Growing stronger and faster, the end-of-the-century ball of worries rolls over us. Vahagn Davtyan's poem contains a spirited echo from the happy and sad years of the distant twenties.
Davtyan is the son of his motherland and the heir of its literary greats - the effort of the motherland to keep its face and weight, not to be distorted in the new spheres of "weightlessness" of existence, passes through Davtyan, and from that effort, Davtyan's poem becomes strong.
It is said: "We are all sailors of this little ship called the earth, and outside the ship the cosmic desolation is nothing. We must caress the earth with fearful love."
Poetry is obliged to caress its motherland and the language of the motherland with the same fearful love, because it is primarily the problem of its being or not being poetry, because even a desert equal to the cosmic desolation is beyond the language-homelands for a poem, and Esperanto will not give birth to a poem.
Davtyan is the singer of his reborn homeland and the rebirth of his homeland. The appeal of one's Small Motherland in the Big Motherland, the Small Motherland itself, because fearing to love the small and live with the love of the big, is only a great poetic short-termism, if not a great irresponsibility, if not a rootless wanderlust. Yes, Davtyan's homeland is Armenia, his love is his love, his arsenal is his native culture, and those of us who are unique in the knowledge of which will be compared to him. No, Davtyan did not change the content of our poetry, nor did he have the desire to renew the forms, he was not tempted by the lures of the world's newest greats and thus did not appear in the group of those pioneers, in the rearguard of the avant-garde, or, in other words, he did not become a resident of their spiritual province, he preferred to remain an Armenian, himself and a provincial, firmly convinced that such an old household craft as poetry never to be industrialized, that literature is divided into provinces and capitals in the heads of those who do not know the truth, only that literature is a multi-capital city, or a world of changing capitals, that the center of that world is my province, and in that province, my unique Self.
Davtyan's poem comes from his personal biography and his homeland.
His poem has an image...we would ask any Armenian artist to depict the poems of Tumanyan, Isahakyan, Teryan, Charents, Varuzhan, Metsarents with a picture, and he would paint Davtyan's poem as well... that poem has an image, and that image is bright, pure blue. No, it is not to avoid looking at blind justice. Life for him, even more patriotic life, for him as an Armenian, life is a sudden invention - this is the sudden source of light, this is why the constant vibration of light is on his poem. After all, everything possible was done so that neither he himself, nor his motherland, nor his successful verses and poems were shed light.
He was born in Arabkir on the Euphrates. He was born as a boy in order to be of military service age in 1941 and to go to prison. Turk's speech bitterly admires that stature. "What an age to die..."
Water was supplied to the quarries of New Arabkir from Hrazdan, water was taken out of the gorge with barrels. Then, when I saw the new Arabkir, it was a hot garden.
Green field of youth
They drove crazy steeds,
Basher is a fire.
They were running, flying.
As if they were firebirds
They were flying...
In the fall of 1941, the military unit was thrown from the deserts of Mongolia to the swamps of Belarus with cargo trucks, of course. It's called getting hit first. Of that generation of boys, only a few survived. While drowning in the river on the way to the retreat, he stuck to a box... of butter. Butter, yes. He ate it, took it back with a helmet. In 1960, twenty years after we met, he still hated butter. However, it is not that terrible, neither the broken soldier, mixed with mud, in the air, nor the image of the soldier fleeing in panic fear, babbling like an animal. Karashar was given a five-minute stop in the desert steppe - the military unit will all get rid of its natural needs. I have seen such a picture, it was disgusting. And he is the son of an Armenian Christian, he leaves, he leaves again. And now the train has moved, and he, that young man who wrote poems about school and girlfriends, runs after the train, runs and does not know if he will reach it or not.
Like a puppy from cold water, a person wants to swim out of that frozen memory, jump out, especially since there are wonderful boys on the rescue bank: Hakob, Suren, Paruyr, Hrant... who would soon become Hakob Salakhyan, Suren Aghababyan, Paruyr Sevak, Hrant Tamrazyan, colorful Mahari would come from Siberia, Hamo Sahyan from Baku.
We early tasted both trial and death,
Life was not given to us freely as a gift.
And that's why there is none in the whole world
More precious than our happiness.
Even before the war, his first poem sent to the editor was printed and printed without any changes; the poem did not ask for correction, so to speak. He says: "They corrected only my name, I signed Vahak Davityan according to Arabkir people, they corrected it themselves." It is perhaps the only intervention of a foreign hand in his work. And the great test for every true poet is kept here. It seems that everything is successful, you write and they print, you write and they print again, then you yourself become the editor-in-chief and you write and you also print your not-so-good and not-so-bad poems, in front of which the reader cannot justify his displeasure, nor take those poems to his heart with unreasoned love. At that decisive moment, an inner itch is needed: an inner itch, jealousy, an awareness of the insignificance of what you have done in front of what you have to do, an awareness of the insignificance of the possible manifestation of poetry, of what you have achieved against the cosmic greatness, a deep understanding of the fact that cultures are weapons in the hands of the homelands today, cultures are fighting today. Davtyan had that jealousy. The collection "Wine Song" recorded a breakthrough in the even, healthy, proportional cardiogram of his poetry, which did not give reason to complain to literary critics. the epic "Tondraketsiner", which was well received by the literary community, he thoroughly reworked, then the books "Tsukh Pharani" and "Ankez Moreni" followed, then the "Tagharan" series. "Requiem" then...
That sacred anxiety, that honor of the literary work did not leave Davtyan and does not leave even in our confused times, when the very essence of the literary work seems to be an unnecessary luxury alienated from the national life.
1977