A new millennium has arrived.
What has happened?
What is happening?
How much have we understood?
How much do we understand?
To what extent are we masters of time’s course, and to what extent its subjects?
Faceless subjects.
An epoch has passed. A period, a great period has passed, and an epoch is coming. It has come. If not for the whole world, then for us, the peoples of the territory of the Soviet Union, this is a very painful process, a painful process difficult to bear.
We had been thrown out of our own time and left outside time. The West had continually followed the same course, and for the West this new epoch, its own time, is no surprise. For us it was sudden, unexpected. That is why it is painful.
I remember that in ’89, at a writers’ symposium in Portugal attended by many very great writers from around the world, an imposing delegation also represented Russian literature, the literature of the Soviet Union. The dissidents Joseph Brodsky and Sergei Dovlatov, half Armenian. I became particularly close to those two, and today they are among my dearest losses. There was Zinovy Zinik, Tanya Tolstaya from here, Anatoly Kim and Lev Anninsky. All beloved, all worthy names. During the meeting the West, including the peoples of Eastern Europe, the so-called oppressed peoples under the Soviet yoke — Poles, Czechs, even Yugoslavs — joyfully registered the retreat: their own advance and the Soviet Union’s retreat. At that time many of us too, perhaps even I, joyfully joined their assault against tyranny, against this country. Yet anxiety showed most strongly on the faces, within the people, who were dissidents, although it seemed that this was their victory, that their struggle had been crowned with victory. That anxiety was especially strong in Joseph Brodsky and Sergei Dovlatov. They knew what horror would burst upon us, what society — not a social system, but a society — we would lose, what enormous losses we would suffer, how many victims there would be. They saw it more clearly than we did. They knew what this was.
Could there have been a gentler transition? I do not think it was possible.
A gentle transition without these enormous losses. It did not happen; that gentle transition did not happen. Which means it was not going to happen. The losses I mean are genuinely weighty, heavy losses.
I have spoken of this before and found a fairly precise formulation: for an Armenian, for my Armenian, for me, the greatest loss is the loss of my imperial standing, my status.
To make clear what kind of loss this is, what it means: after the Union’s collapse, after Russia’s departure, I had to lose my aplomb. I would no longer stand in the world with that expansive bearing, that loud voice, that lofty posture, speaking on familiar terms with the powerful citizens of powerful states, about their presidents, about their culture. Instead, I would have to sit down, return to my actual, small dimensions.
I consider that an enormous loss.
I would say it was also thanks to that Union that I sang “Let me go and see my Cilicia” in so high a treble, or cherished the question of our claims, or cherished the question of vengeance. All that was thanks to those seventy and two hundred years of my shared Armenian-Russian life. There. This is an enormous loss.
A long time will pass before I find my voice again, find my loud voice again, cherish my dreams again, speak again of our claims, relying on justice. I must become part of a worldwide cultural empire, as Narekatsi was in his day, when from Iraq and Persia to the Apennines and the Atlantic Ocean he was a man, a citizen, of a great Christian empire, and his voice addressed God himself.
A long time will pass before it becomes possible to join with worldwide democracy and my status becomes equal to the status the Soviet country granted me. I think my generation will not see it. For now we are a third-rank people and speak a little more quietly; we have already come down a little to our own voices, to our own condition.
Did we enter the twenty-first century empty-handed, with empty pockets? Have we done anything, or are we utterly empty-handed, utterly deprived, with nothing but losses? No, something has nevertheless been created here.
The country, of course, was defeated. Countries generally suffer defeat after ideologies are defeated, after cultures are defeated. Countries and states attack with their armed forces, of course, after the preliminary assaults of cultures. One culture yields to another, and the invading country’s troops follow.
There was a cultural defeat within this country, a defeat before the culture of the West. It was the defeat of that incomplete Word, of culture before free speech and free art. Naturally, it had to be followed by the defeat of the country’s economy, its army, its armed power, in a word, the country. There.
Does a country whose culture is exhausted nevertheless rush, enter the new millennium empty-handed? Does it carry nothing with it?
It does carry something, nevertheless! Something for the world, humanity, the generations to come. It managed to engrave something in stone: it brings one of the century’s greatest thinkers, Charents; it brings Martiros Saryan and Aram Khachaturian. You may now say that they nevertheless rose from the depths of the nineteenth century, were an inertial continuation of the great culture of the past, of the great Tumanyan era, and that nineteenth-century culture was recorded through the existence of these major figures in our reality. There is some truth in that, but the other face of the truth is that they were nevertheless children of this soil and this atmosphere, and endowed them with themselves. They enriched our coat of arms with themselves. They endowed the republic, our nation, the Soviet country without culture, with themselves. They became that country’s glory and its credentials for the future, the credentials of these countries and their own time.
Something like another reflection. I think there is an absolute truth: times and countries, nations and languages possess, from the beginning, an inalienable ambition not to remain barren, to crown themselves with culture. A language must not fall silent; it must become art, become something, so that among other languages it can warble, speak, say and make sense. Time has that ambition too. It does not want to remain a desert. And here is a country of an ideology incomplete from the outset, of coercion and violence, seemingly condemned from its very beginning to a black desert and sterility: this country truly flowered and bestowed personalities. Personalities who can become the glory of world culture.
I name no other names.
I know that if Charents, Saryan and our other worthy names rose from the depths of Tumanyan’s times, then in the times to come people will likewise rise from the depths of our times, my times, who will be independent testimony to my time and also the crown of their own. My words come out a little strangely, but that is how it is.
I hope that if I nevertheless see good, very good things in that time, it is not merely a nostalgic, longing, somewhat sickly yet much more human attitude towards my difficult childhood, difficult youth, difficult times. After all, no one can remember the past only with curses; everyone sees light and warmth in it. I think there were good things in that time, nevertheless.
My dissatisfaction should be this: why, when this literature has repeatedly proved its capacity to stand among the greatest, did my fellow countrymen in other languages have to reach Saroyan’s heights or Shahnur’s, or be named Arshile Gorky or other names? Why did they not attain that height here, that firmness of a name? Why could they not fix their imprint on time’s cruel, hard stone? This is a somewhat different question, and it is true. But it is also true that we can offer the world a collection, a selection, a selected edition in several volumes that keeps pace with world literature.
I can speak of cinema. In that harsh field, regarded as immensely important, kept under the country’s leaders’ fixed attention and equally fixed control, Soviet cinema, and Armenian cinema with it, was not barren either. It created things, works.
Those who established their identities in the first period through the names Eisenstein and Dovzhenko had already shown their abilities and powers by the establishment of the violence of ’37.
The freedom of the first period, the revolution’s first period, and then the decade and a half when the wealth of literature and culture throughout Soviet reality spontaneously managed to express itself before ’35. Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Mandelstam, Mikhail Sholokhov, Charents, Bakunts, the magnificent constellation of Georgian writers, everywhere, everywhere.
It was interrupted by violence. Fascism rose in Europe, and in response, as a counterweight, nationalism had to rise here, fascism here had to rise as a counterweight. And here the human being, human rights and culture had to suffer losses. It was not entirely the fault of this country, of Marxism or Leninism. It was the world’s fault, the fault of the entire world, which cast evil here and then began to walk alongside it. There.
Nevertheless, even the war, even the war years, did not remain so barren and did their work. Here too cinema managed, with great difficulty, with very, very great difficulty, to emerge from that military camp. In part thanks to the wonderful Khrushchev airing-out of ’56–’57, which rushed into every cell like a fresh, cleansing wind and simply shook all the houses free of the stench of violence and staleness. After that, something had to emerge. Those wonderful opportunities were created for this country’s cinema, its culture. Perhaps it meant nothing to others, but for this vast territory, including Armenia, including us, it meant an enormous amount. For you newcomers it is already unimaginable what a life-giving breath it was.
What a sun-filled breath, what a life-giving breath, especially for my generation, for us twenty-year-olds! It seemed another people was coming into being, as though we had absolutely no connection with our parents or their times. We were a people of a different breath. Of course it was fruitful: the effort of country, people and authorities was crowned with a saving, one might say redeeming, culture. It was crowned, its honour saved; the country seemed able to cast off its curse, the curse of violence. Something emerged that the world too accepted, welcomed and took into its fraternal family. Tarkovsky had to emerge: Tarkovsky would emerge here, Chukhrai. I spent about two years in Moscow. I had a splendid teacher, mentor and friend, Valentin Yezhov. That splendid generation had to emerge here as well.
There, Tarkovsky and others; there too, Parajanov’s true masterpiece, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Glory to Parajanov, and glory to the homeland’s officials who raised the barrier here and gave that man the opportunity to make his capriccios here, his caprices and whims, such as Sayat-Nova. That wonderful work was inscribed on Armenfilm’s name.
There was the name of Henrik Malyan, a wonderful man. Perhaps he did not seem so major a figure, yet he managed to assert himself. He created a beautiful world: Triangle, We and Our Mountains... I will recall The Saroyan Brothers afterwards, Dovlatyan’s other films. There seem to be other names too. In short. But at the film studio of those days there was something conflict-ridden. I knew Armenian cinema, the cinema of a small Armenian nation, had been granted an exceptionally beautiful time. Norwegians, for example, without a cinema ministry, do not devote so many opportunities and resources to cinema, while here they were being devoted. Cinema here, which was to become our nation’s foreign policy, domestic policy, whatever else, was our unique opportunity to present our people, our nation, our republic to the world. It was our army, our everything, and we did not use that time well. We did not use it well. How the Georgians, Georgian cinema, managed to use it well is known to everyone. That was the source of my hurt. We did not use it well. A few good things did happen, though. I would like our fellow Armenians in the diaspora, as well as today’s Armenian viewer, the Armenian person, to have their own shelf of cinema made in those splendid days: a shelf, a library, of fifteen or twenty good films. That is where my hurt comes from.
Now those times have passed. I know poverty, the country’s poverty, and I know that no wealthy man has that much either, and even if he does, he will not open his pockets for such a charlatan’s business. Though if they were intelligent, they should. Because in my observation other nations give the Word, speech, theatre and books far greater importance than armed force. In a Christian way. In a Christian way, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, leaving the material to Caesar and taking for themselves the verbal, what belongs to the Word. Once you take the verbal, Caesar holds only an empty body, a body abandoned by its spirit. In other words, taking the Word means taking everything. We must be able to give the Word that attention.
What suffering, what struggle, what long resistance Tumanyan endured to have Armenian writing granted citizenship in Armenia, to bring it into the Armenian family! We still face the need for that struggle today: to instil in everyone’s consciousness, in Mantashev’s consciousness, the understanding that cinema is profoundly important, the press is profoundly important, the book is profoundly important, the world of the Word. If the world of the Word exists, the material world will certainly exist. That is it.
What will happen, what will happen?
Hard times. Culture in general, culture throughout the world, is in a difficult position. Regarding the West, from its experience I can understand and try to make you understand that painting, culture in general, has entered everyday life there, become part of the people’s shared life. Floral painting, for example, has become part of urban design: streets are literally adorned with living flowers, the country becomes a garden in bloom. It is hardly likely that the flower will now return to its frame and hang on a wall again.
Music seems to have done the same: deprived of its classical forms, it has become one of the attributes, one of the things, of human existence. There seems no longer to be a need to go to concert halls or church to hear their Beethoven, their Bach. It too has become a part of the human day. In fact, the book has done the same. They have taken the book’s wonderful possibilities away from it, although in its power to influence the book is something else, something great, very great, greater than the others. But they have taken that power away from their book. And along with the book, they too have found themselves out of the game. With what immense effort, with investments of millions and billions, they want and strive to make their work noticeable!
Alas, the regret is not ours alone. I do not even know whether there is a question of regret or not. It is not ours alone, and to hope that the writer, the book or cinema will ever return to the leading positions of their Eisenstein days is vain expectation. That will never happen. You are witnesses to it, all of us today.
What will happen in the future? Taking literature, American literature, as an example, I suppose documentary writing will play an advancing role, at least initially, as happened in literature after their Vietnam War. A literary movement called New Journalism formed in American literature. We have an Armenian figure there too, Michael Arlen Jr. Norman Mailer is one of its leaders, and there are others, others.
I have said it before: Paruyr Sevak offers not a prophetic but a very accurate assessment:
The wind plays some melody
That would do Beethoven proud.
A faint dawn on the dark horizon:
A newly discovered Rembrandt painting.
Life makes a mockery of Shakespeare
With its tragic dramas...
While we — you and I... play at art,
And... with such certainty
As even Cervantes’s hero never possessed...
“While we — you and I — play at art.” Reality is already great art. Even then Paruyr noticed it: reality is that great art. Our weak pens, our short-sighted gazes, our feeble brushes, the feeble eyes and brushes of the short-sighted, cannot encompass the tragic, profound, great, worldwide, deep, cosmic thing that reality is. Reality escapes our culture because of our weakness. Our wings cannot embrace life in its entirety, its depth, the speed of its course, the moment of its revolutionary character.
That will of course, inevitably, punish us and destroy all those pitiful attempts that pretend to be culture but are not. In that case there will certainly be new Shakespeares, but the general current will consist of copying reality just as it is. For the reality that has unfolded is already the unfolded reality of earlier great cultures.
The great director probably bore the name Dostoevsky, Charents, Tumanyan. The great directors existed yesterday; they shaped today. Today is the reality they unfolded, descended from the stage into life. Indeed, the theatre’s curtains seem torn, its doors broken, and the theatre has come down into the street. Reality has unfolded. That is freedom already.
What will happen?
This new reality will become the consciousness and existence of the whole people. On this new level a new Shakespeare will rise, new prophets who will unfold the future, their future.
For now, while those Shakespeares, those great figures, are absent, there is documentary testimony. Let us at least have the courage, the daring, to see reality as it is. If we are not prophets of future times, let us at least be chroniclers of our own. Let us have the courage to be the documentarians of our time.
A View from Yerevan, 2002, No. 2.