In 1969 fall the hundredth anniversaries of the births of the greatest among the great of our art, Tumanyan and Komitas. Besides being a splendid celebration, that year will be a year of cares for us, a year of struggle against deadly complacency, irresponsible superficiality, amateurism and philistinism in art. It will be a year of an emphatic demand for great art, and thus a parade of patriotism, since great art is above all great patriotism.
The literary scholar Levon Hakhverdyan has brought his study of Hovhannes Tumanyan, “Tumanyan’s World,” into that arena of celebration and struggle. Through juxtapositions and contrasts of drafts, first attempts, variants, evident influences, recreations, Tumanyan’s artistic masterpieces, the poet’s private life, Armenian and international life, the book, while remaining a work of literary scholarship, grows of itself, almost independently of its author’s will, into an inspired call to anguished human kindness, dreamlike longing for the good and patriotism. While remaining scholarship, Hakhverdyan’s book acquires the qualities of a work of art, growing into profound hatred of our age-old enemy and humanity’s: ignorant, violent presumption. It grows because reality itself is such—in this case, Tumanyan’s life and work. Hakhverdyan has not forced the material to fit his own stature as a scholar, but followed its rises and falls to mountain heights and descent, from the kneading and firing of earthly Tumanyan to the last wingbeat in the pure realms of immaterial, non-existent, divine eternity, to nirvana, extinction.
So much a man of Lori that he seems not even a national poet; so Armenian that he seems a narrow chronicler of national everyday life; long familiar as our grandfathers’ counsels; tangible with the weight of clay, woven wholly of object and movement, without even an element of philosophising—his literature is a magnificent flight at the Olympian heights of national and world thought. It is the perfection of art and also the perfection of philosophy, because it is philosophy on art’s powerful wings. (Space, object and movement; space, object and movement; away with adjectives and reflections, even of a Hegelian level! The scholar draws this conclusion from examining Tumanyan and proposes it as the longest-range weapon of poetic craftsmanship. An apt proposal, since all of us are a little given to embellishment and have forgotten the unadorned grandeur of our monasteries.)
If it is true that numerically large, uncivilised peoples endure through their numbers, it is equally an absolute truth that the sole protectors of small nations against assimilation, that cosmic cold, are the great individuals of their national art. They are the good fortune of small nations. Tumanyan’s literature is our people’s good fortune. “A statesman among a people without statehood. A life devoted to a homeland with many enemies and few friends. His entire life a creative and civic feat. Tumanyan placed both life and genius upon the people’s altar.” As a youth, only chance kept him from going to Western Armenia. In the years of Armenian-Tatar clashes he stood between the swords drawn on both sides; then he compiled textbooks for Armenian children. Armenian children’s poetry, fairy tales, stories and tales were lacking, and he wrote children’s poems, stories and tales. In the days of the genocide he and his family were at the front and among the refugees. His son Artavazd died in the positions at Van; he himself turned grey and aged in a month among the multitude of orphans. “Hovhannes Tumanyan is in that hell, working, and fortunately does not go mad” (Leo, “From the Past”). Thus “Anush,” “Illusion,” “Sirius’s Farewell,” “A Drop of Honey,” “Descent” and the quatrains, those testimonies of his genius and our national genius, are fragments saved by chance. He could not save his people, but endowed the surviving half with the strength of his masterpieces.
The director and writer Fellini begins his film about an artist, “Eight and a Half,” with a dream: the artist, suffocating in stifling immobility, with a tragic effort leaves below the herd of cars giving off heat and pollution, the web of traffic streams, the iron weight of bridges, the concrete insensibility of dead-eyed buildings; ascends, approaches the white coolness of clouds, the divine unfolding of melodies and air, clear air, where moonlight would peal with the nobility of an organ. But then from below they throw a rope and pull him down: a headlong fall from the softness of clouds to the hardness of the earth. That film seems to be about Hovhannes Tumanyan. It was Tumanyan who a hundred times was hurled down by unflinching Turkish viperishness, the greasy imperial arrogance of tsarist officials, the deceit of Georgian Mensheviks, the murderous weight of all our enemies and cares.
Patriotism, worship of nature and sighing acquired substance for Tumanyan with the difficult ascent of life and work. From the word sigh to a deep sigh; from a poetic interpretation of nirvana revealing his knowledge of Buddha’s teaching to being forcibly confined by personal and national fate in Buddhism’s airless vial; from “in God’s bosom” to the unfathomable indistinguishability of being and non-being; from patriotic syllables in Patkanyan’s manner to the celebrant ageing in a month among refugees collapsed beneath Etchmiadzin’s walls (“Rest, my orphans… your agitation is vain… vain and fruitless…”); from youthful longing for his birthplace’s nature to the desire of the Armenian poet and son of Armenia, defeated among people, to melt and merge into nature. Back, back to childhood and beyond childhood! What a burden of defeats the world placed upon his shoulders! These are the scholar’s Tumanyans, which at the study’s superbly written end become one enormous tragic figure, with the grandeur of a dying volcano breathing its last quiet smoke.
The literary scholar Levon Hakhverdyan has written one of the hardest monographs for us. Tumanyan is our childhood, and words learned in childhood are not subjected to etymology. Hakhverdyan has subjected them to it with an astonishing freshness of gaze and perception. After reading his book, Tumanyan’s lines, long-familiar lines, resist again as at a first reading, and you advance through them with difficulty.