At the end of 1978, the "Soviet Writer" publishing house published Hrant Matevosyan's book of novels "Trees" and the collection of children's stories "Our Run". Hrant Matevosyan's work is widely recognized not only in Armenia and the Soviet Union, but also abroad. His novels and short stories have been published in English, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian and many languages of the peoples of the USSR. Recently, the famous novelist was in the "GA" editorial office and kindly answered a few questions.
- What about those who don't write books?
- They are probably deterred from writing by the considerable amount of gray literature on the book market, they are apparently excellent readers, that is, they pick the good from the bad and even separate the masterfully prepared mediocrity from even a careless flash of true talent, so they don't want to add gray to the gray and they do well not to. it is respectful silence in front of literature, thanks to them for that understanding and silence. Do not think that there are dormant masterpieces among them, if there were, they would rise up without asking their will.
- But there are many who cannot write and continue to write. They quickly change both the taste and the genre, from poetry to prose, from prose to translation, to children's literature. they don't hesitate to write a review, such people gain the reputation of a "good person" in literary life, they often write articles about their "forgotten" pen pals. Then comes the inevitable: they get old. jubilee, honoring, volumes... Then, after all these, literary critics make a theory about "bushes and oaks".
- "Brushes and Oaks" - "Lalvar Hunt" and "Anoosh", a hundred pre-Shakespeares and one Shakespeare... I don't know? Of course, bushes create an oak environment for oaks, especially oak bushes, but let's build our theories from our impressions. Even the weak or uncultivated works of geniuses we refer to with some mixed feeling of unpleasant pity and forgiveness, at best we don't, perhaps we don't want to see the great whole of their great image broken, we have brought into the public the concept of the exceptional wonderful and we protect even the geniuses from us with the exceptional. "Second-rate literature" may have an auxiliary role in the realization of geniuses and genius works (I think no, it doesn't, and now I'll tell you why it doesn't), but like the deck of a building under construction, it eventually becomes unnecessary and is removed. Here, as in the example of "bushes-oaks", again it seemed that "assistant" literature is necessary. no, it is not necessary. it is unnecessary and unnecessary work from the very beginning. in order not to be called out of place, it should at least be read. it is not read from you, from me, or from anyone else, it pollutes a person's heart and mind when it is read, but here we sit and talk about its necessity. we should have talked about the need to fight against him. the best way to fight, I think, is to bring world literature into the Armenian language, and those "bushes", I think, would be "oak" translators.
- We have many poets. it refers to the printables. and how many people write without thinking about getting published?
What drives people to write, and to a large extent poetry?
- Imagine a small clay figurine - that is the person. One minute it comes into being from non-existence, one minute it marvels at the light of existence and the next second its clay comes to a stage. In this wonderful and cruel moment of time, before the council of existence, those fragile, momentary, fragile creatures are all poets, because they are all mortal; some of them move armies, many of them let the mystery of existence pass through them silently and seem to even remain incommunicado, many of them scream from pain and joy, but all of them are poets, because in this brutally narrow gap between existence and non-existence, one can only be a poet. It's not about being published or not, it's not about ability or inability - a person is a poet with the "earth construction" and mortal destiny. He wants to communicate with beauty and become immortal with beauty. And it becomes a poem especially because the beauty of this is outstanding, this shows most clearly the ways of beauty to merge into life and not be separated again by any death. It also has a famous arsenal - rhyme, syllable, measure. Our nameless poets of the Middle Ages produced "David of Sassoon," our highest flight of poetic thought; time gathered them, those nameless hundreds and thousands, around the same thought of struggle and despair, and lo! But whether time will gather all of us, those who are printed and those who are not, gifted and those who cannot obey, writers and readers, with one and the same mind, around the same hearth, so that we all create the monologue and thousand-voice epic of our time together (Latin America, for example, creates it), or our ancestors have already sung our song... it is difficult to understand.
- Who is the criticism for: the reader or the writer? What useful lessons have you personally learned from critical comments?
- Criticism is for those for whom literature is, it is for all of us, criticism is our attitude to literature, in general, they are inseparable from each other. Literature strives to create a favorable environment for its existence in other ways and means, criticism is that effort of literature. You say that there was no criticism when "Sasuntsi Davit" and "Mokats Mirza" were created. there was the narrator was surrounded by women, children and old men at the hearth, their attitude and presence were the criticism of the time, the narrator corrected himself with their attitude, thanks to the presence of women and children he did not curse even the archenemy, in the presence of the experienced peasants, he did not swell the sail of imagination so much, looking at the fatigue of the farmers, he simplified the story and simplified it again... and here is the literature and criticism of the time today are merged in the temper of the epic.
Hr. Tamrazyan and L. Hakhverdyan's remarks aside, critic L. Anninsky advised me to "love one's enemy"—unintelligible, to say the least, strange advice. I don't know because of that advice or gravity, after years and years I realized that to hate the enemy means to submit to him, to love means to have the power to submit, to be the owner of the situation and not a toy with the situation... otherwise you get involved with your heroes and become one of them and perish. Upon understanding, I saw that a great counsel had been placed against me years ago.
- Do you think it is possible to become a writer without taking into account the specifics of this or that genre?
- Unfortunately, no and only no. How many times have I started work without at least having a good idea of the volume in advance and I am bitterly punished. material is obtained and not work. messy, disorganized, rambling, add: warm, exciting, expensive, even talented, but material that is not destined to live, because it is not in the genre. Genres are the greatest inventions of mankind, it is not enough to say discovery - they are the result of centuries of pain, revenge, blood, horror, victory, joy and defeat, told by a thousand mouths and decayed in time, because they were not in a genre structure. Can they ignore the shapes of the plane builder of the arrow, the architect of the pyramid, the shipbuilder of the mace - they can't.
- What is the role of small details, the so-called supplementary materials, in artistic speech?
- The details... The egg sculpture on Ohanavank's wall, David's tenderness, "he blinked his eyes, they didn't bend" ("Mokats Mirza"), a piece of t-shirt and a couple of cute buttons in the pocket of dead Gikhor's clothes, the spinal sensation of a cold dagger (the head of the murdered Haji Murad is cut off), the white of the eyebrows of Pantelei Melekhov, who died of typhoid. the lice, the momentary flash of a nickel-plated heavy gun above Christmas's head in his handcuffed pair of hands (Faulkner's story "Percy Grimm"), an unexpected-inexplicable butterfly or butterfly-like flower in Saryan's monumental-decorative smear... the detail makes the idea beautiful, the detail itself is the fine art, without the detail, the idea remains the same is an idea that did not become an artistic reality. Have you seen the movie "Pharaoh"? what taste, what an effort to recreate the atmosphere of the epoch, what accuracy of the main outlines and yet what superficiality - because there are no details (there could not be) and the whole is not authenticated in detail. Julio Cortázar considers every fact of artistic perfection to be the result of the exact meeting of the Author and the Unknown. if the fact of art did not happen, then they did not meet. From demon worlds, in fairy tales, daredevils returned with demon ears as signs of their encounter and victory. It seems to me that such a sign of meeting and victory is a detail of artistic texture.
- Is it possible to write completely honestly?
- As the well-known parable goes: the swordsman also falls from the sword. Behold, the hatred you, the writer, uttered in the reader would tomorrow become hatred for you - the hatred you birthed would thus devour you. Your writer's "gun" chauvinism would be hit in the forehead of your own nation tomorrow. So, blind hatred of others like you, blind love of your own, after crushing everything animal in you and sitting before your desk as the whole world, only completely sincere... the whole world, Greeks and Americans, children and old people, Christians and Muslims, hardened mean and mean-spirited, rich and poor--that's only completely sincere. I don't think this was insincere or the writer was just showing some of his inner reserves. First, the memoirs of relatives and their own diaries are the best evidence that real writers did not have or almost did not have passions that were restrained, suffocated in themselves, hidden from the people, that is, they manifested themselves with the full capacity of their resources, and secondly, if something remains outside the boundaries of paper, it remains the fake itself. Forgery evades, does not want to enter a book, does not become literature even after being forced into it. Forgery is able to move armies, make whole peoples crazy, take the guise of political structures, i.e. masquerade as reality and appear in literature in the guise of life, but never become literature, and that is the honesty of literature. As Hemingway said. "There is only one regime incapable of having good writers, and that regime is fascism. Because fascism itself is a hoax born of murderers. An artist who does not want to lie cannot live and work under fascism. Fascism itself is a falsehood and it is condemned to literary indolence."
- You are often compared to Faulkner. Can we talk about his influence?
- If the influences create a writer, if I am already a writer and if it is so necessary to talk about the influences, we should first of all talk about the poetry of our vernacular language, the poetry of the language, then the influences of Charents, Bakunts, Maharu, Sahyan. No matter how flattering it is, there can be no question of Faulkner's influence. It can't be, but Russian critics remember his name in the articles about me, why? Some are for the same difficulty of our writings (I apologize for putting myself in the same "ours" as that titan), some for settling the created characters in the same place on the map of the world, unfolding their works in the same places at the same time, transferring the ready-made character from two to two. God forbid that I add another settlement to the literary map of the world... but here's what I'm saying. For now, Tsmakut is my native village, I am the reviewer of that village, if you want to call it a reviewer, if you want, a photographer, if you want, an artist-naturalist. Will that real village grow into a literary Tsmakuti, will I be able to grow again? I don't know.
- For children, but only about them? Won't it be about adults for children?
- Tolstoy was a great children's writer, Tumanyan's entire work can be given to children and we do. Children's writing is a peculiarity of talent, a special talent, an amalgamation of honesty, great moral purity, clairvoyance and good human qualities. Pedigree is a mirror that shows whether a person has the right to use a pen in general. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening, as it used to be in the old village. a hat was brought from Tiflis for the elder of the house, after wearing it for a couple of years, the grandfather would give the hat to his son, the son would give it to the boy after a few years - folding his ears, the hat would fall on the grandson's eyes, the child would get lost in the hat, as it is now lost in the works of children's writers who have been driven away from the heads of adults. No, why "only about children" - about the whole world, but since we present the whole world - the wonderful and the monstrous, the evil and the good, the mean and the noble, the simple and the complex, the love and the hate - all of it, all the same, simplifying and infantilizing, then it is preferable for them about themselves.
- What would you like to translate?
- I would like to know all the languages of the world and see the Tumanians of all languages in the homelands of their languages, but since this is impossible, I would like to translate something that could wake up the Armenians of Khorenatsi, Narekatsi, "Davti", Kuchak, Abovyan, Metsarents, Teryan, Tumanyan, Charents with a screeching sound. a new fact of great culture. There is no such case in the world, but there are cases. it is possible and we should use all of our efforts to turn the hundred-volume collection of world prose into Armenian. If it works well, it would become an Armenian parade, I don't want to think about the opposite.
- What are your plans?
- In the past and in the present of Tsmakut, taking pains to accommodate new residents, such residents who create bread and are bread for life. How does Pepo say: "Are you fighting or will God create food for you?"
The interview was conducted by Albert ISOYAN
"World of Books", N 5, 15.05.1979