The prose writer Hrant Matevossian’s first book, We and Our Mountains, appeared in 1962. Critics and readers immediately noticed that he had something to say to people, that he knew how to tell a story. Unhurriedly, with long intervals, the writer’s subsequent books appeared, were translated into many languages of the peoples of the USSR, and published abroad. It would be no exaggeration to say that Hrant Matevossian’s vivid, distinctive prose is an entire world: living, moving, intensely tangible, seen through the eyes of our contemporary and inhabited by our contemporaries.
But who is he, Hrant Matevossian’s character? That question began our conversation.
— He is the person we call ordinary, who in the past did not appear in historical chronicles and annals, where only the lives and deeds of eminent people were recorded. Ordinary mortals were mentioned only when the number of those killed on the battlefield was given. I wanted to be the chronicler of our days and write about the fates of those who figure in general statistics only as human units, but are individuals. For I am convinced that everyone, if we examine his life and experiences carefully, gives the writer rich material for thinking about our time, says Hrant Ignatovich Matevossian.
To meet Matevossian’s characters, one must climb to the mountain village of Tsmakut. To do that, one must get off at a station bridged across a narrow gorge. The cliffs had given way just enough to accommodate the railway track; the station hung on pillars above the river.
Life is hard here, and great effort is needed to create a home and a family hearth. We see how difficult everything is for Aghun and Simon in the novella A Mother Goes to Arrange Her Son’s Marriage. Sharp-tongued Aghun is right: “Everything in this house was created through work, born as a child is born: with pain, blood, torment. Nothing came easily, nothing was like a hen laying an egg…” And that can be said of all Tsmakut’s life: difficult, yet beautiful.
— When and how did you begin your tale of Tsmakut?
— If we translate the word Tsmakut into Russian, it means “in the woods”, in the depths. In 1960–61, alongside We and Our Mountains, the novella about the shepherds of Antaramej, I wrote another novella whose characters were modelled on the inhabitants of my native Ahnidzor. But so my fellow villagers would not recognise themselves, I named the village Tsmakut. That novella did not work out. I realised that ready-made prototypes alone do not solve the problem. But the idea of “resettling” my fellow villagers in Tsmakut remained. It allowed me to handle the material freely, to unite in Tsmakut everything I knew about Ahnidzor with what I had heard and knew about other places. My fellow villagers do, of course, recognise themselves. But the most interesting thing is that they recognise themselves not only in stories that actually happened. That pleases me: it means the invented situations follow the logic of my characters’ natures.
My fellow countrymen regard me as an intermediary between them and the wider world. And I see that my little village is part of the wider world. It has the same problems as everywhere else. I am convinced that without “leaving” Tsmakut one can answer the world’s most painful questions…
One such question is war. Forty-eight people of Tsmakut did not return from the war. In the cemetery where their grandfathers and great-grandfathers are buried, their graves are absent: “forty-eight young men did not return from the battlefield, forty-eight mowers, shepherds, teachers, farmers—an entire ringing choir”. This is from the story Then, in Winter, about the first post-war winter, about widows and orphans. In the novel Tashkent, the writer’s thought moves further, towards the greatest moral losses the village suffered because of the war.
— War mowed down our fathers’ generation, the golden generation of great workers, and deprived us of childhood… Is it normal for a ten-year-old boy to put on his father’s boots and consider himself a grown man? Or to hate old men because they are alive and his father is not?
Perhaps only those who experienced war not on the front line but deep in the rear will be able to understand what it is. I remember Saroyan—one of my favourite writers; meeting him is always a gift for me—once asking: “What did you eat during the war?” He simply could not understand that we ate nothing but potatoes. “Potatoes? With what?” Then I showed him as though I were holding potatoes in both hands: “Say this is cheese and this is bread, but in fact both are potatoes.” He laughed, and I never did know whether he understood. Now the threat of war exists in the world once more. It forces us to speak again and again of the disasters war brought, to seek ways of protecting humanity. And the writer’s word can play no small part there.
— What do you value most in a literary work? What relationship do you have with your characters?
— They say that after the Eiffel Tower was built, only sixteen kilograms of construction waste and remnants were collected from the site. That is what the miracle of design thinking and technical calculation means.
Some works of art too are “designed” so that nothing can be added or taken away: the theme is wholly exhausted, and it is clear that no other artistic solution is possible. That is admirable. But to me, works conveying the infinity, the eternity of the world and life are more attractive. They leave room for imagination, for giving a finished form, for fellow feeling. It is as though you walk along a forest path and emerge into a great, beautiful field, go further and encounter new fields, large and small, new each time. When I write, the material subjects me to itself. I cannot forcibly squeeze my character into any place I choose. Sometimes my character moves away from me, yielding his place to those with greater moral strength. How much I have regretted the death of Ohan, the shepherd in Old Mountains under the Open Sky, a story written before Tashkent! His name is often recalled in the novel. It is no accident that both Tevans so badly need their older companion. And how badly I need him!…
— To what extent is there an autobiographical element in your stories?
— Probably as much as with other writers. Of myself I can say that I feel uncomfortable inventing too much, moving away from familiar people and places. It is clear that personal memory alone is too narrow a framework for a writer. In an age of developed communications, thought-provoking information comes from everywhere. Even a report of some fact or phenomenon thousands of kilometres away can stir a whole succession of feelings, make you look anew at everything long known and familiar… What is fixed in memory is interpreted very differently in a work of art. Long ago I heard about an old man who said at his wife’s funeral that he too would die in twenty days, and really did die. This was mentioned briefly, in passing, to emphasise another, opposite character, in We and Our Mountains. I wrote it as I had heard it. But that old man has been living in me for twenty years, and in the novel I am writing now the story takes an unexpected moral and psychological turn.
Often a single episode can awaken a torrent of memories. Once my father, a modest man of few words, asked me: “If it is no trouble, tell about my fear in one of your books. For forty days I worked for wheat in another village, loaded the wheat on our horse and was returning home. It was so hard. I was afraid they would rob me, take away the horse and I would return home empty-handed…”
That was probably in the autumn of ’47. I remembered how we rushed at the sack when our father entered the house, hoping he had brought presents… In the sack of wheat there was only one green, unripe walnut… Only now do I understand: what present could he have thought about if he still remembers his fear on the road home? And that green walnut, the only thing imprinted upon my memory, set off a torrent of images.
In the novel it will be a long passage: the children descend the slope to the spring like ants, carrying water… The thin, exhausted father sits beside a wooden trough; his dirty, lice-infested clothes have been thrown into the yard. The mother pours hot water onto his broad shoulders and scrubs him with ash. Then she takes out a piece of fragrant soap, hidden from the children and kept since before the war, and soaps the father’s shoulders. And that soap, which she had protected from the little girl—the child, tempted by its scent, insisted on wanting to eat it—is the most eloquent evidence that she loves her husband…
The writer recalls another childhood episode, about his own fear. In early spring, as a ten-year-old, he took a cow to pasture with other children. Seeking the first spring greenery, they climbed steep paths. To protect the cows from the cold wind, they covered them with old fur coats. They spent the night by the fire. “The older children talked about women, discussing them one by one, house by house, and I waited in fear, holding my breath, for them to reach our house. But after naming my mother and mentioning another neighbour, one of them said: ‘Those two are pure’… I have remembered that anxiety and fear of hearing something bad about my mother all my life.” Then suddenly, interrupting his recollections, he says:
— I want to write ten short stories. The search for a beginning, a ruthlessly opened knot, an inner moral content in the depths of outward events… That is why I love the short story…
— Do you picture your readers? What letters do they write to you?
— Above all they are intelligent, sensitive readers who love literature and believe in it without limit. Reading their letters, I feel that they cherish their most sacred hopes. And I am ashamed, feel pangs of conscience over my frivolity and shortcomings. Sometimes, yielding to a magazine’s persuasion, you publish an unfinished work, and suddenly receive a letter that makes you realise the reader understands more in what you wrote than you intended to say. They are co-authors, and I think it takes genuine talent to be such a reader.
What do they respond to most? Armenian readers to popular characters, the nation’s fate, reflections on the future. The all-Union reader, brought up on moral questions through Russian writers’ books, pays attention to precisely that aspect in mine.
Hrant Matevossian is a passionate film-lover. At one time he even studied at the Higher Screenwriting Courses, intending to take up cinema seriously. Incidentally, The Master, a film based on his screen novella, was recently made in Armenia. It is about a forester who fights to preserve nature, to preserve an ancient civilisation created by the people’s centuries of labour.
— Of the four or five films made from my works, I consider Henrik Malyan’s We and Our Mountains the most successful, although I did not see material for cinema in my novella. In general, I have been unsuccessful in cinema. But eventually I concluded that good directors write their films’ scripts themselves, while writers should concern themselves with literature. And rejoice in other people’s successes, taking pleasure as spectators. Living through and feeling a good film is a long-lasting pleasure. Among the best recent films I count Balayan’s Flights in Dreams and in Reality, The Kiss, based on Chekhov’s story, and Biryuk, based on Turgenev… As for The Master, everyone praises it so much that I am afraid they will make me believe a good film has come out of it…
— Whom do you consider your teachers in literature? Which contemporaries are closest to you?
— The first serious book I read was probably Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. Then I fell in love with Charents and Bakunts. They have stayed with me. Charents as an example of poetic mastery and thought. Bakunts amazes me with his knowledge of the people’s life. From the very first lines I read, Hovhannes Tumanyan has been with me, like a stream flowing and imperceptibly watering the earth. From that foundation grew love and admiration for the Armenian word, the Armenian language. I think it was Tumanyan who prepared me to perceive true literature. Everything he touched became a fact, part of Armenian culture’s spiritual essence, including his translations of Pushkin. As a person too, he is the highest example of morality. What a thing his peacemaking mission was, when he passed through all Northern Armenia with a white flag to Azerbaijani villages to prevent bloody clashes!… Our Ahnidzor is close to Dsegh, and my fellow countrymen remember him. At one time I wanted to write a book about Tumanyan. The intention did not come to fruition. But in many of my works the people of Tsmakut recall various episodes of his life, lines of his poems. There will be a long passage about Tumanyan in the novella I am now writing. I want those separate parts to form an image of a splendid poet, patriot and citizen.
Among contemporaries I love Yuri Kazakov, Vasily Shukshin, Vasily Belov and Andrei Bitov; I love the Americans, Hemingway, Faulkner, Saroyan… Literary preferences change over the years. Where earlier I was drawn to an author’s ability to convey the beauty of the world, now I am drawn to thought, to precision and aptness in expressing thought. I never stop rereading Tolstoy: Hadji Murad, Kholstomer, The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
I recalled our conversation about literature at a long-ago meeting in Yerevan. Speaking of his favourite writers, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, Matevossian emphasised their attitude towards the human being: only compassion helps a writer understand his character fully, penetrate his psychology. Putting together everything I had heard now, I realised that this, essentially, had remained the most important thing for him.
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Conversation conducted by M. ISKOLDSKAYA.
Sovetskaya Kultura
(Sovetskaya Kultura, Moscow), 18 October 1984.