Towards the end of 1978, the Sovetakan Grogh publishing house brought out Hrant Matevossian’s collection of novellas The Trees and his collection of children’s stories Our Run. Hrant Matevossian’s work has won wide recognition not only in Armenia and the Soviet Union, but abroad as well. His novellas and stories have appeared in English, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian and many languages of the peoples of the USSR. Recently the distinguished prose writer visited the editorial offices of GA and gladly answered a few questions.
— What would you say about those who do not write books?
— Perhaps what holds them back from writing is the considerable quantity of drab literature on the book market. They are evidently excellent readers: they distinguish good from bad, and even distinguish expertly manufactured mediocrity from a genuine talent’s flare, however careless. So they do not want to add drabness to drabness, and they are right not to. It is a respectful silence before literature; thanks to them for that understanding and silence. Do not imagine that masterpieces lie dormant within them: if they did, they would raise their heads of their own accord, without asking their permission.
— Yet many cannot write and keep writing. They frequently change both their preferences and their genre, move from poetry to prose, from prose to translation or children’s writing; they readily write sketches. Such people acquire the reputation of being “a good person” in literary life, and often write laudatory articles about their “unjustly forgotten” fellow writers. Then the inevitable comes: they grow old. An anniversary, tributes, volumes… Afterwards, after all this, literary scholars construct a theory of “shrubs and oaks”.
— “Shrubs and oaks”? The Hunt on Lalvar and Anush, a hundred predecessors of Shakespeare and one Shakespeare?… I don’t know. Shrubs do, of course, create a woodland environment for oaks, especially oak saplings, but let us construct our theories from our impressions. Even when we turn to the weak or unpolished works of geniuses, works they had no time to polish, we do so with an unpleasant mixture of pity and indulgence. At best we do not turn to them; perhaps we do not want to see the great wholeness of their great image broken. We have introduced the wonderful concept of selected works, and through selections protect even geniuses from ourselves. “Second-rate literature” perhaps plays an auxiliary role in bringing geniuses and works of genius into being—I think not, and will now say why—but, like the scaffolding of a building under construction, it becomes superfluous in the end and is removed. There: as in the “shrubs and oaks” example, it has once again seemed that “auxiliary” literature is necessary. No, it is not necessary. It is superfluous, misplaced work from the very beginning. To avoid being called misplaced, it would at least have to be read. Neither you nor I nor anyone else reads it; and when it is read, it fouls the human heart and mind. Yet here we sit talking about its necessity, when we should be talking about the need to combat it. The best means of doing so, I think, is to bring world literature into Armenian. And those “shrubs”, I think, would become “oaks” as translators.
— We have many poets—I mean those who are published. And how many people write without thinking of publication!
What drives people to write, and mostly to write poetry?
— Imagine a little clay figurine: that is the human being. For a minute it comes into existence out of non-existence, for a minute marvels before the light of existence, and the next second its clay collapses. In this wonderful and cruel instant of time, before the mystery of existence, those fragile, fleeting, hurried creatures are all poets, because they are all mortal. Some move armies; many let the mystery of existence pass silently through them and seem even to remain untouched; many cry out, contracted by pain and delight. But all are poets, since in this cruelly narrow space between existence and non-existence one can only be a poet. It is not a matter of being published or not, of ability or inability: the human being is a poet by virtue of his very “earthen composition” and his mortal fate. He wants to partake of beauty and become immortal with it. And he turns particularly to poetry because its beauty is evident: it shows most visibly the ways of merging with beauty, with life, and never again being separated by any death. Besides, it has a well-known arsenal: rhyme, syllable, metre. Our anonymous medieval poets created David of Sassoun, the highest flight of our poetic thought. Time gathered those anonymous hundreds and thousands around the same thought of struggle and despair, and there it is. But will time gather all of us, published and unpublished, gifted and obediently incapable, writers and readers, around the same hearth with one shared thought, so that together we might create the unified, thousand-voiced epic of our time—Latin America, for instance, is creating one? Or have our ancestors already sung our song?… It is difficult to understand.
— Who is criticism for: the reader or the writer? What useful lessons have you personally drawn from critical remarks?
— Criticism is for those for whom literature itself exists: for us all. Criticism is our attitude towards literature; the two are inseparable. Literature strives by other methods and means to create an environment favourable to its existence. Criticism is precisely that effort of literature. You say there was no criticism when David of Sassoun and Mirza of Moks were being created? There was. Women, children and old men surrounded the storyteller by the hearth; their responses and their presence were the criticism of the time. Through their responses the storyteller corrected himself; because women and children were present, he did not curse even his bitterest enemy; before the experienced old peasants he did not inflate the sail of imagination too much; seeing the labourers’ fatigue, he simplified his tale, and simplified it again… And the literature and criticism of that time are now fused in the epic’s tempered fabric.
Leaving aside for the moment the observations of Hr. Tamrazyan and L. Hakhverdyan, the critic L. Anninsky advised me to “love the enemy”: an incomprehensible, at least a strange, piece of advice. I do not know whether through that advice or in the natural course of things, but years and years later I understood that to hate the enemy is to submit to him, to love him is to possess the strength to subdue him, to be master of the situation rather than a plaything within it. Otherwise you become mixed up with your characters and, turning into one of them, are lost. Once I understood, I saw that excellent advice had been placed before me years earlier.
— In your opinion, can one become a writer without taking account of the distinctive features of a particular genre?
— Unfortunately no, and only no. Time after time I begin a work without clearly imagining even its length beforehand, and am bitterly punished: material results, not a work. Disordered, unorganised, falling apart; add warm, moving, precious, even talented—but material, not destined to live, because it is not within a genre. Genres are humanity’s greatest discoveries. “Discoveries” is too little: they are the product of centuries of painful labour. How much pain, revenge, blood, terror, victory, delight and defeat there has been, told by a thousand mouths and disintegrating, disappearing in time because it was not held within a structure of genre. Can the aircraft designer disregard the arrow’s form, the architect the pyramid’s, the shipbuilder the boat’s? They cannot.
— What role do small details, the so-called supplementary material, play in literary art?
— Detail… The carving of an egg on the wall of Hovhannavank; David’s speech impediment; “he crossed his eyes, twisted his jaw” in Mirza of Moks; scraps of calico and a couple of pretty buttons in the pocket of dead Gikor’s clothes; the spinal sensation of a cold dagger—they are cutting off the slain Hadji Murad’s head; the white lice in the eyebrows of Panteley Melekhov, dead of typhus; the momentary gleam of a heavy nickel-plated pistol above Christmas’s head, in his pair of handcuffed hands—in Faulkner’s story “Percy Grimm”; an unexpected, inexplicable butterfly or a butterfly-like flower amid Saryan’s monumental, decorative brushwork… Detail turns an idea into art; detail is itself art. Without detail, an idea remains precisely an idea that has not become artistic reality. Have you seen the film Pharaoh? What taste, what effort to recreate the atmosphere of the epoch, what precision of the principal outlines—and yet what superficiality, because there are no details, nor could there have been, and the whole is not authenticated by detail. Julio Cortázar regards every instance of artistic perfection as the result of an exact encounter between the Author and the Unknown. If the artistic event has not occurred, they have not met. In fairy tales, brave men returned from the demons’ worlds with the demons’ ears, tokens of their encounter and victory. It seems to me that a detail in the artistic fabric is just such a token of encounter and victory.
— Can one write with complete sincerity?
— How does the familiar saying go? He who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. So the hatred you, the writer, put forth would tomorrow become, in the reader, hatred of you: the hatred you engendered would devour you. The chauvinism you, the writer, rolled into a ball would strike your own nation’s forehead with its returning blow. Therefore, only after crushing blind hatred of others like yourself, blind love of your own, everything animal within you, and sitting at your desk as though before the whole world—only then, completely sincere. Before the whole world: Greeks and Americans, children and old people, Christians and Muslims, hardened scoundrels and those incapable of baseness, rich and poor—only in this way, completely sincere. I do not think this ceases to be sincerity, or that the writer has displayed only part of his inner resources. First, the recollections of those close to them and their own diaries testify best that true writers have had no, or almost no, passions reined in, stifled within themselves, hidden from peoples; that is, they have manifested the full power of their resources. Second, if something nevertheless remains beyond the bounds of the page, it is falsehood itself. Falsehood evades, does not want to enter a book, and even when forced in does not become literature. Falsehood can move armies, drive entire peoples mad, assume the shapes of political structures—in other words, embody itself as reality and appear before literature in the guise of life. But become literature: never. And that is literature’s integrity. As Hemingway said: “There is only one regime incapable of having good writers, and that regime is fascism. Because fascism is itself the falsehood babbled by murderers. An artist unwilling to lie cannot live and work under fascism. Fascism is itself falsehood, and by that very fact is condemned to literary barrenness.”
— You are often compared with Faulkner. Can one speak of his influence?
— If influences make a writer, if I am already a writer, and if talking about influences is so obligatory, we must speak first of the poetry of our people’s language—precisely that, the poetry of language—and then of the influences of Charents, Bakunts, Mahari and Sahyan. However flattering it might seem, there can categorically be no question of Faulkner’s influence. There cannot, yet Russian critics mention his name in articles about me. Why? Some because of the supposedly similar difficulty of our writing—I apologise for placing myself alongside that titan in the same “our”; others because the characters created inhabit the same settlement absent from the world map, their actions unfold at the same time in the same places, an already formed character is carried from one work into another. God grant that I too add a settlement to the literary map of the world… But this is what I say: Tsmakut is, for now, my native village; I am that village’s sketch writer. Call me a sketch writer if you wish, a photographer if you wish, or a naturalist painter. Will that real village grow into a literary Tsmakut, will I be able to make it grow into one? I do not know.
— For children, but only about children? Could one not write about adults for children?
— Tolstoy was an excellent children’s writer. All of Tumanyan’s work can be given to children, and we do give it to them. Children’s writing is a distinctive kind of talent, a special talent: an alloy of integrity, great moral purity, clear-sighted brightness and I do not know what other good human qualities. Children’s writing is a mirror showing whether a person has any right at all to wield a pen. Unfortunately, far more often the reverse happens, as in the old village: a hat would be brought from Tiflis for the eldest in the household. After wearing it for a year or two, the grandfather gave it to his son; a few years later the son gave it to his boy. Folding down his ears, the hat sank over the grandson’s eyes, and the child disappeared inside it—just as he now disappears inside the works of children’s writers driven off adults’ heads. No, why “only about children”? About the whole world. But since we present the whole world—the marvellous and monstrous, evil and good, base and lofty, simple and complex, love and hatred, all of it—by simplifying it and making it childlike anyway, it is preferable to write for them about them.
— What would you like to translate?
— I would like to know every language in the world and see the Tumanyans of all languages in their languages’ homelands. But since that is impossible, I would like to translate something that could awaken, with a creaking sound, the Armenian tongues of Khorenatsi, Narekatsi, David, Kuchak, Abovyan, Metsarents, Teryan, Tumanyan and Charents. Our entire Armenian language would work, and in its new linguistic homeland that foreign work would become a new fact of Armenian and of the great Armenian culture. There is no single such work in the world, but there are works. We can and must, through all our efforts, turn a hundred-volume selection of world prose into Armenian. If the work were done well, it would become a parade of the Armenian language. I do not want to think about the opposite.
— What plans do you have?
— To toil at placing new inhabitants in Tsmakut’s past and present, inhabitants who make bread and are themselves bread for life. As Pepo says: “Are you a human being, or did God create you as food for man-eaters?”
Interview conducted by Albert ISOYAN.
Grkeri Ashkharh, No. 5, 15 May 1979.