I will not say that I greeted his entry into the country of prose with jealousy. Not at all. Success in the exact recording of life was so rare, the Abovyan-like torrent of language, released once and for all by the lament of The Wound, so often refused to nourish prose’s peaceful meadow peacefully, that it seemed narration was not Armenian’s element, prose was not Armenian’s element, that a self-portrait in Armenian was forever contraindicated for the Armenian writer.
You say: what about Tigranuhi, The Apple Orchard, The Deer, what about Mushegh?.. Mushegh, Aghasi, The Deer, Sila, The Apple Orchard testify to how wordy and how sparsely populated the country of Armenian prose is, how short-lived, how unproductive, almost barren its masters are. And so every new arrival was a great, new hope, every rustle an expectation of melody, every ripple the anticipation of abundant life in a great valley — all the more so his arrival.
A young man had entered the country of prose who, more precise than all, all his predecessors, told true stories in precise words. He had no approximate words; as though the utterance were to be inscribed on hard stone, he was sparing and selective. He had no word that missed its mark; his word and its object found each other at the same instant. The fleeting, the momentary, the elusive, the nameless appeared having already found his word, already become image and picture, already received a name… And those pictures and images offered delight: their very life and multitude gave joy; their master gave joy through his singular chosenness among the many called. This was a true writer, and this was true prose. Approximation was the cause of all the surrounding desolation, while this was called to longevity. But because Aksel and Mushegh had laid down their pens too soon, and only a brief span of Mndzuri’s long life had been given to literature, and exhaustion within a brief moment seemed to be fate — what would happen to this one?
What would happen was that the unfolding, continuing reality did not satisfy this Vano. More precisely, he was not satisfied with reality’s unresponsiveness to the writer and literary work, and thus with the writer’s and literary work’s facelessness before a reality unfolding and continuing for itself. As though literature were not a component of reality, as though that reality were not a derivative of that literature, as though they did not spring from one another and belong to one another. In his case, at least in this case, the cause was not in him: he and the procession born solely of him lived their earthly work and life with conscientious obedience. The cause was the falsehood of the great ritual. And he and that falsified, defaced, corrupted reality, whose corruption had corrupted whole generations and time, naturally could not belong to one another. But his passage into politics, and into power, that is, into overturning the ritual order, I did greet with jealousy. He had mounted the platform in my place; he, Vano, was being arrested in my place; he stood in the den of the beggar-robber called the police, and today he has put his neck where necks are usually broken.
How good it is that politics too, like literature, like mathematics, punishes those who corrupt it. How good it is that literature has sent into politics its singular man who does not cheat.