In Armenian letters, for fifteen hundred years Syunik had been heroic, had betrayed, had grown wise, had become an inner land, a virgin land, a solitary land, yet remained one of Armenia’s many geographical regions. Then Aksel Bakunts passed through Syunik, and that land was populated with a multitude of remarkably melancholy, witty and just people. A woman, once there and long gone, became the central pillar of Uncle Dilan’s long life; she became it because she had been the only one, and that single day he lived is mixed with blood. In the valleys of hunter Avu’s memories lives the cruel joy of life: the fight with a bear for a bundle of brushwood. Sakan has seen a city woman’s bare thigh and will never see it again. Badi of Vandunts’s family was once proud of his son, almost exalted, and now he has stepped beneath his load of wood again: his son has been killed. Like a tree, like grass, like a speechless animal, Peti grew from the earth, once secretly rejoiced when the thought of having a home and wife stirred in his veins, and now has fallen silently like mown grass, returning his sap and bones to the earth. And the girl Khonar is almost sinful, because the teacher touched her hand and said, “My Khonar…” Leaving the village, the teacher waved from above the gorge towards the field where Khonar stood with a weeding stick, a red poppy and a bundle of weeds: “Khonar immediately bent over the field.” Then twelve years passed: “The villagers had gathered in the schoolyard. They spoke of the land, complained that it no longer yielded its former harvest. They spoke of this year’s plague. Many cows had died; some had no oxen to plough with. Then a woman approached me in rags, barefoot, the skin of her feet cracked. Three half-naked children clung to her skirts. They looked now at me, now at their mother.
With tears in her eyes, the woman asked for four poods of wheat until the harvest.
“Afterwards we’ll find some way,” she said.
Her husband had died the previous year. Their only cow had died of the plague. And there was no other worker in the house.
I recognised Khonar. But I do not know whether she recognised me…”
She did not. Bakunts’s characters “recognise” only once. And on the forehead of all these inhabitants of Aksel’s world is written: I tasted a little honey, and now I must die.
He was an agronomist and a journalist: he taught how vetch crops should be tended and counted how many people and villages remained in the land of old khachkars and chapels after the genocide and civil fighting. His sketches were sometimes photographic accusations, sometimes calls for help, often biting feuilletons; the artist painting himself seemed absent from them. “A little honey” was not an aesthetic principle but a precise image of the reality of the time. The barbed wire of “hard life—longing for the good—hard life—shattered longing” had gathered a multitude of subjects who imposed the course of their lives’ rises and falls upon their chronicler and biographer. The aesthetic abundance of “a little honey” arrived as a spontaneous eruption of accumulated experience, moving from the sphere of the subjects’ biographies into the prose writer’s poetics. It was an aesthetic, if not of opposition, then at least of incongruity between environment and individual, environment and “incident”: the environment, of itself and without “wanting” to, sharpens the colour of the individual and the “incident,” making them the centre, the only one, the unrepeatable. It is the beauty of a white point on an utterly black background, or, in his words: “A lamp’s white light showed from a house window, as if a tiny star had lost its way among those dark shadows.”
“The Girl Khonar” is about love. I aspire to encompass the entire vocabulary surrounding the sentence “a little way off stood a girl with a branch as thin as a rope in her hand”—yes, the sentence itself: winter, a hunter with a crooked neck, an old man with failing memory, mud, dirty water, children, a book of hymns; “the father went ahead with a bundle of dry brushwood on his back,” “like the others, the little chick too came to shake hands; the tips of the rawhide shoes touched, the little chick wrapped itself around my knees.” In short, an old village, the old village’s winter, greyness; “a boy of eight or ten was stacking brushwood on a rope stretched upon the snow”; and a girl Khonar who becomes beauty and love through that greyness, who “stood a little way off with a branch as thin as a rope in her hand.” Neither the word “love” nor descriptive praise of the girl has been put into circulation. In this way our old master builders made for monasteries not huge and numerous bells but sensitive resonators; they did not cover monasteries and inns with ornaments, but made the single ornament resound with the force of whole groups of ornaments. Bakunts is the parallel beginning of those masters in our prose.
Overcoming the deceit of the beautiful word, he reached the beauty of the precise word; more than that, the precision of a word that seems to miss its mark. Overcoming the deceit of reaching the very subject, the important thing, the centre, the core by the shortest road, he used such words to tell of the secondary, the peripheral, the little, the inessential, the echo. Today those stories are some twenty masterpieces to us, because barren, withered women say far more about war than an all-embracing description of planes, bombs, tonnage and armies. Paustovsky’s space traveller returning from other galaxies remembers from our immense globe the scent of dill in the sun. In Bakunts’s works it is precisely that important secondary thing, that enduring secondary thing, which is “mentioned.” This abundance of the little, this momentum of stillness, recalls the lions in high relief on Sanahin Bridge: those lions lie flattened in ambush upon the bridge’s granite parapets. They are stone, but also lions ready to spring.
Charents’s sensitive eye singled out from his rural writing, descriptions of village life, sketches, dispatches, failures and some twenty absolute masterpieces the enduring thing for which we now consider him great:
…And for your marble words,
Ancient, fragrant, like on our old
Stone-carved, doorless chapels
The indelible inscriptions of long ago…
Grakan Tert, 20 June 1969.
Journalism and Commentary
Published in 1969