Before Tumanyan we had everything and nothing, just as before the divine Word everything existed and nothing existed. We had land and homeland, friend and enemy, effort and suffering, joy and laughter, and even a thousand-year-old culture: an entire mountain country of verbal, decorative and musical art. Its ascent would have been in vain had it not been crowned by him, its Ararat. Like pure dawn, as pure dawn itself, Tumanyan fell like dew upon it all, spread and unfolded, revealed all of it and himself within it, gathered it all through himself and around himself. Only a homeland, too, gives such meaning and significance to the efforts of its great and small, to its animate and inanimate existence.
Try, if you can, denying your very own existence, to surrender him to the sea of the unknown. See what things and people sink with him; see whether anything of your ancestors remains after him, whether anything comes after him, whether you yourselves remain. See whether humanity’s great figures and humanity itself remain for you; whether your Armenian language can decipher, explore, shake off, renew and assimilate the divine writing in other tongues that is the creed of all peoples and times.
Almost about this, or precisely about this, it has been said: “I am God’s son, because he sent me, and his father, because I gave birth to him in your souls; I am God himself.” Or thus: “I came at your call and am your son, and I awakened in you faith in your own existence, and I am your father.”
He was our whole people’s aspiration, this Armenian family of humanity’s aspiration, towards the majestically high, and its connection with that lofty height. Without Tumanyan, humanity’s brightest faces would have been alien, if not hostile, idols in foreign temples. With his living, radiant, lofty presence, our own self-recognition shines back from the worlds of the most diverse peoples and languages—and, besides reverence, often even love and intimacy. And if that communion sometimes fails to arise or tremble within us, confident in his encouraging presence, we see those divinities as false and incomplete, rather than ourselves.
Through Tumanyan, we exist. Without Tumanyan, we do not. We enter the great world of literature in different languages and from different nations through Tumanyan, and that world becomes our native land. Without Tumanyan, that land is not ours; we stand before that world with a poor relation’s wretched, petty hostility.
Standing at the single shared boundary of past and future, personal and collective, national and universal, temporary and eternal, he demands historical significance of the temporary and presence of the eternal; an unmistakably Armenian character of the universal, and universality of the Armenian. If cultures are not universally human, they are not culture and cannot and must not travel through homelands and times. Thus pure gold crosses boundaries, and laws drawn from nature. Thus, under scrutiny and mutual scrutiny, the evil ambitions and pretensions that directly express the human beast do arise in their places and times, yet must also disintegrate, though they assume the guise of human culture, belief and ideology, and even assemble armies.
Among the people who brought Tumanyan into the world, in the places where his soul took bodily form in a supple, brave and pure figure, there were fragments of an older, elevated existence. First, of course, the mother tongue, then the broken monasteries, walls and bridges… Then even scraps of writing about his distant ancestor’s noble standing. But he would bear witness to something far greater than the princely power of his ancestor and ancestors, than the success of the European-Russian effort to establish an Armenian refuge in this thousand-year-old black desert from the remnants of masons, chroniclers and gardeners. He would bear witness to whether the sun god, the lamb-brother, the human creature in general, free life itself, enter the cave, the dragon-serpent’s skin, the lamb’s fleece once and for all beneath evil’s blows… Whether they surrender eternally to captivity in death, sleep and stupor. Or whether freedom can release a person from stone and seat him on his destined throne. Whether a person freed from one captivity surrenders to another, perhaps worse.
He did not surrender. Through him, freedom rose above our horizon in the form of perfect beauty.
The fruit of a beaten, plundered, trampled garden, he was bound to be bitter, and was. From no other mouth has this people heard so much bitter reproach as from his.
The son of a people torn apart, divided, its parts wrested from one another, he was bound to be a soldier of the homeland, and was. Only providence, and only for thirty years, held his soldier’s life back from the detachment that was shot from both rear and front on the hostile dividing line of native soil. A soldier’s tribute is paid in life. Thirty years later he paid his soldier’s tribute with the lives of his brothers, with his own, Tumanyan’s life, and with those of his four sons. And the bullets rang out both from behind and directly from the front.
A pilgrim in the whole people’s journey towards the light of knowledge and everyday life, he was bound to be an enlightener, and was. His poems and tales, written for schoolchildren as “material to cover”, passing from book to book and age to age, have been travelling for a hundred years and will yet pass through us and our grandchildren.
His alarm and rapid response, his initiatives, thought and energy produced those foundational educational, scientific, literary and cultural institutions that raise a people into a nation and lead a nation towards statehood.
No revolutionary, however revolutionary, can accuse him of standing far from the banners in his time of wars and revolutions, just as no nationalist driven mad by national pain can say the banner was not in his hand.
A contemporary of destruction and tragic events, he was bound to be his people’s tragic singer, and was. No phenomenon of his time can testify that he was absent from its deepest depths; no day of his time can say it does not remember him. No one—not the terrified foreign wanderer, not the dying deer, not the old man kneeling in prayer—can reproach him for being absent in the hour of their death, in the miracle of their elevation.
But he was not captive to all this and to all of them. Alongside his devastated homeland, he was not bound by hatred; alongside the rescued shreds of hope, he was not bound by gratitude. He was master over all of it and everyone; all of it and everyone lay beneath his commanding flight. Only warrior-kings are like that.
All this is his world, Tumanyan’s kingdom, and we are the subjects of that kingdom. We who came after him; those who lived and passed before him; people, animals, nations, tribes, forms, images, phenomena, history, myths, tales, language, children, light, longing, love, death, reconciliation, hostility… Nowhere else do they tremble, live and play as easily and lightly as beneath his smiling breath. Enter that world of the Armenian Word and, for a hundred years and a thousand years, play, fight, reconcile, sing, laugh, think, contemplate, strive, know, befriend, oppose… be.
And into no other world, written or real, do we send our child, our fellow human, ourselves on a journey as confidently as into Tumanyan’s kingdom. In no other world are anyone and anything so long familiar and intimate as in Tumanyan’s world. It is as though we lived there before our birth, as though we came from there into this world of ours.
Hovhannes Tumanyan, Selected Works.
Hayagitak Publishing House, Yerevan, 2001.