— What, in your opinion, should we be talking about today?
— Something wrong.
— Why? Is no right step ever forgiven?
— By speaking about something incidental, we can speak about what matters most.
— That was how Yeghishe Charents wrote Land of Nairi in the twenties. So have the times not changed at all?
— Of course they haven’t. In one of Tumanyan’s letters he says: no one killed himself over what happened; not one of the nation’s leaders felt ashamed… In fact, for six months he was a governor: Akhaltsikhe, Akhalkalaki, Borchalu, Lori, Pambak, Shamshadin, Gugark. A governor with finances, weapons, everything. Until Vehib Pasha’s advance, when he almost fell captive. At night, on foot, with his daughters, soaked through, he passed along the gorge from Kirovakan to Shahali. He saved the children and himself.
— Could Hovhannes Tumanyan have killed a man? He was a soldier; there was fighting…
— No, he couldn’t. He wasn’t so wretched as to kill a man.
— Is it the wretched who kill?
— Yes, the wretched kill, those whose minds have reached a dead end.
— Then what? What words must be spoken to lead us out of that dead end, to have an effect?
— There had to be a dictatorship, there had to be a country, for a word to be spoken. The Kirovakan chemical combine had to be working, the Alaverdi copper plant, the Spitak sugar factory… The country had to work, and through work, drop by drop, we had to cleanse ourselves morally and materially. Then the word would have meaning too. It’s the same now. And no one can close the borders, no one can elevate equality and justice: the image that attracts, draws and leads us is still that of the houses, wealth and billionaires of Hollywood propaganda. They steal the capital—the seed grain. You don’t create your own image; you have no leader of your own. As that splendid young man who died, Tigran Hayrapetyan, wrote: our thought is frightened, incapable of seeing and describing reality, of giving an answer. The leadership went one way, the people another. We are in the fourth part of the epic. The first three are, in effect, one part: a hero, an adversary, the hero’s victory, a triumphal procession and his death. And at the end, Mher has no enemy: a more powerful, invisible one, elusive, evasive, petty village chiefs, all sorts of Kozbadin’s grandsons…
— Perhaps Mher’s real enemy was within him: his fear, his doubt. David won, but Mher’s strength was not enough…
— On the other hand, humanity cannot live without frustration: it will devour itself. Its own strength will kill it.
— Did you read Viktor Astafyev’s interview in our newspaper? Do you agree that drunkenness destroyed Soviet literature?
— It was a splendid statement: coherent, exact, brief. Yes, the lack of freedom, the crushing pressure of ideology, even the incompleteness of Khrushchev’s freedom. The country and the individual could not forge a national leader, a political mind.
— Was there that freedom in Latin America, where powerful literature was created and great writers were born?
— The literature of Russia and the Union was given a significance greater than its own strength. More attention, more supervision and more deprivation of freedom. It came from earlier times too, from the Orthodox faith, under Turkish-Tatar oppression at that: the demand was to turn the country’s entire strength against it, to unite it, to bind it together, and that became serfdom. Then the same mission continued in the Union. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev… Old tsars of new times.
— Is Putin a tsar too?
— Putin too is obliged to be a tsar. If he isn’t, the country will fall apart. What is he to do?
— So he is not a dictator, but a master people want.
— Had Vazgen and Karen remained, they too would have been masters. That was precisely what they killed. They understood what to destroy.
— Even in this situation there must be a way out. We created the closed circle ourselves. Individuals may have no way out; a people cannot have none.
— You talk a lot, we all talk a lot: your newspapers and your radio talk endlessly. And then what?…
— Because we are all so politicised.
— That isn’t politics. You distort and dirty it. Is politics really within the reach of your minds?
— How and where should we stop? What should we do?
— Don’t you aspire to be that brute who wanted to stop time with an automatic rifle in his hands, who entered the National Assembly and cut off the heads of those of you he thought were leading the nation down the wrong road? What conceit has got into you: to settle a question, to change a country with a couple of shots? Every good-for-nothing gets up and is ready to govern the country, wants to have his say to the people.
— Why do you stay silent? You stay silent, they get up and see the arena open before them.
— I respect the word, so I stay silent. I have a duty, a responsibility, so I stay silent. What are you afraid of? Let my brother be afraid, my brother who lives in the village. He had three cows; each cow fed a family. In the old days, if there was a cow in the household, the children grew up healthy and beautiful; they didn’t remain stunted or become consumptive. A cow now costs a hundred and fifty dollars. The pain is his, the pain belongs to the worker with no work. Today and tomorrow will be made through work. Our greatest enemy is having no work, knowing you won’t receive your wages on the fifteenth, even five thousand drams. You wake in the morning and have nowhere to go… Something must be invented in which your victory is beyond doubt, rather than embracing reality and fighting against it or for it.
— What is the most important question of the day?
— Have you published a single specific piece about a person? That is what we lack most.
— Will that solve a problem?
— I don’t know what a report by a Hemingway actually achieved on the battlefield, but looking back, it alone remained. My last impression from ten years ago: Hakob Hakobyan and I, taking advantage of knowing the police chief, went to see Ani at close quarters. The police chief also had a friend, Alyosh. On the way to Leninakan, on the right, in a little Armenian valley where water revealed itself only in the darker green—the spring was hidden, the land completely unwatered, damaged over the centuries, with remnants of old monuments—my Alyosh had fenced off a plot, set up a farm, gathered his family and was living there. He had a tiny daughter-in-law who knew how to milk; she supported the family. Their hope did not lie in the slopes of Aragats, where there was no grass. Their hope lay in the trains: they would carry animal feed, stop at the little station, an arrangement would be made, and feed would be thrown off the train. Their hope lay in stolen goods. In transport, the railway, the great Soviet Union. The only shortcoming was that Alyosh had no private property. And I was fond of him for the life he lived. When they dammed the Akhuryan River, an island formed in between; the Union’s attention drifted away a little, and on the border the Turks erected their mosque—new, fresh, made of red brick, tall, as a boundary marker, as a house of faith. The land had been supplied with water and was watered by rain as well; the Turks’ herd grazed peacefully, peacefully, in a boundless green expanse. Who is going to write this? Why hasn’t it been written?
— We’ve been carried away by ideas; we want a great country.
— The country’s smallness? We were part of the Soviet family. We thought we would live next to a democratic Turkey, alongside a brotherly Azerbaijan, and then our house fell apart…
— Perhaps we don’t need that house? Perhaps we’re used to living on other people’s doorsteps, in other people’s states, on the roads?
— If the north did not suggest the idea of our own house, it made it possible by creating a favourable environment. That was also the idea of the Armenian Oblast. In the year ’70 we entered the Russian army at our own request; our people hadn’t been conscripted. That was also what the first republic was about, the appeal to Vorontsov-Dashkov, maintaining our schools and church. First of all, a dictatorship was needed. We didn’t have that brave man, that courageous mind. We didn’t have a man of great will. We weren’t united, either in politics or in literature. Not one Armenian writer knows how to write a short story; not one can construct and assemble a drama.
— Which is why the Armenian poet thought himself a dramatist.
— Tumanyan really was a dramatist: he removed a thousand to twelve hundred lines from Anush before the final version. His thinking was a dramatist’s. Had he lived, he would have written one.
— Do you change and edit what you write a great deal?
— While I’m writing, but I don’t return to it afterwards. What remains to be done is more precious than returning to what’s written. There’s no time.
— Is literature being created now?
— Something is being created. I won’t be wrong if I say that literature’s golden age has passed. In essence, it ended in the sixties and seventies. From 1801 onwards, those were your literature’s times. I don’t know what revolutionary, partisan leader can return society’s attention to literature. Who is to do it? Money, wealth and cinema devoured literature, creating a lazy reader—an active spectator and a lazy reader. Every reader is already a director: line by line, staging, making a film, he moves forward. But the cinema-goer and television viewer have no need for that work, those distinctions, those analyses.
— Why did writers grow lazy?
— If literature gives you no bread, no money, you don’t pursue it. Everyone has turned towards poetry… It’s delirium. I’m sick of measured lines already. As luck would have it, they all write so well. Simply splendid uselessness.
— There’s less humanity; the technique is magnificent. There’s no light in literature, no breath. They write well, but what are they writing?…
— Viktor Astafyev has a little three-page story. He says: my aunt had lost her brothers, her husband, her relatives—some eighty people—but whenever she began her lament, she began with Lyoshka. When people went to work overnight, they slept out in the fields so they could mow in the morning before the heat set in. They had gone haymaking on the mountain slopes. The mother left her three-year-old in the care of a two-year-old and a four-year-old. He wanted his mother badly, and the children set off to take him to her. On the way they grew tired and fell asleep… When they woke, the child was no longer between them. The whole brigade searched for days and couldn’t find him. Coming down from the mountains, there are sandy passages without a bedrock base: wide at first, then narrowing. Near the exit it looks like a road. Only years later does the writer try to understand what happened to the child, and, walking the entire route, he realises: the child kept walking and walking, became wedged in that passage and disappeared… I had read so much, but that single line made my throat close. The humanity of literature… You read books with thousands of heroes, generals, soldiers, and not one gives you the pain of losing that child. We haven’t written it, because our literary thought is continually occupied with historical and national questions. We haven’t been ourselves…
This interview has no beginning or end; this conversation aspires to continue endlessly. Not because I do not know how to ask concise questions or conduct complete interviews. This conversation is endless because what there is to say is endless. An endless telling, this portion of which I had no right to rob the reader of.
Anahit ADAMYAN
Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, 25 July 2000.