Sergey Sarinyan, a born academician and literary scholar, is seventy-five. That means he was thirty in the spring of 1956, and, together with his thoughtful colleagues of the same wonderful age, moderately revolutionary and moderately conservative, he was taking responsible charge of renewing our literary and social thought. Those were years when the word, literature, and the thinking of writers and literary scholars were a very important, perhaps the most important, part of society and public life—or aspired to be. At any rate, the Gospel’s ‘not by bread alone’ was no empty phrase.
The country therefore needed to be endowed with the full power of a word enjoying its full rights—a mission as essential as giving a body a soul or saving a life through a blood transfusion. Failure would reveal the unmistakable prospect of the country’s collapse and the ruin of us all; success would bring our shared country, our world of words, into life-giving relations with our own world of yesterday and the cultures of other peoples.
And if the country nevertheless collapsed, it did not collapse through the fault of Sergey Sarinyan and his generation—or, at any rate, theirs was the least of the blame. Under his and their serious gaze, informed by a deep sense of the dignity of their country and their time, the country’s social, political, literary and critical thought brought to light so much of what is enduringly true in us that it keeps us, if not in the foremost ranks of nations and peoples, at least moving alongside them.
The word subjected to violence, forcibly driven from its course, corrupted and disfigured, takes on the character of an avenger prepared to die. Driven from the path of truth, it disappears into the unknown, taking with it and leading astray those who led it astray.
Sergey Sarinyan and his work do not belong among those who have lost their way and are disappearing.