— Why did the writer Hrant Matevosyan become chairman of the Writers’ Union? Had he nothing left to say, or did the survival of his literary family make him put down his pen for a while?
— There was something to say. Even a very long life would not have been enough for it all. Many unfinished works remain stacked on top of one another on my desk. The Writers’ Union’s great importance will become apparent in its absence. Its existence in our national, cultural and social life may not seem much, but its absence would be terrible. My awareness of that importance brought me to the Union. I hope that in the near future, once the Union has established its vitality in the republic in full voice, I shall be able to return to my desk and do my own work.
— Your day at the Writers’ Union. Do you leave home each morning with distaste or with affection?
— With the terror of an animal driven to the slaughterhouse. And with a curse. Must others have enjoyed the Union’s prosperous, spacious days and left me this hardship, when everything begins again, when a poor country places no value on words, when you are no part of statehood, when the conditions of unwarranted attention, unwarranted hostility, unwarranted, exaggerated friendship have changed into neglect and indifference?
— Is Hrant Matevosyan, chairman of the Writers’ Union, at peace with Hrant Matevosyan the writer?
— Hrant Matevosyan considers an inseparable part of his literary life not only his own line, but Hamo Sahyan’s, and the lines of those who are coming and will come. That girl’s, that boy’s, a schoolchild’s, a villager’s, a city-dweller’s, ultimately the whole people’s striving towards something higher is part of my literary life. Their failure I consider my failure. Their failure becomes a black mark in the Armenian language, their success a ray of light. The activity of the chairman and leadership of the Writers’ Union should serve not only themselves, but the creation of that wonderful panorama of all Armenian literary life, where what is valuable rings out, the peals are heard, nothing is forgotten and newcomers have somewhere to come.
— The Armenian writer is living through difficult days, with publishing problems on one side and financial problems on the other. Can the Writers’ Union support its members?
— To some extent it can offer support and shut its eyes to the fact that this is not really help after all. The opportunities are simply very limited; there are no funds.
— Who is today’s best prose writer, best poet? Do you see anyone?
— To add to your previous question, we are living through a time of upheaval. It is such a change of eras that the intellectual—the painter, musician, writer—stands before society in an entirely different position, in a genuinely new and unfamiliar status. The age of ideology is ending, an age that spanned two hundred, even two thousand years of our national life. We are entering a new age, the age of pragmatism, where the Word with a capital W is no longer the principal force: Jivani, Abovyan, Tumanyan, Charents, Sevak, Sahyan, Davoyan, Khorenatsi, Narekatsi, the Western Armenian writers, all of us. We are entering the age of pragmatists, and a hard struggle awaits us in the new era. Can we impose the Word, meaning ourselves, on this new, unfriendly age? The former panorama existed for us; that panorama of Pushkin, Abovyan, Tumanyan and many, many others was intended to bring us into being. These are new times, and we must make our voices heard in them. We truly face a difficult situation, especially the intellectuals of small nations, particularly those in the arts.
— Following your thought: who is today’s best poet, prose writer? Do you see anyone?
— I do. Khachik Manukyan, Violet Grigoryan. They can make themselves heard. Their success is not fleeting but lasting and convincing; they have no dead words, living reality grows within them into living language. It might be too much to call them outstanding, major individuals, because they are not so alone. Yet those diabolical gates that stand before us all, those heavy entrance doors locked against us all, which we scratch at, ask, plead, charm, somehow persuade to open or fail to open… For now those gates yield before them. Before Violet and Khachik. In prose, Gurgen Khanjyan is no chance name. He has brought forward new prose of a different kind and good quality, and is a lasting presence. Another is Levon Khechoyan. I have anxieties about all four, but may God give them Demirchyan’s perseverance, to keep knocking at those closed, enchanted, locked doors. They are our literature’s tomorrow.
— What is literature to you?
— Literature is a faith to me.
— Your favourite literary work, your favourite character?
— There are many. They may not be of our own people, but belong to other peoples and literatures: Russian, American, Anglo-Saxon. Yet sometimes I notice with pride that in my difficult moments characters and states of being emerge from Armenian writing too. I see that my boys of yesterday, destroyed yesterday, born yesterday, are not among the condemned and the nameless dead today, but exist: Tumanyan, Charents, Bakunts, Hamo Sahyan… If I had to single out one work, Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat.
— And a literary character?
— Let us generalise. My favourite literary figure is the Armenian woman collectively created by Armenian writers: Hakob Mndzuri, Aksel Bakunts and many others. I once thought of proposing such a collection. Perhaps tomorrow we shall be able to compile it ourselves and publish it through our own publishing house under the title Our Mothers. That collection would portray my favourite figure. I have a stroke or two, Mushegh Galshoyan a line or two; Bakunts’s The Modest Girl, Tigranuhi, Hakob Mndzuri’s succession of mothers, those little girls…
— Why did you begin writing?
— Apparently the reasons are the same, the same impulses send us into literature: our physical and spiritual resources are not enough for us to find fulfilment in life anywhere but literature. I began writing because I was a poet from the beginning.
— What is your bedside book?
— Today I truly am searching for a bedside book. I wish I had the Armenian people’s Gospel, that Armenian writers from Khorenatsi’s time to now had compiled that Gospel, so that today I need not make do with the Gospel of Greeks and Jews. I do not have that book on my desk. I often feel frustrated that, in these difficult times for me and the whole nation, that national Gospel is not on my desk. Our literature is indeed timid, incomplete. Our literary thought has been timid and has not created my bedside book in Armenian. Into that great book I compile in my mind go only rare pages by our own writers: Tumanyan’s The Deer and others.
— Are your literary works born with difficulty?
— With great difficulty. Unfortunately, the depths of literature seem to have been whispered to me from above, and I know what literature is. I envy those who write innocently and think they have already made literature. As though a son of a fully realised nation, or one of the world’s fully empowered writers, I undertake great things and, as a rule, fail. All my works lie like that on my desk, half-alive, unfinished.
— You follow the literary tradition of Tumanyan and Bakunts. Who follows your prose?
— I would not say I am a follower, that anyone in the world is my teacher. But it is wonderful when I turn their pages, and others’ too, without anxiety that they will fail on the next page, that now they will collapse. I would not say I am a follower. One could equally say I follow Chekhov or Tolstoy. One could say I follow my mother. Having said that, I realise my words have grown weaker since my ear began to empty of my mother’s voice, since the peal of the Lori dialect left my mind. Those seem to be the last ties with life too. That is how it is. I am no follower, and I do not like those who resemble me a little, who aim at resemblance. I like those who differ from me and, as such, stand before me as teachers rather than pupils. I think a writer must always be inclined to learn. If you are not a pupil before reality and literature, from that instant you no longer exist as a writer. I like those who teach me something. Unfortunately, Russian literature teaches me much more; foreign literature gives me something.
— The generations of the seventies to the nineties were brought up on your works, and future generations will be too. For a true reader your books will be constant companions. Have you ever felt Charents’s anxiety:
“What does that book say, and what does it proclaim?
Has he not spent his inexhaustible gift in vain?”
— That is a question I cannot answer fully. I do not entirely agree with your assessments of me. If I compile my own bedside Gospel from Charents’s Commander Shavarsh, from Towards Mount Masis, whose lines you quoted, from rare pages of Hamo Sahyan and Razmik Davoyan, I cannot consider myself the bedside book of today’s and tomorrow’s generations. As for anxiety, mine has always existed and still does. I postponed my best work until tomorrow, when I thought I would be wiser. Unfortunately, I was wisest at the very moment those ideas came. Tolstoy says, “One must catch a thought at its zenith.” After the zenith comes decline. Let the moment slip and the threat of lifelessness will hang over the writing. You will never be able to awaken the feelings and tremors that led you to that idea. I was a slow man of Lori, left my best for tomorrow, and tomorrow is already a graveyard of thoughts.
— Bakunts has Kyores, Charents has Land of Nairi. What is Matevosyan’s homeland—is it Tsmakut?
— We have given ourselves over a little too readily to that concept, “the writer’s world”. It has simply been equated with birthplaces: Kars as Charents’s homeland, Kyores as Bakunts’s. It should be related much more to the writer’s outlook. A writer must be something like God, opening up a world: “In the beginning was the Word.” The writer must say something, and with those words a world must open. World-creating writers are rare: a William Saroyan, a Tumanyan, a Charents…
— There are Teryan’s, Charents’s, Bakunts’s and Sevak’s definitions of the Armenian language. What is Matevosyan’s?
— Add to their definitions Pushkin’s magnificent formulation: “It cannot be that a freedom such as our Russian language should not bring forth its own Mirabeau.” Mirabeau was one of the wolves of the French Revolution, and Pushkin’s prediction came a hundred years before the great Russian revolution. That is what listening to language means: it then becomes impossible not to prophesy. “In the beginning was the Word.” Matevosyan’s definition? It is the awareness of that absolute truth. Fortunate are those who listen to the language’s bidding rather than violate it. All those who are truly great have received God’s word that way:
You are an unknown Poet, never seen till now,
Pouring songs without words through your shining gaze.
And I, let us say, am a wondrous, fortunate Reader,
Reading those songs so easily and so deeply.
Through language, Pushkin, Tumanyan and often Bakunts received the divine text, the text suggested from heaven, in that way. It was a great tragedy that this immensely gifted man, Bakunts, was destroyed in his youth, in the youth of his literary life.
— Your prose is very poetic. Have you ever tried writing poetry?
— No. I have tried to be much less poetic. These are entirely different worlds, living by different laws. One must obey the law of prose. If you have noticed such passages in my works, they were probably intended to cover up some flaw in the work, to hide it. They have hidden it, and now you like them. Not bad; I have deceived you rather well.
— As a reader and as a writer, which of your works would you single out?
— My favourite work has yet to be written, of course. Among those I have written, the story The Beginning.
— Do you often read your own works?
— Never.
— Do you miss your characters?
— I miss one, because she is unfinished; I must complete her portrait. Shushan in the novel Takh. That work exists for me precisely because she is there, calling me.
— Minas’s paintings My Parents, Jajur, Women Baking Bread, At the Threshold, and your collections My Run and The Trees. Is the strength of those works the Armenian spirit hidden beneath their outward poverty?
— Those works have fervent admirers, and people who pass over them or by them indifferently. The admirers are those who, becoming co-authors in their own way, can bring out what the author has left to their will and ability. The indifferent are those who lack that power of co-authorship. Another kind of art is made for them: the art of direct words, of open expression. Minas, and perhaps Hrant Matevosyan too, believed in that principle of art: the speed of stillness, the kinetic in the potential, the red in black, the beautiful in the ugly… and so on. The reader, if even a little of a poet, had to make that black red, give that poverty a spirit. There it is.
— The adolescent Armik Mnatsakanyan in The Punishment and My Wolf; the young Armen Mnatsakanyan in The Hangover. Will the reader meet a sixty-year-old Armen Mnatsakanyan? If so, what is he like?
— I cannot say, because my works are not entirely about me. I have always tried to embody things through someone else. There are some things of mine, of course, but the model and the portrait have never repeated each other. Likewise, I am not in my plans; my self-portrait is not there, cannot be there.
— Which Armenian poet accompanies you in the difficult moments of your life?
— Tumanyan, Charents.
— Are you a happy man?
— I am happy to the extent that I have seen the face of the god of literature once or twice.
— Who are your parents?
— My gods. Now, belatedly. My parents were people of the soil, of village reality. Thank God my fame and city life, my relations with them, did not disrupt them too much. They did not quite believe in this life of mine, this reality, and did not give themselves over to me; they remained with their work.
— The happiest moment of your personal life?
— When my son was born.
— What is your family like?
— I love my children, especially my daughter; she married and left home. I know my children are good people, and it is not because of kinship that I can overlook their shortcomings. Conversely, kinship does not make me surround them with a halo. They are good people and dear to me, as all good people are.
— A woman keeps the family, the country, the homeland standing—Aghun in Autumn Sun and The Trees. What about your own life?
— Sometimes I am terrified when I imagine myself without my wife; that would be the end of the world. But… we must make sure this issue of Shrjapat with my confession does not fall into her hands. Let her not get conceited and think I did not exist, and she created me.
— Your daughter translates. Has she established herself as a translator? Do you like her translations?
— She had a beautiful, youthful, living, tremulous rhythm, like the young Saroyan. She gave it up, did not love translating, abandoned literary work altogether, as many other gifted people in literature have. It is a failing of the times. I do not think she will never return to literature; perhaps in fifteen or twenty years…
— How many grandchildren do you have? Do you love them more than your children?
— I have two grandchildren. I love them very much, very, very much, but they are not my children. My children were mine. I love my grandchildren very much; they are little, and I love little ones, love children in general, my own a little more because they are part of my day, my life. But it would be false to say they give me what my children gave me when their mother and I bathed them, when I, a man, swaddled them, knew how to swaddle them. That is an irreplaceable feeling.
— Do you have free time? If so, what do you do?
— Unfortunately, I do not have the circumstances to fill my day with genuinely good time. Our Armenian life, our Yerevan life, does not offer that opportunity to fill one’s leisure.
— The reader awaits Matevosyan the writer’s return. When will it happen?
— Soon, very soon.
— You have been at the Writers’ Union for ten months now. Have you worked on a literary work during that time?
— My work stopped when I came to the Union. I will not say writing was easy for me. Truly, it is a blessing to throw oneself into another full life outside literature, fill the day with madness, energy, even foolish undertakings, be busy and no longer return to the hard labour of working at a desk. That hard labour has stopped, and unfortunately, soon, very soon, I shall return to that suffering.
— Children have a special place in all your works. In Metsamor there is undisguised pride in them and faith in them. Why do you so often turn to children for “help”?
— And again, yes. In the works to come too: children, children, children again. Adults’ childhoods. Then, in our daily clashes, when you can no longer bear the present behaviour of your wife, daughter, friend, enemy, you love and forgive them by seeing their childhood, the child within. The drop of poison that tomorrow will kill the human being in them is being dropped today, in their childhood, through injustice, lack of freedom, violence… And the ray of light that tomorrow will return to us from them is also being warmed and gathered today, in their childhood.
Interview by Karine MESROPYAN
Shrjapat, United States, No. 19, 1997.