With deep gratitude towards our native land, today we return to it the one it bore and nurtured, who stood firm for long decades in our time: the supreme, chief lawgiver of our literature, ethics, political thought and conduct, the true academician of literature, the master teacher of the republic’s literature teachers for forty years, Hrant Tamrazyan.
The man who set out with The Book of the Road, rescued from the Inquisition’s pyre, against his chest, and an oath in his young heart: that he would yet bring good days for that book, that in his time there would be no inquisitions, and if there were, his friends and he himself and no genuine value would be consigned to the flames.
His friends: Suren Aghababyan, Hakob Salakhyan, Vahagn Davtyan, Levon Hakhverdyan, Hamo Sahyan, Paruyr Sevak, Sergey Sarinyan, Sero Khanzadyan, Hrachya Hovhannisyan, and not many others. A beloved generation of fighters and poets who called themselves to the mission of not leaving their time a barren desert, of not standing before the future with faces blackened by shame. A mission which today, not before this open grave, not on the occasion of this immense absence, but before the entire horizons of Armenian culture, must be considered wholly accomplished, its apostles unashamed and victorious.
The name Hrant Tamrazyan was woven into my generation’s life and mine together with the name Gurgen Mahari. He and Vahagn Davtyan, together as they were throughout their lives, had gathered with tender care into one volume everything of some value in Mahari’s prose and verse that he had created in his turbulent life during the turbulent years before exile. Later, one of their short overcoats sheltered that tall, worn man. It was a good book and a good deed.
With that tender love, Hrant Tamrazyan stood before the whole expanse of our Armenian history and the fields of Armenian literature, from Khorenatsi to today’s literature and history, from legendary tales to the lives and people familiar to him and us. Conversely, his aversion reached open anger and disdain towards everything alien and alien-seeming, incomplete and amateurish, towards anything not at least a little like his idol, his God. And he had woven the image of his God, moulded his idol, from the remains of all our named and anonymous forebears, in the image of his parent, himself and his sons, and according to the commandment of that burned Charentsian Book of those distant years:
The ashes of the dead are the strongest lime,
The strongest mortar and pledge,
And through them the land becomes a country,
And the people a people, and the future an ineffable future.
Indeed, Hrant Tamrazyan had created a country, was creating a country, inhabited by people as courageous, intelligent and sensible, as unaffected and lofty as himself. At his country’s border he stood with a true sovereign’s confidence. With every great person who departs, we lose entire worlds. With Viktor Hambardzumyan’s passing, the passing of that super-star, we lost a universe, a sky. We have long ceased to look at the sky; we have no star there. With Martiros Saryan’s passing, with Minas Avetisyan’s passing, the world’s interest and our own in the great world of painting weakened and faded: again, we lost a world. With Vardan Achemyan’s passing, the same again…
God forbid that our Armenian soil should lack pride so completely that, with the passing of Tamrazyan’s generation and Hrant Tamrazyan himself, it should fail to endow the new times with his kind of human being, literary scholar and historian: scholar and soldier, soldier-scholar; master and worker, working master. Otherwise we shall lose a world again, as with the loss of Saryan, Hambardzumyan and the other great ones, perhaps more. For before astronomy, before painting, the word makes a land a homeland, and those who give the word its charge are the Hrant Tamrazyans, who are, alas, few, and whom we are so sorry to see depart.