— …In your opinion, what do we need most today?
— We need a Homeland.
— Do we need the Homeland, or does the Homeland need us?
— Don’t play with phrases. Yes, we need a Homeland. The Homeland has evaded us; the country has emptied of Homeland. The country has become desolate. There is no Homeland. In Charents’s lines: “With the thunder of rifles we wanted a Homeland, while the Homeland fled that thunder.” We need a Homeland.
— But we continually search for that Homeland.
— Do we want it, or not?
— “We set out at the dawn of morning, // Fresh and light was our traveller’s soul”—do we not want it?
— It was a wonderful generation that was squandered.
— But they wanted a Homeland…
— They wanted it and created it. There is a wonderful book, Hovhannes Poghosyan’s Two Months in Soviet Armenia. Simply magnificent. Everything is there: the people, the country, the parties with their struggle. I suppose in 1921 he was among those creating the environment. There is Stalin, Aramayis Yerznkyan, Aghasi Khanjyan, Sargis Lukashin, a recollection of Myasnikyan three or four years after his death. I have never read such precise mapping and chronology: Sevan, Ijevan, Gharakilisa–Kirovakan, Leninakan, Stepanavan, Kolageran, Shamlugh, Alaverdi, return—as though he were the administrator of your Homeland, your country, going along building and correcting.
— On 21 September we shall mark another anniversary of our independence. Enough time has passed to assess it: what conclusion can we reach?
— First we must establish a critical gaze, look critically at the whole past and see that reality has not entered our awareness and understanding.
— The decade’s reality?
— Yes, yes, the decade’s reality has not yet entered political thought. They have avoided it. They have taken different paths. Our thought has been parasitic, reality has gone separately on its own. An analysis of reality has never taken place, and all of it has not become a component of political thought and accordingly a programme for building or rebuilding.
— Meaning that the cause of all our crises is an ideological crisis?
— Yes, a crisis of thought.
— And what is needed to overcome it?
— To overcome the crisis, I do not know: must one not be a slave, or must one have intellectual strength so that it does not allow one to be a slave, or not be a slave so that intellectual weakness does not exist…
— Perhaps in this decade we failed at the most important thing: we created no systems of values and had no real criteria for real life.
— We lacked a sense of honour. The Homeland’s honour. I fear Armenia’s Azerbaijanis may have had more pride in this country’s honour than we did. Take the trophies brought during the war and give them to the Germans, a whole library; hand the Echmiadzin highway to the Americans to build an embassy; give away the brandy factory, your airport. There is servility in all this. If we prove men, tomorrow there may be a coup arising from all this, and this entire alienated country may be nationalised. As Musabek did, returning Persia, sold after the war, to the Persian people. True, at the cost of his life. But it was a problem that had ripened of itself; it had to be so. When there is no other way, what was yours, your Homeland’s, whether you are a shareholder or not, from Mount Aragats’s slopes to the brandy factory, from the country’s scenery to Alaverdi’s mines, from landscape to the country’s depths, if alienated, must be returned…
— I do not agree that we lacked honour. Perhaps in our dull mediocrity we refuse to accept people of honour and strike them, physically and morally. We had a president and ministers of honour; half we killed, half we deprived of power. Is it the slave within us at work?
— If they had honour, they would not have handed the country over so easily. Then they considered it their own to give, since they gave it so easily.
— Well, why does all this not become a fact of literature? Why does the accumulation that later erupts in great literature fail to occur?
— When was the first revolution expressed in literature? How much later?
— Through Charents, immediately. Then Bakunts, Mahari, then your sixties generation came to create literature out of life.
— Everything happening until now is much more complex than what happened before.
— Have we now lost a country and not found a country?
— We have not found a country, we have lost it. That was the Bolsheviks’ weapon: they came onto the square supposedly as internationalists, but nevertheless had to become nationalists, even Nazis, first to stand against international Nazism, second to stand up for the Homeland. “For centuries we had no Homeland; // He gave us a Homeland”—Charents found very exact words. One can say them to Myasnikyan, Stalin, any rank-and-file Bolshevik; it was the time’s symbol, the twenties. For the first time a person of Lori felt himself, beyond being of Lori, a person of Karabakh; the Karabakh Armenian thought he was also of Lori, master of the Ararat plain, from everywhere, from the Homeland. The human gaze embraced the great Homeland. Awareness of the great Homeland was sprinkled over everyone. Nikol Aghbalyan noticed it. After the war, in the seminary courtyard, two men talked, clicking their prayer beads: the Western and Eastern Armenians, Nikol Aghbalyan and Levon Shant. “Do you know, Nikola, the Armenian death toll is not fifty thousand but a hundred thousand and more.” And the other: “Levon, let it be a hundred and fifty thousand rather than a hundred, but for the first time that people engaged with great ideas, with the defeat of fascism, with communism. For the first time it lifted its head out of the henhouse.” Their expression. Indeed, in that time we engaged with great ideas… Now it is a question of living space where the country was to establish itself. We have no living space; it is too small to build the country. Too poor: what does it mean to have only four hundred thousand hectares of arable land from end to end?
— Is that why we create people who embody a Homeland and build everything upon individuals?
— Where is that person-Homeland of yours, if you have created one? Who does not have one? Does Russia, with its vast territories, not? Does it not have Dostoevsky, Tolstoy? Chekhov? Every second girl is a magnificent actress, every second person a scholar. Where is our person-Homeland, where have we created one? I too would wish we had them. I say the opposite: there is no one more foolish than my individual. He grows foolish especially on this soil. On foreign soil he becomes William Saroyan, Arshile Gorky, a general or scholar or literary critic, when the background is provided. Glory to those rulers who created the conditions for them to become Loris-Melikovs.
— In literature and art there is inheritance, continuity of generations, ideas and heroes. To secure that connection, must you necessarily reject your predecessors, or can you continue linking their chain?
— First absorb, then fulfil yourself. If you fulfil yourself, kinship will manifest of itself, whether you wish it or not. You must fulfil yourself completely for your shared descent and kinship to be revealed.
— If your characters came down from the shepherds’ republic to the city, or stayed in the mountains, who would they be in today’s life?
— Do I have characters, then?
— They have already become embodiments of ideas within time and the people.
— My reality would have been a reality wearing away, ending, becoming deformed. That is how I began. I submitted such a collection too. Half was rejected, half went forward: I gave the State Publishing House a book of two novellas under the general title The Thieves; one was returned and remained unpublished. I had very few defenders; some noticed too late: a pity, it stayed unpublished. That was the reality; perhaps I had found the right place. With normal, decent treatment, if they had not made me a hero over idle village matters, which were We and Our Mountains, and had not awakened my stubbornness, which was to go continually from material to material, endure, give life, if there had been such a cavalry campaign, I would have returned to my true work. That true work would have been a republic wearing away and my anxiety for a country wearing away, being sullied, distorted and depleted. We were entering a reality where the heroes were much more myth, the struggle much harder and more complex, the real enemy intangible. Not the old characters’ times, and so on… The new times clarified what was happening. They did it. Not among us. They did it abroad.
— Why not among us? What about Metsamor? What about The Trees, what about…
— Metsamor—what? There is no forty-page great literature. There are stirrings towards great literature…
— Will there be a continuation?
— If I were honest, I would have to write in a style of weakening: what was beautiful to me before now seems ugly. What was complex now seems slight. If my love were restored, it would continue. I am compelled to continue, because it is meaningless to leave that work halfway, to leave years of work unfinished. It is hard to continue, and necessary to continue.
It is very broad; everything must be included. Narrative has always been my weakness. I have never been an epic writer. They did not teach me in school or institute, nor did Armenian teach me…
— But can it be taught at all?
— Oh, to this day young people do not learn; ask as much as you like, promise your friendship, say write a narrative, and it is still the style of a prose poem, fragmentary, hopeless. Even today Isahakyan’s Lilith is considered prose. It is simply embarrassing. You cannot tell your society what narrative is, what telling a story is.
— What is telling a story?
— It demands both courage and intellectual daring, genuine intellectual daring, to see a situation and enable others to see it. It demands dramaturgy. If your dramaturgy is weak, if you cannot bring heightened situations into collision, cannot intensify them, then you are a coward. You do not know reality.
— Does reality not become more understandable through literature? Perhaps the life you begin to live thirty or forty years later appears in books thirty or forty years earlier in the form of ideas, then enters life. And the writer must give an ideal, say where you are going, but also show what you will be. Perhaps that demand upon the writer is outdated?
— It is not outdated, not outdated. You must give an ideal. The writer must give both himself and his reader an ideal. An image. The image leads; you must be able to create one. Armenian literature did not create that image, and that is why the image created by the Americans appeared before society. The image of socialist realism appeared, crushing, began with the destruction of our idols and then replaced them, and suddenly we saw we were following their image: our girl dresses like theirs, dyes her hair, builds her family in their way and follows their cult of accumulating wealth. The American ideal becomes ours, and at the head of your procession someone else’s flag flies, not your flag.
— We easily abandoned our systems of values because it seemed we had left that life irrevocably and were now independent, in a different social and economic order, different people. Yet neither did we become those others nor establish how one becomes them.
— If only we knew them deeply, knew with understanding. That would be wonderful.
— Are we unable to overcome our ideological crisis, or are we in perpetual waiting?
— Living in a phantasmagorical reality, not once did we see its manifestations recall some page of literature. There was much negation.
— What shall we tell those who come after us?
— It has been said: Seven Counsels to the Sowers of the Future. If they understand…
Orran, 4 September 2002.