Literature has only one address, or rather should have only one address: Yerevan, 3 Pushkin Street, to Hrant Ignat’s son Matevossian, with a little note: “Read, dear Matevossian: here you are a Georgian, here you are a stone, here you are a princess, here you are Hitler.” If I read and say it was not about me but about my neighbour through the wall or my neighbour by blood—that is, my brother—then it is not true literature and is returned to the author. Whether it finds him is not even important; that it struggles for a time to find its address and disappears is already certain. In the splendid hunting scene I feel myself to be Danilo and Karay the wolfhound, the big-headed wolf and Nikolai Rostov, the old prince and Natasha Rostova, all equally; but Karay the dog and Danilo are closest to me. And I very much want to know what happened afterwards to Danilo, who blushed deeply in the young princesses’ presence. Danilo appears later elsewhere, under the name of the servant Gerasim, in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”: his teeth are still white, his shirt still clean and white, he gives off pure health. What is in his soul, Tolstoy does not say. Can he not? Does he not want to? Is he afraid? He is afraid: tomorrow Gerasim will fling Ivan Ilyich’s lordly white legs from his shoulder, spit and reach for a rifle. Several centuries earlier this Danilo-Gerasim was named Thersites, a Greek, branded by Homer on his forehead as coward and rebel. Tolstoy has now corrected his great forebear, showing and proving that he too is a human being, almost like us: not a coward and rebel, or a coward and rebel as we are. The next stroke in humanising this unit, this one oppressed and humiliated for centuries, this age-old mute, almost animal, this Adam, in completing his portrait, will be made by us, the artists of the Soviet country, the children of that silent animal. That is, we ourselves will paint our self-portrait, not someone else. I was told that one of our critics had a major objection of principle to William Faulkner. I am a devotee of Faulkner, but inwardly I was so ready to object that I did not even hear who was objecting or to what. My own objection arose at once: what is this black background of silent people of mixed descent, mules, Black people and farmers, standing like a wall? I say this despite “Tomorrow,” “Red Leaves,” “The Monk” and many wonderful stories. What are these bodiless shadows bringing whisky, taking away empty glasses and vanishing into that black, silent background? That background, that unlit hollow, exists in reality. Some day in history it will speak and move—or will not speak or move at all. What matters to us is that it should speak and move in literature. To make it speak, to make it move, to be its voice and force is first of all our duty, the children of workers and peasants. I take the existence of those black hollows in literature as a personal insult; it seems to me that my father remained there—my father, my grandfather, myself, my child, my people, our suffering and our morality. For sixty years we have spoken about them and on their behalf, but how often have we been their voice? Even with Melekhov and Levinson, very rarely. Often it seemed we had transferred time and reality to paper without remainder, and that this was for the ages. But a decade or two later it became clear that both reality and time, and unfortunately their literature, had been falsehood and theatre, a spectacle. People had not been in their calling or spoken in their own voice, either in reality or, sadly, in literature. The prompter who told them what to say and do is gone, yet they are still on the stage and no longer know what to do or say. In this situation Vasily Shukshin’s literature seems to me a true act of courage, and his untimely loss a grievous one. His people existed, rather than performing a role, whether that role was the author’s assignment or something else. There are other authors and achievements too, but I want more often to see this molecule, this unit, recorded as an independent being, with the author’s position simply registering it before taking an attitude: saying, this is how it is. That is what we all strive for, yet a distance continually remains between us and our characters. We continually seem to think we must portray not ourselves but miners, collective farmers, creatures outside ourselves. Hence our admiration for their heroic labour, which we supposedly would not do, our indulgent pity for their spiritual or other poverty. It is the same old master’s attitude towards life, though we ourselves are neither masters nor ayatollahs. We ourselves are the people, and in literature too we must be the people. At best our literature is about something, yet “about” is not literature; it is “about.” We must overcome the gulf that lay between Pushkin on horseback and the Armenian land. Platonov’s novella “Takyr” and Aitmatov’s literature narrowed it, but it still exists. Another step or two is needed, and then we can say, in Hamo Sahyan’s exact formulation:
I am his mysterious effort,
His mysterious suffering.
Hrant Matevossian, “Before the White Page,”
Hayagitak Publishing House, Yerevan, 2004.