I was born in Lori, in 1935. The village of that and the following twenty, even thirty years between us and the ancients was much closer to the times of Tumanyan-Tolstoy-Xenophon than to ours today. I caught a moose, mowed grass, gave birth to a cow, gave birth to a vaccine... in order not to fill the page with the list of my abilities and information, let me say at once that if the mythical flood were to happen again, like Noah, I could recreate the great cultures of farming and animal husbandry, and if people's memory was suddenly disrupted, I could reassemble the code of human morality from the behavior of my relatives and countrymen in those days. I owe all this to the old village of Ahnidzor, where I spent fifteen years.
By the way, something like this - memory crash and re-creation, like all our Armenian clans and valleys, that settlement also experienced. when a hundred and fifty years ago a young man named Ohanes, Hovhannes Tovmasi Matevosyan, and Tumai Ohanes settled this remote valley and made it a village, the former people were drawn to rebuild Tiflis and Georgia destroyed by the Persians Agha-Mohammed-Khan, or maybe they were driven to the depths of Iran by the great migration of Shah Abbas and maybe they were invaded by Turks, Arabs and Caucasian mountain dwellers. Not even a wild garden, not even a cord plowing field, the embankment of a lost canal, not an underground sand and grinding stone - apart from their Armenian-Christian stamp of the Khachkar, the ancients left nothing to the future citizens of Ahnidzor, and their first child did not bring anything with him from his grandfather's Haghpat - a pair of hands, a female friend, let's name her Nani, and a Armenian language.
The village of the great-grandsons of that quiet farmer and nameless girl was already a whole land of clean meadows, well-cultivated fields, well-springs, and a buzzing school with two hundred students. Here is that country, that ark tied by our forefathers, for one hundred and fifty years, it was separated from the surface of life, then the world entered a new sphere of existence, and that village, that ark, that centuries-old abode of humanity and humanity disintegrated and sunk before our surprised eyes and or changed, I don't know.
I want to repeat the experience of Ohanes in literature. I want to open a new valley and populate it with new people and animals, and I seem to be succeeding. I already have a small village name, a couple of residents and animals. Many come from my memory village, and sometimes I can create "purely from me", and it all gives the impression of resettlement. I wish my valley were big and sunny, I wish its inhabitants were only good people and there was no room for the bad in my valley, that the life of my people flourished in good times and that war and poor enmity had no way to rush into my valley, but I have to be the chronicler of my time.
Why am I writing? because Tumanyan and Tolstoy wrote? maybe yes, but I write much more because they didn't write it and didn't write it like that. Is this the answer? It would be close to the truth if I said I don't know why I write. If any creature of God can say why he is a flower, a wolf, a man, a horse or a picture, the writer will also say why he is a writer, why he writes. All I know about myself is that I am an Armenian of such and such an age, I write, my words sometimes satisfy me, here. "They plan their past and future, while our behavior runs away from under us like a foreign horse." I want to be the true decipherer of the fate of those who are individuals, but enter the summary of losses and gains as a faceless-anonymous-passed-away unit, are only a mute background in great tragedies and are sealed crowds in the impotent works of bad writers. "The Armenian peasant of the decapitated country would certainly make his house a state and himself, along with the farmer, the prince of that state. the nobility of the country passed to the Armenian builder, instead of the Armenian statehood, the Armenian house stood before the enemy" - Hamo Sahyan's oral words. The chroniclers recorded the history of the beheading of the country in their time, I try to testify to that nobility of the Armenian house of my time.