We need literary struggle, literary competition: open competition, before all our eyes, against and for all of us, readers and writers, for the sake of the republic’s artistic thought. It need hardly be said that artistic thought means thought in general, and its absence means the absence of thought in general. Marx considered those inadequately educated in art inadequately educated altogether; Lenin gave his occupation as man of letters. And it need hardly be stressed that this republic’s artistic thought is lagging behind, that this people is lagging behind in the very field that would seem to be its unique calling. Great philosophers, commanders and public figures are good writers: not also good writers, but great philosophers, public figures and commanders because they are good writers.
If Manfred’s thousand-page “Napoleon,” printed in fifty thousand copies, sells out in an hour without ever appearing in the bookshop, while the splendid García Márquez at best bewilders the reader and at worst leaves the reader indifferent; if a half-ashugh poet—an ashugh, meaning the words from me, the melody from you, and fame from the people for both of us; half an ashugh—still makes halls thunder and is honoured by officials of some standing with “You are the Charents of our day,” then we must stress again that our taste is lagging behind. The taste of that poet, that hall, that official, and all of us who make up this republic’s great assembly and public square is lagging behind.
The calling and purpose of us all, after eating our bread, is to be Mozart or to give birth to and nurture him; humanity is called to nothing else. We all eat bread, one way or another but without fail. How ready we are, or whether we are ready, to become an audience for the Mozart among us or to become Mozart ourselves is somewhat doubtful. If our calling to be a national culture, the only way culture exists, is confused with and tied to a revival of nationalism, which this land has never possessed, then we wait in vain for our next Saryan, Charents and Komitas. More precisely, the republic’s artistic thought has yet to learn many elementary truths: it has not learned them, has not made them the daily bread of each and all of us.
We need the daily presence of world literature in our home; we must feel its breath at every moment. Let us have a conscience and say that this is needed first by those who do not read Russian, or read it poorly. They must not be deprived of it, yet we deprive them and keep them poor. But who are they? They are our tomorrow, and the memory and experience of our recent yesterday tell us that tomorrow’s literate people will be as illiterate as we are today. Second, this literature’s daily presence is needed by us, the so-called connoisseurs, because reading in Russian or another language does not yet mean feeling rich and strong in the Armenian-language world. A work must still be brought from another linguistic world—with losses and discoveries—into the native world, become a cultural fact there, and thus become an arsenal and a field of action for me, the Armenian writer. Those great figures of world literature come into national literatures to define standards, to measure and to be measured themselves. They stimulate aesthetic thought. Only after the introduction of Kierkegaard, Camus, Kafka and many others did Russian aesthetic thought begin to view its Dostoevsky in different lights. We living writers and our great forebears await our examiners. Beneath such examiners’ gaze our great precursor said, “Though we are a small valley, we too have had people and stories worthy of being written down.”
In short, we must think about bringing literature in. Let those who will take something from here, those who need our culture, think about giving; we must think about having world literature in Armenian. We need a monthly journal, the daily presence of world literature, which does not exist: it occasionally makes itself heard with the irregular shots of an outlaw and vanishes for an unknown time. Otherwise we bring forth a Minas and do not know whether this is good or bad until a Kamensky comes and tells us it is good; bring forth a Mansuryan and still do not quite know whether it is good that we have done so; without taking a position, we build bad buildings, erect bad statues and do not know whether they are good or bad.
We write many stories and never receive a true assessment of what we have done; we are afraid of works that are a little crooked, a little unlike the usual. Yet for each of us it is very important: if we had written, say, Aitmatov’s latest novel, would it have been published here or not? Could Armenian aesthetic thought have absorbed it?
We ask, demand, plead for a periodical. Not even one, but two: a monthly journal of literature and criticism, and one of world and all-Soviet literature. Their existence would create an atmosphere of artistic thought in which one could expect genuine literary treasures and their correct interpretation.