— We will try not to talk about politics, although the very first question touches political life to some extent.
Before the movement you were our country’s only literary opposition within the powerful empire, a guide for the reading part of the people, especially those who understood and valued literature. They awaited your words, and I want to stress, words as sharp as the laws of art and literary expression allowed…
Times changed quickly, and somewhere along the way the man calling for rebellion became a father trembling with fear for the survival of a family left without its head.
— Everything could be anticipated, I could imagine everything except the empire’s collapse. One cannot say that in two words and move on. The empire had its own arsenal of concepts, with which we worked, making adjustments and corrections along the way. People of the pen, of art, could do something, create something. We meant only to put our house in order. We did not understand that confrontational, downright hostile harshness towards intellectuals and dissent, or, on the other side, the confrontational attitude of dissent towards the government that existed here.
Apparently, as Armenians—I stress Armenians, a people who had experienced genocide—we consciously and unconsciously excluded that confrontation from the limits of our understanding, knowing that every upheaval would cost our people immense losses. In other words, the Turkish factor weighed heavily in our psychology, and we relied, one might say wholeheartedly, on the empire of the International, trying to renew its substance.
The empire collapsed, and we were left alone facing reality. Fighters could be fearless or pretend to be; to people of my occupation and age God left fear for those very fighters, for the whole people. Your question does indeed judge my situation correctly, and I do not find it insulting at all. You have formulated it succinctly; I seem to have nothing to add. In any case, only the outlines of today were opening before us then. Yesterday I did not see today, and lacked the audacity to order “forward” or “back”.
I do not know how far history will blame me for missing that moment of readiness for sacrifice. I do not know. What happened happened. For 1915 I cannot blame anyone of our own.
— I do not want to use the word “opportunism”, but have those pinpricks present in almost all your works not become outdated?
— Again you use a very apt description: pinpricks. At other times I seem to have judged my own literature and my generation’s Armenian and all-Soviet literature even more harshly. It was incomplete literature. It seemed beautiful, sufficient to get by, but then Western literature, today’s fiercely realist and surrealist literature, arrived to destroy this literature of half-words, Aesopian language and things left unsaid, throw the books off the desk and establish itself in their place. I regret it very, very much, because this concerns not only literature but history, art, everything. So much paper ruined, so much money spent, so much time wasted, so many actors and actresses grown old giving artistic form to falseness, to a false reality.
It has been pointed out, and once again the formulation comes from the West: “Fascism is condemned to literary sterility because fascism is a lie.”
Triumphant fascism was our reality. Literature created on that reality was as false as its underlying soil. Such a reality must leave life with its literature and culture. However much we lament, much of it will no longer attract you, your generation or your children. History swept it away. However much we lament, it is so, and I may be one of those carried away by that flood.
— With a strange feeling we connected the film The Saroyan Brothers with Hrant Matevosyan the writer, until we learned by chance that, in the words of Armenfilm’s director at the time, you had a hand in it. Of course… “Lucky you, Hayk, you haven’t killed a grandfather or a priest, and your conscience is clean, clean!”
— A creative association and an author must be so barren for such minor incidents to matter as facts of a biography… But since you recall it, I will repeat myself. There were certain conditions for creation. There were efforts to revise the empire’s substance, make it tolerable. In this case, in the duel between Dashnak and anti-Dashnak, we won, did we not? I say that with the genuine masterpieces in mind that stood up to world competition too. They were greater because they contained an Eastern parental modesty and responsibility for all reality, and did not always contain the Western vulgarity, that worship of open relations which turns our stomachs here today.
Andrei Tarkovsky rose nevertheless; Sergei Parajanov came into his own. I am not speaking now of how they devoured ten creative years of a man, broke his magnificent flight. It was terrible to see Parajanov just out of prison. What a beautiful man, what a beautiful being we had sent there, and what we received back: a ruined masterpiece of art.
The phenomenon of Parajanov emerged. Other authors too, in the second rank, did more or less tolerable work. An opportunity seemed to arise to recover what had been unjustly stolen from us.
I could never understand those who spent so many years seriously cursing the Dashnaks, nor could I take seriously those compatriots abroad who attached this country and its people to the same abuse. I disliked that party madness entirely and thought they could be reconciled. We could create an environment, an atmosphere where everyone received their proper appreciation. Some holy martyrs would prove false martyrs in normal conditions; true values would establish themselves in competition. A man like Nzhdeh would truly find his place in our life; both his literary work and his actions would remain. Many other names would establish themselves. It was possible; those conditions were emerging.
— Would the empire’s foundations not be disturbed? Thinking would change, would it not?
— There was only one factor to fear, and the Centre saw it better: the two great nationalisms, Pan-Turanism and Russian chauvinism. But they were slogans made absolute, while life did its own work, revised ideologies. A reality was emerging where these horned monsters lost their force and occupied small places of their own. But to rule over the whole country and become its guiding images… Hardly. It seemed that before life itself, before a child’s tear, in Dostoevsky’s words, before the elderly, the disabled, the pictures of their everyday lives, peoples would retain the sobriety not to surrender to ideological obsession, but reach conditions of mutual tolerance. Rather than stand as new gods at the sources of new life, declaring that new orders require new sacrifices.
Since we have touched on those times, just a moment, a few words… I have said in other interviews too that Khrushchev himself met the people’s wish to exist, their longing to cast off idolatry and make real life their banner. He brought a dry wind to this country, dried the mould, broke ideological orthodoxy. Specific steps led to the discovery that this country had not entirely forgotten its ability to create. I have said it before: I too was born of those days.
Through his own buffoonery Khrushchev testified that the idols above were not such idols after all. They were human: buffoons, drunkards, sentimental, strong-willed, weak-willed… They are not masters of your head; you are.
National cultures were created. I want to recall Georgian cinema; there were beautiful flashes in ours too, the Ukrainian film studio. Before our eyes a great literary personality such as Chingiz Aitmatov emerged. Russian literature has names too, poets and prose writers.
But the country had become so exhausted and ugly that one could no longer grieve for its destruction and those being destroyed. A beauty gradually wore out, grew old and had to leave the arena.
You see, my spoken words are no use at all.
— I just gave the example of The Saroyan Brothers. In general I can take a sentence from your works and say it is unmistakably Hrant Matevosyan; only he writes like that. Do you consider this a strength or a weakness?
— No, I truly have rendered one service. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Armenian first poured from the screen into the audience in We Are Our Mountains. The example was infectious. Everyone followed it along the easy road; it is not my fault they began imitating it.
— Say a young, beginning prose writer is influenced by your language and copies your way of constructing a phrase. That reflects a lack of individuality, but…
Can we take a random sentence from Leo Tolstoy, for example, and be sure it is his alone, that only he writes that way?
— No, there is no such question. I am simply grateful to the teachers of my writer’s language who taught me something: Charents’s forged, hammer-worked words, Tumanyan’s universal expressions of folk life, the splendour of Isahakyan’s language. If I told you how much Charents took from Teryan, how much Teryan wrote in Tumanyan’s manner… We travel on, teaching one another. But it is unpleasant to see nothing beyond what has been learned, nothing of one’s own. It is a repetition. Otherwise we are all children of Armenian, our mothers’ sons.
— Since we have spoken of cinema, tell me which adaptation of your work you consider the best. And in general, what values has Armenian cinema created, and why could it not do more?
— I cherished and truly expected a film masterpiece from my script This Green, Red World, based on Bakunts’s The Pheasant. I had noticed that work long before. Rafael Aramyan once…
Perhaps there is no need for so much detail? He was a wonderful man, not so much a first-rate writer as a vibrant being, a good experimenter. He symbolised Yerevan’s intelligentsia; with his loss the substance of Yerevan itself seemed lost. He had seen the Japanese film The Naked Island and came to the Grakan Tert office to tell us about it. A harsh island, a man, a woman, a child: that is their planet, they must turn it into a garden. First, that Naked Island. Another: there was a wonderful man, Ion Druță, whom I later met, but a Moldovan had told me about his The Last Month of Autumn. And Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which I saw in Moscow. Those, and Bakunts’s The Pheasant—I do not know how they joined within me, but I felt something good was emerging in cinema. Beyond myself, I wrote that forty-five-page work without opening Bakunts’s book. I wrote it and for a long time envied the person who would author that masterpiece. Who would be that stern knower of Armenian soil, of the Armenian cultivator who built terraces, created grapes in our harsh earth, grew a hard-won apple, made hard-won bread? The Armenian’s fidelity, morality, fidelity in this wasteful, extravagant, dissolute world of ours. In this expanding world making immorality absolute, we needed an outright counter-film.
Just as moral people forged and tempered Christ amid those absolutes of theft, adultery and betrayal, as their counterweight.
We had to create such a counterweight from the Armenian human being: not a reflection of the world, but directly against the world. I cherished that film so much, and sadly it was the worst of all. It was a very unfortunate film and left me unable to take cinema quite so deeply afterwards.
I turned to cinema a couple more times. August, for example, was filmed too, but I did not write the script. I wrote scripts twice, both at the director’s urging. Yet to my credit, I never opened my own book and worked with scissors. I wrote Autumn Sun and the other afresh. Copying was simply boring to me. But the cinema that my literary gift entitled me and my Armenian audience to, that I demanded of our filmmakers because I saw a national mission in national culture, sadly never came into being.
Their incomplete works, those works of my so-called colleagues, seemed outright national betrayal to me; I endured their failures with profound distaste. It is a very difficult subject. If it is not too late, and if it still concerns us, I will say: we were not direct and strict with our colleagues, tolerated defective work, and for thirty whole years defective work kept being produced. Though, I repeat again, there were conditions for creating tolerable works.
Mikhalkov did it, Konchalovsky did it, Tarkovsky did it; they did, did they not? Georgian Film was becoming the Soviet Union’s cinema centre; every work there became an event.
Our own put little on the shelf. Today, when I want to offer my brothers and sisters in the diaspora, their children, something from cinema, I see there is nothing to offer.
Jean-Luc Godard shot one of his films on narrow amateur film stock. That is, if you are a writer, you can create; here your pen is simply a camera. Worthy aspiring writers should take up the camera and do their writer’s work with it. Our people were not writers and sadly were poor craftsmen, which cannot be said of Russian directors, Gerasimov for example.
How well he knew Russian literature, how much he respected it! He was something like an encyclopaedia of it. He did enlightening work, bringing Russian literature to the screen with great mastery. Did we have such knowledgeable masters here? We did not. Sadly, we did not. Ignorance of the craft and downright disrespect for Armenian literature. How often Anush has been tormented here!
I love Malyan’s Triangle; it is a good film. About Bagrat Hovhannisyan: he was a restless man of great taste, a seeker unsatisfied with standard ways of thinking, a wonderful knower of world literature, but sadly he knew filmmaking poorly. Others’ mediocrity did not satisfy him, enraged him, and in that he was honest. Yet something was missing in him too, something needed to create the lofty, living, unsettling thing that existed in his mind and heart.
I think The Master failed too, and the script is not to blame. In my opinion it is a script of a proper standard. In other cases I might say, all right, I am guilty; but Armenian literature exists. It lay before you. Had you been good craftsmen, you would have staged it well. You met Tumanyan and failed, Bakunts and failed. No, I am not to blame for The Master.
— Yes, the film is very inadequate to the script-novella.
— At least it was written especially for him. He knew I put my own work aside and wrote a screenplay for him. For him! Disrupting my own work, I wrote for him. There were other motives. He was in need. I am sentimental, such things affect me. He had begun something very difficult and responsible, wanted to stage Land of Nairi; they did not let him. He had been without work for a long time, had no resources left. If I would not help my friend even there, then… I knew, expected little of him. Autumn Sun had shown he could not do it for me; let him try his experiment on someone else. But simply for friendship I said, all right, I will sit down for a month and do it. The month stretched a long way; I did my work as a friend. My conscience is at peace before myself. It is not a bad novella, a tolerable screenplay.
— Critics considered the Drama Theatre’s Autumn Sun a work of great value. What would you say now, at this distance?
— Apparently I am always strictest towards my works. There too. Though much displeased me, I kept modestly silent so that Violet Gevorgyan and Artashes Hovhannisyan would not lose an award because of it. For at least a few months that work deserved one.
Then they inclined towards bad taste, went after laughs, turned it into a farce. It was offensive. They thought themselves higher people than their characters, entitled to make them ridiculous. They can justify themselves now: we performed it five hundred, a thousand, even two thousand times. Their business. My ideal of theatre is different; I do not know, Chekhov’s theatre is my ideal.
Once, when the chance arose to write a play…
We were returning from Mahari’s funeral when Vardan Achemyan suggested Vahagn Davtyan and I write a play. In his mind he perhaps assigned Vahagn supervision over me, and me the writing. Vahagn Davtyan wrote his own, I made my attempt too, wrote The Neutral Zone, whose staging I saw in Chekhov’s theatrical style: subtle, slow, restrained, not a spectacle.
Karlen Varzhapetyan staged it. You are a man of art, and it is no news to you that a work of art is a living body too: anything missing or anything excessive destroys that body. In that failed production I admit Sos was good, and Karen Janibekyan was good too. Writing, I almost thought they would play those roles. But Toros Toramanyan’s physique involuntarily suggested that Khoren Abrahamyan would play the architect, Sos Sargsyan the priest, a figure I love very much. Those two roles were realised, I admit, but there were so many errors! The crowd scenes were utterly neglected, utterly useless.
Karlen Varzhapetyan was a bold fellow, a talented man; I say that recalling his Land of Nairi. But something, lack of time or resources, prevented him from properly revising those errors. Sometimes I see it as an open-air production, say in a monastery, filmed in black and white.
Slowly, slowly. Let something different arise.
That is how I wanted The Neutral Zone: restrained, the opposite of spectacle. While writing, I held an image in mind: wine poured into a karas jar and left alone, slowly, quietly coming into being within itself.
At first, taking up the pen, I thought everyone would arrive within two or three pages, five to ten minutes, and everything unfold among them. Sadly I could not follow my purpose; the group from outside came very late, and so on. I do not know why, but what I wanted did not happen.
— Nevertheless, The Neutral Zone has greater literary than theatrical value, less value as material for the stage. Once, in 1984 or 1985, you said you do not write drama because you cannot create a story of “poison and a handkerchief”.
— Truly I cannot. You are right. In my view, and I speak very theoretically, the language of prose and the language of drama are quite different things.
They fail to understand something very important. If the text is expressive, restrain it. One cannot perform an expressive text expressively, push every possibility of expression to its utmost. Let another law operate, the dynamics of statics. Is a stone about to roll not more terrible than a rolling stone? The fear of death is greater than death itself. You must leave something to the audience, it seems. Let them take it to its utmost. You invite the audience to share the feeling, do you not? Otherwise, taking that initiative of co-authorship away, you must stage it so splendidly that they become purely spectators enjoying the spectacle. If you want something more serious, something must be restrained. That is how I wanted The Neutral Zone.
— You said you are always strictest towards your works. That is natural: what you create has verbal value, and on stage it becomes another meaning and value. I do not know whether any good writer has been satisfied with the staging of his work.
— There is one. Saroyan was entirely satisfied with My Heart’s in the Highlands. I was satisfied too. A wonderful production.
— I am speaking of a writer’s prose work.
— I think we writers, I in particular, consider ourselves satisfied, or silence ourselves, when we see that even if it is not ours, something exists, has emerged, is there as a living body.
— We Are Our Mountains, for example. I remember you saying Malyan tore out of you what he needed.
— Yes, yes. That is why I did not include We Are Our Mountains when compiling a book of scripts. A body emerged; I was satisfied. There were so many stillbirths that one could already rejoice in a living body.
— What is the best production you have seen in Armenian theatre?
— That belongs to very early times: Vardan Achemyan’s The Rock. Gurgen Janibekyan’s Grigor Agha. It was a production of one solid piece of rock, an absolute example of the classical. Flawless, precise.
— Precise in what sense, faithful to the author?
— Not one character missed the mark. As an evening’s whole, a production’s whole, nothing was superfluous. The characters worked like all the parts of a good machine. None hindered another’s emergence; all forged and polished one another. The whole under one powerful hand. The tension was constant.
The other was in a different key, a watercolour, light, transparent, romantic production: My Heart’s in the Highlands. Mozart seemed to sift from the sky.
What a great man Achemyan was, what a great being, what an artist, a beautiful man!
— I would like your opinion of Violet Gevorgyan’s and Anahit Ghukasyan’s different Aghuns.
— To speak of them side by side, both Aghuns would have to be fully realised. While I considered Violet Gevorgyan’s Aghun realised, especially before the production grew old, I cannot say the same of Bagrat Hovhannisyan’s film. I think it failed to come into being. There was only a small passage where she nurses the child. Just the house walls, splendid lighting, and Tigran Mansuryan’s wonderful melody sifting with the rain. Only that passage was magnificent. The rest incomplete, damaged…
I do not know, it did not come into being. I am sorry; perhaps she will read this now and be hurt, but what can I do?
— Years ago at the Sundukyan Theatre Hrant Matevosyan’s The Master was “being prepared for production”.
— The initiative to dramatise The Master, as incidentally Autumn Sun too, was Valeri Tumasyan’s. Yes, one of his flights of imagination, which I met with enthusiasm not especially restrained.
Let it have succeeded; I too would have gone, watched and shared their glory.
But there was another doubt. Russian criticism then, which could be more candid and direct, had said the novella was already late: “the train has left”.
I fear it really was so. That fear and reservation came from the production of Hatsavan: it seemed a genuine success, yet something alien and strange repelled. Even from our youth that work had not been in dialogue with us; it was outdated when written, already dead and repellent then.
— The sole guarantee of success was Sos Sargsyan’s acting. He did not follow the traditional interpretation through which the author seems to have discredited his character.
— Yes, true. Sos played it correctly. Many years ago Levon Hakhverdyan said a time would come when we would say Balabek was right not to work, to avoid working on the collective farm; the character would rebel against the author. I had a similar fear about The Master.
— At the gathering in the Writers’ House for your fiftieth birthday and State Prize, you mentioned Vano Siradeghyan as a noticeable talent. What became of your expectations of him as a prose writer, and what are they now?
— 1988 broke the destinies of very many of us. His too. I consider Vano Siradeghyan a good writer, but he took on another task. Nobody dared; everyone spoke, but nobody dared assume the difficult work of that ministry, always discredited and being discredited. Vano was a bold fellow, took that risk. Either he devours the mafia or it devours him. I fear the latter.
— I would rather hear more about what you liked in his works.
— He made direct, living, unaffected literature. To answer your question I would have to say in one word what brings our texts to life and what kills our pages. I do not have that word. Vano’s texts played and trembled before your eyes. Yet… Let us leave it… Vano will no longer come to literature, like very many of us.
— Hrant Matevosyan had ominous thoughts about passing his fifty-fourth year. Was that connected with Tumanyan’s death at fifty-four? Thank God that age has passed.
— A thousand thanks to God, but… Fifty-four did not pass. There was no way round it: fifty-four stood in its terrible image of 1988 and began death’s merciless harvest, drove everyone and everything mad, crushed and brought them down. Like the Mongol in our Middle Ages who blocked all the sources feeding my fortress, keeping me standing. At fifty-four there was a break with my former life. Now I am in another atmosphere, perhaps another person too. It will be very hard to return to the works I began before forty and after.
I do not know how I will connect with the work of the man I was before. It is very difficult.
Manuscripts have accumulated, unfinished works exist and live. Yet it has been observed that at this age one should not intervene in the work of youth. I noticed it when I interfered in my young daughter’s vibrant translations. I tried touching her translations of Saroyan, writing correct, firm, magnificently precise words and… killing the text. What she had done was different, needed intervention, yet I touched it and the text died. I fear the same may happen to my own work. That danger exists.
But I want to return to one of your earlier questions: “I do not want to use the word ‘opportunism’, but have the pinpricks present in all your works not become outdated? How do you adapt as a writer to the new conditions?”
They have. Thank you for the courtesy and delicacy of the question, but they truly have. It is hard to write with pinpricks now. Then we sought corrections; now there is a whole set of concepts that must receive their correct, arithmetically exact judgement. Our immoral reality, parading bareheaded, must receive your manly answer as a writer. A grotesquely cruel reality demands a grown man’s answer: I know you. I will not get by with pinpricks and allegory. You must be right, blunt, precise and direct, as much as Charents was in his day.
— In Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, speaking of Byron’s poetry, Goethe says that if he had been allowed to make speeches, half his poetry would not have been written. Goethe calls that part of Byron’s poetry “unspoken parliamentary speeches”. I mean the layer beyond art that becomes unavoidable when giving reality its proper judgement.
— No, one thing always hinders art: the artist’s timidity. Incomplete understanding, insufficient learning, darkness of thought that brings a lack of courage, produces incomplete work. A Shiite sect says, “If you meet hell on your road, turn back: the darkness of your mind is at fault, return to your teacher.” You have met infernal darkness, so you were unprepared. By enlightenment I mean the knowledge and courage to call an angel an angel, a devil a devil, a thief a thief, everything else by its true name.
Then through those figures you can bring your desire to its fullest expression. A good ending truly awaits you, not dark hell. Then the tragedy is born from which you emerge enlightened.
Otherwise incomplete art consigns the reader to hopelessness, drives them into a dead end. This is a culture where incomplete figures grope in darkness and make the author and reader grope too. The enemy, then, has not been understood and mastered.
How Gogol diminished them, the Sobakeviches and all the others: ridiculous, even lovable, yet terrible, are they not? They devour Russia. But Gogol mastered them, revealed the comedy of evils. That is mastery, is it not?
Commander Shavarsh. Our reality today repeats Commander Shavarsh. Yet you emerge laughing, brightened, from that cruel tragedy. You witness birth, the rebirth of the idea of sacrifice. That is right, is it not? A discovery occurred; the question did not remain conditional, suspended. Discovery, birth. The birth of art, great art.
Anush is the birth of great art, Hamlet is the birth of great art, is it not? True. You witnessed a birth, which is why you come away from the work smiling. There are bad works about bright things, are there not? Disgusting, is it not? The work itself deserves pity. It too is a body and must breathe. A stillbirth kills reader and spectator too.
— Years ago again, word spread that Roman Balayan would film The Buffalo.
— He signed a contract but did not do it. Wrote a not-so-bad script but did not do it, and I am glad. It was not his. The work had grown old within him. Now someone with a fresh attitude may come and make it, but it was already beyond Roman, and beyond me too, far removed from me.
— I see something good in our situation too. Those out of place leave literature and art. Now art is practised by those who ought to practise it, are called to it, can do nothing else.
— But they were necessary people. They were to create an atmosphere so the individual could act. The actor must act every day, the writer write every day, in their environment. You should have seen Sergei Parajanov: never alone for a minute, constantly people around him who would never become individual personalities. They gave themselves to the work of Parajanov’s existence. He resembled a queen bee, always amid an entourage…
Interview by Hovhannes YERANYAN
Arar, Nos. 2–3, 1993.