Literature has only one address, or rather, it should have only one address: Yerevan, Pushkini Street 3, Hrant Ignati Matevosyan, and a small couplet: "Read, dear Matevosyan, 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 a neighbor in my image or a neighbor by blood, that is, my brother, then it is not true literature and it is returned to the author, whether he finds it or not, it is not important, but that he suffers for a while while finding his address and disappears, that is already certain. In the wonderful scene of the hunt, I feel like Danil and Karai, the big-headed wolf and Nikolai Rostov, the old prince and Natasha Rostova - all equally, but Karai the dog and Danil are the closest to me. And I really want to know what happened to Danil, who was blushing hard in the presence of princess girls. Danil appears elsewhere in the novel "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" as the servant Gerasim. his teeth are white again, his shirt is pure white again, he smells of pure health, what's in his soul, Tolstoy doesn't say - he can't, he doesn't want to, he's afraid? He is afraid. Tomorrow he will throw Ivan Ilyich's princely white legs from his shoulder, spit and take his hand to the gun. A few centuries ago, that Danili-Gerasim's name was Tersedeus, his nationality was Greek, he received a cowardly and rebellious stigma on his forehead from Homer. Tolstoy has now corrected his great ancestor, showing and proving that he is also a man, almost like us - not a coward and a rebel, or a coward and a rebel like us. That unit, that oppressed and humiliated for centuries. We, the artists of the Soviet country, the children of that silent animal, will draw the next line of humanizing and completing the portrait of that age-old dumb, almost animal, that Adam, just like we will do our self-portrait and no one else. They said that our so-and-so critic has such and such a big ideological objection against William Faulkner. I am a fan of Faulkner, but I was so ready for an objection that I didn't even hear who the objector was and what he was objecting to - my objection immediately came to mind: what is that black background of silent mulattoes, mules, negroes, farmers standing like a wall? I say this in spite of "Tomorrow," "Red Leaves," "The Mont," and many, many wonderful stories, what are those disembodied shadows bringing whiskey, carrying empty goblets, and not receding into that black, silent background? That background, that unlit cavity exists in reality, will ever speak and move in history or will not speak and move at all - it is important for us that it speaks and moves in literature, to make it speak, to move it, to be its voice and momentum is first of all the duty of us, our children of workers and peasants. I take as a personal insult the existence of those black holes in literature, it seems to me that my father stayed there - my father, my grandfather, me, my child, my people, our suffering and our morality. We have been speaking about them and on their behalf for sixty years, but have we been their voice many times - with the existence of Melekhov and Levinson, very few times. It has often seemed that time and reality have been completely transferred to paper, and it has been for centuries, but after a decade or two it appeared that both reality and time, and, unfortunately, its literature, were fake and theater - a play. people were not in their position and did not speak with their voice neither in reality nor, unfortunately, in literature, there is no one to suggest what to say and what to do, people are still on the stage and don't know what to do and what to say anymore. In this situation, Vasiliy Shukshin's literature and his untimely loss seem to me a real courage. his people were there, not playing a role, whether that role was an author's assignment or another. There are other authors and achievements as well, but I want to see more often the spontaneous fixation of that molecule, that unit, when the author's position is purely fixative rather than attitudinal, that is, it says this is how it is. This is the aspiration of all of us, but some distance always remains between our heroes, it seems to us that we should portray not ourselves, but the miners, the kolkhozniks, the creatures outside of us, hence our admiration for their heroic work that we would not do ourselves, our indulgent pity for their mental or other poverty. It is the old and same Agha attitude to life when we ourselves are neither Agha nor Ayatollah. we ourselves are the people and we must be the people in literature as well. In the best cases, our literature is a part, a part is not a literature, but a part. It is necessary to overcome the gap between Pushkin on horseback and the Armenian world, the gap was narrowed by Platonov's novel "Takr" and Aitmatov's literature, but it is still there, one or two more steps are needed, and in that case we can say with Hamo Sahyan's exact formulation:
I am his effort mysterious,
I am his mysterious torment.
Hrant Matevosyan, in front of the white paper,
"Haygitak" ed., Yerevan, 2004.