Following the award of the USSR State Prize to prose writer Hrant Matevosyan, already a recipient of the Armenian State Prize, our newspaper’s correspondent Anzhela Hovhannisyan met the writer and asked him to share his thoughts with the readers of Soviet Armenia.
“Dear Hrant Ignatovich, you excavate little Tsmakut, and your discovery—the human being—joins humanity’s great family. How do you see the formula ‘literature–humanity’?”
“‘In the beginning was the Word,’ says Holy Scripture. The word is the beginning of everything. Human history begins with the word. It ordered cosmic chaos, distinguishing and naming light, darkness, star, person and grass. The word is the key to the mystery of the universe. That is why the ‘literature’ in your formula means to me the greatest responsibility before humanity. Culture creates a country, creates a people. I think—I am convinced—that the culture of a country which unleashes war is also complicit in that loathsome work of human disintegration. It therefore needs to cleanse itself. If an Armenian diaspora exists today, the reasons are not exhausted by the highlands’ geography, conquering tribes and so on. Culture is responsible too: somewhere it has failed in its role of gathering, uniting and making whole.
“Literature’s figures lead a people. If I feel well today, if I do not believe in war, it is also because today’s cross-section of literature signals neither war nor the disease of domination. Take any literature: Armenian, Russian, French, English. There is nothing there to destroy the human core. Armenian literature, a worthy shareholder in world literature through its epic, Khorenatsi, Narekatsi, Abovyan, Tumanyan and Charents, is distinguished by a particular altruism. It was born of a country and people forever raided, wronged and divided. Every child of our nation carries the pain of loss. It seems we should have become ‘the evil force in God’s paradise’. Yet see how harmoniously all Armenian literature flows; how willingly our great names, burdened with pain, take on the universe’s pain, how united they are in carrying the cross of human salvation.
“Remember where William Saroyan was born, then Martiros Saryan, or Tumanyan, Toramanyan. The geographical bridges are hard to see, yet what they say is set with the same leaven. Their subject is the Human Being as absolute value, a supreme magnitude, responsibility for that person’s fate, conscience and honesty. Listen to our song, to Komitas, to Armenian poetry; turn your gaze towards Hripsime’s church. The purpose is love for the human being, human salvation. The great Saryan, every cell of him soaked in the genocide’s terror, painted the force that makes the earth fertile. No scorching wind threatens his flowers’ furious explosion. Saryan did not paint Evil, did not deform the world’s wonder with images of destruction; his light spreads justly, bringing good tidings. Compare the Armenian folk tale The Master and the Servant with the Tatar version. In ours, the younger brother is content with the agreed payment; in the Tatar version he tricks the rich man and abducts his wife as well. And Pepo, deceived, wronged, indignant Pepo, merely says, ‘Shame on your honour, Agha Arutin!’ and considers his case heard. So it is with all our culture: always seeking conscience’s judgement. I think Toros Toramanyan defined our art’s essence most truthfully: ‘The beauty of other nations’ arts is moving, often arousing and disturbing; the beauty of our art brings peace, calms, leads to contemplation.’
“Our epic, our fairy tales, our rebellious, world-renouncing Little Mher simply drive me wild. He will leave the cave when wheat is as large as a walnut and barley as a rosehip—but this is the people’s Testament! And how faithful the epic’s tellers are: they believe in myth and deity, love, forgive, are humble, brave… I read it every year without fail and make my family read it. It is all so beautiful!”
“What do you think connects your writing with Armenian and world literature?”
“I was fourteen, not strong, but since I was among eight-to-eleven-year-olds, I was the strongest. The ploughman handed me the plough and went hunting. I can still hear the earth rumbling beneath it. The moon above, children on the yoke. Our harvest, our soil, we were ploughing… The boys on the yoke dozed and dropped off one by one like ripe pears. All of them became decent people. Every single one.
“Some years ago in the village I dared go mowing. I am weaker now: drinking, smoking, coffee. I mow and see a man on the hill watching me. Standing and watching. I am ashamed of my mowing, but keep mowing closer, closer, and find it is a child.
“‘How come,’ he says, ‘you can’t mow, but you smoke cigarettes?’
“‘Let’s eat,’ I say.
“‘My bread’s dried out, I can’t break it. Have you any fruit?’ In the mountains bread dries quickly in the wind. ‘What are you doing this evening?’ he says.
“‘Going to the village.’
“‘Oh… Come to my place. My father’s not here; you can keep me company.’
“That evening I went to the boy. Three days earlier his father had left a hundred and fifty calves to his six-year-old son and gone to attend to someone ill. He returned that evening. Returned, lightly, very lightly, almost imperceptibly stroked the boy’s head.
“‘Be patient, I’ll give you bread,’ he said.
“The boy hung from the shelf and climbed up, his shirt riding up, little navel bare. He took down a bowl of honey and set it between his feet.
“‘Give me water,’ he told his father. Before his father could bring it, he fell on his back, gave a faint murmur and slept. Slept sweetly… I know this is a man: he will support himself and me too, if he can look after a hundred and fifty calves.
“My writing is about these people.
“My father is seventy-seven; he mows. On wet autumn days, if the sun comes out for half an hour, he must mow. He knows the cut grass will rot in the rain, but because this moment is sunny, he will cut it, must cut it. He is not mowing for himself, but for the collective farm. His benefit is indirect, mediated; what is direct is the grass, the sun, conscience. My father Ignat has a habit from the days of travelling on foot: wherever he sees a stone lying on the road, he must throw it aside. It does not matter whether it is his village’s road, Ashtarak’s or Yerevan’s. A stone lies on the road: it must be moved aside. That is the act of the country’s keeper, the land’s keeper, the stone’s keeper.
“One day Sahyan asked whether I had ever grazed a horse on the strip between two fields. I remembered: I was a hungry boy, given the district Party secretary’s horse to take out grazing. The horse ate, the horse filled out, I became full. That is how it is. You love the horse, and with it you love everything: living beauty.
“Idleness spoils a person. Whenever I look at soil ruined under vehicle wheels, I remember our wheat in the war years. We got eight centners per hectare, poor wheat mixed with peas. We lived half-starved and sent almost all eight centners to the front. Beside that wheat a human being grew. That person would not drive livestock into a neighbour’s field or a collective-farm field. These were ploughers and sowers; one thing they knew absolutely: you cannot cheat the earth. Beside that pea-infested field a wonderful people grew.
“We lost that peasant nature. Now the man of the soil stands with hands behind his back, watching a machine do his work. Now we throw bread onto rubbish heaps. Bread!
“Everything I have written is about my world, the people I know. Sometimes I change the names—they take offence; sometimes I do not—now they take offence differently. For me, each real person is dearer than every kind of abstraction, because abstractions produce battalions: so many people have been killed. Each real person is the work of centuries, a thousand years’ creation. In any person from Tsmakut there is Shakespearean tragedy, Schillerian flight, Tolstoyan purity. Why should I invent a person, invent a life? I am my country’s photographer and chronicler, and existing life amply satisfies me.”
“What would you like to save people from, those in Tsmakut and elsewhere?”
“From the presumptuous culture that gathers armies, takes its ideals by force of arms to another country, forces them upon people as though an idea could be greater than a person. Let us remember and curse Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler. It is terrible when such epidemic ‘ideas’ flare up in great nations. In agreement with my country and its ideology, I see my mission as awakening respect for the human being, for each person, each particular person.
“For the human being who is wonderful, tragic and heroic from the beginning.”
Soviet Armenia, 22 November 1984.