He has a swift, fiery tongue. And were it not for His Majesty literary scholarship, today we would have, under the name Hrant Tamrazyan, a radiant poet, a well-formed and accomplished prose writer, or the most Armenian of dramatists. That hypersensitivity to the modulations of beauty, that love which bends him in reverence before an artistic structure, is his enduring quality. Even at sixty, when people already worship the mere fact of life and the dryness of thought without epithets, you could shut this man in any bare room and draw from him, image by image and line by line, the finest selection of our two-thousand-year-old literature. No worthy image by any named or anonymous author would be absent from his anthology.
He knows people in a peasant’s way. And so his love, hatred, disdain and disbelief, taking on a kind of heavy material substance, are final and complete. His thought is swift and his speech, especially his spoken words, to his students’ delight, is precise. Today let us recall one of his stories, trying in this way to guess why someone so gifted became a literary scholar rather than a poet. Of course, it will only resemble the truth, but must one not at least try?
This is his story: the masters of those poor, terror-stricken days have come to feast in the village. None of its houses is worthy of them; they eat and drink in the orchards. The crockery and carpets, of course, have been brought from that same village, and so have the honey, meat and matsun. With that they have settled their account with the village; it does not exist for them. Perhaps they do not even know its name or who has tended the orchard. But the rifle is their own: lying beneath a tree, they take aim at the only red apple.
The village does not exist for them, but for the village, for the group of boys and especially blue-eyed Hrant among them, they do exist. The boys sit silently at the edge of the orchard and watch. If someone there asks for water or sends them to the shop for tobacco, they are so obedient in their peasant way that they will go, and run. But that does not mean any of the boys wants their bullet to hit the apple; it does not mean that from that moment unrestrained anger is not swelling within the young Hrant.
That apple, that poor collective-farm chairman who laid the orchard before the guests and stood in humble service himself, that Sower of Black Fallows always carried beneath a shirt, tucked into a belt, that Charents always changing its place in the house, that tragic and heroic past, that equally tragic present which had isolated itself from the reality of the past and closed its eyes to the future — they wanted a defender, someone to take responsibility for them, and literary scholarship offered such protection. Is that how one becomes a literary scholar? Do literary scholars become so in this way? I do not know. Even if that work had not existed before him, he would have created it himself, and his substantial achievement already consists of volumes of defence.
What he has done is considerable and cannot be bypassed; what remains to be done is considerable too. Thank you for the school and university manuals and monographs that become a component of the authors’ legacies. But there is not even an article signed Hrant Tamrazyan on Hamastegh, none on Hakob Mndzuri, Andranik Tsarukyan, William Saroyan… and many others who will extend a brotherly hand, perhaps even from within other linguistic shells.