On the first day of this endless Armenian 1915, the outbreak of the Black Plague in Sumgait, Vano Siradeghyan sat in our house for a couple of minutes and demanded many trains from me.
- Call tseka, let's get the people out of the neighboring republic.
The house was still my house, it had not become an aquarium that could be seen from all sides and could not hide anything, in the last effort I was still me, I was not yet an aquarium fish, Vano was half my old Vano: upright, fiery, born a soldier, not a farmer, and therefore militarily defenseless and exposed to all the cold, and half was already the son and witness of a reality that was unwanted, but it existed, but also took on a domineering character.
A voice of pan-Union, but also of global resonance, I, of course, immediately moved my almighty mouth, and from all corners of the world blue train carriages rumbled into the mouth of black hell. They carried light, justice, trust and humanity. Among the companions, of course, was Anatole France, the tall figure of General de Gaulle was seen, the Turkish writers came forward with their girls with flowers and songs, the images of Christ and the prophets were scattered, the "Internationale" was flying over all the roads and borders... Everyone, everything was restrained and silent in the black desert.
I gave my speech a hint of a joke, but neither the color nor the weight of the heavy and black whirlwind, which was the accumulation of the evil of all our souls, which was tamed by the hands of Turkish politicians and the homeland was sealed and pushed into the arena of Armenian eating and which was going to collapse on everyone and everything, does not change at all. With the confidence of a crook in Armenian, a doorknob in Russian, here we went to fight against a many-headed monster, the approximate image of which we did not even know, and whose end was our own end, because at least one of the many heads was on our own shoulders.
What was Vano trying to do with me, the measure of my and "my tseka's" possessive feeling, what was he testing, was he trying something, or was he, like me, confused by the alarming extent of the reality that the army green shell had torn open in a poor Turkish town for the time being and was rising and tearing the shell over the entire surface of the huge country? Much more, the last one, much more, was confused.
He later clarified. the owners of life and the square would all (all of us) run away, all of us would enter the holes, Vano would not run away. Vano would stand in the square and confirm something with his every hour and every day. "This is my homeland for this hour, and I own it."
... The image of a fellow countryman who lived with his hands and was absent from his home, a driver, was transferred from Vano to the story of Vano Siradeghyan, and from that short and accurate story, it emerges multiplied as an image of many of us, many of us who were called not to live like this, but we are condemned to live like this.
Blind, restless, instinctive, one can say non-mental, but purely bodily, as if an animal, a hard effort characterizes the behavior of Siradeghyan's characters, an effort towards the morality of being and being, as if they do not yet exist and want to create themselves, as if they have not yet been created and strive to create themselves. In that persistent, blind, endless striving, they fall down and join new works under new names, to fall down again and strive again from non-existence to existence, from animal to human.
According to the old, hundred-year-old saying, Vano was not meant to be a tragedy, perhaps outstanding, he has to drag his role of a mourner in the square of our Armenian woe-life, and thank God that among the many comedians like him, the bravest is his attitude again, he will admit defeat to all of us at the latest.
I am this Hrant Matevosyan, almost ten years ago. Ten years later, on the occasion of the publication of this book, I read my speech and leafed through the entire work, and now I add:-
In 1988, the pen put down what a careful and unerring hand, what a domineering face was withdrawn from literature, what a true story! what a look of Gorov was cut from our crowd of children and animals, old people and old men, women and men, who never in that look of Gorov, loving, forgiving, perceiving us as we are, no matter how much we lose ourselves, no matter how much we are defiled and we will not be distorted, we will not be printed as a crowd, because we are mothers - his mother, brothers - his brother, younger - his boyhood, we are the motherland - the only place for him to live, establish himself, rest, and how unerring the political thought of the coming time was twelve years ago, choosing from among hundreds and thousands of us of his past the one who can remove the falsehood, whether that falsehood is burdened by the reality of life or literary reality. who is able not to limit himself to the literary reality with an irresistible conventionality ("Well, it's a thing: we talk, again"), nor to the reality of life with a convincing presence ("Well, it's life: we obey, again"), but also keeps himself in a constant march between the abstract and the real.
Of course, this is not a call to return to our pen brother. that would be the desire of those whose peaceful initiation is hindered by his presence; and on the contrary, it is an exhortation to get stronger in politics, because the tyranny there turns the drama of all of us into a nationwide farce.