Before Tumanyan we had everything and nothing, just as before the divine Word there was everything and nothing. We had land and motherland, friend and enemy, effort and suffering, joy and laughter, and even a thousand-year-old culture: a whole highland of oral art, jewelry art, song art, whose ascent would have been in vain if it had not been crowned with Ararat. Like a pure dawn, as a pure dawn, Tumanyan sprinkled himself on all that, spread, spread, opened, revealed all that and himself in all of it, and gathered all of that with himself and around him. In this way, the motherland gives meaning and significance to the efforts of its big and small, its living and non-living existence.
Then, if you can, reject your very existence and give it to the sea of the unknown, see what and who are sinking with it, see if there is anything left of the ancestors after it, is there anything coming after it, are you yourself left, see if all the greats of humanity and humanity itself remain for you, is your Armenian language capable of deciphering, explaining, shaking off, renewing and appropriating the divine scripture of tongues, which is the creed of all peoples and times.
It is almost said about this or exactly this. "I am the son of God, because I am his sent, and the father, because I gave birth to him in your souls, I am God himself." Or like this. "I came at your call and I am your son, and I awakened the belief in your own existence in you and I am your father."
It was the aspiration of this Armenian family of our nation, humanity, to be exalted, and to be related to that exalted and superior. Without Tumanyan, the brightest fronts of humanity would be foreign, if not enemy, idols of foreign temples. And so, with its living, edifying, high presence, our own self-knowledge and, apart from respect, often even love and closeness radiates from the worlds of the most diverse peoples and languages. And if it happens that it is not born, that communion does not vibrate in us, sure with its encouraging presence, those deities appear to us as false and imperfect and not ourselves.
Tumanyan: we exist. Without Tumanyan, we do not exist. With Tumanyan, we enter the great world of foreign-language literature, and that world is no longer our native border. Without Tumanyan, that border is not ours, but we also stand before that world with our poor and low enmity of a poor relative.
Standing on the one and common border of the past and the future, the personal and the universal, the national and the universal, the temporary and the eternal, he demands historicity from the temporal and presence from the eternal, exact Armenianness from the universal, and universality from the Armenian. if cultures are not universal, they are not cultures and cannot and should not travel through homelands and times. Thus, it is only gold that crosses borders and laws derived from nature. In this way, in the conditions of control and mutual control, in their places and times, it is true, those bad ambitions and ambitions that are a direct manifestation of man-beast, but take the form of human culture, religion and ideology, and even unite armies, are created, but also forcibly destroyed.
Among the people who brought Tumanyan into the world, in the places where Tumanyan's soul was embodied in a flexible, brave and pure stature, there were fragments of old high life, the first of which was the native one, then the broken monasteries and walls and bridges... and even fragments of writing about the noble status of his distant ancestor. But it would testify to something much greater than the ruling power of the ancestor and ancestors, than the success of the Euro-Russian effort to connect the Armenian refuge in this thousand-year-old black desert from the marks of masons-chroniclers-gardeners. He would testify whether the sun god, the lamb brothers, human beings in general, free life itself, under the blows of evil, once and for all enter a cave, a dragon's cloak, a lamb's skin... are they forever given to the captivity of death, sleep, darkness, or can freedom take a person out of stone and multiply a person on his predestined throne? worse captivity.
He did not give himself. itself, freedom rose from our horizon in a figure of perfect beauty.
Beaten, robbed, fruit of the trampled garden, he was going to be bitter and was. This people has never heard such a bitter reproach from any other mouth than from him.
A child of a divided, divided people, separated from each other, he should have been a soldier of the motherland and he was. only by providence, and only by thirty years, was his life as a soldier withheld from that squad, which was fired upon from both the rear and the front, on the hostile dividing line of the native soil; a soldier's duty is paid with his life, thirty years later he paid his soldier's duty with the lives of his brothers, Tumanyan himself and his four sons, and the bullets exploded both from behind and face to face.
Pilgrim of the popular journey towards knowledge and everyday light, he was going to be an enlightener and was. His verse and conversation, written as "passing material" for a schoolboy, have been passing from book to book and age to age for a hundred years and will still be passed down from us and our grandchildren.
The educational-scientific, literary-cultural, scientific-cultural fundamental institutions that grow a people into a nation and push the nation to statehood are the result of his alarm and quick response, his initiative, his thought and energy.
No revolutionary, the most revolutionary, can accuse him of standing far from the flags during his time of wars and revolutions, just like any nationalist maddened by national pain, that the flag was not in his hand.
A contemporary of destruction and tragic events, he should have been and was the tragedy of his people. No phenomenon of his time can testify that he was not in his very depths, no day of his time can say that he does not remember him, no one, not the terrified stranger, not the dying deer, not the old man kneeling in prayer, can reproach that he was not present at the moment of his orgasm, at the miracle of his exaltation.
But he was not the prisoner of everyone and everything, he was not the prisoner of hatred with his destroyed homeland and he was not the prisoner of gratitude with the saved branches of hope - he was the owner of all of that and everything, all of that and everything was under his dominion. Only military-kings are like that.
All of that is his world, Tumanyan's kingdom, and we are the subjects of that kingdom, we, those who came after him, those who lived and passed before him, people, animals, nations, tribes, forms, figures, phenomena, history, myths, conversations, language, children, light, longing, love, death, reconciliation, enmity... and nowhere else do they vibrate, live, play as easily as under his smiling breath. Enter that world of Armenian Bani and play, fight, reconcile, sing, laugh, ponder, pig out, strive, get to know, make friends, be enemies... for a hundred years and a thousand years.
And in no other world, neither written nor real, we send our child, our person, ourselves on a journey as confidently as Tumanyan's kingdom, and in no other world is anyone and nothing so familiar and close as in Tumanyan's world, as if we lived there before our birth, as if we came to this country from there.
Hovhannes Tumanyan, Election
"Haygitak" ed., Yerevan, 2001.