There are names in literary history who mint coins bearing their own image from silver mined by others, and thus, as our compatriots in the diaspora say, do profitable business in the literary market. Sometimes even recasting is unnecessary: a coin bearing someone else’s image circulates on behalf of our present-day author. This revival of existing values is not in itself objectionable. But the desirable and hardest thing is when you yourself both mine and mint your silver. In other words, it is far more honourable to turn living, murky, contradictory, difficult life into art.
Throughout her long literary journey, Anahit Sahinyan has always sought her own mine, extracted her own ore, forged her own metal, even in those difficult cases when a work’s historical nature placed her before similar circumstances of character and situation, and repeating her predecessors seemed inevitable.
Repetition seemed inevitable, yet within the literary torrent unleashed around one and the same subject, Sahinyan’s novels give the impression of an original source, her work of a documentary record, her pages of precious dispatches from their own place and time. For those of us who follow, it is now difficult to return to those events and that time without taking Sahinyan into account.
This is a principle easy to explain and hard to live by: life has not allowed her to be bookish. Ultimately, it is what we call the writer’s civic responsibility. For Sahinyan, no, literature is not a game, but a particular domain of life entrusted to writers to build, demanding as much blood and sweat, honesty and responsibility as the work of the builder and the peasant.
Only this civic understanding of literary work can explain the unexpected durability of her novels. Unexpected, because her writing, rough as tuff stone, seems not to have yielded to the author’s hand, and her less than graceful structures initially seem unstable. Yet for her equally rough, equally insistent characters, this is exact writing. And that lack of symmetry is evidence of the original conception’s retreat before the torrent of life: the seemingly firm, seemingly logical outlines of the conception waver, bend, break, leave their foundations to admit into the structure this fragment of life too, this surprise, this manifestation. Her works, yes, are assembled not from distant, echoing, filtered, weak voices of life, nor from vague, abstracted, life-like images tending towards symbols. They are noisy, heavy life itself. And yet above that murky torrent trembles a noble sadness such as belongs only to poetry. At the same time, this linguistic and structural “carelessness” is an open battle against idle smooth writing and polished emptiness.
Anahit Sahinyan believes in literature. That trust in living life within literature, approaching reverence, that self-forgetting conviction which subordinates all other literary questions to living life, is above all the result of faith in literature: Sahinyan believes in literature’s influence on life. She endows her literature with such a charge that a literary work truly acquires a creative role. Today we need that faith more than ever.