“Today’s multitude of prophets, messengers and psychics says things we all know: there are other galaxies, cleverer than us; visitors might come from there; if we continue behaving foolishly a little longer, our destruction is near, and so on and so forth… And we, as though we did not know any of it, gasp and fret—oh, oh, oh—and marvel… But real writers did not wait for perestroika and free speech; they spoke freely from the outset. Already in ‘Ahnidzor’ you foresaw where our behaviour was leading us, and in all your subsequent works you have not fallen silent about it for a second. I want to know what your intuition tells you now. What will happen?… Will we go on behaving this way, or will there be a divine miracle and we become wiser, finally follow the most important commandment of our Son of God and love one another greatly, after which the fruits of love will be born, each more beautiful than the last?”
“The chief commandment of the Armenian’s Son of God, I believe, is not a trait imposed on us by our former rulers, Russians or Turks: it is work, diligence. Work, which in the last seventy years, or at least thirty, we have unlearnt. In the first forty of those seventy years, still faithful to their calling, people worked conscientiously, through inertia. Then, before our eyes, the traditional image of the Armenian was defaced. I do not know what other real benefit independence will bring us, but of one thing I am certain: fate urges us to rediscover our traditional identity. The people of khachkars, temples, ploughmen, bakers, printers and carpet-makers must awaken in us again, whether we wish it or not; otherwise we will not be kept on this earth. So the Armenian we lost under totalitarianism, stripped of his face, will find his face again. We will no longer look with envy, say, at the Kirakosyan brother who flourished and became a figure in America, while the other brother here lives like a beggar, as though they were not children of the same father. Independence will give us this: in some thirty years we will discover among our people kindred spirits to our former giants—Acharyan, Leo, Abeghyan.”
“I have long wanted to ask you this, and would like you to answer in your own way, in your own language and words, so everyone knows why you did not stand every day in Freedom Square at the rallies of 1988 and afterwards…”
“From the beginning, perhaps from childhood, possibly because my father’s house stood apart from the village, I have disliked the village centre, the square, the gathering. I have disliked revolutionaries, whether Robespierre or Pugachev, Gachag Nabi or… Only towards my own, the Dashnaks, has there always been a warm wave of love within me, perhaps because theirs was a party of martyrs and exiles. The square, our square, yes, smelled of revolution, and accordingly, as a just demand, it appealed to me; as revolution, it repelled me. Especially since at times, with leftward agitation, it aspired to an Eastern revolution. And Eastern revolution means cut, erase, destroy, demolish palaces. Only the genuinely precious, genuinely human and universal tolerance in our national character kept our revolution from growing into, turning into, a pogrom. I personally accepted with satisfaction that the country’s political leader was not me, Hrant Matevosyan. Responsibility for that difficult domain has been taken by people who could manoeuvre better than I. In short, it is a domain in which you must devote yourself completely to work. Honour and praise to those who manage, to whatever degree, to find their way in it. It would be very good if I and the others could suppress our pride and stop constantly remembering that yesterday’s heroes of the square and podiums were us, asking why they take us off our pedestals while we are still alive. But if, say, my egotism overcomes me and I rush into the square again as yesterday’s hero, and my son tells me to my face, ‘Go home,’ that will be a lesson, and I will be glad of it.”
“You need not answer this question if you think that as a political figure you have no right to say everything you think publicly. In your work you could not, and have not, avoided the relations between us and our kirvas. Do you think our official stance towards them and our other kirvas is right, and what do you think will come of it?”
“The new thinking in politics brought many very apt expressions. The ‘image of the enemy,’ for me and very many of us, is not an image suggested or imposed by the powerful of this world; otherwise it would not have been so immediately understandable. The enemy has indeed changed his image; political questions are indeed settled in spheres other than the Iraqi model. If not today, tomorrow a Transcaucasian Armenian–Georgian–Azeri–Kurdish confederation will arise. In the coming years our government’s and people’s efforts must be directed to one thing alone: keeping emigration from this republic as low as possible. Then we will enter into economic relations and competition with neighbouring peoples. Yesterday’s, pre-revolutionary experience—although afterwards we were weakened and suffered enormous losses in the genocide—points to the brightest prospects in our future: Mantashovs, Tumanyans, Saryans, all the bright names and great people you know. The happiest period in our history was from the end of the nineteenth century to 1915 and until the revolution. A hundred years later we shall find ourselves in that situation again, and there will be no massacres. The weakening of totalitarianism, decentralisation: the world’s human reason drives us towards this, and we are ready. We all admire our monolingual, homogeneous city, but few of us know the beauty of Istanbul or Paris, the charm of a multilingual city; we have forgotten old Tiflis’s charm. In this great theatre and spectacle of peoples, if we hold out, we hold out; if we do not, nothing will be missing from the world. But I believe we shall hold out and prevail. If European citizens have emerged, Asian citizens will emerge too, and will be just as elevated as the Hungarian, German, Frenchman or Greek. We must not think the Kurd, Turk and Georgian were created by God as feeble creatures, destined to gnaw one another’s bones forever. In short, I am not afraid of the Turks. Let them fear their own murderers, their ranks of rapists, their image of the enemy and their idols.”
“In your opinion, how much longer must we live without theatre, cinema, opera and ballet?…”
“Under yesterday’s conditions the republics’ governments were politically faceless; the republics were endowed with something like the rights of cultural-national autonomies. Both within the Union and before the world, the right to conduct ‘politics’ was reserved for sport, ballet, opera, literature and cinema. If I have sometimes felt great bitterness towards our cultural figures, it was because they made poor use of those wonderful conditions for culture to flourish and failed to rise to their calling. Now material opportunities are shrinking, while, without ideological totalitarianism, the horizons of spiritual and intellectual freedom are widening. For a time the Armenian intelligentsia will have difficulties. Afterwards the nation—because its calling is to create culture—will certainly provide the possibilities for development in which Tumanyans and Charentses arose. Today… For three days now I have felt as though I have been given a great gift. As though a beautiful woman passed me in the street, or I had been given something life-giving. What happened? I read two stories by Levon Khechoyan in ‘Garun.’ He knows life and knows what literature is. In our circumstances he has written his truthful pages. That means it is not the end of our culture; on the contrary, literature is living through the first days of a good time. Violet Gevorgyan, Levon Khechoyan—there are two… They exist and are growing. Welcome.”
“We now talk a great deal about the importance of Armenian and an Armenian upbringing. What would you say?”
“Importance is importance, but in many cases, even if we numbered not three and a half but five to eight million in the republic, our language would still not be able to encompass every field of life in its full depth and extent: medicine, physics, chemistry… Ultimately, it is a fact that there are genuinely rich nations and languages whose bookshelves compared with ours are as a kilometre to a metre, a building to a room. We would be foolish to bar our sons from those vast libraries. On the contrary, I see only benefit for Armenian in ending its isolation, in its entering competition with rich languages, and I believe it will certainly become competitive. We should speak of equipping a citizen born here with the ability to live in the world. We will arm our child with knowledge of languages, not one language but languages… Ultimately it is a matter of daily bread. We should not consider our language’s situation so constrained or make it today’s burden. Especially since ours is not one of the world’s small languages. I also see jealousy in this, spite among people who would like to hold the local monopoly in their own hands. Let me say something seemingly unrelated: if among the Russians Akhmatova, Brodsky and this or that person nevertheless represent Jewish culture, why should I not think Armenian culture can emerge in other languages? Especially with its glorious example before us—the towering presence of William Saroyan.”
“A Frenchman said a good writer can never be an optimist. Yet I think that although perhaps no writer in our reality is as pessimistic as you, the grain of your optimism is far stronger than all our pessimism combined… In your view, do we now need pessimism or optimism more?…”
“And an American, Faulkner, said: I know I am doomed, I shall die, but one cannot wake every morning embracing Lady Death.”
“We consider these people pessimists and those others optimists, but a simple comparison of works, let alone analysis, points directly to the depth of talent. The same event under one pen becomes something after which you do not wish to live; in another case it becomes ‘Anush,’ from which you emerge having touched an infinitely beautiful mystery. In the latter case you were present at a birth: a tragic death occurred in the plot, but the artistic fabric already testified to birth. Optimism is directly linked to the ability to commune with God. They accuse us of being tearful: an absolute falsehood. Simply setting the great facts of our culture side by side—Zvartnots, Komitas, Tumanyan, Khachaturian, Kuchak, Saryan—speaks of the joyfulness of our nature. Yes, we are a people who live and give life. One of our laments ends exactly this way: ‘We shall give our pain to the south wind.’”
“As a peasant’s son and defender of the land, what would you say about our land policy?”
“Our land policy, privatisation, was the only possible means of saving the land from further loss. I opened my eyes in a country of well-tended hayfields, terraced slopes, springs with their sources cleared, beautiful garden beds. Before my generation’s eyes the rivers died, the sources clogged, the hayfields filled with stones, the owner’s hand disappeared. The collective farm as such was still a form of private ownership. Russian totalitarian nationalism declared war on it, even at the cost of harming itself, and the flourishing country became a desert. Privatisation will reveal many difficulties and unpleasant things for us in the future, but it was the only means of reviving the land. The petty bourgeois who yesterday called the peasant an ‘ass of a peasant’ will be beaten and driven away among us. And it is quite possible that my daughter, who has shown a good aptitude for translating from English, will tomorrow tuck her jean-clad legs beneath her and milk a sheep, learn to make cheese—in other words, her grandmother, who could do everything, will reveal herself within her. The land, and I with it, have longed for that all-capable, complete, full-blooded human being. That person existed yesterday and must exist tomorrow. The Armenia of bright, light-filled houses will exist tomorrow. Our most generous, most magnificent Armenian-American relative will not be someone offering alms to us beggars, but merely a relative of my farmer in Armenia.”
Interview by A. Hovhannisyan.
“Gegharvest”.