I was born in Lori in 1935. The village of that year and of the next twenty, even thirty years, standing between us and the older generations, was much closer to the times of Tumanyan, Tolstoy and Xenophon than to our own present day. I have held a plough, cut hay, delivered calves, grafted trees… Rather than fill a page with a list of my skills and knowledge, let me say at once: if the legendary flood were to return, I could, like Noah, recreate the great traditions of farming and animal husbandry; and if human memory were suddenly impaired, I could piece together a code of human morality from the conduct of my relatives and fellow villagers in those days. For all this I am indebted to the old village of Ahnidzor, where I spent fifteen years.
Incidentally, that settlement, like all our Armenian families and valleys, had itself lived through something similar: the collapse of memory and its reconstruction. When, a hundred and fifty years ago, a young man from Haghpat named Ohanes—Hovhannes Matevossian, son of Tovmas, Tuma’s Ohanes—chose this remote valley as the site of his village, its earlier inhabitants had already left to rebuild Tiflis and Georgia, devastated by the Persian Agha Mohammad Khan. Or perhaps they had been driven into the depths of Iran by Shah Abbas’s great deportation, or scattered by raids of Turks, Arabs and Caucasian highlanders. Not a garden, even a garden gone wild; not a ploughed field, even one lying fallow; not the bank of a vanished irrigation channel, nor a buried mortar or millstone: apart from their ornate Armenian Christian seal on a khachkar, the old inhabitants left nothing to the future people of Ahnidzor. Nor did the first of the newcomers bring anything from his ancestral Haghpat: a pair of hands, a woman to share his life—let us call her Nani—and the Armenian language.
The village of that uncomplaining farmer’s and that nameless girl’s great-grandchildren had become a whole country of well-tended hayfields, carefully levelled threshing floors, cleared springs and a school ringing with the voices of two hundred pupils. This country, this ark built by our forefathers, rocked upon the surface of life for a hundred and fifty years. Then the world entered a new sphere of existence, and the village—that ark, that age-old shelter of humanity and humaneness—broke apart and sank before our astonished eyes. Or perhaps it was transformed; I do not know.
I want to repeat Ohanes’s undertaking in literature: to spread out a new valley and populate it with new people and animals, and I seem to be succeeding. I already have a village name, Tsmakut, and a few inhabitants and animals. Many come from the village of my memory; sometimes I manage to create something “entirely out of myself,” and it all feels like a resettlement. I would very much like my valley to be large and sunny; I would like only good people to live there, with no room for the bad, and my people’s lives to flourish in good times, with no way for war and wretched hostility to break into my valley. But I am compelled to be the chronicler of my time.
Why do I write? Because Tumanyan and Tolstoy wrote? Probably yes, but much more because they did not write about this, and did not write in this way. Is that an answer? It would be nearer the truth to say that I do not know why I write. If any creature of God can say why it is a flower, a wolf, a human being, a horse or a painting, then a writer will be able to say why he is a writer and why he writes. All I know about myself is that I am an Armenian of a certain age, that I write, and that my words sometimes satisfy me. Here: “They plan their past and their future, while our conduct, like an unfamiliar horse, slips out from under us.” I want to be a truthful interpreter of the destinies of those who are individuals, yet enter the balance sheets of losses and achievements as mere units—faceless, nameless, incapable of pain; who form only a mute background in great tragedies and are branded a crowd in the feeble works of bad writers. “The Armenian peasant in a beheaded country would of course turn his home into a state, and himself into not only that state’s labourer but also its prince. The country’s nobility passed to the Armenian tiller of the soil; in the face of the enemy, the Armenian home took the place of Armenian statehood”—these are words spoken by Hamo Sahyan. The chroniclers of their time recorded the history of the country’s beheading; I try to bear witness to this nobility of the Armenian home in my own time.