1. Deprived of state patronage and cast into the forces of the “market,” literature now enjoys the unlimited freedom many writers dreamed of. They can write about whatever they wish, however they wish. There are no ideological or thematic dictates. Yet we do not see the valuable, enduring works of art that ought to give a full picture of our time. Armenian literature is in crisis. How do you explain this? How do you envisage its survival and development under the new conditions?
2. An extreme, absolute understanding of independence has, in effect, isolated us from Russian culture. In your view, how does this isolation affect Armenian literature and culture in general, and what consequences might it have in the future?
3. What do you think about the relationship between literature and ideology? Should literature take part in political and ideological struggle, or remain an indifferent observer? In the latter case, would the writer not have to give up what we used to call the writer’s “civic stance”? Can we say that there is now a tendency to isolate literature and the intelligentsia in general from political and social life, to reduce their role in it to a minimum?
1. The “Odyssey” has handed down to us the image of the siren: with women’s voices, they enchanted the soldiers and drew them away. To keep another’s enchanting voice from entering you, you must stop your ears, as Odysseus had his soldiers’ ears stopped. We did not dream of “market” relations; we felt the need for reforms as far back as Khrushchev’s time. We favoured renewal. To prevent upheavals, change must take place every day. Now we are in an uncontrollable situation. Today we do not speak our own words, live in our own country or think with our own minds; we live under arrangements devised by others, enchanted by the siren’s song. We follow someone else’s course; we are being led down someone else’s road. And not just us writers, but the whole of society: my children’s constant companion is not my writing—it is television, mass culture. The people have been estranged from their culture. When we still stood on stable ground, writers warned of this danger. Kaputikyan has a poem about Komitas’s voice being drowned out by a “pop” song. The alarm was there long ago.
Many of us may be silent because our alarmed calls and cries could fill the square once again. Let us not add our voices to this flood of muddied voices, to this polluted atmosphere, because anger ultimately achieves nothing. It is noise, nothing but noisy silence, and you want to remain apart. Even if you rush into the square, nothing will happen. You want to withdraw and do your work, since the course of life is, after all, somewhat independent of us; wait until it settles of its own accord, then bring what you have made of value before the public.
We are losing the commanding height of professional literary criticism that arose under the previous statehood. The system is dispersing; we are losing a school—a scholarly standard, a discipline of thought. What we call culture is also the fruit of a regimen: the short story, novella, play, theatre, painting, song… They too need a regimen in which to take shape, just as steel comes into being under a particular regimen…
National literature is something that will vanish with the nation, so there is nothing to be alarmed about. Now, when we complain that we have lost state patronage—and I too could bring out a couple of delirious speeches full of complaints—I also ask myself: what should I do to get this or that person’s work published, to secure state support for it, to free it from dependence on petty traders and oil thieves? I do not know the answer, so I keep silent. What should Levon Ter-Petrosyan do? Ultimately he is called upon, or obliged, to attend first to far more important matters. The road from Vanadzor to Alaverdi has been closed; by yesterday’s standards, pennies are needed, yet they cannot find them… It is a poor, deprived country; not a country, in effect not a country. We must simply admit that the country is not a country, because to take shape as a state it must have land and a nation living on it. We lived because we were part of the empire; there was an integrated economy: we gave, received, worked… Today we cannot realistically count on state patronage, because the state is a member of an utterly ruined family, and not a member rich in natural resources; it does not have the means to support culture. Culture survives to the same extent as each member of society, if we leave aside those growing wealthy in the present conditions. Culture is in the same wretched state, sharing the nation’s wretched state; there is nothing unusual in that.
We should doubt those who doubt the course of literature’s development. Literature exists. There is the experience of the past too: cultural giants were born in 1915, 1923, 1925. If anyone is to complain now, it should be us older ones, because we had created more or less bearable conditions for ourselves and wrote our texts with devotion, “at a high level.” The issue is not our comfort but our very existence. Yet I must admit: be strong—live. What do people pay for now? Their daily bread. Give your writer’s word the necessity of bread, and the people will not abandon you. It is difficult, but that is how it is. We older ones may scarcely withstand this heavy shock, but there are young people. During our crisis of 1915–1925 and the American crisis of 1928–1932 there was a “great young generation.” We must hope there is such a generation now. Yesterday there were a few names; now there are dozens who can write. What a fine standard has developed in newspaper articles! It will inevitably become a new quality, perhaps even grow into a genre called “New Journalism” in American literature. Essentially, it is documentary writing. These days of ours offer an unprecedented chance to transcribe them exactly as they are: rise from Lady Macbeth’s abyss and go as far as Hamlet’s ascension, embodied by Monte Melkonian…
People were talking about a literary crisis back in the sixties, when Mahari was here, when a younger generation had arrived, when there were many wonderful writers on the Union’s literary scene, and Vardges Petrosyan saw fifteen Hrant Matevosyans in Armenia’s literature alone. They said then too: literature is in crisis.
We will create literature, and there will be literature. Literature requires an investment of material resources. Those resources are lacking now, but the strong create literature and will clear their own path into public view. It is literary criticism I regret. Literary critics must be paid and encouraged by the state. The work of developing standards for artistic and ideological analysis, preserving a national and human identity, and examining values is entrusted to them; it is their bread. We must understand its importance if we wish to call ourselves a nation.
Today’s literature will truly be made by those whose skin and nostrils are more sensitive, who have smelled blood and brutal poverty, who are the age Charents was in 1915. I, and the other older writers, will continue our work; history will decide whether anything of it remains. Let us look at ourselves a little more coolly, a little from the side; let us not surrender to lamentation. After all, we are the elders.
2. However important we consider ourselves, it is very difficult on our own. Isolation has brought an exodus of the people, and however much you wail, it makes no difference.
But could we have avoided separating, avoided isolation? Let us not invoke common sense for the moment: had it been possible not to separate, the mere instinct of survival would have kept us in the Union. It did not. That means we had to leave. Let us remember the suffocation and nausea of the fraternal embrace; remember the loss of identity across the whole country: entire nations and peoples, a whole society of three hundred million, shifted onto one another their natural duty to work, to live, to live by working. Everywhere, everyone betrayed themselves and each other. Yes, we had to draw away from one another, give ourselves fresh air, find our footing and turn our faces towards one another again. We are now making that return. Having lost something of the virtues and advantages of the social order and of citizenship in a great country, having learnt a lesson from our losses and undoubtedly found something—say, the spirit of initiative and work—we will come together again, and… it will not be bad. Let us not call a loss what was truly worth being rid of: for them, our presence as petitioners and rebels; for us, the heavy breath of their prosecution. Will freedom reveal and strengthen God’s human being in us and in them? Will we relate to each other as free people? If it does not reveal that being and we cannot endure this new regimen, unfamiliar to us, we will both perish, and it will be good that we perish. But the fairly substantial “company of the free”—my Tumanyan, their Pushkin, Charents and Astafyev, Tolstoy and Saryan, and many, many others—is a guarantee that we will be saved and live our lives as God’s human beings.
The West’s political and economic leadership today was first marked by the leadership of the Word, and therefore of literature. Culture is defeated first, and only then the country. With a little jealousy you see that a society your predecessors, and even you yourself, regarded with reservations has reached summits in literature. Our inhibitions and seclusion prevented us from engaging with the “outside” world; Americans and others were crowned with Nobel Prizes—from here, only those who had been dissidents. We are now repeating their situation of yesterday; we are still very far behind. Yet however firmly one nation is bound to others, it always preserves a hope of separating: your national dignity will not allow you to become American, to merge and disappear even into Shakespearean culture. The process of return will bring forth new tumanyans, new expressions of the old Tumanyan.
3. What ideology should a writer embrace? If it is nationalist, it is not literature; if communist, it is not literature; if humanist, it is sugary slime; if bourgeois, it is not literature. If he is an adherent, he is not a writer but a preacher. A writer is required to be simultaneously present at the points listed and at many, many more. I repeat: simultaneously in all those positions and among all people. Adherence to any one of them stations the writer at a single point, and that is already a case enclosing him, and the end. The vast dead mass of Soviet literature is your proof; the equally dead anti-Soviet literature is another.
“Grakan Tert”, 4 October 1994.