Great and small, elders and juniors, mature and immature, with a deep sense of thanks and gratitude, today we kneel as a nation in reverence before the memory of our great man, whose immense, radiant sun rose a hundred years before us and set sixty years before us.
A hundred years and sixty years are a great enough distance to sink beyond our field of vision not only individuals noticed in their own time, but phenomena and ideas of epochal importance. Yet the phenomenon of Charents has not moved away from us by even a year, even a day. He who stood in the dawn of each and all of us, from whom it seemed we would draw away as we followed the course of our day, once again stands in the distance of our road as our day already heads towards sunset.
But to say that this is so because it is so, to say that he is from God and, like Salieri, gnash one’s teeth at this favourite of God and at God himself, is to say nothing. To say that it is so, that he is great, that his gaze accompanies the eternal march of generations upon generations from the high heights of his time, because he was the master of his time and responsible for it, because he made his entire time into his own height, is to say everything about him and about the great in general. That is how Charents himself, Tumanyan, Abovyan and Khorenatsi are great: through the greatness of their purpose.
They are masters and bearers of responsibility; they are makers of a homeland; they created a homeland.
Or: yes, it is so, yes, he is a genius, yes, he is from God, if we constantly remember that Moses, the prophet of the Jews, in the solitude of his mountain was already himself his time and his entire people; that he cast their Ten Commandments from their curses and blessings, their gains and losses, from the people’s whole journey.
A hand of my homeland caressed me with love,
And in a single night I grew wise.
The hand of your homeland caresses you, and in a single night you grow wise, if throughout your homeland’s day you are with it hour by hour, if it itself is your anxiety and hope. In that case, the caress of that native hand reads the destiny of the homeland from your brow.
Invoking the great Russians, the thought that Pushkin was an answering call to Peter the Great’s summons a hundred years later, that across a century they call to one another about Russia’s revival, we must remember that our great man calls across a century and centuries to everything lofty and true in this people’s past, its present and future, and stands in curse and denial before everything alien, not ours, even if sanctified, that drove this people’s life into hell.
Through his Word, after that courageous traveller, it is easy for us to step in every direction. It is a blessing for us to work in this language, which Charents awakened. We shall have only one aim: through effort and suffering to become kin to him, as he became kin to his great forebears, from Tumanyan to Khorenatsi.