...For me, our epic is simply the summit of all Armenian culture. Specifically, the branch of Mher the Younger. The intellectual power of the people, of the storyteller, of the storytellers, seems not to have sufficed to mould, create, unfold and give substance to the essential thing that a mind of genius once intuited. Today our reality is Mher the Younger’s unreal reality: an elusive, indeterminate enemy and a real defeat.
Who will be able to embody all this? Who will embody the enemy that evades our thought and our field of vision, this condition that occasionally touches the edges of our thought but is never encompassed by it? David was brought to the fore; David was what the reality of our national awakening needed: a real David, a real enemy, a real victory. In that way Armenian artistic and philosophical thought moved away from literature’s very essence, although clearly Mher’s predicament was recurring in the fates of individuals, even great ones, of parties and of Armenian reality as a whole. And The Trial had to be written not here and not then, but later, in Europe: death will come like an unreal enemy, simply smiling as it invites you to die on a real rubbish heap, while you had a different conception of death. Commander Shavarsh is Mher too: a titan, a brave man, tragic and ridiculous. Mine is still on the way. My manuscript Mesrop, my genuinely audacious venture as a young man, was pulled about and pushed this way and that to the point of insult...
I understood painfully late that one cannot be so much of a documentarian. Some of the fault lay with the environment, the literary critics and my fellow writers, who wrote in all seriousness about things with no connection to our lives, distant in time and space, often things that had already been written about once. I had to hold on to the opposite pole: write about every woman as though you were writing about your own mother. And every human being is already an abstraction; each deserves a particular attitude, his or hers alone. Say there is God in every person, and each person’s God deserves the deepest respect. Look for God in the person beside you.
I find it hard to understand people who write about today by writing about yesterday. How can their thought make today a wasteland, drive out of today, say, you and me, themselves, the people beside them, all of us, the celebrated and the ordinary?
If you want to embody a domineering, coarse, authoritarian idea, embody it in your present-day ministers and thieves. Do not throw yourself back into the Middle Ages. There are things here that did not exist in the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages are not present in today.
Every person, every thing, has its own particular substance, and your duty as a writer is to draw that substance out, to reveal its morality.
The heavy pressure of your time upon you, born once and for the last time, that murderous pressure together with even one exceptional work, say The Bronze Horseman, leads you to distinguish two starting points in literature, two fundamental attitudes towards life. On one side, literature from the perspectives of shepherd and flock, leader and people, king and people, God and earth. On the other: God is in each of us; there are flowers in all our souls; “You yourself are the flock”; “We are our mountains; there is no place for you among us.” One cannot strip the people of their individuality to such a degree, take away their initiative to exist, deem them without a morality of their own and stand over them as though fulfilling one’s prophetic mission. And I say: if they are immoral, why have they not perished by now? For a thousand years, a hundred thousand years, they have been left alone before themselves; why have they not devoured themselves like evil, like cancer? It means they have kept themselves in harmony with the universe. Only yesterday we lived in a land of leaders, of the sanctification of generals, of generals and troops, leader and people, idols and ordinary men. What was needed was to bring the individual human being to the fore: to see in your mother both Queen Tamar and Mary, the Mother of God. Our literature seems to have been no bad valley for Armenian women and girls: see what modest girls it has brought into bloom — Makako, almost all of Mndzuri’s work, A Little Piece of a Kind Heart, Tigranuhi, Caucasian Esperanto...
Whatever else may be said, we did have literature opposed to totalitarianism and diktat, and it managed to produce masterpieces within Soviet reality. Let them not brand only us with the stigma of totalitarianism and consider the matter closed. Totalitarianism is the pain of every country and every age, and therefore an eternal subject of literature.
I feel gratitude towards the literature of neighbouring countries, literature that was itself also a catalyst for today’s revolution, fanning the fire of release from human bondage, freedom and national dignity. In our youth, especially for my generation, Western literature was a gleam in the darkness. It influenced us even more than it influenced its own peoples. The population of a state of three hundred million truly thirsted for a different word, a different voice, and literature from abroad became that voice. It is another matter that later you saw it was no different voice at all, but the same voice of your forebear, your Charents, Bakunts and the others and others: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Towards Mount Masis, Find Your Life, Tigranuhi... Still, thank you.
Now, looking back, I see that the connection with those values of cosmic thought, universal, worldwide and eternal, was not broken here either. The voices were timid, of course. Paustovsky, say, or Abig Avagyan, who created a literature of gentle half-tones. Yes?
After the truly powerful voices had been silenced — Charents, Babel, Gorky, the Bakunts who was yet to be, those great, genuinely great figures whose mighty roots had sunk into world literature — after they had been destroyed, torn out by the roots, a frightened literature arrived, though one that had not lost its conscience. It would have struggled to live among today’s authors with their grotesque power, Márquez, say, or the “Gulag” Solzhenitsyn. Literature is freedom. There is no such thing as half-free: one is free or a slave.
Nevertheless, they were our connection to another shore. “Another sky”: culture has been called that too. Besides, the reign of the so-called idea over us and over society as a whole was not so very long. For my generation especially, it could have become an irreparable tragedy had that turning point not come when we were fifteen to twenty, that demolition of imperial thinking through the genuinely heroic revolution of a man who seemed a buffoon: Khrushchev... He opened the doors of Stalin’s prisons, tried to air out those mouldering souls and spaces, send a dry wind over all of us and everything. If there is anything of value among us today, it arose and grew strong from the fresh breath of those days.
After that, the conditions for good literature existed, at least after ’56, conditions in which lasting values could be created. If they were not created in Armenia, or few were, the fault is ours, the homeland’s half-educated, half-brave, lazy sons. There seemed to be a secret oath: we would not work for the empire. It is a debatable question: should one work well for the masters, or badly? Within the state one must work well, because by working badly, creating badly, you corrupt yourself first. Before building an unreliable bridge, you corrupt yourself. An immoral being emerges from you, one who in tomorrow’s conditions of freedom will remain just as immoral before himself, his country and his sons.
Ultimately, the opportunity to create literature was greater than at any time in our two-thousand-year history, because although we lacked statehood, we had cultural autonomy. In many places even the centre encouraged the creation of national values locally. Often we failed even to meet the standards set by the centre. If I tell you that my own people here were devouring Martiros Saryan, even accusing him of devouring his colleagues, supposedly because he was one of the state’s favourites and “ate up” colleagues more talented than himself, as though Armenian artistic thought had radiated more brightly than he did... But if I say Moscow undertook Saryan’s defence, in the person of Ilya Ehrenburg, as it did the defence of the wonderful Kalents, believe me, that is how it was. We received Minas badly. Without the help of the “centre”, we would have levelled him too with the ruler of our mediocrity. Raise your gaze a little, pass over Baku and go to Central Asia: Moscow forged and tempered Aitmatov. Look around the entire Union and see that in many cases the empire’s masters, knowing precisely that collapse would come from the loss of provincial identity and excessive centralisation, replaced political self-government — one could say substituted for it — with cultural, and not only cultural, autonomy. For us local practitioners, a unique moment in two thousand years had arrived, when we could create the values that would sit on our shelves today, from the diaspora to here: fifteen films, fifteen or twenty volumes of selected poems and stories. We do not have them. We worked too little. Alas, all the more so because our new masters — I do not know who the masters of you journalists are; for us writers they are cobblers and oil merchants — will never provide the serious conditions an undertaking as serious as literature deserves. And the days of Mantashev are far away.
The state had given you the opportunity to make three films. Had you managed it, you could have made seven, imposed your national image on the world and the Union through seven or seventeen. Those pitiful people now dragging out an existence have not even earned the bread they ate. Who should I blame for that, the state or them? Had they at least been professionals, they would have done it; had they been decent people, they would have done it. When they were sent to the centre to study, did the Russians forge and temper their own but not those who came from the provinces? If you had thirsted for the national, for what was yours, you would have quenched that thirst yourself, returned forged and tempered, at least a professional...
Ah, let it be past...
After all this, as a reader and a human being, I long for pure, unpretentious literary texts free of an agenda, narratives freed of this journalistic hysteria, these “reflections”, these “analyses”. After so many passions, let a lovely landscape be drawn, a description of a river or field, let there be a return to the channel of the classical short story.
Am I contradicting myself? Apparently, my element is the dotted-line narrative you mentioned. Of course it is arrogance to reserve the dotted line for myself while expecting calm narratives from others. But in my nature I am precisely dotted, discontinuous, and naturally I would look to others for tranquil narration. I keep pushing myself towards the channel of a peaceful narrative, and perhaps something in me breaks, my natural element is destroyed. I know you will now ask about the avant-garde, about the culture of turning points and a super-realist reality. Salvador Dalí, say, rather than Martiros Saryan. Yes, Dalí enchants; he has a demonic charm: “I want to be Dalí too.” But from Khorenatsi to Abovyan and Charents, all Armenian culture, even my Armenian avant-garde, if there is such a thing, testifies through its architecture, painting, poetry, prose and so-called applied art to one thing: we, our culture, have a somewhat different nature from art that reflects and promotes disintegration. Set your cultural summits and major achievements alongside one another — Tumanyan, Komitas, Saryan, Khachaturian, Charents, Saroyan, Alan Hovhaness — and you gain the confidence to say that my people have another calling, another direction. In Toramanyan’s words, they bring peace, calm and contemplation. As children of a destroyed homeland, they create in literature and culture what ought to have existed in reality. Another time, perhaps, I will say that our culture has a tender, maternal attitude towards reality.
I see the capacity for good prose in one person: Levon Khechoyan. His physical qualities were good too; I liked him physically. He seems a strong, brave fellow.
Do not ask me about my influences. I do not want to speak of them. Usually I value differences rather than similarities. Whoever has written the text, a fifteen-year-old girl or some prizewinner, I sit before it as a pupil. Let me see what they will teach me. What I cherish is precisely their position as teachers.
Do you remember, I think it was you who asked me on the telephone which twentieth-century work I would single out in Armenian literature? We begin the century after Tumanyan’s time. Commander Shavarsh, I said. Commander Shavarsh is in our souls and before us today. Since Shavarsh, have we created the literature whose staged version is our country and city today? Once again Shukshin gives me reason to remember him. You ask: why Shukshin? I do not know. It was the literature of a shared homeland, and there seems to be a kinship that has come into being, although I may feel closer to the Arabs. But over these two hundred years something had formed that was not quite familiar, yet neither was it alien, still less an enemy.
So Shukshin’s preserved images come before my eyes. They were brave fellows: Shukshin himself, Vasily Belov, Bitov, Rasputin, Okudzhava, Astafyev, Astafyev again; I could name others, Tyutyunnyk among the Ukrainians, Dumbadze among the Georgians. Lately I keep remembering Shukshin’s story I Believe! A drunken provincial inquisitor has backed dubious priests against the wall: do you believe in socialism? Do you believe in God? And the other, with his Russian nature: socialism is in me, communism too, God too, fornication too, or none of them is in me; I must dance the squat dance, I must get drunk, I must drink badger fat, because I am myself, I exist.
Has your Armenian writer, apart from Demirchyan’s attempt in The Armenian, managed to concentrate individuality so strongly that today’s Yerevan seems a gallery of literary characters to us? My people were timid... Put that aside. We filled the entire literary arena with foolish, secondary disputes. It was ugly, the speech of the unfree. Helping one another, we should have multiplied and raised our literature and cinema, so that at last one person might become the voice of everyone, as Tumanyan became the people’s voice. But for that we had to be at least open and sincere. ...Among poets now I often see sincerity, feeling and courage. Hrach Sarukhan, yesterday’s young man, already seems conventional and bookish beside the newcomers, so new are the new.
My generation and I are already falling out of the text of literature being created today, already moving into its margins. Overcoming our personal hurt, we must nurture the newcomers. I seem able to notice and rejoice in new glimmers of “my prose”. I ask the same effort of yesterday’s poets, painfully already yesterday’s.
By nature I have been drawn towards prose, and even in the work of my poetic idols, Tumanyan, Isahakyan and Charents, I regard the narrative quality of their poetry as what is valuable. Once people even laughed at me when I said that Commander Shavarsh was embodied epic power to me. Abovyan: a poet again. We seem to have no true prose, and one involuntarily thinks that prose, at least, is not Armenian’s natural element. Yes? But my aspiration has been prose, the prose of slow narration: not stating the main thing, not turning the essential into metaphor, yet wholly about the main thing. The prose of slow, calm pressure, which we do not have. The reader himself will “materialise” the essence of what you have to say. That is true prose. Not our A. A.’s prose. All the paragraphs are beautifully about the main thing, but there is no structure, and the whole is not about the main thing. You are right: that undeniable cycle of his cannot be denied; those works are our most durable success. But look at Shukshin’s The Insult: he went to the shop holding a child’s little hand, they insulted him, he came back, and you, the reader, want to hang yourself alongside the injured man. Saying without saying probably requires greater knowledge and culture. At one time our Grakan Tert began something like a debate, but it failed to develop; we did not help: perfect the genre, fulfil its demands. Look back: how many novels in Armenian literature meet the demands of the genre? I remember only Gevorg Marzpetuni. But look what Derenik Demirchyan, author of the brilliant Brave Nazar, did in Vardanank: what he did was such that... the French took that object of my youthful worship and published it in an abridged, assembled version, in other words rewrote it. I will not even speak of the rest of us. We just set off and drive on, with reflections, with audacity... That is not how it is done. It will not do. You must write the most necessary words. Confine yourself within a space, say little, fall silent at the right time, have a sense of the pause. Learn from Tigran Mansurian, from musicians, from Aram Khachaturian, from painters, from great Saryan. See how he pauses, how blue becomes a pause for red... I do not know; today I long precisely for a pure object moving through nature. That should have been the short story.
And how beautiful Camus’s The Stranger is: an object’s movement through space. Not a word about existence, yet the distillation is existence. Now look at the chamber-like The Fall: every reflection is philosophy, every utterance analysis... Packed, packed, there is no movement. I cannot read it, cannot get through it. The work was to have been about being condemned; the work itself is condemned.
I like Zoryan’s prose: The Apple Orchard, The War... I would say that the finest work of our prose is The Apple Orchard, also Ghachaghan and another five or six works that probably very few of you have noticed. In general, a very substantial part of our intelligentsia was alienated from Armenian culture: yesterday subject to Moscow, today subject to someone else, tomorrow to another. Watch it in motion, see its return tomorrow to its mother, Armenia, and see its aggression. Nothing here is precious to it. It will come with fire and sword, say “Narekatsi” and “khachkar”, yet it has nothing sacred here. Seemingly with great ideas, but only with a provincial’s great appetite, it will descend on the “capital”, and you natives will find yourselves expelled from your own country. How many people have I directed towards Bakunts’s The Sunset of the Province: what a contemporary, truthful film it would make! It is the greatest work of our time, a person’s alienation from his own country. They came in the name of civilisation, demolished your Eastern palace of clay, which was you yourself, drove you out of your country; you left your clothes somewhere above the city and vanished. That is my condition today. Mher again, yes? Perhaps some Moscow Jew will arrive with this theme of alienation in hand, take me on as a consultant and... But The Province was here, was it not? It had already been here for forty years, waiting for someone to open it up and unfold it. Where were you, what were you doing? Is someone else to portray your condition in your country?
Recorded by Ruzan KHACHATRYAN
Ar, 15 June 1993.