Unbelievable, but a fact: after the genocide, the minds and hearts of those who remained should have been paralysed, yet the opposite happened. Bakunts has this image: where Petu fell, upon his blood and marrow, the grass grew more luxuriantly. So yesterday’s valley of blood was blossoming with culture. Everyone created—painters, architects, musicians, writers—and all were poets, all created well, even those who seemed destined from birth to be barren. The loss of age-old dreams and a real homeland was compensated by a spiritual homeland. The richly gifted, colourful, light-breathing Mahari testifies that, largely to annoy Charents, Bakunts promised to live a hundred years, citing his ninety-year-old grandfather, who still cracked walnuts with his teeth. He did not live that long; even together, he and Charents did not. The three of them—Mahari, Bakunts and Charents—with Mahari’s known unknown years deducted, perhaps. His tragic violent death was not only his death, but the end of many, many beginnings, and it brought our starry traveller to the grave too. This is not merely a phrase to glorify their faithful companionship; it is substance. When everyone was thinking of saving his own skin, Charents, still outside prison, described his slandered, imprisoned friend this way:
…And for your marble words,
Ancient, fragrant as the old,
Indelible inscriptions on our ancient
Carved-stone, doorless chapels,
And for the mysteries, sacred as chrism,
Kept in the pure chalices of your songs,
Ever-enchanting mysteries,
Like the mystery of our Nairian spirit,
For your “Mirhav”—and for the luminous,
Forever sanctified by Arpenik’s memory,
Fragrant “Alpine Flower,”
Whose immaterial scent will linger forever,
And finally for your lofty, heroic
“Sower,” who with noble hands
Upon the black fallows of our black existence
Scatters light and selfless seed,
For all this—and for that thousand-year-old
Apricot Pipe of yours,
Sounding the song of peace
Longed for through the centuries—and while our people
Have even a handful of earth beneath the sun,
It will sound with brotherly songs,
For all this, oh my poor friend,
I bless you now with my unsullied song…
For all this—and for your tragic
Suffering, which now once again
Mingles grandeur with your unsullied song,
I hold out a brotherly hand to you…
And praise you here once more with pure
Lips, as only days ago,
When you were still an unblemished man,
And I was your poet friend.
This miraculous ode, so splendidly exalting the slandered Bakunts, is even more a tribute to Charents himself, sinewy and copper-forged, his unbreakable manhood and his physically palpable sense of the grief of the approaching days. The heavy tragedy of what happened and passed—yet has not passed in its consequences, making its great absence felt at every moment today—will not be understood, not by the ignorant: an ignorant person would not know so precisely where literature’s heart lies. No, those who will not wish to understand are conscious, hardened enemies of culture, evil people who, even after killing and burying, look with malice for a long time at the place where their victim stood.
Bakunts’s untimely absence was a tragedy for him and his contemporaries, but a greater tragedy for us, his successors in Armenian literature, for the whole of Soviet literature, for world literature. Through his mouth we were going to say something to the world. In today’s interconnected, interlinked, intertwined world, talent can be the child of one people but never the property of one people alone. How impoverished we Armenian readers would feel without the American Faulkner, the Spanish-speaking Márquez, without the immense achievement of Tolstoy! Perhaps as impoverished as those peoples have been by losing a beautiful and truthful Armenian word when Bakunts’s caravan was struck down.
This is not a general lament for the young who died prematurely, nor a plea to the enemies of culture not to raise their hands against talent. Glory to those they strike, whether García Lorca in Spain or Axel Bakunts in Armenia: the people overlook their deviations, wipe away their blemishes and sanctify them. This is the wish to straighten our own hump beside his upright stature. It is a word about the author of “Mirhav” and “Sabu,” “The Modest Girl” and “Tigranuhi,” “Charki” and “Gyulbahar,” “The Apricot Pipe” and “Kyores,” “The Sunset of the Province” and the unfinished novel “Abovyan.” It is the profound awareness that in today’s world, more than a wrestling match between standing armies, natural sciences, intelligence services and economies, there is a struggle of cultures. Woe to the people whose culture emerges defeated: afterwards the people themselves face total and unconditional surrender. That is how it is, and only that way. Yet our culture’s commander was eliminated at the very start of battle. We call him a commander not because our circumstances are cramped—though they certainly are not spacious—but because, among his contemporaries and us successors, language and the people endowed no one but Charents as abundantly and in the way they endowed Bakunts.
He was a new beginning in outlook and aesthetics. Many developments looking towards the future, which we successors would find hard to discern even fifty years later, were already taking breath and shape in his work fifty years before us. Recall the collision of clay and metal, the twentieth century and the Middle Ages, national and individual enclosure and a nationless, impersonal mass procession in “The Sunset of the Province,” or the endless chain of phantasmagoric images in “Kyores,” so celebrated today. It becomes clear that almost every work of his was a new beginning, and as such essential for us all.
What the people had given him and what he was to return cannot be compared with what he managed to return. Yet even what survived his work as an agronomist, his abruptly closed work and life, his devastated archives—in short, his enthusiastic contemporaries and times, to whom destroying and building seemed equally easy—and especially what he managed to correct and edit with his Momik-like fingers, places him among modern culture’s greatest masters. The small size of his output is fully compensated by the precision with which he depicts the epoch and its people. To call a writer who could not finish “Karmrakar,” the epic of social enmity, the First World War, interethnic massacres and civil struggles; a writer who, in the Armenian mountains thousands of versts from Smolny and Deir ez-Zor, gathered only distant, distorted, peasant echoes of revolution and genocide; a writer whose hand constantly recalls Armenian medieval miniature painting and khachkar art—epochal, accurately epochal—will sound absurd to the newest successors. To those for whom the eternally saving creed of internationalism excluded national dignity and efforts of resistance; for whom the unfailing, hundred-per-cent embodiment in a novel of this or that useful idea turned living people into chess pieces and those tendentious novels into chessboards; for whom the socialist reconstruction of the village was wholly contained within the quadrilateral of party cell, village council, collective-farm administration and people. They wanted to be epochal and indeed were, but only for two days. Then living life, swelling, transformed that reality, and the literature that reproduced it precisely remained in its epoch, although it might have happened that the reality disappeared and its literature remained. Both reality and literature were thesis-driven, intentional, and both fell behind. Yet Bakunts’s “Gyulbahar,” about the wrong, the missed, the secondary, the incidentally important, remained.
Bakunts’s view of people and phenomena was fundamentally new; the style brought by that outlook was new; Bakunts the writer in his entirety was new and unprecedented. As such, he is a guiding sign for us successors, perhaps the strongest sign among all our predecessors, just as Teryan’s “Land of Nairi” cycle was a guiding sign for him among the many greats before him. Bakunts was new not merely as every more or less gifted creator looks at the world afresh, admires and is disappointed, marvels and grows angry. He was new on the scale of an epoch: before him, however great the individual personalities, they could not and did not see the world and its phenomena as Bakunts did.
His outlook retained not even a memory of his predecessors’ hopes, in the age of national awakenings, to summon the heroism of ancient centuries among contemporaries buried in their wretched three-layered tomb of religion, society and nation—hopes ending in bitter disappointment. Nor did it retain a love passed from generation to generation for those “madmen” who did not believe in the people’s strength, reduced its role in its own salvation to zero, stripped the people of identity and considered its freedom their own matter of life and death, whose end was again deep disappointment. In essence, Bakunts’s gaze is towards the people, upon the people—it is a view from within the people. That is, he does not see them as material for battle or salvation, does not approach them with a ready-made programme, but reveals to us the mystery of being within the people, and that mystery is good. Again: it is not he, dressed in folk costume, who speaks in the people’s name; rather, decisively the reverse—the people speak through his mouth. His living art grows from his reportage and sketches and could not be other than it is. The multitude of living models does not allow him to create art through authorial coercion. It is art that comes into being, which is the essence of our century’s literature.
We are grateful to the people who gave him birth, to his time and his people’s language, for having our own emissary in him alongside the century’s greatest artists.