Literature was Aghababyan’s creed. There are those who lack the strength of his faith, and those who lack the word for their faith. He drew his fellow believers to him through love and reverence, and met those who did not share his faith and word with disdain and indifference. Belonging or not belonging to literature determined his relations with writers, the authorities and his time.
And if even he himself, in a moment of weakness, inattention or helplessness, felt that he was not at the height whose crowned grandeur was above all the fruit of his own effort and suffering, his relations with himself deteriorated. Simply put, he bowed his head before himself as a pupil before a teacher.
His elevated taste and wakeful conscience, entirely his own, Aghababyan’s and bearing his distinctive stamp, would often have made his eyes, beautiful as a girl’s, lower themselves before his own judgement, had his ever-thirsting nature, always a pupil before reality and art, not kept him in ceaseless movement, in continual comings and goings, advances and retreats: between the eternally mistaken yesterday and the eternally right present, between parties and parties, East and West, old and new. The sword of orthodoxy, which belonged to the age, never appeared in Aghababyan’s hand. He was no orthodox believer, not even an orthodox destroyer of orthodoxy. Not all the sufferers of his time were haloed by Aghababyan’s word, for his just child’s eye did not see the poetic halo of the divine word above their poor human heads. Nor were all the crowned figures of his time uncrowned by his hand, for they were at least true witnesses to their age, the age of tyrants and praises sung to tyrants. There is no time without witnesses; without witnesses there is no time. And time cannot be cut off and thrown away, cannot even be corrected. He was not the brave man who empties a Mauser into past times as into the dead.
He had another way of punishing: he spoke his word of appreciation to the end, and his “brick” retained what was most essential. Outside that “brick” lay nothing worthy, but all that was unworthy.
A son of a country that had lost its sovereignty, a country that had entrusted the power of sovereignty to the true Word, he longed for his country’s culture to have a full and rightful presence in the splendid procession of the world’s great culture, all the more because his Charents and other examples assured him that such a presence was possible.
And even if that culture, its country and their time are now a sunken bell that will never ring in other days, and even if Aghababyan and his generation of splendid men understood that doom, his blameless effort was nonetheless as full of faith as that of those whose homelands and times remain intact today — still intact.