— Who was the central figure of twentieth-century Armenian literature, and what was that figure like?
— The central figure of twentieth-century Armenian literature was the heir to that of the nineteenth century. The abstracting artistic and philosophical thought of nineteenth-century Armenian literature, endowed with a populist mission, had called upon itself to enlighten and lead the nation. In Russia, towards social upheaval and the salvation of the Russian people; here, to lead the national liberation struggle. That literary, artistic, philosophical and social thought did not see reality as it was. It had invested itself with a mission of salvation and saw reality as absolute darkness. Those it was to save were utterly unenlightened, oppressed, suffering people; for Armenians the oppressors were Kurdish and Turkish beys, in Russia the tsar and the landlords. In rare cases, people of rare genius—Tumanyan, Charents and others—noticed the error in their mission, because reality manifested itself quite differently from their apostolic conception of it. Literature came to correct itself and its stance, and we gained salvaged fragments that take us into the realm of world literature, true, great literature: Towards Infinity, Anush… Compare the first version of Anush, with its social emphases, and the final version, a conversation with infinity. Towards Infinity, Anush, Charents’s Dantean Legend and Commander Shavarsh, many pages of Bakunts became the salvaged pages of Armenian literature. They show who its central figure was in the twentieth century, what that figure was like, how much we lost because of the apostolic mission and what heights we reached through self-correction.
— That was at the beginning of the century. What about the middle?
— In the middle of the century, literature was called upon to become an ornament in the margins of ideology and statehood, merely an artistic rendering and embellishment of the great idea of Marxism-Leninism. Yet in its very first attempts it found a wholly independent path. Partly by instinct, often consciously, it found its calling—and retreated, withdrew from its positions, because it continued its old mission of bringing new ideas to the masses through imaginative literature. In mid-century too we had salvaged authors, though again with immense losses; our literary thought effectively lagged behind world literature. Nevertheless, once again we had names and works that can make up the substantial volume which places our literature among living literatures rather than among stillborn writings. In difficult circumstances and moments of heavy responsibility, when you, the reader, want to create for yourself a textbook-Gospel from your Armenian language, you often look to foreign literature: the saving word comes from there. Our sense of honour, the honour of our national language and literature, obliges us to regard Armenian literature a little more affectionately, a little more tenderly. I name no names, but that substantial volume exists.
— Who was the central figure of Armenian literature at the end of the twentieth century? However much we declared a crisis, literature existed, was alive, books were written and published. What did that literature bring the reader? Was it seeking itself or the reader? What literature was it, and whose?
— Speaking frankly, from my own experience: the work I thought would speak with the times, I now see, whether I wish it or not, already belongs to the past, I fear even to the distant past. It is literature born of an entirely different alphabet from that of today’s literature.
— What you say makes me think that today we face the same situation as at the beginning of the century: a country we do not know, a country whose artists have an imagined mission rather than one grounded in reality.
— The parallel with the beginning of the century is illusory; the resemblance is superficial: war, fateful moments… The literature and reality of the century’s beginning were direct heirs to the preceding period. The communists adopted the same ideological mission. Writers had no entirely new task of mastering a new alphabet or speaking to reality in a new language. They spoke their predecessors’ language. The same language of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Tumanyan, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Andreyev and Gorky. A new language was not needed. But today’s Armenian writer is in an unprecedented situation.
— What is the writer’s mission today?
— To create a language for reading the times. In these circumstances very few writers of the past help the new writer converse with today’s reality.
— What does a “state commission” for literature mean?
— It means the state cannot remain alone with this monster called reality without literature: as Stalin without Sholokhov, Khanjyan without Charents, the American president without Faulkner.
— Hovhannes Tumanyan said long ago, “Literature needs national protection.” What do we expect of the writer and literature today?
— We demand a lasting presence from our literature in our reality.
— As a reader, what do you want to read now?
— A book that gives a positive charge, meaning the deepest possible knowledge of reality. A book that emboldens me, enlightens me in the face of reality, gives me courage and the light of thought. Penetrating vision, the ability to see today within history, not to fear today, and to make your nation its own master.
— We keep saying: a crisis of culture, of art, of literature. Is it finally a particular crisis or a general social standstill from which the other retreats follow?
— Here it is a crisis of the social order and society, the condition of a country drained and defeated by the bitter struggle between East and West. Much time will still be needed to recover. Yet one cannot say the crisis has passed the victors by.
— Every crisis, despite its destructive effect, also has some positive, rational element. When will we find that positive element, and when will we try to emerge with the fewest possible losses from the circle we have closed with our own hands? Ultimately, what is our national ideology, which should have freed us from misconceptions?
— These are complex questions, rooted mainly in matters outside literature and cultural studies. National ideology grows from fully realised achievements of art and culture—architecture, music, singing, science, literature—which speak to people and give society a form. Hakob Hakobyan put it wonderfully: take the Government House building out of the square, and the nation will scatter. The sum of all this is national ideology. In my view, national ideology is Saryan’s flowers and mountains, Tumanyan’s Anush, Charents’s Commander Shavarsh… And such-and-such works are not national ideology. A work fully realised as art becomes national substance.
— What must we do today to become a fully realised nation?
— Have many Teryans.
— But The Coming Day of Armenian Literature was written only once in a hundred years.
— Even if Vahan Teryan had written no theory, his poems were already a national ideology. The making of a nation. The language was being endowed with immortality.
— It has always seemed to me that Teryan entered our history less through his poems than through the new thinking, culture, psychology and language he established. His presence in Armenian literature, with his contemporary protagonist, was a peaceful revolution not understood in his own time, perhaps not understood today either.
— Yes. Word by word, concept by concept, Teryan entered Armenian literature, Armenian reality. That is to say, he “was understood in his time, is understood today”.
— What relationship should literature and politics have? What is a sensible way for them to interact?
— Literature must be literature, politics must be politics. If politics does not embrace literature, it is not the politics of this nation. If politics does not grow out of its literature and culture, then either the culture and literature are very poor or the politics is foreign. Both were to be the substance of this society. Literature should be rich enough to contain all reality and possess all its answers; the politician should arise from that same society. Your Shakespeare should live within your Churchill.
— How should Armenian literature’s isolation, its separateness from the course of world literature, be overcome?
— What isolation? Or separateness? From where?
— On the tree of world literature, ours is a branch that, regardless of nature’s laws, flowers when it wishes, grows leaves or breaks when it wishes, independently of all the other branches and the root.
— A little late, but we have followed very much the same course.
— Then why are Armenian writers absent from today’s recognised authors of world literature?
— Armenian literature sustains its nation, and that nation lives among all nations. What else do you want? Are you looking for Shakespeares?…
— I am translating Joyce now, and I am not sure any Irish person in their own country is translating any Armenian writer. Why? All the more so since, in the questions they pose and resolve, Armenian writers concede little to Joyce or the other famous figures of world literature. The issue is not standards but visibility and acceptance, being sought out by the world. Perhaps it is also a matter of having a large, powerful country in order to be recognised as a great writer.
— We are part of European culture. There were long periods of confrontation after the revolution; the ice of the Cold War has not yet melted. The standards of a unified world culture are European; political circumstances have placed us in its disdained part. The political isolation formed through ideological confrontation spread to culture as well. That situation continues now.
— Modern technology can overcome that isolation. For example, which work by which Armenian writer is represented on the internet? And according to what principle?
— I would very much like that question to be resolved at state level, with an editorial board of respected people to determine which writer should enter the internet with which work. And not only writers. Armenian art, culture and scholarship can and must have a selection of their finest achievements on the internet.
— The internet could be an excellent way precisely to overcome that separateness and present our values to the world. Is that a task for the Writers’ Union or the state?
— It is a task for the Writers’ Union with state support. Those in power should concern themselves with strengthening their art for the sake of their own stability and strength. At the beginning of the century individuals did this: a Mantashev took the place of the state, financing Tumanyan and Komitas, educating students in the centres of Russia and Europe, creating a nation, strengthening himself.
— Perhaps this is my subjective impression, but there is a difference between your literature, which has shaped the thinking and outlook of several generations of Armenians, whose characters’ behaviour makes people think, teaches them to love and hate, have memory and teeth, struggle and avenge, and the figure you present in interviews and public activity, calling people to kindness, compromise, calm, to living in peace and harmony. Which is the real Hrant Matevosyan?
— Perhaps there really has been a turning point within me, and my words have taken an entirely different direction. We have all changed. The times have changed. The country has changed. You have changed. The criterion of what is genuine and what is not has changed. The boundaries of the natural and the supernatural, the physical and the metaphysical, have shifted.
— Which was your actual grandfather, Avetik or Ishkhan?
— I was going to write a second part of The Trees, in which a third, impartial person would retell the same events, in which baseness would ally itself with strength and they would not destroy each other but live together. I thought I would write it, attach it to the story and create a new novella. But what happened happened, and the reality within me as a memory of the past did not become a text; the terrible reality removed the need to retell the same thing. Now we must speak of other things, or find the strength to encompass all that has happened, bring it into a panorama, generalise and assess yesterday in order to find today’s points of departure. Nothing more terrible happens than in Commander Shavarsh or Anush, yet you come away smiling rather than crushed, because before your eyes is an artistic discovery, a miracle: you have witnessed a birth, not a death. The birth of art. Reality becoming art. We need the joy of discovery, the miracle of understanding…
— Almost all the writers of the sixties, moving beyond the familiar subject, either died or stopped writing; at any rate, they did not remain the writers, the artists who expressed the essential voice of the country, the people, the times. What happened, and why?
— What often happens to us writers happened. What happened to Tolstoy in his day, when he renounced art and turned to politics. There come times when, in the face of reality, it is immoral to concern oneself with literature. It happened to all of us: in the face of this reality it was no longer possible to sing literary trills. Should Vano and Vazgen have gone on writing fine stories, should Levon have gone on deciphering hieroglyphs? Impossible. But we writers are people who die and rise again; as Saroyan says, we do not die just once. So stay and await our resurrection.
— What is your greatest wish today as an Armenian writer?
— The Armenian writer’s greatest wish is to have an Armenian reader. The only wish: to see the Armenian reader’s home flooded with warm light, the reader at work, confident before tomorrow, joy overflowing on their face. To see them freed from this environment of estrangement and alienation.
— Who must take the first step, the Armenian writer or the Armenian reader?
— We will take the first step together. Alexander Myasnikyan and Yeghishe Charents gave each other energy and were the people’s strength, just as the people were theirs. On the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the American president observed that America had lived in isolation and security on its comfortable shores, armoured by its oceans, with no intention of becoming involved in European affairs. But Churchill appeared and, deploying all his knowledge of Shakespeare’s language, drew America into the war. That means the presidents themselves and society itself were so steeped in Shakespeare, so much the sons of one father, that they found one another at once. This is the ideal relationship between the state, society and their literature. And we are not far from that state.
Anahit ADAMYAN
Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, 22 January 2000.