With the years, with growing old, I find myself returning again and again to the image of my country. Every evening before sleep, the landscape of Armenia rises before me like a nightmare. And sleep seems a salvation. I would like to sleep for a long, long time and not wake, so that this nightmare does not confront me again. Devastated slopes, broken fences, houses in need of repair, bad roads, poisoned waters—all this in a country that once flourished. I wish my country could be renewed, that we could make those earth-coloured slopes bloom, that those fences and old houses, dirty villages, ruined gardens, poisoned waters—all of it could be restored. So that our children might feel the beauty of life, the charm of this infinitely beautiful world, through this country and in this country, rather than stumbling into America like beggars with empty pockets and only from America cherishing within themselves the image of a flourishing land. Hence my Armenian heroes, who truly allow me to face history without shame: they are people who make the country bloom. My heroes are men of arms and titans of thought and art alike. Yet for me the symbol of Armenian perseverance remains the island of San Lazzaro: the work and energy of Abbot Mkhitar Sebastatsi, the monastery he built, the printing house he opened, his work of enlightenment. I saw variations and expressions of that example in my childhood, on my own soil: people working for nothing, receiving nothing, perhaps even less than under serfdom. Just as master stonemasons raised those monasteries by working without pay for spiritual and secular lords, I saw the same in my father and grandfather. They worked for the collective farm just as Sebastatsi worked on San Lazzaro. I have also seen what my generation, my sons’ generation, has lost compared with its grandfathers. It pains me, but this form of patriotism is dwindling among us. The country must be built; we must become our own serfs and work that way again. I feel deeply ashamed when, say, someone in my native village is short of hay this year because the grass was not mown. Where were the village’s sons then? At demonstrations. Reborn through revolution, we have all somehow become heroes of the public square, although that too is a task demanding great labour, and not every clown should step into the square. For many people, a mouth is given merely to eat bread. Yet they step into the square and take up a pen, when a pen carries more responsibility and weighs more heavily than a spade. They should take up a spade; it is the image of the labourer with a spade in his hand that I cherish… That is what we must fight for. Here I am: I must put down my pen, since you have taken up yours, and go into the fields. I do not know, I do not know… I would like to see well-tended pigs, piggeries that do not stink; I would like the heifer living in my country, on my soil, to be as beautiful and well cared for as one in Norway, the horses to be clean, the orchards pruned and cleared of dead branches. We need work. Work must become the main hero, and it is absent from the square today. Sadly, though this sounds like an excuse, we have adopted an attitude to work that is not our own, that came from the regime of Russian dictatorship: those wearing pressed military uniforms never take a spade into their hands. But they are Russians; they have an army numbering millions. They are serf-owners in their own way, and you, by your position, are no such serf-owner; you have no right to adopt their outlook, their conduct towards this world. You were born a labourer on the land, and a labourer you must be again, like my grandfathers. That is what I demand of myself and of my sons.
We are in revolutionary euphoria, delirium, intoxication. Our exceptional situation as Armenians offers us none of the precedents that would let us view these things more calmly. Condemned to hopelessness, silence and oppression, we longed for free speech, for saying our own words in our own voice. That has brought about the romanticisation of revolution and revolutionaries that exists among us. If we could overcome ourselves and look at events from a little higher up, we would have to curse both the revolutionaries and the revolution. Our revolutionaries, our daring young men, our terrorists can be justified only insofar as their violence is a response, forced upon them by the enemy. But today we must simply strive to be strong, to rise a little above ourselves and our fate and look at reality soberly. For the survival of the people, let us choose the shortest possible route to healing ourselves, so that we may endure in the world… We must try to look calmly at history and at today’s reality. Make the country once again the kind of country possessed by peoples who have lived through their national liberation revolutions. Yet, I repeat, our circumstances force us to be what we are today. But how long are we to roast in this revolution, in these cries of pain, in this lamentation and wailing?… It gives us so little… I do not know… Besides, our situation is so precarious that none of these things takes full shape among us as a reality in its own right. If we have chosen an interethnic war, we must fight our enemy by all the laws of war; if we have chosen peace, we must live by the laws of peace. Today neither our war nor our peace takes shape. This is a very grave situation, imposed on us; once again it is the enemy who dictates. You must speak to the enemy in his own language. We have turned Armenia into an orphanage: this wretched mother, unable to feed her sons, takes in another 500,000 exiles—those forcibly displaced from Azerbaijan. They should have been formed into an army and deployed against Azerbaijan. The Turks fight us with mothers and children; we too must fight with our mothers and children, with the refugees. Those forcibly displaced should have gone to Karabakh, where the danger is not so great. We violate the laws of war; we do not answer war with war, and that is why our movement today is condemned to fall again after every fall. Perhaps our humanity gets in the way, I do not know. But I also do not know which is the greater danger to us: this, or the acute ecological situation we face today, which will become still more acute tomorrow. We have no jobs, no productive capacity to keep and hold the sons we already have. Now another half-million people have been added to them.
…The novel I was writing was interrupted by the events of February. Since then I have been unable to add a single line. In it, my attitude, drawn directly from life itself, was developing. There are a few eruptions of the figures of adolescents, old men, military leaders of a statehood that did not exist, proud people: a youth who would not bow his head, an old man who was a failure… They were taking shape, but the novel was interrupted.
…Our heroes of a statehood that did not exist… When Gogol was changing from carriage to carriage and travelling all over Europe with empty pockets, he knew there was Tsar Nicholas I, who would send him money. And so it happened. Nicholas sent him an enormous sum: let him travel, let him see Europe. My Tumanyan never received such treatment from a king; he had no kingdom of his own. Perhaps Mantashov might have indulged him a little… My strong men, those Armenians of mine, had no statehood, yet they behaved like sons of a people with a realm of its own: as though we lived within a state, as though there were a king, as though their conduct might suddenly harm the state. That exists in my people; it is not my poetic delirium. That is how my Murad of Sebastia fought: after a battle, after a victory, he did not expect a decoration. But take the Turks’ Dali Pasha, the hero of a Turkish–Russian battle, whom they called Dali—mad, crazy: even he was not so mad as to forget himself. He knew he would receive a golden dagger, receive a decoration, that a triumphal arch awaited him. No triumphal arch awaited my people; they had no statehood, yet they conducted themselves as generals of a realm. That is their beauty. Perhaps Teryan’s poetry prompted me, I do not know. My people, the young men of that time, sensed their own elegy in Teryan’s poetry: alone you will remain in the dark ranks of executioners… But what magnificent young men they were!… My heart really does fill with the sobbing Teryan spoke of. I imagine some intelligence agent, a Chekist, falling into the hands of enemy intelligence in a hostile country. The state immediately rises to his aid and somehow… perhaps gives a shipload of gold, perhaps an island in exchange for him. My captured young men have no protectors, yet before a foreign court they behave as though God were their protector. Now that kind of feeling must take root in us. We must be the owners of our country to become like that. The earthquake ruins are ours; the country laid waste over seventy years is ours. I came to the conclusion that it was easy to persecute and drive so many Armenians out of Azerbaijan not because we are cowards and they are brave, but because those people were not owners of the land there and could easily leave it. In Karabakh the Turks steal ten head of cattle every night. In countries with even more theft and cruelty, people do not surrender so much livestock so easily—if the animals are their own rather than belonging to a collective or state farm. These houses would not have remained in ruins for two years. My rubble is mine, my railway is mine, my cow is mine; I must stand beside them. This is my home; elsewhere I have no air to breathe, elsewhere I have no bread. I will stand here. We are talking about freedom. But for now we are serfs, unable to free ourselves from psychological constraint, from legal constraint, still waiting… And if the question is freedom, Azerbaijan’s declaration of a sovereign republic was viewed among us as a crime, whereas in fact they have already created a model for us, opened a path: yes, follow them, it is a step towards federation. As for our complexes concerning the Turks… Indeed, in a people burdened with such complexes, what the sultans suppressed does not disappear so quickly; it will persist for a long time yet. I do not know… But we have preserved some things: Charents’s “Dantean Legend”—the word “Turk” is absent, is it not? That is a kind of arena for the strong. Such interethnic relations are an arena for the strong: Tumanyan’s attitude, Isahakyan’s… Those contemporaries who directly suffered the genocide and afterwards bore on their shoulders the whole burden of gathering the fragments of the people together had far more tolerance and understanding towards the Turks than we do, and they seem to have been more inwardly composed. It follows that they were more complete human beings, intellectuals who grew up in better conditions than we did, the offspring of a wrong regime: narrow-hearted, uncomprehending, we are part of the enraged crowd rather than the part that restrains and guides it. Perhaps in time the most capable among us will walk beside them, become heirs to their forebears, perhaps…