- Today's crowd of prophets, psychics, and psychics say things that we all know, that there are other galaxies (smarter than us), that guests may come to us from there, that if we continue not to be smart, our destruction is near, etc... and we, as if we did not know all this, are afraid: oh, oh, oh, we are surprised... And the real writers did not wait for perestroika and libertarianism, they were libertarians from the beginning. With your "Ahnidzor" you had already predicted where our behavior would lead us, and in all your subsequent works you have not been silent for a second in this regard. I want to know what your feeling dictates to you now. What will happen... Will we continue to behave like this, or will it be a divine miracle and we will become wiser, we will finally follow the most important of the messages of our God and we will love each other very much, after which the wonderful fruits of love will be born from one another?
- I think the main message of the Armenian God is not a characteristic imposed on us by our former rulers, the Russians or the Turks. it is work, hard work. The work from which we have learned back in the last, if not seventy, at least thirty years. In the first forty years of those seventy years, still being faithful to their calling, they worked with inertia and conscientiously. Then, before our eyes, the traditional image of Armenians was defiled. I don't know what other real benefits independence will bring us, but I am sure of one thing. Fate pushes us to find our traditional self. The race of bricklayers, temples, weavers, bakers, printers, and carpet weavers will have to wake up in us again, whether we like it or not, otherwise they will not keep us in the world. So, under the conditions of totalitarianism, our lost, disenfranchised Armenian will find his face, and we will no longer look with jealousy at, let's say, one of the Kirakosyan brothers, who flourished and became a face in America ¥whose other brother is in the state of a beggar here, as if they are not the children of the same father¤. Independence will give us the fact that in thirty years we will find relatives related to our former giants, Acharyan, Leo, Abeghyan.
- I wanted to ask you this question for a long time and I would like you to answer it in your own language, in your own words, so that everyone would know why you did not stand every day in Freedom Square, in rallies in 1988 and in the following times...
- From the beginning, perhaps since childhood, perhaps because my peasant house was cut off from the village, I don't like the countryside, the square, the assembly. I didn't love the revolutionaries, be it Robespierre or Pugachov, Ghachag Nabi or... and only for my confederates, there was always a warm wave of love in me, perhaps because they were the party of martyrs and outcasts. The square, our square, yes, smelled of revolution, and accordingly, as the justice of the demand, it was sympathetic to me, as a revolution, it was respectable. What's more, sometimes he aspired to an eastern revolution with a left wave. And the eastern revolution: to cut, erase, destroy, demolish the palaces. And only the truly cuddly, truly humane and universal tolerance of our agzai character did not turn our revolution into a massacre. I personally accepted with satisfaction that I am not Hrant Matevosyans, the political leader of the country. The responsibility of that difficult province was taken by people who could maneuver better than me. in short, it is a region where you have to dedicate yourself to work. And glory and honor to those who are able to cope with this region to a greater or lesser extent. It would be great if I and the others could suppress our pride and not constantly remember that we were the heroes of yesterday's square and podiums, and why they take us down from the pedestals with our lives. And if we say that my selfishness defeated me, and I, again as the hero of yesterday, threw myself into the square, and my son told me to go home, it will be a lesson for me, and I will be happy about it.
- You may not answer this question if you think that as a political figure you do not have the right to tell everyone what you think. In your works, you could not and have not been able not to refer to the relationship between us and our kirvas. Do you think our official position towards them and our other kirwa is correct and what do you think will come of it?
- The new thinking in politics, which brought with it many correct expressions, обраг врага (image of the enemy) for me and for many of us is not an image suggested or imposed by the powerful of this world, otherwise it would not be so understandable at once. The enemy has really changed its character, indeed policy issues are decided in other spheres than the Iraqi version. Not today, but tomorrow, an East-Caucasian Armenian-Georgian-Azeri-Kurdish confederation will emerge. In the coming years, the efforts of our government and people should be directed to one thing only: to give as little as possible emigration from this republic. Then enter into economic relations and competition with the neighboring nations. Yesterday's pre-revolutionary experience, although we have been exhausted since then and have suffered huge losses (in Ekhernov), but yesterday's history gives us the brightest prospects for tomorrow: Mantashovs, Tumanyans, Saryans (how many bright names you know, tall people). The most fortunate period for us in history was from the end of the 19th century until 1915 and before the revolution. In a hundred years we will be in the same situation again and there will be no pogroms. Shaking of totalitarianism, decentralization. human universal intelligence drives us to it, and we are ready for it. We all admire our monolingual, homogeneous city, but few of us know the beauty of Istanbul, Paris, the charm of the multilingual city, we have forgotten the charm of old Tiflis. In this great theater-performance of the peoples, we will endure, we will endure, if we do not endure, nothing will be missing from the face of the world. But I think we will endure and rule. If European citizens appeared, Asian citizens will also appear and they will be as tall people as the Hungarian, the German, the French, the Greek. One should not think that the Kurd, the Turk, the Georgian were created by God as weak creatures and are called to eternally gnaw at each other. In short, I am not afraid of Turks. Let them fear their murderers, their rapists, their image of the enemy, and their idols.
- In your opinion, how long do we have left to live without theater, cinema, opera and ballet...
- Under the conditions of yesterday, the governments of the republics were politically powerless, the republics were endowed with the rights of a kind of cultural-national autonomies. both in the Union and before the world, the right to do "politics" was reserved for sports, ballet, opera, literature, cinema. And if several times I have become very angry with our cultural figures, it is because they used those wonderful conditions for the flourishing of culture badly, they did not live up to their rank. Now the material opportunities are decreasing, with the absence of ideological totalitarianism, the horizons of spiritual and intellectual freedoms are expanding. For some time, that Armenian intelligentsia will have difficulties. Then the nation. because the vocation of the nation is to create culture, it will definitely give those development opportunities in which Tumanians and Charents were rising. Today... it's the third day, it's like I've been given a great gift. It's as if a beautiful woman passed me on the street, or I was gifted with something life-giving. What happened? I read Levon Khechoyan's two short stories in "Garun" magazine. Life knows and knows what literature is. He wrote his true pages under our conditions. It does not mean the end of our culture, on the contrary, literature is experiencing the first days of a good time. Violet Gevorgyan, Levon Khechoyan, there are two... and they are growing, welcome.
- Now we talk a lot about the importance of the Armenian language, Armenian upbringing. How about this?
- Importance is importance, but in many, many cases, even if we were not 3.5 million in the republic, but 5-8 million, our language would not be able to cover all areas of life in their depth and scope: medicine, physics, chemistry... after all, it is a reality that there are really rich nations and languages in the world, whose bookshelves are like a meter and a kilometer... like a room and a building, and a fool would have to be it if we ban our sons' access to huge libraries and on the contrary, I see the benefit of the Armenian language only from isolation, in that it will enter into competition with rich languages and I think it will definitely gain competitiveness. Our word should be about giving the citizen born here the ability to live in the world. We will equip our child with the knowledge of languages, not one language, but languages... In the end, it is a matter of his bread and butter. We should not consider the state of our language so distressed and should not make it a concern of today. Especially since our language is not one of the small languages of the world. I also see in it jealousy, malice among people who would like to have the monopoly of the place in their hands. Let me say something irrelevant. if among Russians Akhmatova, Brodsky and so-and-so are Jewish culture, why should I not think that the emergence of Armenian culture is possible in other languages, especially since the glorious example of this is in front of us, the high existence of William Saroyan?
- A Frenchman said that a good writer can never be an optimist. And I think that although there is probably no writer as pessimistic as you in our reality, your grain of optimism is much stronger than the pessimism of all of us combined... Do you think we need more pessimism or optimism...
- An American (Faulkner) also said. I know I'm doomed, I'm going to die, but you can't wake up every day with lady death in your arms.
We consider these to be pessimists and others to be optimists, but the simple arrangement of affairs, not to mention the analysis, points to the sheer depth of talent. One and the same case under one pen becomes something that you don't want to live after reading, in another case it becomes "Anoosh", from reading which you leave with infinitely beautiful advice, because in this last case you were present at the birth. a tragic death took place in the fable, and the artistic fabric was already a testimony of birth. Optimism is directly related to the ability to relate to God. They accuse us of laziness. is an absolute lie. The juxtaposition of major facts of our culture, Zvartnots, Komitas, Tumanyan, Khachatryan, Kuchak, Saryan, speaks of the cheerfulness of our nature. Yes, we are a living and living people. One of our laments ends just like that: "We will give our pain to the south wind."
- As a son of a farmer and a defender of the land, what do you say about our land policy?
- Our land policy, privatization, was the only possible way to save land from further loss. I have opened my eyes to a land of clean cultivated meadows, scarred slopes, clean springs, beautiful meadows. Before the eyes of my generation, the rivers died, the springs were blocked, the meadows became stony, the master's hand was absent. Kolkhoz as such was still a form of private property; Russian totalitarian nationalism, even at the cost of self-harm, declared war against it, and the flourishing country became a desert. Privatization will reveal many difficulties and unpleasantness for us in the future, but it was the only way to revive the land. The citizen who yesterday called the peasant "donkey peasant" will be beaten and persecuted among us, and it is very possible that my daughter, who has discovered good data for translating from English, will fold her denim legs under her tomorrow and learn to milk sheep and make cheese, that is, her universal grandmother will be revealed in her. The land, and I with him, missed the image of that all-powerful, complete, full-blooded man. He was yesterday, he will be tomorrow. Tomorrow will be Armenia of bright, enlightened single houses. Our most extravagant, most luxurious American-Armenian relative will not be merciful to my beggars, but will be just a relative of my Armenian farmer.
The interview was conducted by A. HOVHANNISIAN
"Fine Art"