Suren Aghababyan came from decades that had drained the blood of reason, faith, dear people and himself. He was among the tireless seekers of realms of healing and the creators of an environment for recovery, one of the first of those creators, if not the very first. In that new and renewed environment, which he too had created, the efforts of yesterday’s sorry heroes to renew themselves, the rebirth of victims, and the struggles of entirely new people were infinitely precious to him. He did not seek a fresh battle among all of them, reds and whites, old and new; he sought their union within one whole called great Armenian literature.
His enormous industry, his acutely sensitive receptiveness, his comparative and analytical mind, the courage of his conduct, and his virtually limitless memory, which supplied his text with so many quotations without the aid of books, were impressive. In other words, the scholar in him was beyond reproach. Yet he remains in our memory as a great heart, a heart like a mother’s hearth, around which all of us sons gathered: the virtuous and the prodigal, those returning in shame and those returning victorious. He knew each of us from our cradle; for our sins he felt equal shame himself and pretended not to see them, and at our victories he rejoiced before us and more than we did. He could not deny even an opponent’s success, or was inclined to see the capacity for success in all, all of us.
Those who “write well” about literature are still, thank God, plentiful, and may they always be so, for they all do the necessary work he did, for without literary scholarship literature itself shrivels and dries. But the place he left grows wider and deeper day by day, becoming a black hollow from which orthodox intolerance itself smells of blood in the name of sovereign truth. This was absent from what he did and intended to do. His mind and body recoiled from it, from this easy way, this negation that is the only possible task for the lazy, but for him was easy and unacceptable.
With some inescapable awareness of duty towards the work and its creator, of guilt he did not have, he rushed to meet every uncorrupted voice and considered every pair of lips untainted, whether they came from a future seemingly beyond his reach or a past of unjust oblivion, whether they were reciters and actors, painters, poets, or students with an inclination towards criticism. It seems this was a sense of duty towards the young poet who had been within him, had been himself, but had not been born, had not revealed himself. He sought that poet in everyone; he believed in the presence of that pure being within each person.
A witness to hard times and a silent foreseer of these hard years, but never their conjurer, in his life’s work he brought together our yesterday and today, so that the homeland of generations would not find itself in alien times, so that the past would not appear as delirium in our present, so that we would not be strangers in our own home. His work was that of a son never absent from home, a permanent inhabitant of the homeland. Sadly, despite his and his generation’s persistent efforts, it was to end in this grave collapse, and the homeland was once more to find itself in times of loss. The accumulated past burst the dams and rushed into today in a black torrent. Perhaps a time of healing will follow again, and his image of a beautiful human being, under a new name, will again raise peaceful dams for all the times of our Armenian literature and all its inhabitants: Charents, Bakunts, Mahari, Zoryan and Zaryan, Sahyan and Sevak, Shiraz and Dashtents… and for him, the worthy one, for him too, Suren Aghababyan.