— Why has time stopped for us, and long ago at that? What was urgent, say, in Khorenatsi’s day is still urgent today. And all the individuals we remember and know effectively become our own, our contemporaries…
— They truly become contemporaries, kin in blood and thought, in the one question eternal for Armenians: they see the nation’s salvation in statehood. That fundamental question makes giants of them, from Khorenatsi to Abovyan, Tumanyan and Charents. That same question becomes their weakness in every dimension, the weakness of Armenian literature. Instead of other inward explorations, other depths, the eternal question of statehood is everywhere. A wall our great men have always come up against. In other words, they were doing at once what Russian reality, Russian life, divided between its two great figures, Peter the Great and the great Pushkin. Russian life chose Pushkin for cultural greatness and gave Peter the task of advancing the state. In that sense, Peter and Pushkin are united in Tumanyan: they both weaken and strengthen each other. My Tumanyan, with no Peter the Great behind him, assumed the national question as an emperor might and made it the essence and the weakness of his literature.
— For ten years now, we seem to have resolved the question of statehood. Why do we still consider the questions raised since Khorenatsi relevant? Latin American literature managed to break away from its national question by turning to metaphysics and myth-making, yet in our reality there is nothing new left to write or think. What has been written is written, what has been thought is thought. And… nothing has been done. Worse still, nothing is being done…
— It has pained me too: why did Salvador Dalí not emerge in Armenia, in my Saryan? The same with others. How often Armenian aesthetic thought, coming into contact with the world of metaphysics, with what lies beyond the physical, has withdrawn because of the national question. Yes, Saryan, standing on the borders of metaphysics—remember his fairy-tale period—drew back to depict Armenia’s coat of arms, the symbol of harmony and care. Those who had encountered the worlds of Márquez and Dalí, Charents himself, returned to Armenia, the Homeland, Armenian history: the poet was drawn into thinking in terms of the state.
— Perhaps we were not ready for independence and the restoration of statehood? As you said, things had been fermenting for centuries, thought through for centuries, and everything came up against the same wall, which could never be demolished, never fall. But ten years ago, whether by our will or independently of us, the wall fell. Why can we not step forward, why are we still standing before the place where a wall that no longer exists once stood? Perhaps it was easier for us to think we would keep colliding with the wall; we had not only failed to think about demolishing it or what would follow, we had not even seen it. Had not imagined it. Or perhaps our abilities carried us only as far as that wall.
— …What have we done so far? Have we drawn up a balance sheet of losses and gains or not?
What has independence taken away, and what has it given?
The course itself was mistaken.
— Who should have done it? We keep saying: we have not done it, we have not done it… Who was to do it, and why did they not? After 1988, every successive government repeated its predecessor’s mistakes and added its own. How are we better, for example, than the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the others who vanished? Perhaps we too have vanished and simply do not realise it yet.
— What were we supposed to do to be able to say: we have become what we should be, we exist?
— In the former country we could enter both the all-Union and the world arena; we could express ourselves, but now…
— We existed in that country. Not very well, not very badly—we existed. And we will exist again when we enter a new country, the great country of worldwide democracy, as full members, as we were in yesterday’s country.
— But are we taking any steps? Or do we sit thinking, “If only Hitler had fallen off a rock as a child”—let Armenia become Switzerland, become Japan—and do nothing to make Armenia at least become Armenia?
— Do you remember Charents, “A Nairian Idyll”? Let me remind you:
Once I went into our revolutionary museum.
The director was sitting there, talking at ease
With a very famous detachment commander. When I came out,
“Go,” I told my friend, “go into the museum:
In our revolutionary museum, sitting unperturbed,
Nairian Dan and Uncle Makhno are having a talk.”
Once I recalled those lines, and someone asked me who this Nairian Dan was. To this day I do not know who Nairian Dan was. A generation has truly come along that is ignorant of its own history, knows nothing of it and thirsts neither for learning nor for knowledge of the world. In that state of ignorance it cannot champion any idea that might take things forward.
— Do we have anything that can be called history at all? Or does everyone just…
— We have no history as a chronicle of the development of empires and national states. Perhaps our history unfolded in such a way that, finding no model for itself in the experience of world historiography, it could not have its history written by scholars. Of course we had a history: the amiras, your sons’ service at foreign imperial courts, charitable works, the history of your religion and culture, of your communities abroad, of your migrations. That too is history. Yet how is it that the history of the Jews’ fall and rebirth becomes history and the Bible?
— Jewish history is clear: it has always been guided by a single aim. Ours is a tangle of contradictions. Take even the 1920s: they play their own games with the dates and…
— Do not say “they”. There is no “they”; it is us, all of us.
— All right. Were our events of May 1920 an uprising or a mutiny? Likewise in February 1921: an uprising or a mutiny? Until you know, what lesson can you draw? The lesson of an uprising is one thing, the lesson of a mutiny another. We have narrowed our history so much: each of us looks from our own viewpoint and turns what we see into a judgement on an era or an event.
— My impression is that the May events were an uprising which, unfortunately, did not succeed. In my youth I felt a “Dashnak” pride that Sepuh, with six hundred Mauser-armed men, had subdued the two-thousand-strong garrison at Alexandropol, which included the future Marshal Baghramyan. Sadly, the uprising failed; otherwise Kars, Ardahan and Nakhichevan would have been ours too. After the uprising’s defeat, Moscow viewed Armenia as a nationalist country, as it had been under the tsar with its aspirations to independence, and punished it: Armenia lost territories.
— But Russia was punishing itself too…
— How?
— Armenia was part of Russia, was it not? The loss of our territory was a loss of its territory too.
— What did it care! What it lost in Armenia it gained in Azerbaijan, and to win the East’s goodwill as well, it acquired an ally such as Turkey. Is that not so?
— Perhaps, but why do we devote every five years of our country and our lives to erasing the previous ten?
— I am not one of those who erase. I have my own principle as a writer: everyone Mother Armenia has brought into the world is my child; I take responsibility for them all.
— But the prevailing social and political thinking calls every previous government the former criminal regime…
— That comes from extreme partisanship. To make their job easier, they take a tiny part of the great whole and deal with it brilliantly: their article, their piece of writing or their brief day in power succeeds, while the great history collapses.
The path of the round table was there from the time of the first parliament. The First Republic collapsed because of our partisanship, and the weakness of the Third is partisanship too. We must overcome party selfishness.
— Why is your voice not heard? Why is a party created every day, adding nothing new to what already exists?
— Machiavelli said: “Societies like it when even the greatest and most humane ideas are imposed on them by force.” Moses imposed the word of God on his people by force.
— Why does the state not resort to that “force”? At six or seven we are not burning with a thirst for learning, with a longing to chew through “the granite of knowledge”. Our parents take us to school and make us learn our lessons until goodness knows which year. Why does the government not assume the role of a parent towards its people?
— We thirst for nothing. A young Azerbaijani writer, just entering literature, got up and set off: he reached Vologda to see Vasily Belov, went to Irkutsk and found Rasputin, came to Yerevan to meet me. He thirsted to know what world he was living in, what he was entering. Like a bird, he had decided to explore and discover the limits of the sky in which he would fly.
Among us, perhaps it was the men of the early awakening who had that thirst: Nikol Aghbalian, doctors, historians, economists, Shant—the generation after Abovyan—went to European universities. We are not a people thirsty for knowledge. After them an ignorant, narrow-minded intelligentsia arose. Nationalism and “the genocide” were treated as measures of civic courage and understanding, though in themselves they mean nothing…
— Perhaps we cannot find a common language with ourselves?
— I give myself over to the hope that nations and ages have a sense of honour and that we will not let our country and our time become a desert after us.
— Perhaps, but we keep going backwards. What if we cannot live on our own? What if we need someone’s boot, need Moscow, Ctesiphon, or perhaps Washington? Or at least New York.
— That too is a path, but do not say “boot”. In the days of the boot we lived in a great country; now we must become part of the great world.
— How? There is no system of values: all standards are disappearing, everything is the same, all of a piece. Everyone says whatever they like, does whatever they like. There is no measure, no weight, no judgement…
— A Russian writer published a story in the sixties called “Virunin”. Revolution, lice, the NEP, the White Guard, persecution, the Reds’ victory—from the Black Sea to the South Caucasus and beyond. The whole class distinguished themselves as soldiers, commanders, heroes, but one of the boys was nowhere to be seen. Even at school he had been a little odd: he wanted to build a perpetual-motion machine. After the war they go to see him and find that he has built one in a barn in a village in the Tambov region.
Let us hope one of us is building a perpetual-motion machine in his barn.
— In literature it is possible: beautiful, impressive, offering an ideal. But in life, as we have discovered, no perpetual-motion machine ever gets built, because it is simply impossible… Meanwhile we lose a generation in the search for that very machine. Or for nothing at all.
— Yes, we lost the generation.
— How, then, do we join the chain?
— What else have we joined for that to be joined?
— To have a tomorrow, we must join those links today. We must resolve at least three questions today.
— What are those questions?
— Turn this territory into a country, a state and a Homeland; resolve the Karabakh question; uncover the crime of October 27. For which of them is even an outline of an answer emerging? It becomes a vicious circle: until these questions are resolved, you do not know what will become of your culture, your industry, your agriculture… We cannot resolve any question because we have not resolved the Karabakh question, and we do not resolve the Karabakh question because we are a country growing weaker by the day. Each depends on the other; we are in retreat, and no end is in sight.
— Under no circumstances can Karabakh be given away.
— We neither give it away nor take it… Nor can we leave things as they are. You do not even have a leader…
— Yes, you have no leader. Anyone could be a leader if they gave themselves the right to be one.
— Why do they not?
— They do not see themselves as being in the right or entitled to act.
— What, then, is all our bluster for?
— Imagine your nation had no dream, no romance, no memory… What would you do?
— Dreams, romance and memory must rest on at least some strength, some value, if you are to speak to others as an equal… Who has ever given anything to the weak, taken them seriously? We are a people celebrating a seventeen-hundredth anniversary, yet we are not even beginners as Christians.
— And who among all your nations in this world is such a profound Christian?
— I do not know, but it certainly is not us…
— We have emerged defeated from a hard economic and political struggle, and the same rules are being imposed again: withstand competition—your worker against another worker, your trader against another trader, your writer against another writer. We must withstand it.
— But to withstand that competition you need spirit first of all, do you not? I must see and understand my tomorrow in order to live today accordingly, preparing for tomorrow. Had we not consciously chosen independence, had we not taken part in the referendum as a whole nation, we could hardly have endured three or four years of cold, hunger, darkness and war. It was that spirit, was it not, that ensured not only survival but victory…
— It is impossible to turn back, simply impossible.
— As a nation we are indifferent, inert or fragmented. However clean you are, in a swamp at least the smell of mud will cling to you. What is our salvation?
— Salvation… Our situation is certainly no situation to be in, but the enemy is nothing much either. There is room under the sky for both of us.
— Are we to put our hopes in others again?…
— How many years have you followed someone else’s flag? Ten years ago, what did we ask when we met: which country have you been to? Where was your God, where did you go on pilgrimage? The walls have come down, but the pilgrimage goes on.
— Then we lived in hope of the light at the end of the tunnel; now we cannot see the light, or even the tunnel. Perhaps we need to find an idea…
— There is no need to find an idea. What idea? Your television manufacturer must make televisions like the Japanese, your car manufacturer must make cars like the Germans; you must push them out of the market. Your dram must provide bread on a par with Europe’s carefully tended, cherished money. What idea?
— Why does my dram not provide me with bread?
— We are forever trying, like a young lady, to please someone, in Europe or America. We have never advanced along our own path with our heads held high, done what we had to do, pleased ourselves.
— Why?
— I will speak my own word, follow my own course, have my own army. We took those steps and saw what came of them. We were punished with October 27. Perhaps that frightened our other officials; perhaps not in so many words, but we were given a very clear hint about what we should do. In that case the leaders of my nation show great timidity if they heed commanding voices and behave to please those who own our sky.
— But surely we can find something shared between us and the owners of our sky? At least points where our interests meet.
— It is very difficult. Even if in the natural sciences two times two is four, here, under the laws of the universe, you do not know what it is. Finding a common answer is very difficult.
— Because the relationship between responsibility and power has not been established: why is the “I” not set aside for the “we”?
— A country needs a king, and a king needs a will: a king and a royal will.
— Will we have them?
— As a citizen of the Republic of Armenia, I will place myself under the authority of any ruler of this country if that submission creates unity and inspires respect for us among other peoples and tribes. Vazgen Sargsyan was on that path, and that is why he was not allowed to go farther.
— Why do they discredit him now? He is dead already, harmless…
— It is appalling. I am saving my words to address that vilification seriously one day.
— Why one day? Why not now? If we do not stop it now, it no longer matters for Vazgen, Demirchyan and the others, but we are removing the ground beneath our own feet, the country’s ground.
— I was mocked when I was the first to say that it is easier to see Commander Vardan in the historical distance than a living Sparapet beside you. It is easy to find God a hundred or a thousand years away, but see the Virgin Mary in your mother, and in your brother, your own flesh and blood, see your Sparapet.
— They mocked you out of fear. They fear strength; those who are distant or dead are harmless. Strong living people are unmanageable and dangerous. They were afraid not only of you and what you said, but of your words becoming reality.
— …Yes, sanctify and submit, then destroy… That brings a very strange peace, a peace smelling of death.
— In the language of politics it is called stability.
— A stability as finished, gleaming and dead as mother-of-pearl, from which nothing is born, which is death itself. With the colour of death and a dead hardness.
— In one interview you said, “Who are we to uncover October 27?” Do you still think so?
— I said it and I say it, remembering who controls the October 27 trial.
— What are we to do, then?…
— Literature and history themselves have revealed so many beautiful and noble qualities in the thousands upon thousands of your nation’s people, past and present…
Look at your people, rely on those qualities and consider them against the backdrop of others.
— The central character of your literature is the Master; its core is the idea of the Master…
— The Master is within us, beside us; we must not let him destroy.
— …What must we do so that he builds rather than destroys?
— We must see a builder in him. See manly courage. Land and victory. A striving for beauty. See strength that we can rely on to overcome the suffocation and not choke.
— Is the basis of your optimism real, or…
— It is a question of outlook.
Peter bound the hands of all Ukraine, of the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich, and drove them north to build Petersburg in the newly conquered marshes. He closed the borders to imports so that the Russian peasant would work for himself. That was a man’s action. A man’s risk. Take your own step in your own country. Do not fall in with someone else’s procession. Have a procession of your own. At the head of ours was not our own flag, woven by our own hands; we followed someone else’s procession. Along the way men appeared who managed, in the fields of trade, deception and war, to be discerning, subtle, intelligent, resolute and warlike. They built an army, made the world take us seriously, drew our way of life beneath us like our own horse and set it moving, stirred envy—and paid heavily for it.
We paid.
But if it was possible once, it is possible again. He was no wonder child. Our sense of honour, our manly courage will find themselves again. Nations and ages have that sense of honour, I repeat; they do not leave a desert behind them.
— …And art, culture, literature?
— Literature creates Christ. Luke, John, Matthew and Mark were writing the Gospel. The Book was created and transformed the whole world. Khachatur Abovyan revived the past of Khorenatsi, of Commander Vardan. The nation’s past and the nation’s future. What does your literature do? Literature is Raffi—can you disown him? It is Abovyan, Tumanyan, Charents—will you disown them?
— Are they still literature today?
— They always are. There are no great names today, but let us look at ourselves a little too: why were there great names yesterday and none today? Why was Paruyr Sevak, only yesterday, a greater presence than Commander Vardan?…
Nevertheless, if the square is empty today, the fault is not with our contemporaries but with the times. In the twenties Charents cracked like lightning and filled the square with himself because a worldwide revolutionary-democratic movement stood behind him. Your nation was ready for that lightning. There are bright, good names today too—not many, but there are some.
— How do you assess the past ten years?
— It is fate. We were what we were and would not have been otherwise. What had to happen happened.
What did we do to prevent it?
What I considered an omission was carried out with far greater force among our neighbouring peoples and ended in failure. There was Chechnya, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Yugoslavia…
What Levon Ter-Petrosyan did or did not do, which ended in our present situation, would under different circumstances have ended in tragedy.
For the whole nation and for me, Vano’s absence, Vazgen’s death, the defilement and distortion of the others are a terrible loss. They would have been a force for the whole nation in the presence of a commanding emperor. Those present today are also defiled and distorted, and more absent than the murdered Vazgen, the exiled Vano.
What would Pushkin have been without Russia, what would a bell or an organ be without a church?…
If we had been soldiers and commanders for one another, how beautiful our unity would have been!
— All right, but should there not be revenge in us, a fist, so that we can at least return an unjust blow? Should we not make those who strike our heads hurt their hands? Should we not hate, bite, have memory and pain? Should we not clear the filth, the rubbish from within us? Must we tolerate, forgive?…
Are we Avetik or Ishkhan?…
— Both Avetik and Ishkhan are us. We must defend ourselves. Existence is defended with teeth. Do you possess your enemy’s respect or his contempt?
— His respect.
— Then be strong; do not give what is yours to another.
As much as you give, they will take. They take and grow stronger; they grow stronger and despise you.
Now decide for yourself: are you Ishkhan or Avetik?…
Anahit ADAMYAN
Hayatsk Yerevanits, No. 4, 2001.