In other times, our literature would have found in Gurgen Mahari (1903–1969) an outstanding poet of love. And although it is difficult to seek, much less find, other times for this people and its thousand-year-old literature, since from the days of Khorenatsi to the present this people has lived in only one time, that of the struggle for existence, Mahari managed, as though this were how things ought to be, as though this were all there was to life, to disregard much in his people’s life and his own and make room for the golden-haired poet within him. Let us call him, that Mozart within us all, a golden-haired poet, or a flute-player with a bare flute in his hand, or a prodigal son, or find another name for this youth who keeps clear of the cares of home as a young ox shuns the yoke: he flees in terror from the misery of the ancestral house and sometimes, as testimony to his heavenly calling and seemingly in defiance of that house’s desolation, plays over it a pure, unresentful, carefree melody on his flute, as though defying that very desolation. Mahari was like that, always and everywhere, so much so that one of his contemporaries, who had the right to do so, made a weighty observation disguised as a mild reproach: “Isn’t your style too happy for the material you have chosen?” And the “chosen material” was the hard life of himself and his homeland — our genocide. Yes, a hard life had been imposed on him, perhaps the hardest ever lived beneath this sky: genocide, the murder of everyone and each person, against which a narrow escape into exile and the eternal loss of one’s homeland counted as good fortune; seventeen years of forgotten imprisonment and banishment for this poet, beginning at thirty-three — and here good fortune was the exile itself, of which he could even speak with a smile; those ten or fifteen years of hurried, nervous work between two enemies, one the ever louder footsteps of the approaching tyrant from beyond the grave, the other the poisonous goitre in his throat. He was obliged to become the chronicler of his cruel time, and he did. For a man of his temperament, that was true heroism. The age of the cannibals of genocide and dictatorship is deeply inscribed in Armenian literature by his pen, the pen of a man born for other times and another life: Childhood, Adolescence and On the Threshold of Youth, Burning Orchards, Charents, Flowering Barbed Wire, and a series of novellas and stories that we call “Siberian”.