Hamo Sahyan has a wonderful poem about the essence and calling of poetry:
And your eyes ask once again
Who I am and what,
And where my road is taking me…
Clearly this is an explanation before all of us and before himself, but the poem—I do not know whether by chance or in answer to his truly questioning eyes—is dedicated to Suren Aghababyan. I think it is a just dedication. None of us bears the burden of all of us and each of us, of the present and destiny of Armenian literature and culture as a whole, as Suren Aghababyan does; in none of our eyes does another’s failure darken and success shine as in Aghababyan’s eyes. And I think this is not because of his duties, but because his nature is poetic—poetic, creative, bringing forth. In his case duty and calling have found each other. Neither God himself nor Aghababyan himself could say whether well or badly, but he could also have been a poet, playwright or prose writer. That is the source of his conversation about poetry, drama and prose from within; that is why his attacks on their failures are rare, while his reproaches to criticism are frequent, almost constant. Love and reproach reach something like maternal indulgence in the first case, paternal severity and self-reproach in the second. That is… not bad, even good, or neither good nor bad. It simply allows us to say that Aghababyan himself is there, his heart here (the emphasis, like putting “approximate” words in quotation marks, comes from his style.—H. M.). Yet we can say that from this combination of excessive love and excessive rigour, which is Suren Aghababyan himself, a truth emerges: faced with the task of artistically apprehending this naive and profound, complex and simple, ever-changing and unchanging life, always wavering between old and new shores, looking backwards and moving forwards, the critic and literary scholar and the writer stand equally face to face with equal responsibility. More than that, the critic and scholar stands a step ahead, since literary scholarship and criticism are ultimately an ordered science—that is, armed against life—and life ought to have no ambushes before it. Literature, however, is not a science and is always vulnerable to traps.
Endowed with civic courage, Aghababyan labours, burns and often flares up in those positions between life and literature, to endow others and all of us with his own daring. Its source is a deep awareness of national culture’s place in a people’s existence and of the nation’s historical mission before the world.
Aghababyan met his fortieth, fiftieth and now sixtieth birthdays under a shower of criticism. In the days of the fiftieth birthday’s “gunfire,” it was forgotten that the fortieth birthday’s “indictment” had been followed by a whole decade of “confession”; with the sixtieth birthday’s “condemnation,” the preceding decade of his being right and our “sin” was forgotten. Each time we forget that he simply sees farther than we do, that one person can see farther than everyone.
Literature, like life, does not take him by surprise; the extent of his knowledge does not allow it. One could say he knows everything, even beforehand. He has sharpened his eye and perception so much that he often reads “with his nose”; often does not read, but knows what is what; often knows how the course will continue and keeps his eye on the one path among many from which the writer who set out along unknown routes will emerge. And often, very often, he sits “amid the ruins” in the famous pose of “Mother Armenia.” That means that some phenomenon noticed by predecessors deserved to be developed further, to become a distinctive possession and defining trait of the national literature, but we successors were unable to do so; the phenomenon did not find its full expression and seems accidental. All these many gifts are ultimately one great gift: the unique ability to see the historical and history in the present. It is the clear vision acquired through the “difficult training” of your Armenian language, your people, your family and you personally.
He has been an active participant in the birth and rebirth of all Soviet Armenian literature, of every writer by name, in their assessment and reassessment; he has accompanied many from their beginnings to a peaceful resting place. In short, he is one of the chief creators, if not of the literature itself, then of the fruitful environment in which our literature takes shape today.
He has signed a thousand or more monographs and articles—let him remember the exact number himself, if he can—yet the name SUREN AGHABABYAN remains a name authors seek and desire. In that dizzying quantity, words have not lost their worth; literary criticism is therefore no pose for him but an element, his own element. What opinion will Aghababyan have, what will he say, and above all, will he remain silent? He knows how to be silent, and for us writers his silence is the most hurtful thing.
I do not know whether to say it or not: he lay seriously ill, forbidden to smoke, speak, move or be moved, and then the doctors said that he must not listen either. Those same days our entire press was publishing article after article under his signature, and the impression was that we were the patients in hospital while he scattered articles over editorial offices. He could not be allowed to hear the rise and fall of the republican stadium’s breathing, so the doctors lowered a two-hour curtain of deep stupor between him and the stadium. Afterwards he said that in the depths of his unsedated consciousness he had heard all the stadium’s roars and all its silences. Whether a literary study or a cycle of poems, successful prose pages or an advance or retreat in historiography, one of our family troubles or a success of the republic in some field, the success and failure of each and all of us—he considers it so much his own, takes it so much to heart, that isolation by a curtain seems necessary each time. Literature is always, every time, a beginning, an experiment and a daring act; and in Aghababyan’s presence, which is equivalent to protection, one can dare.