Two children, a boy and a girl, were eating yogurt outside in the sun, a calf of this year's hair was the color of henna, in the green fields, one by one, a calf was plucking the heads of spikes one by one. calling, but he pretended not to understand...
Husik ran from village to village and from village to village through fields, fields, oak groves, hills, and roads to find a place for his dying aunt...
Talking to the donkey, teaching wisdom to the donkey, getting angry with the donkey, giving hope to the donkey, Shirin would go to get wood from the far oaks, the journey was difficult, but in the oak stood the ancient monastery of Saint George, and because the journey was very difficult, one could ignore that the ancient monastery of Saint George was a Catholic monastery...
Grigor Tsornik, six months after Tsornik's death, set out to get a wife. From the villages of Akna, three days' journey away, because in the nearby villages, whoever would give him a girl, no one would give him a girl...
The great grandfather of Temirchens had a dream about their red ox, the ox allegedly grew fat, became beautiful, became unrecognizable, so something bad happened to the ox, and Hakob, the grandson of the great grandfather of Temirchens, professor Hakob, crossed the Blue Light mountain, was looking for the herd of oxen from their Little Armtan village in the sea-colored mountains of Mdzur, their red ox in the herd, on which he had a bad dream. Temirchen's great grandfather. Twenty-seven-year-old professor Hakob was shouting from mountain to mountain in the sea-colored mountains of Mdzur: "Where's the herd! Whose herd is that! Whose herd is that!" and they answered him from mountain to mountain: Little Armtan went to the Euphrates side three days ago! The oxen herd of Little Armtan village went to the Euphrates side three days ago. go away! - and the natural world of the native was slowly absorbed into the essence of the twenty-seven-year-old teacher Hakob, like fine rain is absorbed without loss into black soil, and teacher Hakob Temirchyan wanted to be the writer, describer, mapper of his world, teacher Hakob secretly called himself the writer of Hakob Mndzuri.
The red ox had changed to the point of perishing, had become beautiful to the point of delight, had become the most beautiful creature of the Mntzur sea-colored mountains, and professor Hakob's tonsils were inflamed, he continued on his way to Polis for treatment. It was the last month of the summer of that year nineteen fourteen, a little before the autumn plowing. Winter closed the doors of return, and in the summer of 1915, there was neither Armta, nor the great family of Temirchens, nor a crowd of children waiting for the teacher's return, nor the mute wife of teacher Hakob with four children. There was no whole Western Armenia. In the history of the world, such a thing has not happened to any people, no writer of the world has seen such a monstrous miracle. Zohrap, Varuzhan, Siamanto, Zardaryan, all the writers were killed before the massacre...
In that monstrous summer, Hakob Mndzuri sat, possibly on Kapuytluys mountain, he looked at the countryside and did not understand, he did not understand anything. there were the fields, there were the gardens, there were the houses, there was the road between the villages, but Husik did not run along the road, through the birch trees, through the fields to find a priest for his dying aunt, Shirin did not go to the wood talking to the donkey. The path leading to the wood was slowly turning green.
Hakob Mndzuri, a true Christian, could not curse against the green fields. Shout out - the world was busy with its affairs. Go crazy - how Komitas went crazy... God saved Hakob Mndzuru so that the memories of the dead would have shelter in him. A little more, a little more, and the lavash is spread out on the clay roof, drying in the autumn sun to become dry, the crow stood on the bard and did not see the lavash, and the dog set himself up as a watchman near the lavash and in turn pretended not to see the crow, choosing this year's calf with henna-colored hair one by one in the green fields, as if to especially take patience for, blows the heads of spikes. - Entrance, Tsornikin Grigor went on a journey from twenty-five up to thirty-five villages of Akna to find a suitable wife, and at home he has no bread to satisfy himself. he got lost, he is afraid of Gabo to return home. - Mkrtchents Vahan, the father, convinces his wife to go on a dry road after a long, difficult and lonely winter. - Go ahead, I'll say whatever you say, why do you say let's go on the spring road? - On the spring road, - Nothing else. Thus, about two hundred stories. Two hundred stories, in almost none of which nothing has been done to narrate the original material, which is why the personal names of each and every story are easily forgotten, and, one might say, the stories themselves, but the environment-atmosphere of the stories absorbs you and, like the sun of the southern country, lives with you, lives in you for a long, very long time, maybe forever. The country described by Mdzuru is simply unforgettable. And the surprising thing is that Mndzuri does not have a single paragraph, a sentence, a hint of description of the country: an oak, a birch, a stream, a field, a path, a mountain, an ox, a plow, a heat, a cricket song. from the accent, from the good cheer, from the stupid haste... ("- I have fifty fields." - Only in Armtan it is possible to have fifty fields - in the mountains where it was possible to plow, it was plowed and "I have fifty fields", which ultimately means a description of a mountainous and rocky country).
According to him, "tragedy, drama was not in my writings", Mndzuri described where they went that day and what they did. Mndzuri was "lucky" not to meet the upset prototypes after publishing the stories, they were all swept away by the flood of, say, 1915, Mndzuri could have put "tragedy, drama" into his stories, but he didn't; did not, in my opinion, because of or because of deep respect for the material. He knows his country, its people well, he himself is one of them, his conscience as a peasant does not allow him to exaggerate the descriptions of his fellow villagers, his conscience as a delicate aesthetician forbids him to place an explosive tragedy where that tragedy, as a foreign body, would not be tolerated.
Draw like nature, expand like nature, die like nature, fertilize like nature - as the ear is fertilized, the flower bursts, the stream dries up, the seed dies, the honey gathers. Drama, tragedy, internal collapses are certainly present in all of Mndzuru's stories, as they are necessarily present in life, but this amazing novelist has thrown away, rejected the classic and classicizing literary apricot of drama-tragedy, deceiving us that literature itself reduces to grounded realism, unbiased description of life. He wants to give a true picture of his world, and the literary apricot of "drama" would only and only prevent it, just as the word "yellow-gray, gray-yellow" would prevent the accurate depiction of the color of the beard of the Greek merchant who came from Trebizond to sell Tutu to Armtan. yellow, gray, yellow-gray are the words of artists, and this world is the world of Armtan and only Armtan, the word yellow-gray of artists has no business here, just as a Russian brick would have no business in an Armenian limestone wall. "The hair, beard, and mustache were mixed together. Our mulberry pecmez, what color is urup, their hair and beard were the same color.
Hakob Mndzuri is eighty-five years old. His literature is not a fermentation, it is not a process, it is a finished fact. He spent his eightieth birthday selling candles in the Armenian church in Istanbul. He wrote his fairy tales, chronicles, field paintings, river paintings, short stories, very often just brilliant stories while working as a baker, a porter, a coal dumper from a transport ship. He does not owe us anything. We owe him, at least, the royalties for all his works. Now, when he has spent his talent and life almost exclusively telling about Armenians, it seems to him that he has not done anything for literature, that literature will not respect his weakness to tell only about his compatriots, and the eighty-five-year-old theorizes: "I brought to literature the village of the period 1890-1914. others had done that too, but it was not enough." This is a fragile theory, it can be objected like this. let the past stay in the past. And with the muscle of an old-fashioned writer, literature does not feel the need for theoretical proofs and to be justified by theory at all. That literature exists, and let the theories adapt themselves to that literature.
His literature turns our eyes back to the days when women, fields, salt and water were cults. Hakob Mndzuru's work contains the worship of a woman, salt, a field, a stream, and thus, as an addition for our Armenian readers, the cult of our lost old country. For today's man, the plane has become a way of life, the look from the plane is a way of seeing the country. Mdzuri is not an airplane pilot, nor a horse rider. arising little by little, he clings to the paths of his Armtan, descends with the valleys, climbs with the shelves, ascends with the hills, like a watery stream, which goes crashing and falling; so, inch by inch, scent by scent, whisper by whisper, our good old country is absorbed into you, which if we don't love, which if we look at the city or the universe with contempt, we can lose it for good. Hakob forces Mndzuri to love. A great worship of nature, which will deepen with time and give real weighty value to the writer's landscape paintings.
I would like to end my speech with a quote from an article about the great American artist Andrew Wyeth, which was published in the last issue of 1970 of the International Literature magazine. "The America of skyscrapers, endless roads, perfect cars and high speeds," says the columnist about Wyeth, who, like our Mdzuru, considers himself "the painter of the native border", that America is increasingly impoverishing the other America of small farms, devouring the purity of its forests and fields, irreversibly disfiguring its image. And as decisively as that world of civilization attacks, the undefiled fragments of the past gain the same great value and weight for Wyeth.
There is no need to prove that the globe we all live on is one and the same, and what is said about Andrew Wyeth literally refers to one of the talented Armenian novelists, Hakob Mndzuru.