A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR A PROSE THAT HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE
"Man and animal are separated by memory. Memory is placed between cattle and man. You are in memory, so you are on fire, you are human, you have bills, you are restless and you are not in memory: the cow grazes in the open field without memories, and the calf was slaughtered yesterday. That tree has a memory, so do yours. They cut you off, butcher you, deprive you, make fun of you, and you run away from your memory, and you will be deprived again, and again, and again, and again, and will have no memory again, because they are afraid to respond to mockery with a fist and cut off the deprivation... You say love, you say we love. You love because you don't have the manhood to bite, break, deprive, hate, and you are afraid to hate. You make your love a handkerchief, blindfold your eyes, because you are afraid to look with open eyes and hate, and suddenly they will see that you hate, and they will kill you..."
Hrant Matevosyan, "Trees"
"Sophisticated, original, amazing style."
"The very type of artistic view makes Matevosyan a unique writer in our literature. he sees both the event and that which made the event inevitable, and that which gave birth to that inevitability."
"All three parts of the trinity (intellect, conscience, sense of harmony) in his case are in a wonderful balance and on top..."
"Vampilov, Matevosyan, Vysotsky - they are the strongest from the previous generation, who were able to resist compromises..."
"You have crossed some very important borderline to higher literature."
"I now live in the world you created, I suffer its sufferings, I rejoice in its joys."
"Hrant Matevosyan's prose is difficult to place in any specific modern direction. It is first and foremost a prose that has never existed before."
Excerpts from reviews and letters
- Do you know that you live in an apartment where our great Yeghishe Charents lived a long time ago? Second floor, right wing, room with balcony. Consider yourself lucky.
And I consider that I was lucky to know Hrant Matevosyan. In Moscow, they repeated the same thing about him: he is an original writer, a personality, a wonderful, kind person.
That's right. Hrant Matevosyan told about Armenia, its history, today. We went with him to Garni and Geghard, sacred places for every Armenian, wandered around Yerevan, and stayed at his house until midnight.
Reading the chapter about Matevosyan in the book "Articles from the Novel" by Andrei Bitov, who knew him well in his youth, I realized that he has hardly changed. As before, he is conscientious and wise in a peasant way, not particularly fun-loving and chatty. As before, he drinks a lot of coffee and sleeps little at night. He loves his Armenia just as strongly, stronger with age. As before, he writes only about his village, where he spent his youth, where his relatives and friends live today.
Just as steadily, almost slowly, he writes his books. His fiftieth birthday has recently passed, and he has written only two volumes, published in Yerevan. Half of it is translated into Russian. While his books do not remain in bookstores, his name is known throughout the country - he is a recipient of the USSR State Prize. In my presence, he received a call from the Writers' Union, American admirers of his talent were inviting him to the United States. By the way, I thought he reluctantly agreed. Meanwhile, he has something to say to the reader, both our Soviet and foreign one. Because in Matevosyan's works, such as "Buffalo", "Tashkend", "Old mountains under the open sky", "Mother goes to marry her son" and others, the whole world is depicted. Not every nation is a model of humanity, the eternal questions of life and death, love and hate, war and peace intersect in its destiny.
And if the Armenian village of Tsmakut was interesting only to the Armenian reader, then he would not be successful as an artist, Matevosyan thinks.
- I don't want to ask questions to the unknown. I strongly disagree with the notion that a writer should ask questions. But who to ask? Time, society, high? Someone else? Who should answer these questions? Literature should be entered with answers. With answers.
- But many people, and today we especially feel it, Hrant Ignatevich, are not only unable to answer the questions posed by the time, but also to formulate them.
- Yes, there are many writers. In Armenia too. It's annoying. It means they don't read. They don't read Leo Tolstoy, they don't know what Pushkin means. I like the caring-paternal attitude towards life and people in literature. Not rebellion, not malice, not malice, but concern for everything. Anxiety about everyone and everything. Here Nodar Dumbadze had a similar point of view. A writer must be a father. Omniscient, omniscient, omniscient.
Although, sometimes, you realize that you don't have the strength anymore, it's not enough, and you can't do anything anymore and you just want to shout that you feel bad, that it hurts.
Sometimes you get frustrated when you feel that your words are not helping people. When some major events are happening around you and you have to respond in the same way, but you can't, you don't want to. Or you see that you don't answer like that. And you want to just shut up? But here too you understand that this right is given to someone else, let's say Sholokhov or Marquez.
- And maybe Hrant Matevosyan? It seems to me that not much has been written for thirty years of creativity - only two volumes. I understand that it's not the number of books that matters, but why?
- It is difficult to write. I don't know why it's so hard to write. But I see a lot of garbage and ruthlessly throw it aside, because that excess is a lie not only in me, in my thoughts, but also in life. At first it seems like you are encountering real life, and then it turns out to be a poorly staged play. There is so much falseness in your writings that you, let alone your reader, find it difficult to read, even though you have depicted life itself. But what you picture is exactly the direction. You feel it, and you have to reach a state that can be called revelation, because it is impossible to go forward without it. Because the rest is theater.
- Do you remember Verlaine - the rest is literature?
- Yes, it is very accurate, I am talking about that. We have so much half-living or inanimate in life, art, culture, so many half-artisans, non-existent people, that any personality in any craft, if it does the job well, any completion amazes me. I see that life has taken place here, is present. It is from these positions that I accept in art those whom we often try to repel.
The masters of the past had confidence in everything they did, created, and now there is some depression, I see half-blind people who enter great life, but are not able to rule, manage, influence.
- I know that your ancestor founded a village in an empty place 150 years ago. He must have been a strong personality. Tell about him.
– Once he appeared in these parts with an ax in hand. He lit a fire to relax and heat water. And was petrified by the question of the little, naive daughter. "Dad, there is no pipe here, how will the smoke rise?" That phrase has been passed down from generation to generation as a myth. The ox was tied to the tree, the mother milked the cow, the girl sat by the fire. In order to build a house, he had to find building materials. He was a man of conscience, that's why he didn't cut down the beautiful trees with straight trunks. He laid roads, opened springs, built barns, dug furnaces, fired bricks. And became God's deputy on earth.
Many years later, his grandchildren asked him: "Why did you choose this particular place, in the mountains, far from settlements?" And he answered: “I got here with an ax, and now we have hundreds of goats, a dozen buffalo, twenty cows, well, a house full. This is a very good place, son."
Indeed, he created his state, his country here. Then five more sons were born, and each of them was the minister of meat and milk industry of that state. And there was also the queen, the hostess, with the wooden ladle in her hand. All brides obeyed her.
Ten years later another clan appeared. Life flowed away from the hustle and bustle of the cities. But here the great world took one of the men to war. He became literate, learned Russian, and wrote his name to the arborist, "Isaiah." They all had wonderful names: Avetik, Harutyun, Hakob, Hovsep, Grigor...
I, Hrant Matevosyans, a weak city dweller, bow down to such a strong person as my uncle. Strong, proactive. The passion was boiling in him, he could rule his family, his village, his country if he had to. Because he stood firm on the ground. Our lost and lost world needs such people.
- Hrant Ignatevich, in your stories and novels there are so many natural-vital, uninvented, popular wisdom and observations that you seem to me to be a person of a different, older generation. But you are only 50 years old.
- To some extent, I am a happy and unhappy person. Yes, I can judge past generations because half of my life was spent around those people. Those generations accompany me to this day. So, in a sense, I am a part of the unconverted past. Part of their experience.
It is not easy to talk to Hrant Matevosyan. Not because his Russian is imperfect, not because his slow speech often turns into a flurry of words. But because he thinks amazingly unusual. Tight, spiral, unexpected. It always seems to me that when talking with Matevosyan, as when reading his books, you don't see or feel some third context.
How vividly folk wisdom compares with the knowledge gained in it. Bitov noticed correctly. "It is the peasant who is intelligent in him, not the person who came from the peasantry and received a higher education."
- I think that the world began to fundamentally change only from the 70s of the 20th century. Of course, there was a revolution, there were wars and many other things, but the revolution of people's consciousness happened before our eyes.
- In what sense?
- In the last 15-20 years before our eyes, the village of Ahnidzor, for example, founded one and a half hundred years ago by my ancestor Hovhannes Matevosyan, tightly interwoven by his hand, like an ark, strong and reliable, that century-old structure has started to collapse and go to the bottom. People of the old, patriarchal temper are increasingly losing a lot, a very important thing: the sense of master of the land. Bread, the owner of the plow. At one time I could say that my wife is younger than her mother by thirty years, they repeated each other, but here my daughter resembles her mother only in external features, in everything else she does not repeat her. A different environment was created, a different generation grew up in that different atmosphere.
I'm completely out of there, out of that withdrawing environment. I was brought up there, and I have to tell about them, my ancestors and grandfathers. I can't change anymore. If I felt, say, 100 years of life in me, I would deal with new problems like a seeker of truth. But I don't have time. That is why I need to find a wise, truthful word about the departing generation.
- By "that generation" and that life, I mean the fate of the Armenian peasant, builder, worker. You've come out of that rural life and you're writing about that life. It is not for nothing that criticism calls you a "village writer". Let's not argue about the term itself, but any reader will say that the main theme of your books is village life, modern or past. And you don't want to write about the city, its problems and worries?
- Once I already put aside perhaps my only story about the life of the city and in the same evening I started to write a review about my village. It came as a surprise, and just as much as a surprise, I discovered that the life I wanted to tell about in an essay is a life worth writing about for the rest of your life. It is interesting to talk about the city, not that my life and thousands of other destinies shape modern Yerevan, but so little is said about the village. Tolstoy didn't say it, Sholokhov didn't say it. Let's say, Sholokhov wrote well about Khopan, he was a witness and participant of those events, but he did not notice how tragically work and man begin to argue with each other. Meanwhile, yesterday they were friends.
Writers of my generation add some detail to that theme. We still have experience and feeling. But those who come after us will not be able to tell about the peasantry, which, conventionally speaking, was formed from the first century to the 19th. We are Mohicans in that sense. And we have to make sense and tell.
I don't dare to talk about the whole "village", I will say only about myself. I am of the line of Daniel. Do you remember in "War and Peace" there was a hunter by that name in the village of Natasha's cousin? he only appears once in a hunting scene. Tolstoy notices him and seems to make it clear that I, Tolstoy, can also reincarnate as Danila... But neither Pushkin, nor Gogol, nor Shakespeare, nor Tumanyan, nor the great Armenian democratic literature, it seems to me, looked at life through Danila's eyes. Most of the Armenian writers were the sons of peasants, but nevertheless they looked at life with a "noble" view. Their size is rural, and their view is from the outside... And we want to look from the inside. I want to tell about myself, my father, who even looked like Danila and blushed like him when he met the girls of the city for the first time. I would say that Danila is not poorer than Pierre Bezukhov, the real Pierre lies in Danila.
- I noticed that the women in your books are complete, strong characters. Even being submissive to a man. For example, Aghun from the novel "Mother goes to marry her son". I don't think it's a coincidence.
- I am the son of all those women. And I owe them. Men lose themselves, weaken. And women are as strong as before. Perhaps they were tricked into our world and placed on their fragile shoulders a huge, unbearable job. Such heroic characters are not only in my works. Isn't that Nastyona from Rasputin's Live and Remember?
- When you work, is the form or the content what drives you? Sometimes the language of your characters seems complicated, not every reader is ready to understand that complexity.
- But there is no intention in it. Maybe the lack of strength in this hand is the reason why my characters speak my language. I hope that if not tomorrow, then in the future they will speak with their own voice.
How I would like to help a person find his home, his yard, his family. So that it doesn't all fall apart. Man is not fragile. Although we "put him under the atom", we put inhuman difficulties in front of him and he continues to survive, but he is fragile, he needs his family, his wife, economy, he needs a cat, a cow... so that he does not become an absolute orphan...
Matevosyan jokingly noted that his "earning" in the search for the union of form and content is only that he found a few correct thoughts and expressions. For example: "They plan their past and future, while our behavior runs away from under us like a foreign horse."
- I heard that you live a rather closed life, and meetings with readers?
- I like to meet an understanding reader. When such a hall gathers, it is a real happiness for me. In such a reader I see a sympathizer, a supporter. The writer owns only half of what he creates, the rest is a response to the environment, which is a vast hall from the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean.
When I am asked if I feel my reader, do I see him, I answer that I see only mediated, but it is not absurd to say that I am writing for Leo Tolstoy. I am writing for Tumanyan, for my younger brother, a great reader, for Andrey Bitov, my friend, for some smart letters that will be written to me, and I am making sure once more that everything is not in vain.
- And the villagers, of the same hopeless village that you protected from loss, because you believed that it is impossible to destroy the nests from which the people have drawn their strength at all times, how do they feel about your writings? Do they understand you, isn't it all about them?
- They are just educated, polite people, they accept what the city accepts, they are subordinates in that sense. I am not naive enough to believe that they will read me, understand me, and love me. There will never be anything like it. In any case, I am for a different reader. No, it is naïve to think that if I wrote it, they did it too.
- William Saroyan was a guest in your native Ahnidzor. What did you talk about with him? Saroyan, of Armenian origin, is one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
- About everything... I thought that a person can be big, free, like a sanctuary. And I was thinking not only about the "backwardness" of my condition and upbringing. I read Tolstoy, I know Shakespeare, I was acquainted with the wonderful artist Papazyan, the god of the stage, and all this was a flight of the spirit for me. But Saroyan is higher... With his natural breathing, freedom of expression of thoughts and feelings. I felt like a provincial fan in front of him. High-spirited fantasy is so natural to him. After all, a person often becomes stupid and mean as a result of mood or some life events. Saroyan was high, accurate, extravagant in everything - details, nuances of behavior, existence. When he gave a speech on television in Yerevan, having mastered about 250 words of Armenian, he expressed the whole world with those words, enveloped the whole world, there was such subtlety and precision in the expression of thought. He stood before me as a great man, with whom communication was a great gift.
He was very fond of Gogol, especially The Overcoat. Once Saroyan was asked what he writes about when he runs out of material, does he think about hoarding material, and he, that smart, genius old man, said: I am the material, because I am, there is material for the word.
- Who or what influenced you the most? I mean the entire Armenian culture.
- I will answer with a larger scope than your question. One of the Russian writers very accurately said that the time in which you live is part of the concept of Motherland, that my Motherland is my time.
Well, and from other times, perhaps the 20th Congress, the spirit of freedom and ease. Then the spirit of white bread, when they started selling without queues. Then, when Gurgen Mahari returned from Siberia. Then, when the poems of Yeghishe Charents were published in a complete collection. And if only one from the school desk? Hovhannes Tumanyan. Hovhannes Tumanyan is the only one left in me from childhood.
- How do you feel about the changes that are happening in our lives? What do you consider important in village life now?
- It is necessary to return the peasant's respect for himself, for his work. Change attitude towards work. Even if that work does not always bring quick results and is wasted. Still, something remains. You remain, a wonderful village worker. You have to work, and work will reward you. Only work, only work will save a person. Shovel in hand work. Nothing will happen otherwise. Hard bread is needed. If you can't feed yourself, you're in bad shape. Every piece of land in Armenia is worth its weight in gold. You have to imagine what mountain forest means, what mountains mean. It is necessary to love and keep. Even the mountains.
Sometimes you hear that now people seem to be returning to the village, going on weekends, buying houses, building country houses. Let it be temporary, but they will come. I would like to ask everyone to give me honest answers: why they come back, what they want. And many will answer to cultivate the land, to plant trees. And then? To buy a car later. They will buy a car... That's the trouble, people want an easy life. But no one thinks about hard, bitter bread. And it is necessary to think. You have to think about the fact that you were born there and you have to return there forever. A person should have the feeling of a small homeland, the feeling of master here in this small homeland. On this one shore of land. But not a guest. You are a guest in other places, other cities and villages. You are a stranger there. And here, where you were born, here you are both a master, a farmer, a prince, and a servant. A great servant in the land of your fathers and grandfathers.
Human psychology is dangerously changing before our eyes. On the one hand, it is good, on the other hand, it is extremely responsible to feel the master of a huge 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 removes your irresponsible attitude towards the small country, the small homeland where you were born and raised.
In this regard, I remember a Tumanian proverb. It was a terrible drought, there was no harvest, although the villagers cultivated the land honestly. What to do? They went to a neighboring, richer region. Maybe, they thought, there was no such disaster there. But there was no harvest either. They went further, but even there the disaster did not bypass the people. And the peasants understood that the whole country was in trouble.
Today we are lined up. We are sure that help will come by itself. You can forget about the soil. Some are convinced that there is always bread in Kuban, and Kuban will not be left in misery if a disaster occurs. And Cubans, I am sure, think that grain grows in France or Canada, and something happened, we will bring bread from a foreign country.
I see a salvation in the existence of the Azerbaijani or Armenian who still trusts the horse. It seems backward, it smacks of conservatism, but it is holy backwardness. The one who puts his hope in the horse, who is responsible for his family, his collective farm, his state, he will feed his family, give share to the collective farm, help the country.
You will be surprised, how can we explain that our grandfathers used to take home two tons of grass from the fields of my village, and now there is nothing left of those fields.
You have to work today to see results later. But I think that in this case it is necessary to think and see in terms of generations. As one figure told another in an emergency situation, you won't understand now, the generation that is in kindergarten now will understand us. Rebuilding consciousness is hard work, and I think it's work with a horse, not a machine. Everyday, thorough, unhurried.
Renewal. But there are facts that do not let you close your eyes. And we know about it. stealing millions, defrauding the state with supplements, minister-criminal... Your hair is turning gray.
If we talk about literature, acceleration here is first of all respect for individuality. The personality of the writer. Of the creator. Seer of truth. You should be able to see him, understand him, even if he says what sometimes not everyone understands at once. It should be respected and viewed not as a material, but as a goal. A true writer is always a great goal. Society needs him like air. He is the first to understand what is happening and what will happen. It has always been so in both Russia and Armenia...
- Hrant Ignatevich, if you were asked to write an autobiography, how would you start?
- I was born in 1935. The picture of my life in the next 15, 20 and even 30 years is much more similar to the times of Tumanyan-Tolstoy and Homer than to our days. I cultivated the soil, mowed grass, helped the calf at birth, grafted a tree - in order not to list everything, I will say at once. if the legend of the flood was repeated, I, like Noah, would be able to restore the culture of agriculture and animal husbandry on earth... And if something happened to the memory of humanity, I could reassemble the code of human morality in the image and likeness of my fellow villagers, in the image of their life at that time...
I would like to invent a lot of wonderful people, and then there would be no room for bad people...
On this high note, my conversation with an amazing person, a thinker, a peasant, a servant of literature, the author of a prose "that never happened before" ended.
The conversation was moderated by Felix MEDVEDEV
"Ogonyok" ("ОГОНЕК", МОСКВА), N 1, 1987