A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR OF PROSE UNLIKE ANYTHING THAT EXISTED BEFORE
“Memory separates a human being from an animal. Memory stands between the animal and the human. You live in memory, so you burn; you are human, you have accounts to settle, you are restless. Without memory, there is the cow grazing in the open field with no recollections, though her calf was slaughtered yesterday. If that tree has memory, your people have it too. Your people are cut down, slaughtered, dispossessed, mocked, and they flee their memory. They will be dispossessed again, and again, and again, and again they will have no memory, because they are afraid to answer mockery with a fist and dispossession with a blow… You say love, you say we love. You love because you lack the manly courage to bite, break, deprive, hate, and you are afraid of hating. You make your love into a handkerchief and tie it over your eyes, because you are afraid to look with open eyes and hate: what if they see you hate, and kill you…”
Hrant Matevosyan, The Trees
“A complex, original, astonishing style.”
“The very nature of Matevosyan’s artistic vision makes him a unique writer in our literature: he sees the event, what made the event inevitable, and what gave rise to that inevitability.”
“All three parts of the trinity—intellect, conscience, a sense of harmony—are wonderfully balanced in him, and at a high level…”
“Vampilov, Matevosyan, Vysotsky—they are the strongest of that earlier generation who managed to withstand compromise…”
“You have crossed some very important threshold on the road to the highest literature.”
“I now live in the world you created, suffer its suffering, rejoice in its joys.”
“It is difficult to place Hrant Matevosyan’s prose within any particular contemporary movement. Above all, it is prose unlike anything that existed before.”
From reviews and letters
“Do you know you’re staying in a room where our great Yeghishe Charents lived for a long time? Second floor, right wing, the room with the balcony. Consider yourself lucky.”
I consider myself lucky to have met Hrant Matevosyan. In Moscow they all said the same thing about him: an original writer, a personality, a wonderful, kind man.
And so he is. Hrant Matevosyan spoke about Armenia, its history and its present. We went together to Garni and Geghard, places sacred to every Armenian, wandered through Yerevan and sat in his home until midnight.
Reading the chapter about Matevosyan in Andrei Bitov’s Articles from a Novel—Bitov had known him well in his youth—I realised he had scarcely changed. Still conscientious and wise in a peasant’s way, not particularly fond of amusement or conversation. Still drinking a great deal of coffee and sleeping little at night. Loving his Armenia just as intensely, more intensely as he grows older. Still writing only about his village, where he spent his youth and where his family and loved ones live today.
With the same steadiness, almost slowness, he writes his books. He recently turned fifty, yet has written only two volumes, published in Yerevan. Half has been translated into Russian. His books, however, do not linger on bookshop shelves; his name is known throughout the country: he is a laureate of the USSR State Prize. While I was there, the Writers’ Union telephoned: American admirers of his talent were inviting him to the United States. Incidentally, he seemed to me to agree reluctantly. Yet he has something to say to readers, both ours, the Soviet reader, and those abroad. For in Matevosyan’s works—The Buffalo, Tashkent, Old Mountains Beneath the Open Sky, Mother Goes to Find Her Son a Wife and others—the whole world is portrayed. Every people is humanity in miniature; in its fate the eternal questions of life and death, love and hatred, war and peace intersect.
And if the Armenian village of Tsmakut interested only Armenian readers, then he himself would not have succeeded as an artist, Matevosyan believes.
“I do not want to address questions to the unknown. I firmly disagree with the view that a writer should ask questions. But whom should he ask? Time, society, the Almighty? Someone else? Who is to answer these questions? One must enter literature with answers. With answers.”
“But many people—and today we feel this particularly keenly, Hrant Ignatyevich—cannot even formulate the questions posed by the times, let alone answer them.”
“Yes, there are many writers. In Armenia too. It is irritating. It means they do not read. They do not read Leo Tolstoy, they do not know what Pushkin means. What I like in literature is a caring, fatherly attitude towards life and people. Not rebellion, not malice, not gloating, but concern for everything. Anxiety for everyone and everything. Nodar Dumbadze had that outlook. A writer must be a father. All-knowing, all-seeing, all-feeling.”
“Though sometimes you realise you have no strength left, not enough; you can do nothing any more and want only to cry out that you feel bad, that it hurts.”
“Sometimes you grow disillusioned when you feel how little your words help people. When some triumphant events are happening all around and you are obliged to respond in the same key, but cannot, do not want to. Or you see that your response is wrong. And you simply want to fall silent. But then too you realise that this right has been granted to someone else, say Sholokhov or Márquez.”
“Perhaps to Hrant Matevosyan too? It seems to me that not much has been written in thirty years of creative work—only two volumes. I understand that the number of books is not what matters, yet why?”
“Writing is hard. I do not know why it is so hard. But I see a great deal of rubbish and ruthlessly discard it, because that excess is false not only within me, in my thoughts, but in life. At first you think you are encountering real life, then it turns out to be a badly staged performance. There is so much falseness in what you have written that you yourself, let alone your reader, find it hard to read, even though you have portrayed life itself. Yet what you have portrayed is precisely stage direction. You feel that, and you must reach a state that can be called revelation, because without it you cannot move forward. Everything else is theatre.”
“Do you remember Verlaine: all the rest is literature?”
“Yes, very precisely put; that is exactly what I mean. In life, art and culture we have so much that is half-alive or lifeless, so many half-craftsmen, unfulfilled people, that any individual in any craft who does the work well, any completeness, astonishes me. I see that life has come into being here, is present. It is from that position that I accept in art those whom we often try to repel.”
“The masters of the past were confident in everything they did and created, whereas now there is a kind of dejection. I see half-blind people entering the great world of life but unable to master, govern or influence it.”
“I know that a hundred and fifty years ago your ancestor founded a village on an empty site. He must have been a strong individual. Tell me about him.”
“One day he appeared in these parts with an axe in his hand. He lit a fire to rest and heat some water, and froze at his small, innocent daughter’s question: ‘Daddy, there’s no chimney here. How will the smoke go up?’ That phrase was passed down from generation to generation like a legend. They tied the ox to a tree, the mother milked the cow, the girl sat beside the fire. To build a house he had to find materials. He was a conscientious man, so he did not cut down the beautiful, straight-trunked trees. He laid roads, opened springs, built byres, dug kilns, fired bricks. And became God’s deputy on earth.”
“Many, many years later his grandchildren asked him: ‘Why did you choose this very place, in the mountains, far from any settlement?’ And he answered: ‘I arrived here with one axe, and now we have hundreds of goats, a dozen buffalo, twenty cows, a good, well-stocked home. This is a very good place, my son.’”
“He really did create his own state here, his own country. Five more sons were born, and each was the minister of meat and dairy production in that state. There was a queen too: the mistress of the house, with a wooden ladle in her hand. All the daughters-in-law obeyed her.”
“Ten years later another clan appeared. Life flowed far from bustle and cities. But then the great world took one of the men away to war. He became literate, learned Russian and wrote his name on a tree trunk: ‘Yesayi’. They all had wonderful names: Avetik, Harutyun, Hakob, Hovsep, Grigor…”
“I, the weak city-dweller Hrant Matevosyan, go to pay homage to a strong man like my uncle. Strong and enterprising. Energy seethed in him; he could have governed his family, his village, his country, had it been necessary. Because he stood firmly on the earth. Our lost and bewildered world needs such people.”
“Hrant Ignatyevich, your stories and novellas contain so much natural, lived, uninvented folk wisdom and observation that you seem to me a man of another, older generation. Yet you are only fifty.”
“In some measure I am both fortunate and unfortunate. Yes, I can judge past generations, because half my life was spent beside those people. Those generations accompany me to this day. So in a sense I am part of what has gone for ever. Part of their experience.”
It is not easy to talk to Hrant Matevosyan. Not because his Russian is imperfect, not because his unhurried speech often turns into a torrent of impetuous words, but because his way of thinking is astonishingly unusual. Compressed, spiralling, unexpected. I constantly feel that when talking to Matevosyan, as when reading his books, one fails to see or sense some third subtext.
How vividly folk wisdom combines in him with acquired knowledge! Bitov observed rightly: “It is precisely the peasant in him who is an intellectual, not a man of peasant origins who has received a higher education.”
“I think the world began to change fundamentally only in the 1970s. Of course there had been a revolution, wars and much else, but the transformation in people’s consciousness happened before our eyes.”
“In what sense?”
“Before our eyes, over the last fifteen or twenty years, the village of Ahnidzor, for example, founded a century and a half ago by my ancestor Hovhannes Matevosyan, firmly woven together by his hands like an ark, solid and dependable—that age-old structure has begun to break apart and sink. With the passing of people of the old patriarchal mould, much is disappearing, something very important: the feeling of being master of the land. Master of the bread, of the ploughing. Once I could say my wife was thirty years younger than her mother: they repeated one another. But my daughter resembles her mother only in her outward features; in everything else she does not repeat her. A different environment has arisen; a different generation has grown up in that different atmosphere.”
“I came entirely out of that disappearing world. I was brought up there, and I must tell of them, my ancestors and grandfathers. I can no longer change. If, say, I felt a hundred years of life in me, I would tackle new questions as a seeker of truth. But I have no time. That is why I must find wise, truthful words about that departing generation.”
“By ‘that generation’ and that life I understand the fate of the Armenian peasant, the farmer, the worker. You emerged from that rural life and write about it. It is not for nothing that critics call you a ‘village writer’. Let us not argue over the term itself, but any reader will say that your books’ main theme is village life, present or past. Do you not want to write about the city at all, its problems and concerns?”
“Once I put aside what was probably my only story about city life and that same evening began an essay about my village. It happened unexpectedly, and just as unexpectedly I discovered that the life I wanted to describe in one essay deserved to be written about for a whole lifetime. It is interesting to tell of the city: my life and thousands of other lives are shaping modern Yerevan. But so little has been said about the village. Tolstoy did not say it, Sholokhov did not say it. Sholokhov, for instance, wrote well about the virgin lands; he witnessed and took part in those events. But he did not notice how tragically labour and the human being begin to quarrel with each other. Only yesterday they were friends.”
“Writers of my generation add some details to that theme. We still have experience and feeling. But those who come after us will not be able to tell of the peasant who, figuratively speaking, took shape from the first century to the nineteenth. In that sense we are the last of the Mohicans. And we must have time to understand and tell.”
“I dare not speak for all ‘village prose’; I will speak only for myself: I am of Danila’s clan. Do you remember the huntsman of that name in War and Peace, in the village of Natasha’s relative? He appears only once, in the hunting scene. Tolstoy notices him and seems to suggest that I, Tolstoy, can do this too: become Danila… But neither Pushkin, Gogol, Shakespeare, Tumanyan nor the great Armenian democratic literature, it seems to me, has looked at life through Danila’s eyes. Many Armenian writers were peasants’ sons, yet they still looked at life with an ‘aristocratic’ gaze. Their bearing is rural, but their gaze comes from outside… We want to look from within. I want to tell of myself, of my father, who even looked like Danila and blushed as he did when meeting city girls for the first time. I would say Danila is no poorer than Pierre Bezukhov; the real Pierre sleeps inside Danila.”
“I have noticed that the women in your books are complete, strong characters, even when subordinate to men. Aghun in Mother Goes to Find Her Son a Wife, for example. I do not think that is accidental.”
“I am the son of all those women. And I owe them a debt. Men lose themselves, grow weaker. Women are as strong as ever. Perhaps they were tricked into our world and an immense, unbearable burden of work was placed on their fragile shoulders. Such heroic characters are not found only in my works. Is not Nastyona in Rasputin’s Live and Remember such a woman?”
“When you work, is it form or content that leads you forward? Your characters’ language sometimes seems complex; not every reader is prepared to grasp that complexity.”
“But there is nothing deliberate in it. Perhaps it is because this hand is not firm enough that my characters speak in my language. I hope that, if not tomorrow, in the future they will speak in their own voices.”
“How I would like to help a person find their home, their yard, their family. So that it does not all collapse. A human being is fragile. Though we ‘place’ them beneath the atom, pile inhuman difficulties before them and they continue to survive, they are fragile. They need their family, their wife, their household, their cat, their cow… so as not to become utterly orphaned…”
Matevosyan remarked jokingly that his only “achievement” in seeking the unity of form and content was to have found a few true thoughts and expressions. For example: “They plan their past and future, while our way of life runs away from beneath us like someone else’s horse.”
“I have heard that you lead a rather secluded life. What about meetings with readers?…”
“I like meeting a reader who understands. When an audience like that gathers, it is true happiness for me. In such a reader I see someone who shares my thoughts, a supporter. Only half of what a writer creates belongs to him; the rest is the response of his surroundings, a vast audience from the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean.”
“When I am asked whether I feel my reader, whether I see him, I answer that I see him only indirectly. Yet it is not absurd to say I write for Leo Tolstoy. I write for Tumanyan, for my younger brother, a wonderful reader, for Andrei Bitov, my friend. I write for the sake of a few intelligent letters that will be written to me, and once more I am convinced it is not all in vain.”
“And the peasants of that same ‘unviable’ village which you defended from disappearance, believing that the nests from which a people has always drawn its strength must not be destroyed—how do they regard your writing? Do they understand you? It is all about them, after all.”
“They are simply well-mannered, polite people. They accept what the city accepts; in that sense they are subordinate. I am not so naive either as to believe they will read, understand and love me. That will never happen. In any case I am for another reader. No, it is naive to think that I wrote and they read.”
“William Saroyan visited your native Ahnidzor. What did you talk about with him? Saroyan, an Armenian by origin, is one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.”
“Everything… I thought a person could be great, free, like a sanctuary. And I thought that not merely because of the ‘backwardness’ of my circumstances and upbringing. I have read Tolstoy, know Shakespeare, knew the magnificent actor Papazyan, a god of the stage, and all that was a flight of the spirit for me. But Saroyan is higher… In his natural breathing, his freedom of expressing thought and feeling. Before him I felt like a provincial admirer. Lofty flights of imagination came so naturally to his soul. A person, because of a mood or some event in life, often becomes dull and base. Saroyan was elevated, precise and generous in everything—in small things, details, nuances of behaviour, in his existence. When he appeared on television in Yerevan, knowing perhaps two hundred and fifty Armenian words, with those words he expressed the whole world, embraced the whole world, with such subtlety and precision of thought. He stood before me as a truly great human being, and contact with him was a great gift.”
“He loved Gogol very much, especially The Overcoat. Once Saroyan was asked what he wrote about when his material ran out, whether he thought of gathering more material. And that wise, brilliant old man said: I am the material; as long as I exist, there is material for words.”
“Who or what has influenced you most? I mean the whole of Armenian culture.”
“I will answer more broadly than your question. One of the Russian writers said very precisely that the time in which you live is part of the idea of the Homeland, that my homeland is my time.”
“Well, from other times, perhaps the Twentieth Congress, the spirit of freedom and openness. Then the spirit of white bread, when it began to be sold without queues. Then Gurgen Mahari’s return from Siberia. Then the publication of Yeghishe Charents’s poems in a complete collection. And from my school days, only one: Hovhannes Tumanyan. From childhood only he has remained within me, Hovhannes Tumanyan.”
“How do you regard the changes taking place in our lives? What do you consider important in village life now?”
“We must restore the peasant’s respect for himself and his work. Change the attitude towards work. Even if that work does not always yield quick results and is wasted, something still remains. You remain, a fine worker of the land. One must work, and work will repay you. Only work, only doing something will save a person. Work with a spade in your hand. Otherwise there will be nothing. We need hard-earned bread. If you cannot feed yourself, things are bad. In Armenia every scrap of land is worth its weight in gold. One must understand what a mountain forest means, what mountains mean. One must love, cherish, preserve. Even the mountains.”
“Sometimes you hear that people seem to be returning to the village now, going for weekends, buying houses, building summer homes. Even if temporarily, they come. I would like to ask each one for an honest answer: why are they returning, what do they want? Many will answer: to cultivate the land, plant trees. And then? So they can buy a car. Buy a car… That is the tragedy: people want an easy life. But no one thinks of hard, bitter bread. And they must think. Think that you were born there and must return there for good. A person must have a sense of their small homeland, of being its master here, in this small homeland. On this handful of earth. Not its guest. You are a guest in other places, other towns and villages. There you are a stranger. But here, where you were born, you are master and labourer, prince and servant. A fine servant in the land of your fathers and grandfathers.”
“Before our eyes human psychology is changing dangerously. On the one hand it is good, on the other an enormous responsibility, to feel oneself master of the immense territory called the USSR. If something happens, you will be protected as a citizen of the Soviet Union, but on the other hand that feeling brings out your irresponsible attitude towards the small country, the small homeland where you were born and grew up.”
“In this connection I remember a parable of Tumanyan’s. There was a terrible drought and no harvest, although the peasants had worked the land honestly. What to do? They went to a neighbouring, wealthier region. Perhaps, they thought, there had been no such disaster there. But there was no harvest there either. They went farther, yet there too the disaster had not spared people. And the peasants realised that misfortune had struck the whole country.”
“Today we are spoiled. We are sure help will come of itself. We can forget about the land. Some are convinced there is always bread in the Kuban, and the Kuban will not abandon us if disaster strikes. The people of the Kuban, I am sure, think grain grows in France or Canada, and if something happens we will bring bread from abroad.”
“I see one salvation: in the existence of the Azerbaijani or Armenian who still trusts the horse. It seems backward, that thought smells of conservatism, but it is a sacred backwardness. The man who relies on his horse, who is answerable to his family, his collective farm, his state, will feed his family, set aside a share for the collective farm, help his country.”
“You may be surprised, but how do we explain that our grandfathers took two tonnes of hay home from my village’s fields, while now nothing is left of those fields?”
“We must work today to see results later. But I think here we must think and see in terms of generations. As one public figure told another in some emergency: you will not understand now; the generation that is now in kindergarten will understand us. Restructuring consciousness is hard work, and I think it is work with a horse, not a machine. Daily, painstaking, unhurried.”
“Renewal. But there are facts we cannot shut our eyes to, and we know them: millions stolen, the state defrauded through falsified figures, a minister who is a criminal… Your hair turns white.”
“If we speak of literature, acceleration here means above all respect for the individual. The writer’s individuality. The creator. The seer of truth. You must be able to see and understand him, even if he says something not everyone understands at once. He must be respected and regarded as an end, not as material. A true writer is always a great end. Society needs him as it needs air. He is the first to understand what is happening and what will happen. It has always been so, in Russia and in Armenia…”
“Hrant Ignatyevich, if you were asked to write an autobiography, how would you begin?”
“I was born in 1935. The picture of my life for the next fifteen, twenty, even thirty years is far closer to the times of Tumanyan, Tolstoy and Homer than to our own day. I worked the land, mowed hay, helped a calf to be born, grafted a tree—to avoid listing everything, let me say at once: if the legend of the Flood were repeated, I, like Noah, could restore the culture of farming and livestock husbandry on earth… And if something happened to humanity’s memory, I could reconstruct the code of human morality in the image and likeness of my fellow villagers, from the picture of their life in those days…”
“I would like to invent many wonderful people, and then there would be no room left for bad people…”
On that high note my conversation ended with an extraordinary man, thinker, peasant, servant of literature, the author of prose “unlike anything that existed before”.
Interview by Felix MEDVEDEV
Ogonyok, Moscow, No. 1, 1987.