Within an entire century, cruelly radiant and cruelly dark, a hundred years are fulfilled since the advent of the poet Yeghishe Charents, the singular one allotted to us among humanity’s most perfect creations.
We want to spend the whole year in his universe. We would like to see his banner, that courageous man’s, at the head of our broken, scattered, bewildered march. We want to discover our kinship with him, that lofty, upright man. We want, by his example, not to stand speechlessly mute before this agonising time: to open Armenian times and spaces before our Armenian Word, to see ourselves in the eternally one and same march of our ancestors and the young people yet to come, and to hope and believe in our eternity.
Is he worthy? Can we? Today, is he the worthy one?
Strangely, he is the worthy one. Strangely, it is not we who have unexpectedly come to call in his heavy promissory note. Strangely, he has been with us and of our time at every moment. Even if his corrupted, mutilated time and our corrupted time are opposed and at war, he is the leader of our time, because he is the spirit of freedom and freedom itself. Unaccustomed to spiritual serfdom, he could not be moulded to belong even to a very great idea or party, nor even solely to his own time.
An enemy of provincialism and provincial thinking, will he be able to belong to our national community for a whole year, for at least one year? An enemy of violence and abjection, an internationalist to the marrow, inseparable in the substance of his work from our national essence, will he not abandon, with his torn regiment, our camp of oppressors and the downtrodden, of corrupted internationalism and endangered national identity? Will we be able, if not to honour his entire retinue, then at least to tolerate it among us? I want us to be able to, and we shall. They are Charents’s and bear his stamp: that Lenin, that Myasnikyan, those Communards, that lament and curse over our Nairian misery, that stubborn, enduring effort to shake off this national curse, as though the giant Mher were trying to break free of the rock and could not, could not; that hysterical laughter at idolatry and collapsing idols, that new idolatry in a new form, that divine, fierce anger of the human being and that wretched slavish obedience, that eternal cycle of destruction and rebuilding, that knowledge of the human being and humanity by which everything and everyone could be marked with a symbol, which could erect real barricades and turn every contemplator into a soldier with a sword in his hand. All this is Charents’s and bears his stamp, and must be ours; we are obliged to make it ours.
Across all times and in every direction, we can set our foot down firmly: that courageous traveller named Charents has been everywhere before us, and in no dark hollow does destruction lie in wait for us, only the shiver of discovery, even the discovery of destruction.
Blessed is the regiment whose scout he is; blessed are those free people of our nation and of the world. Blessed are we who enter his and their camp: we shall emerge filled with the courage of perpetual movement, emerge having cast off all our bonds.
Grakan Tert, 21 January 1997.