Vasili Belov, the son of Ivan who died in the war, was born fifty years ago, lives and will live thousands of versts away from Armenia in the north, in Vologda of fleeting summers and harsh winters. Immediately after the war, like all orphans, he was trained in carpentry at a vocational school, which he had known since the time of his grandfathers. After two collections of poetry, he conscientiously studied literary work at the capital's literary institute, the first, only and irreplaceable teacher of which is the language of his grandparents, the language's rocking life, experience, morality, clear optimism, authentic memory of people's suffering and suffering. He was in Armenia (Yerevan). He was quiet, his speech was weighted, impressive, heavy like a cold press. Called to debate important issues around the round table, he disputed the round table itself. He answered the eternal question of the students about love, that they confuse their biological vibrations with the greatest human emotion, which is talent and, like talent, the ability of the unique. He expressed his distaste for tourism, considered modern sports to be nonsense, etc., and the unity of the answers rejected this "bright, bright, bright" world.
He was noticed by the literary and reading public about twenty years ago with the extensive novel "Privichnoye delo" ("This is it", "This is life", "This is our life", "What can I say"...). He will be noticed, singled out and in literature, perhaps also in world literature, primarily with that novel. Although subsequent years have only added glory to his fame, despite the already existence of the unprecedented encyclopedic book "Lad" ("Perfection") (1982) and despite the literary work and his Vologda homeland (which for him are equal and one and the same), he will diligently cultivate his conscience at the desk and not a single idle day will pass, nevertheless "Privichnoye delo" the novel will remain unsurpassed, because its author will never again be able to maintain the attitude of an impartial chronicler, great literature trusts precisely the impartial chroniclers. He will no longer be able to be that "cold narrator", that indifferent ruler over today's good and bad, because he will never come to terms with today's urban retired excess of grandmothers leading flocks of grandchildren like yesterday's old ducks, he will not come to terms with today's fabricated socialization of yesterday's farmer and mistress of life, the Russian peasant woman, today's conveyance of rustic universal, With the destruction of the old, thousand-year-old village, the cradle of humanity, that "pitiful school", we will not be able to leave the cut, worn, melted, shrunk, already sinking island of the great continent of "rustic Christian culture" and watch from the concrete edge of the civilization of the century the consumption of what, just yesterday, seemed like the eternal homeland of the soul and body, and in the new spheres of our existence today, no situation and no community of people to be able to extract as much sympathy from his chronicle as the village of that novel, perhaps the village of his bitter youth.
To renew my old love of that rustic apostle and his gospel, I opened a random page and here it is.
"He already knew all the sounds of his parents' hut. Especially the sound of the door. Every time her heart sank from despair, when the grandmother left the hut with the bucket and went to get lost. The sadness was becoming unbearable, the tears were gathering, every now and then it wanted to burst out, the mouth became hopelessly hooked, it remained like a final horseshoe.
The unbearable seconds gnawed at the soul, it became impossible to hold back the tearful cry. The constricted throat would have let out that scream now, but the door opened there and brought in the real, glorious grandmother Evstolya, who filled the hut with herself and, ignoring the children, went to the stove. And the accumulation of screams and tears subsided, Valodka, hopelessly abandoned, appeared in delightful lightness. Until the grandmother was freed from household chores, this was repeated over and over again, she simply could not come to terms with her situation. The longing for the always absent, endlessly absent mother wore out his little heart, and when the grandmother left, the child could no longer cope, he was already falling apart, he didn't even want their cradle anymore.
The older of the two brothers of the cradle, sister Marusya, came closer and rattled the toy on the brothers. Marusya was four years old, all the bars and twigs of the crib were more familiar to her than Valodka, and she herself wanted to enter the crib secretly from her.
Rock them, Marusya, rock them, sweet girl, so that they grow up and put you in a car."
Thus, everything here is so natural, deep, significant, necessary and important and close enough to squeeze the heart that it is impossible to limit the excerpt without holding on to one's own hand. Thus, with chrestomatic clarity, he is able to tell about the sixty-nine-year-old grandmother and the six-week-old baby, the kolkhoz horse and the "Christian" cow Rogulya, the saints and the promiscuous, the serious rulers and the submissive ones, as one of his short series of images is titled, "All God's Creatures."
On one occasion, I boasted that in the case of the retreat of human memory, which with stubborn consistency happens every day and in all our hours, I could restore for all mankind the great old culture of agriculture - animal husbandry - but here is who could and who could be trusted.
Reading, as others have expressed about a writer, raises a great wave of creative envy, you want many, many pages, until you encounter some shallow place or some approximate truth always tolerated by the reader, transcribe, rob, and there is not that conventionally true, and there is not that disturbing unimportant.
In this case, I also envy the translator for his ability and ability to assimilate this best, this truest word about our mothers, this masterpiece of all of us, created by our generation after the 20th Congress. While reading the above passage, I stopped several times in front of untranslatables. PODKOVKA is a horseshoe, GORKY is bitter, but "bitter horseshoe" is nonsense. Translation of a work of art is simply impossible. It is impossible not only to translate from one language to another, but also to transfer one writer, let's say Sholokhov, to another writer, let's say Belov, in one and the same language. It means removing the writer from his linguistic environment, when the writer himself is his own language. Should the work to be translated be recreated according to the laws of the new linguistic environment, let's say Armenianize or Germanize it, or leave it in Russian or English in Armenian or German? the possibility of which was noticed even by Thomas Mann. I don't know, I only know that two should not be killed on the way of transportation. Accomplished translator Armen Hovhannisyan, who won the grateful trust of Armenian readers by translating Shukshin's charming stories, at least repeated his success here.
Vasili Ivanovych Belov, who cherishes himself as a proverbial child of his time and country, seems to be riding only on gray-soil Russia and Vologda destinies, but these are precisely Armenian destinies, it is our Orukyan that is so well-informed in his "northern" novels. He revealed the uniqueness of his place and time in his effort, that is how the universal and the universal are revealed, the core of love, loyalty and compassion that still exists under the seven folds of all of our differences and keeps us still human and very similar to each other in our humanity.
Yerevan, 24.10.1983