-...In your opinion, what do we need most today?
- We need a homeland.
- Do we need the Motherland, or do we need the Motherland?
- Don't phrase it. Yes, we need a Motherland. The Motherland has escaped us, the country has been emptied of the Motherland. The land is desolate. There is no homeland. According to Charentsian lines, "With the thunder of guns, we wanted the Motherland, and the Motherland was running away from that thunder." We need a homeland.
- But we are constantly searching for that Motherland.
- Do we want it or not?
- "We set off in the early morning, // The soul of our traveler was fresh and light" - don't we want to?
- It was a wonderful generation that was wasted.
- But didn't they want a Motherland...
- They both wanted and created it. There is a wonderful book: Hovhannes Poghosyan. "Two months in Soviet Armenia". It's just a great book. Everything is there: the people, the country, and the parties with their struggles. I suppose that in 21 he was one of the people who created the environment. There is a memorial about Stalin, Aramais Yerznkyan, Agassi Khanjian, Sargis Lukash, Myasnikyan, 3-4 years after their death. I have not yet read such a precise cartography and chronology: Sevan, Ijevan, Gharakilisa-Kirovakan, Leninakan, Stepanavan, Kolageran, Shamluh, Alaverdi - return as if the ruler of your homeland, your country. building, fixing goes.
- On September 21, we will celebrate another anniversary of our independence. enough time has passed to assess what total we can come up with.
- First of all, we must document the critical view, we must look critically at the entire past and see that the reality has not entered our awareness and knowledge.
- The reality of the decade?
- Yes, yes, the reality of the decade has not yet entered the political mind. They avoided. They went in different ways. Our mind has become a parasite, reality has gone its own way. An analysis of reality has never been done, and all this has not become a component of political thought and, accordingly, a program of construction or reconstruction.
- That said, the cause of all our crises is the ideological crisis?
- Yes, the crisis of the mind.
- And what is needed to overcome it?
- In order to overcome the crisis, I don't know if one should not be a slave, or if one should have mental power, so that mental power does not allow one to be a slave, or not to be a slave, so that mental weakness does not exist...
- And maybe in this decade we failed to do the most important thing: we didn't create value systems and we didn't have the real standards of real life.
- We had no honor. Honor of the motherland. I am afraid that the Azerbaijanis of Armenia would be more proud of this country than we are. Take the general you brought during the war and give the whole library to the Germans, give the Etchmiadzin gorge to the Americans and let them build an embassy, give the brandy factory, give your airport. There is awareness in all of this. If we were men, there might be a coup tomorrow, and this entire alienated country would be nationalized. As Musabek did, returning Persia sold to the Persian people after the war. That's right, at the cost of his life. But it was a ripe problem in itself, that's how it should be. When there is no other way out, whatever was yours belonged to your homeland, whether you are a shareholder or not, regardless of whether it is from the slope of Aragats to the cognac factory, from the landscape of the country to the mines of Alaverdu, from the landscape to the depths of the country, if it is alienated, you must return it...
- I don't agree with not being honorable. And maybe we don't want to accept honorable people with stupid mediocrity and beat them physically and morally. We had an honorable president, honorable ministers, we shot half of them and deprived them of power in the other half. Is the slave in our midst acting?
- If they were honorable, they would not have surrendered the country so easily. So they considered the country theirs, because they gave it so easily.
- Well, why doesn't all that become a fact of literature? The accumulation that later explodes with great literature, why does it not take place?
- When was the first revolution expressed in literature? After how long?
- Charentsov expressed himself: the place. Then Bakunts, Mahari, then the generation of your 60s came to create literature from life.
- What is happening until now is much more complicated than what happened before.
- We have now lost a country and haven't found a country yet?
- We have not found a country, we have lost it. It was the weapon of the Bolsheviks, who came to the public as internationalists, however, they had to be nationalists, even Nazis, to stand against international Nazism, firstly, secondly, to stand up for the motherland. "We didn't have a Homeland for centuries, // He gave us a Homeland", Charents found very correct words. You can say it to Myasnikyan, you can say it to Stalin, you can say it to any ordinary Bolshevik, it was the symbol of the time, the 20s. For the first time, in addition to being a Lori citizen, a Lori felt himself to be a Karabakh, a Karabakh thought that he was also a Lori resident, the owner of the Ararat valley, of all places, from the Motherland. Man's gaze encompassed the great Motherland. The consciousness of the Great Motherland was sprinkled on everyone. Nikol Aghbalyan noticed it. After the war, in the courtyard of the seminary, two people were talking, the Western Armenian and the Eastern Armenian, Nikol Aghbalyan and Levon Shant. "Do you know, Nikola, the number of Armenian victims is not 50,000, but 100,000 or more?" He also said: "Levon, it may not be 100, but it may be 150,000, but for the first time that people came into contact with great ideas, with the defeat of fascism, with communism. He took his head out of the oven for the first time" is their expression. Indeed, during that time we dealt with great ideas... Now it is a matter of living space, where the country would be located. We don't have living space, it's too small to build the country. Very poor - what does it mean you have 400,000 hectares of arable land from head to toe?
- Is that why we create people-homelands and build everything on individuals?
- Where is that person - your Motherland that you created? Who hasn't? Doesn't Russia with its huge territories? Doesn't he have Dostoyevsky, doesn't he have Tolstoy? Does the Czech not have one? Every second girl is a glorious actress, every second is a scientist. Where is our man-Motherland, where did we create it? I wish we had too. I say the opposite: there is no fool from my unit. He is a fool, especially on this land. On a foreign land, William Saroya becomes Arshile Gorky, a military leader becomes a scientist or a literary critic when the background is provided. Kudos to those rulers who created the background for them to become Loris-Melikov.
- In literature and art, there is a succession of generations, ideas, heroes, isn't there? To ensure that connection, do you necessarily have to deny your predecessors, or can you continue to loop their chain?
- First to master, then to realize. If you do, the kinship will manifest itself whether you like it or not. You have to be completely real for your tribe-ethnicity to be revealed.
- If they had come down from the republic of shepherds to the city or stayed in the mountains, who would be your heroes in today's life?
- Do I have heroes?
- They are already ideologies, among people and time.
- My reality was going to be a fading, ending, disfiguring reality. That's how I started. I presented such a collection. Half were rejected, half left. I gave Pethrat two novels with the common title "Thieves", one was returned, so it remained unpublished. I had very few defenders. some belatedly reflected: it was a pity, it remained atypical. That was the reality, I had found the right place, perhaps. In the case of a normal-orderly attitude, if they did not make me a hero, on the occasion of idle village issues, which were "We, our mountains", and if they did not awaken my willfulness, that I had to constantly go from material to material and last, give life, if it was a cavalry campaign, I would have turned to my real work, and the real work would have been that of a eroding republic and my anxiety for a eroding country. for a worn-out-desecrated-distorted-consumed country, we were entering a reality where the heroes were much more mythical, the fight was going to be much more difficult-complicated, the real enemy was intangible. It wasn't the old character times, etc, etc... The new times were figuring out what was going on. They did it. Not in us. They did it outside.
- Why not in us? And the "Grandfather"? And the "Trees"? And...
- "Metsamor" - what, there is no great literature of 40 pages? There are vibrations for great literature...
- Will there be a continuation?
- If I were honest, I would have written in the style of weakening. what used to be beautiful to me now seems ugly. What was difficult now seems trivial. If my love were restored, it would continue. I have to continue because it makes no sense to leave the matter unfinished. Leaving many years of work unfinished. And it's hard to keep going, and it's necessary to keep going.
Too broad, should cover everything. Storytelling has always been my weakness. Never been epic. They didn't teach it either at school or institute, they didn't teach the Armenian language...
- But is it possible to teach it at all?
- Oh, until now young people don't learn: ask as much as you want, promise your friendship, or write on the wall, the style of prose poetry is choppy, hopeful. Today, Isahakyan's "Lilit" is still considered prose. It's just inconvenient. You can't tell your society what the story is. What is storytelling?
- And what is telling a story?
- It requires both courage and mental courage, really mental courage to be able to see the situation and let it be seen. It calls for drama. If your dramaturgy is weak, you can't create a clash of aggravated situations, you can't escalate situations, then you are a coward. You don't know reality.
- Doesn't reality become more understandable through literature? Maybe the life that you start living in 30-40 years, appears in books 30-40 years ago in the form of ideas, then comes into life. Then, the writer must give an ideal, he must tell where you are going, but he must also show what you will be like. Maybe that's an outdated requirement for a writer?
- Not outdated, not outdated. You have to give an ideal. The writer should give both himself and the reader an ideal. Character: Character driven, you must be able to create a character. Armenian literature did not create that image, and that is why the image created by the Americans appeared before the public. The image of socialist realism appeared, crushing, starting with the crushing of our idols and then replacing our idols, and once again we saw that we are going after their image. our girl dresses like their girl, dyes her hair, builds her family in their way and follows their cult of accumulating wealth, and the American ideal becomes our ideal, and someone else's flag flies at the head of your parade, not yours.
- We easily gave up our value systems, because it seemed to us that we had already left that life irrevocably and now we are independent, we are in a different social order, a different economic system, we are a different person. But we did not become that other person, nor did we find out how they become that other person.
- At least we would know them deeply, we would know by understanding them. It would be wonderful.
- Are we unable to overcome our ideological crisis or are we in eternal waiting?
- Being in a phantasmagoric reality, we never once saw that the manifestations of reality resembled such and such pages of literature. There was a lot of denial.
- What will we say to the one who comes after us?
- It is said: "Seven counsels to the sowers of the future." If they understood...
"Orran", 04.09.2002