After Sevak and Minas, death struck once again at the very heart of our culture, and once again at forty-seven. Children call people of that age grandfathers. To the young, it is a far, far distant future. But we know that for people of literature it is the beginning, youth; at that age we are only just learning to hold a pen. Or, in other words, the country, the world whose discovery and settlement — more precisely, creation — we hope for from the most gifted among us, appears so mysterious, beautiful, vast and inexhaustible that one person’s effort, even a long life, seems insufficient to reveal that world in its fullest possible extent, to its farthest limits. Measured against his promise and what he was to create, Mushegh’s life was indeed cruelly short. The better half of a writer’s life was taken from him; with his loss, we were deprived of that inseparable temper of integrity, love, mystery, vengeance, history, anger, despair and hope that he embodied among us.
I have seen his birthplace, the broad southern slopes of Aragats, Talin; I have not seen the other, the land of his father and forefathers, Sasun. Torn apart like uprooted scrub, leaving its roots in the old land’s difficult crevices, the people came and clung to these slopes, which are a nightmare rather than soil. Stone: places for a house, a tree or a grave are hard to cut out, cannot be cut out. After spring’s brief, fifteen-day, scant flowering, the animals devour to the root everything that can be chewed, then gnaw at stone and earth. It is impossible to live there, yet in no other gorge or on any other slope of this country do the people cling so closely to the land, where the soil is only two fingers deep. The enclosing walls are built with such care and solidity as houses are not elsewhere. Beyond them stands a stone structure, a store of stones removed and gathered solely from that little plot; elsewhere they do not build such walls for their hearth and children. The stones must be confined in a structure and kept there, or they will scatter and lay waste those little Edens that can be called neither vegetable gardens nor orchards. All this is bitter, heavy, faithful labour. What demonic force, then, could have displaced this people? And there are tiny hollows in that stone nightmare, no larger than two cupped hands: lush poppies flare in them, red, red as a banner; the downy flower called “brothers’ blood” is nowhere so dark as there. Those were the cruel and beautiful slopes, and their unbending dreamers, their defeated yet unvanquished people, that Mushegh brought into our literature. Those people’s memories and hopes.
If I am a little him and he a little me, I know with certainty: he fell asleep embracing the enemy and woke with the enemy. He did not believe what had happened, yet was compelled to believe it. He searched for a ledge in the future to cling to, and was compelled to invent it.
Whether an abandoned orchard, road, settlement or grave, when we encounter abandonment, sadness grips our throats. It is terrible to accept that Mushegh’s road, which led us to the land of David of Sasun and ploughmen, of the apricot-wood pipe and men who were fedayi fighters, is now abandoned. Every person is irreplaceable, all the more every vivid talent, and it is foolish to look for him now in others. Yet it is also terrible to remain without hope: we cannot but expect the people of those cruel and beautiful slopes to send another son into their native literature, to tell of their heroic past and their equally heroic present, filled with struggle and faith.