Two children, a little girl and boy, were eating yoghurt outside in the sunshine. This year’s calf, its coat the colour of henna, was plucking the heads of grain one by one in the green fields. From the hilltop the field watchman called: whose ca-a-alf is that, who let it loose, the calf will eat the field! And although this year’s henna-coloured calf knew perfectly well that the watchman was calling about it, it pretended not to understand…
Across stubble, fields, poplar groves, hills and roads, from village to village and field to field, Husik ran, looking for a priest for his dying aunt…
Talking to his donkey, instructing his donkey, getting angry with his donkey, encouraging his donkey, Shirin was going to fetch firewood from the distant oak woods. The path was difficult, but in the oak woods stood the ancient monastery of Saint Gevorg, and because the path was so difficult, one could overlook the fact that the ancient monastery of Saint Gevorg was Catholic…
Grigor, Tsornik’s husband, six months after Tsornik’s death, had set out to find a wife. In the villages of Akn, three days’ journey away: who in the nearby villages would give him a daughter? No one would…
The old grandfather of the Temirchyan family had dreamt about their red ox. The ox had supposedly grown fat and beautiful, become unrecognisable; that meant something bad had happened to it. So the old grandfather’s grandson, the schoolteacher Hakob, crossed Mount Kapuytluys and searched the sea-coloured Mndzur mountains for the herd of oxen from their village of Little Armtan, and in that herd for their red ox, about which the old grandfather had had a bad dream. In the sea-coloured Mndzur mountains, the twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher Hakob called from mountain to mountain: where is that he-e-erd from, whose he-e-erd is it, who-o-ose he-e-erd? And from mountain to mountain they answered: Little Armtan’s went towards the Euphrates three days ago-o-o, the herd of oxen from Little Armtan went towards the Euphrates three days ago-o-o! The native landscape slowly soaked into the being of the twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher Hakob, as fine rain soaks into black soil without a drop being lost. The schoolteacher Hakob Temirchyan wanted to be his world’s writer, its describer, its mapmaker. Secretly, the schoolteacher Hakob called himself the writer Hakob Mndzuri.
The red ox had changed almost beyond recognition, grown beautiful enough to fill one with delight, become the most beautiful creature in the sea-coloured Mndzur mountains. But the schoolteacher Hakob’s tonsils became inflamed, and he continued on to Constantinople for treatment. It was the last month of the summer of nineteen fourteen, shortly before the autumn ploughing. Winter closed the paths of return, and in the summer of nineteen fifteen there was no Armtan in the world, no great Temirchyan family, no crowd of children waiting for the schoolteacher’s return, no silent wife of the schoolteacher Hakob with her four children. All of Western Armenia was gone. In world history such a thing had happened to no other people; no writer in the world had witnessed such a monstrous miracle. Zohrab, Varuzhan, Siamanto, Zardaryan—all the writers had been killed before the Great Catastrophe…
That monstrous summer, Hakob Mndzuri was sitting, perhaps, on Mount Kapuytluys, looking at the village world and understanding nothing, nothing at all. The fields were there, the gardens were there, the houses were there, the road through the village was there. But along the road, through the poplar groves and fallow fields, Husik was not running to find a priest for his dying aunt; Shirin was not going for firewood, talking to his donkey. The path that led to the firewood was slowly turning green.
A Christian to the marrow of his bones, Hakob Mndzuri could not curse before the green fields. Cry out? The world was busy with its own affairs. Go mad—as Komitas went mad… God preserved Hakob Mndzuri so that the memories of the dead might find shelter within him. A little more, a little more, and the lavash is spread on the earthen roof, drying in the autumn sun to be stacked away; the crow stands on the poplar and pretends not to see the lavash, while the dog has appointed itself guardian beside the lavash and in turn pretends not to see the crow. This year’s henna-coated calf chooses the grain one stalk at a time in the green fields and tears off the heads, as though deliberately trying the watchman’s patience. — “Introduction”: Grigor, Tsornik’s husband, has set out to find a suitable wife in the villages of Akn, older than twenty-five and younger than thirty-five, while at home he does not even have enough bread to fill his belly. — “Grigor, Tsornik’s Husband”: Pyos, old Gabo’s son, has gone to build the walls around the gardens. He took a blanket to sleep there, lost the blanket, left the wall unfinished, and now sits bewildered in the twilight—the father of a fifteen-year-old boy—afraid of Gabo, afraid to go home. — “The Father”: After the long winter, Vahan of the Mkrtich family is persuading his wife to take a difficult, deserted, supposedly dry path. — Go about your business! And I keep wondering what he is saying, why he says let us take the Spring Road… If we go that way, won’t they see us, won’t they understand, won’t everyone gossip about us?… What a fool I am to stand here listening to you! — “By the Spring Road.” Nothing else. So it goes: some two hundred stories. Two hundred stories, in almost none of which has anything been done to turn the raw material into a story. That is why the names in each and all of the stories are easily forgotten, and, one might say, the stories themselves as well. Yet their setting and atmosphere soak into you and, like a suntan from a southern country, live with you, live within you for a long, long time, perhaps forever. The land Mndzuri describes is simply unforgettable. And the astonishing thing is that Mndzuri has not a paragraph, a sentence, even a hint devoted to describing the land alone—the oak wood, poplar grove, stream, field, path, mountain, ox, ploughing, heat, cricket’s song. All this rises not even from between the actions but from their very core: it is a quality of the actions. You cannot separate that land from the inflection of its people’s speech and movements, their kindly laziness, foolish haste… (“I have fifty fields.” Only in Armtan can one have fifty fields: wherever it was possible to plough in the mountains, people ploughed, and the result was “I have fifty fields,” which ultimately amounts to a description of a mountainous, stony land.)
In his words, “There is no tragedy, no drama in my writings.” Where they went that day and what they did—that is what Mndzuri described. Mndzuri had the “good fortune” not to meet indignant real-life models after publishing his stories: all had been swept away by, let us say, the flood of 1915. He could have put “tragedy, drama” into his stories, but did not. He did not, I believe, because of—or thanks to—his deep respect for the material. He knows his land and its people well; he is one of them. His peasant conscience will not let him exaggerate his fellow villagers’ characters; his conscience as a sensitive artist forbids him to plant an explosive tragedy where it would not be tolerated as a foreign body.
Paint like nature, unfold like nature, kill like nature, make fertile like nature—as the ear of grain is fertilised, the flower bursts open, the stream dries up, the seed dies, the honey gathers. Drama, tragedy—inner collapses—are of course present in all Mndzuri’s stories, as they inevitably are in life. Yet this remarkable prose writer has cast aside, rejected the classical and aspiring-to-be-classical literary purple robe of drama and tragedy, misleading us into thinking he is lowering literature to earthbound realism, to an impartial description of life. He wants to give a true picture of his world, and the literary purple robe of “drama” would only get in the way, just as “yellowish-grey, greyish-yellow” would get in the way of accurately depicting the beard of the Greek trader who came from Trabzon to Armtan to sell tobacco. Yellow, grey, yellowish-grey are painters’ words, but this world is Armtan’s world and Armtan alone; the painters’ yellowish-grey word has no business here, just as a Russian brick would have no business in an Armenian wall of hard stone: “Their hair, their beards, their moustaches were all mixed together. Whatever colour our mulberry pekmez—our urup—is, that was the colour of their hair and beards.”
Hakob Mndzuri is eighty-five. His literature is no longer fermentation, no longer a process, but an accomplished fact. He reached his eightieth birthday selling candles in an Armenian church in Constantinople. His tales, chronicles, pictures of fields and rivers, his stories—very often simply brilliant stories—he wrote in the intervals between working as a baker, a porter, a man unloading coal from a cargo boat. He owes us nothing. We owe him, at the very least, the fees for all his works. Now, having spent his talent and life telling almost exclusively of the people of Armtan, he feels he has done nothing for literature, that literature will not respect his weakness for telling only of his fellow countrymen. And the eighty-five-year-old man theorises: “I brought into literature the village of the period 1890–1914; others had done that too, but it was not enough.” This is a fragile theory; one could answer it by saying: let the past remain in the past. Yet the muscular literature of the venerable writer has no need whatever of theoretical proofs or justification by theory. That literature exists; let theories adjust themselves to it.
His literature turns our gaze back towards the days when woman, field, salt and water were objects of reverence. Hakob Mndzuri’s work contains a reverence for woman, salt, field and stream, and thus, as an additional gift for us Armenian readers, for our lost old country. The aeroplane has become part of everyday life for modern humanity; the view from an aeroplane, a way of seeing the land. Mndzuri does not travel by aeroplane, or even on horseback. Moving forward in little steps, he bends with the paths of his Armtan, descends with its ravines, rises in steps with its terraces and climbs with its hills, like an irrigation stream feeling its way and drawing back. Thus, span by span, scent by scent, whisper by whisper, our good old land soaks into you. If we do not love it, if we scorn it with our gaze fixed on the city or the cosmos, we may lose it forever. Hakob Mndzuri makes us love. A great reverence for nature that will deepen with time and lend the writer’s pictures of fields a real, substantial value.
I would like to end with a quotation from an article about the wonderful American painter Andrew Wyeth, published in the last issue of “Inostrannaya Literatura” for 1970. “The America of skyscrapers, roads of ceaseless movement, perfect machines and high speeds,” says the author about Wyeth, who, like our Mndzuri, considers himself ‘a painter of his native region,’ “that America increasingly oppresses the other America, the America of small farms, devouring the purity of its woods and fields, irreversibly disfiguring its image. And the more resolutely this world of civilisation advances, the greater the value and weight of the unspoilt fragments of the past for Wyeth.”
There is no need to prove that the earth on which we all live is one and the same, and that what is said about Andrew Wyeth applies literally to one of the gifted Armenian prose writers, Hakob Mndzuri.