Many years ago I wanted to write a film narrative about Vahan Teryan, and the officials at Armenfilm immediately signed a contract. How fortunate that the script was not written and the film not made: otherwise this sacred image of our culture, too, would have been distorted. As it is, each of us remains in some measure a director, unfolding and fluttering images while reading the poet’s life and work, images no less powerful than those that should have appeared but fortunately did not. That unwritten film contained heavy peasant labour, the ancestors’ stubborn drive towards Europe and light, scenes of building the monastery, Father Sukias’s “Tolstov”, the disastrous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Vahan travelling in the same railway carriage, perhaps the same compartment, as a bristling Turkish diplomat—a scene taken from Tumanyan’s life—and the cold Orenburg steppes and death. In short, it was the tragic life of the great Armenian poet Vahan Teryan, not somebody else’s.
I do not claim that I will never return to Teryan and his time. The world’s stony indifference to the Armenian people’s fate, the seemingly conspiratorial, concerted silence of empires and governments before our tragedy, on one side, and the poetic helplessness of our efforts, so like Teryan’s powerlessness, on the other, turn our eyes back each time to his fateful days. Then the conspiracy was more than open, our efforts more than faithful and pure. Perhaps one day I shall find a kindred spirit who shares my pain and love, whose store of knowledge exceeds mine and whose nerves are steadier, and together we shall nurture that film narrative, Like the First Christians.
By then, I know, much in my attitude will have changed, been reconsidered and rejected. In particular, under glasnost we will be able to see more closely the truth about Brest-Litovsk, which weakened and wore away the Armenian people’s future, now their present. But one scene will not change: against a white backdrop, the poet recites:
My sunlit young man, your bride is red,
My heart is full of your mother’s, your mother’s sobbing…
…………………………………………………………………
All of us, all of us, are orphaned children,
Lost children, forever motherless…
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The foreigner will not understand us,
The cold foreign woman will not understand us…
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To the spring cloud in the bright heavens I say farewell…
And so for perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty full minutes. A minute of cinema is indeed full, like gold approaching refined purity. He recites, straightens where he stands with restrained satisfaction—and that silence becomes one poem’s end and another’s beginning—and recites again. Only that hidden smile reveals that he is in a hall before his people, that the people and their prophet have found one another.
Whether I or someone else will write the film is unknown, but the scene will not change. I think so because these poems, these true testimonies found in the deepest reaches of our noble soul and fate, are unique and everlasting. In our culture, which has made Saryan’s canvases, Khachaturian’s Toccata, woven Tumanyan’s From the Heights and forged Charents’s Shavarsh, there can be no question of creating an equivalent to those Teryan poems, that Farewell Ghazal, that Nairi. Only the poems themselves must speak about themselves.
Leo Tolstoy has a work about those who live for people like bread, and those who live for themselves at other people’s expense. In Father Sukias’s “dark” times, Tolstoy was a known writer and respected thinker in at least one Javakhk family. In our age of universal literacy, does that giant still ponder and suffer in anyone’s heart? I doubt it. The man who lived only for himself at others’ expense—drank and gorged, amused and corrupted himself—went into chrome-leather boots and an oak coffin, special chrome-leather boots and an expressly oak coffin, and took his well-fed body to the worms. Neither his skin nor his flesh was of use to anyone in this world. But Kholstomer the horse, who had given people his living movement, left life his flesh and bones, hide and blood as well: the hide went to the leatherworker, the bones to the maker of knucklebones, the blood to the horse-keeper’s dog, the meat to a starving mother wolf and her cubs.
In life and literature I know no other example that so essentially demonstrates the utter devotion to life of Teryan’s life and work. His work and experience, his failures and successes, the flesh and bone of his poetry were wholly absorbed by the Armenian life and literature of his time and afterwards. He had no word left uncopied, no line left unborrowed. He put language into Armenian literature’s mouth. Indefinite instinctive tremors that eluded recognition even by Tumanyan received name and meaning from Teryan and became a stable vocabulary for those who followed. Those who followed could now invite into Armenian even writers and thinkers for whom our language had had no room before Teryan’s arrival. Is this not the very phenomenon meant by the Bible in its parable of the word: “In the beginning was the Word…”? This alone!
Yes, Teryan gave Armenian the word, and language, the foundation and fabric of all culture, began to assimilate phenomena it had only been able to outline before him. Is this Teryan’s achievement alone, or his time’s too? Without increasing or diminishing the significance of his work, let us say that Teryan himself was also the result of the persistent labour of many ages and generations. But let us also say that after him Armenian painting began to see and paint differently; after him Armenian architecture began to draw and build differently; so too music and verbal art itself. Otherwise they would have remained old believers and been called behind the times.
It has been observed that migrants seek and find, in new places, a homeland as similar as possible to their old one, and reproduce their old house exactly in the new village. A mountain stood in the distance before them: they seek a mountain in the new place. Their village lay at a river’s source: here too they find a source. Their door faced east: again it faces east. But we are speaking now not of the unquestionable likeness of Byurakn and Javakhk, but of the exact repetition of one another by two seemingly distant worlds: the land of Javakhk and Teryan’s poetry. This worship of beauty in the people and nature and that worship of beauty in his poetry call to and find each other. If I were taken blindfolded around my homeland and saw just one tiny scene—a prettily dressed girl keeping her own time and dancing before a kid and a calf—or one bend of a distant stream, a monastery wall, a carpet-sized patch of carefully tended grain and potatoes, I would say: you have brought me to Teryan’s Javakhk; only Teryan’s poetry is this beautiful.
This yearly pilgrimage of ours is necessary both to us and to the poet himself. We are his immortality; he needs us. Without us, his peal too would fade, as, for example, Akhtamar’s has faded. And all of us, great and small, leaders and ordinary people, need him, because a person’s purpose is to connect with something beautiful, lofty and exalted. Striving towards him, we strive towards that height.
26 July 1987