose of Bakunts and Hamastesh sang that longing.
There is no rural or urban history. there is only a human view of nature and the world.
"Literary Newspaper", 13.09.1968