Hamo Sahyan has a wonderful poem about the title of the essence of poetry.
And your eyes ask again
Who am I and what
And where does my path take me...
It is clear that this is an explanation to all of us and also to himself, but here the poem, I don't know by chance or in response to his truly questioning eyes, is dedicated to Suren Aghababyan. I think it is a fair ode. none of us cares about the present and destiny of all of us, of Armenian literature and culture in general, like Suren Aghababyan, in the eyes of none of us does the failure and success of the other darken and shine in the same way as in the eyes of Aghababyan. And that, I think, is not due to duty, but because he is a poet, a poet, a creator, a dreamer, in his case duty and calling have found each other. God himself and Aghababyan himself would not say, good or bad, but he could also be a poet, dramatist, novelist. this is where his inner conversation about poetry, drama, prose comes from, this is why his attacks on the failures of poetry, drama and prose are rare and why there is frequent, almost constant rebuke to criticism, love and rebuke, which in the first case reaches a kind of motherly tone of forgiveness, in the second, paternal strictness and self-examination. It's not bad, it's even good, or it's neither good nor bad, it just gives us the opportunity to say that Aghababyan himself is there, his heart is here (emphasis, as well as not quoting the "approximate" words comes from his style, - Hr. M.), we can still say that from the combination of that extreme love and extreme strictness, that he is Suren Aghababyan, a naive truth emerges, that this naive and shrewd, complex and simple, In the face of the problem of artistic appropriation of life that is changing and unchanging, always divided between old and new edges, moving backwards and forwards with a view, the critic-literary scholar and the writer stand equally face to face and with equal responsibility, and even more so, the critic-literary scholar is one step ahead, because literary studies-criticism is ultimately a disciplined, i.e., science armed against life and life should not have any ambushes in front of it, literature, however, is not a science and is always subject pitfalls.
Endowed with civil courage, Aghababyan strives in those positions between life and literature, gets inflamed, often flares up with his audacity to endow others and all of us, the source of which is the deep awareness of the national culture in the existence of the people and the historical mission of the nation before the world.
Aghababyan celebrated his fortieth, fiftieth, and sixtieth birthday under a barrage of criticism. In the days of the "shootings" of the fiftieth anniversary, the fact that the "accuser" of the fortieth year was followed by a whole decade of "hooliganism" was forgotten, and the previous decade of his truthfulness and our "sin" was forgotten in the "conviction" of the sixtieth anniversary. We always forget that he simply sees far from us, that one can see far from everyone.
Literature, like life, does not bring him surprises, the volume of his knowledge does not allow him to be surprised, one can say that he knows everything and even knows in advance. He has sharpened his eye and sense to the point that he often reads "with his nose", often he does not read, but he knows what is what, he often knows how the process will continue and he keeps his eye on the exact one of the many branches from which the writer who has set off on a journey through unknown paths will appear and often, very often, sits "in the midst of ruin" with the characteristic attitude of "Mother Armenia". This means that such and such a phenomenon observed by the predecessors deserved to be deepened in order to become a monopoly and defining line of national literature, but our descendants were not able to, thus the phenomenon did not have its full manifestation and gives the impression of a mistake. These many gifts of his are, in the end, a great gift: a unique ability to see history and history in today. It is the simple-mindedness of your Armenian language, your race of people, your clan, and your personal "hard training".
He was an active participant in the birth and rebirth, evaluation and re-evaluation of the entire Soviet-Armenian literature, name by name of all writers, he accompanied many from the beginning to the peaceful destination, in short, he is one of the main creators, if not of the literature itself, then of the favorable environment where our literature "stands" today.
He has signed a thousand or more ¥if he can, let him remember the exact number¤ monograph and article, the name SUREN AGHABABYAN is still a sought-after, desired name among authors, in that dizzying number, the word has not depreciated, so literary criticism is not an attitude for him, but an element, the element. what opinion will Aghababyan have, what will he say and especially won't he be silent, and he knows how to be silent, and the most offensive thing for our writers is his silence.
I don't know if I should say it or not, he was seriously ill, he couldn't smoke, talk, move, get excited, and now the doctors said that he couldn't listen either. It was in those days that our entire press was publishing article after article with his signature, and it was the impression that we were the hospital patients, and he was scattering articles on the newsrooms. The breath of the republican stadium could not be heard, and the doctors lowered a two-hour curtain of heavy suffocation between him and the stadium. He later said that in the depths of his unconscious mind he heard all the shouts and silences of the stadium. Whether it be a literary study or a series of poems, successful pages of prose or a historiography's achievement or retreat, someone's family trouble or the success of the republic, the success and failure of each and every one of us, he considers it so much his own, takes it so close to his heart that every time Varagura isolation seems mandatory. Literature is always and every time a beginning, experience and audacity, and in the presence of Aghababyan, who is capable of patronage, one can be daring.