- Master.
- We accepted your master conditionally.
- Good. There are writers who avoid their time, avoid using the attributes of time and place, even give their characters the names of their time, resort to allegories and other devices, apparently with the aim of extending their work into eternity. In your opinion, is it possible to extend the life of a work in this way?
- All of these are points of approach, and all of them have recorded so much success that it would be narrow-minded to speak against one or the other. we can only talk about our preferences, and I consider it honest to focus on the real, the authentic, your place and your time; turn and see all times and all the world in your place and your time. The historical moment in which you live contains all the moments of history and the future. The moment in which you live, of which you are a child, has in it the life of your grandfathers and also your grandchildren. Of course, depending on their time, some can remain a columnist, a documentarian, a journalist. Whatever you accuse these writers of, at least you can't accuse them of dishonesty, and that's a good thing. there is civic duty, courage as well.
- In other words, you need talent and talent to fit yesterday and tomorrow into today.
- Courage and responsibility in front of you and your time is needed, yes, to see yourself as Movses Khorenatsi, Arshak or Vardan Mamikonyan as your contemporaries, instead of avoiding yourself and your time and disappearing into timeless times and spaceless spaces.
- Mr. Matevosyan, the Soviet censorship, which the artists complained about so much, was abolished, what changed, and is the change beneficial?
- I hesitate on that question, remembering how much suffering, what suffering, almost every publication of mine came to pass, how much time and energy it took in the best time of my life. But at the same time, I thought that the fault was also mine, that if my work was as perfect, flawless, closed as an egg, no one would dare to push into it. I judge a little differently. the society should help the writer to come forward, if the society records through the mouth of the writer, then the society should also help the writers, instead of hindering them, because literature is a capricious, difficult place, where one out of a thousand attempts succeeds, perhaps none, and here, a helper is needed, not an obstacle. Perhaps two things should be demarcated: censorship is necessary, but it should know its place and not interfere. Censorship has always existed in Russia, the communists inherited it. Pobedonotsev stopped the publication of "Kreutzerian Sonata", "Haji Murad" is a posthumous publication. Now, while remembering the gross savagery of all this, I still think that a foreign eye, an outside eye, is needed on our work. There was, well, Thomas Wolfe, and there was Maxwell Perkins. He separated a novel from Wolf's manuscript, a novel and a short story. Let's be Wolf and wait for our Perkins. Disruption - no, punishment - certainly not, but let us all understand that there should be some kind of responsibility on both sides. It has become easier to be published, to be published, there is no one to catch us, but we are not puppies, we are not writers on the walls of garages to publish our thoughts, so some kind of control is needed. Goncharov, the author of "Oblomov", was a censor, Sundukyan, I think, too...
- In other words, a censor that does not prohibit, but shows a certain level, ensures taste.
- That's right, something like a synod.
- Returning to your literature, did the Soviet censorship still harm you?
- A lot and always.
- Have you ever had to take the censor into account when writing this or that phrase, did you feel his silent presence while writing and moved the word to another place or removed it altogether?
- The panorama of the said concept in Soviet literature was the image of the inquisitor removing the heavy breath from himself, being defiled and distorted as a result of that effort, showing himself incompletely, with half strength, with half truth. The country was going to be the word's, ours was the thing - it was the army's. They don't build a country with an army, they build the country, including the army, with things. "From the beginning was the Word."
Our country of hard speech, unfree, oppressed speech has collapsed.
It seems to me that it will not be rude if we make a distinction like this. if not a censor, then at least an editor, an outsider, a second eye is needed by all of us. You say that the lyricist of our epic did not have a censor, I say that he did, the young listeners did not allow impropriety and obscenity to rave.
- And the fact that the field was suddenly opened, and the "inappropriate-indecent" influences of the free world poured in unhindered, you consider it dangerous, yes?
- Due to the influence, Russian wanted to have its own Shakespeare and got Pushkin. Armenian wanted to have its own Pushkin and got Tumanyan. also, the new times wanted to have their "War and Peace" and Tumanyan and they had "Khalagh Don", Yeghishe Charents. For two hundred years, English-speaking America has striven to have its own, non-English, American English literature, and it has. Examples abound. Languages, nations, times have this enduring honor to be re-invented and made their own. You and I will rely on the stable number of readers who demand from us not what is being served today by the so-called surrogacy of mass culture, which is not worth talking about or against, is irrelevant.
- Thank God, there is that reader among the youth. I wasn't sure at one time, but recently, when I interacted with the student body, I changed my mind. Interestingly, good readers are mostly girls.
- Because God entrusted them with the responsibility of maintaining the hearth.
- Maybe. Or were the boys sifted through the fields of business, worried about making money...
- Perhaps. But you said girls, and a warm wave of memory brought favorite names. Princess Mariam of Tumanyan, Armenuhi Tigranyan of Charents, Anna Grigoreva of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy's daughter and wife, knights of jealousy and honor of literature, without whom these greatnesses would not have happened. Now, perhaps, it is the same case - our high school girls of jealousy and honor expect from us unfaithful dedication to literature, the literature of our conscience.
Based on that, how do you look at the problem when the writer presents life as he sees it, and the other when the writer compromises, hides the reality he sees, embellishes it to give the reader optimism?
- Didn't your experience as a reader tell you with what insatiability one reads "life as it is", but also what desolation it leaves behind? I experienced that rapture and sheer robbery.
Unpretentious certificates and documentaries of the writer are very dear to me. Illiterate people's stories of their lived lives are very dear. Even now, literature will probably go that way. Thirty years ago, American literature turned to documentaries, Vietnamese diaries, etc., and a current called new journalism emerged. If we don't have the power to analyze and abstract, we should at least have the courage to transcribe life.
- However, do you accept that a writer should not tell the truth to the end, distort what he saw, for the sake of great goals, say, the future of his country, generation, etc., or should a true writer still follow the truth, no matter what the cost?
- Literature, let's remember Charents' "Tagh, dedicated to the brave traveler", is a process of recognition and not a distribution of what is known, so that this and that part of what is found is made public, and this and that is hidden. You go on a journey with your reader and search, find or not find, know or not know your reader. Back. If the reader did not come with you, it means you are not a writer, you have not set out, you are not looking for anything and you will not find anything good or bad. With Dostoevsky, we find evil in our own behavior and soul and rejoice in our own invention. so physicists rejoiced with a shudder when they saw the face of death in the splitting atom. But could they not break through? Can we stop short of discovering the truth and deprive ourselves of the joy of invention...
- Dostoevsky, with the audacity of his search, overwhelmed not only literature, but also "peoples" in other fields.
- He went on the edge, constantly on the edge, shaking the boundaries and expanded not only the boundaries of literature.
- Does it matter whether the country or the nation is big or small? I want to say, if the unrestrained freedom of Dostoevsky or someone like him was not dangerous for endless and multi-million-strong Russia, could it be dangerous for us?
- Of course, our literature has this grace and defect of imprisonment. Since Khorenatsi, our writer has taken upon himself the responsibility of restoration of statehood, the future of the country, the emerging state has taken refuge in our literature. Political thought has taken a lot of attention from the writer, and we have certainly given losses in the field of pure fine art or in the fields of pure fine art. the avant-gardism that our musician, our artist, our writer was going to have was revealed in others, so you even think about the greatness of your unit, but well, it is the history, not the person, it is the destiny, we did not have a country, we did not have a tsar, we did not have Boris Godunov, to reveal the story of Boris Godunov in a Pushkin way, our Boris Godunov is from a different point of view look, the lack of statehood has pulled back, restrained our genius.
- In this case, can it be said that Narekatsi was a bit non-citizen, he lacked a sense of citizenship, a sense of his homeland, because you read and do not see an Armenian, a citizen, who cares about his country?
- I spoke about this on another occasion.
The empire collapsed, we lost the status of a citizen of the empire, and with the loss of that status, this small country will also be deprived of the confident, commanding, loud voices that Narekatsi, Tumanyan, Isahakyan, Charents had. And Narekatsi... Narekatsi was also the son of the world Christian empire, his empire stretched from Iran to Europe, he was a part of it.
- I would like to say that while doing for the Christian empire, he was also doing for his Christian homeland.
- There is an exact formulation by Belinsky: "Pushkin is Peter the Great's answer call." For over a hundred years, Pushkin and Petros have been at each other's throats, the border pillars of those powerful areas were knocked down by Peter and called to give substance to those areas of his and the Russian language, after a hundred years, here is Pushkin answering his call with his "Little Tragedies", "Poltava", "The Copper Horseman", "Don Juan", his story of Ayd Pugachev... And Narekats. Also, let's not always forget that the Armenia of Narekatsi was the powerful Armenia, there was the Vaspurakan of the Artsrunis, the Shirak-Gugark of the Bagratunis, it was a period of national awakening, but also all or almost all the powers of the region were in that inseparable union, which today we call the identity of the cultural field.
- They say that opera is a dying art. There seems to be a rational element in this opinion, it is true, opera theaters are functioning, there are those who are interested, there are lovers, but as if it were a museum specimen, the same classic operas are taken out, shown and kept again, even if new operas are written, they do not arouse special interest, they are not part of the museum collection. Could something similar threaten literature?
- No, the opera is alive. a new opera is written or not, but the effort of humanity to present the old one in a new way is also appreciable. And as for literature... Literature has just barely found its language, only the first press of its new volume has been written, what a closing! Literature is a feature of language and will die with language only when language does not want to become literature, i.e. to be at its best.
- Every time he will need to express his feelings, his thoughts in literature, yes?
- Of course. We see every day how much the people love the beauty of speech, it's a fight, it's an obituary, I don't know what, it's just a conversation, how they want their phrase to be flexible, capacious and exhaustive. So this is the tendency of the people to express themselves through art, and before writing, the invention of printing - language worked, and it did not work badly, at least not worse than our written literature. There are people who don't know letters, holy faces come to me, whose job it shouldn't be, but they are drawn to culture, they aspire to something high, beautiful. Why else would we talk about the end of literature, when literature is the highest, most difficult, most precise, most found manifestation of that aspiration.
A working old man, my father's age and older than my father, you could see what he decorated the unplastered walls of his hundred-year-old house with: Vysotsky, Vazgen Vehapar, Sakharov, Komitas, President of America, Charents, Hovhannes Tumanyan...
And what they said about life and Armenia... "Dear Hrant, you are there too" and what the union magazine said about me. From the head of the throne to the ceiling, three whole nipple walls. He himself is gone now, the great-grandchildren or grandchildren are now in the old grandfather's house, and let's be sure that Saroyan and Charents are pasting their Saroyan and Charents on the old pictures.
- Do you watch television, are you satisfied with the quality and taste?
- I don't like it, no. We have always looked back over our shoulder: can this thing be done, can this thing be said, will Moscow allow it, will Polis, Shah Abbas, the king allow it... Now there is no Moscow, no Polis, no king, the kingdom has been given to you, so are you the one, is that all you wanted and did?
- So there is a need for a king?
- So there is a need for a king, if we are not able to serve ourselves as a king.
During the period of excitement, I had a very difficult conversation with a high-ranking intellectual. He was a guaranteed person, we went to Alaverdi on the occasion of his deputyship, we went and put the company aside, we sat down and talked, I said: well, Moscow is gone, the system is not there, yesterday we were careless, we said: we will make a mistake, Moscow will correct it - today will you be able to awaken in yourself the power, the last instance beyond which only God is? He said that he has that ability. He has it, I have it, the president of the republic has it... However, it turned out that we don't have it, it turned out that there is still a need for something higher, another, higher need. And we are to blame. If we are a country, if we have taken over the air, we must keep the air in such a way that we don't feel the need for the above.
- No matter how much we talk about democracy, at least in this region there is a need for a strong hand. If a superman were found...
- The transition is always based on a strong personality. For the transition to be orderly, a strong personality is needed, a factor of determination. Myasnikyan was that strong personality for our threatened, bitter, already-losing second republic. as an expressed ideologue, he was not Trotsky, he was not Shahumyan, he was not someone fiery, he simply put himself in the center of this poor motherland and became a middle pillar for our perishing house, and by his significance he is now more than all the faces personalized by theory and ideology. "I mean, what are we without a master, we have a master like Alexander Feodorovitch" (Mahari-Charents).
- Literature is also a place of strong personalities: Saroyan, Faulkner...
- Saroyan had a good laugh, didn't he, at Faulkner and ideologues in general? "Bill Faulkner, if that white girl married that Negro boy and the Negro boy came to that white girl, what do you have to do with them?" Faulkner has powerful stories, he knew how to tell a lie, he knew how to perceive a child, he knew what a pause is. Hey, who were we going to call Master?
- There is an opinion that Hemingway did not write a great work and the reason is that he was afraid of failure. But is that so?
- Hemingway gave me a lot. consider him a friend of my youth, I cannot agree that he did not write a great work. Today, if I need to trust, if I need a writer brother, I remember him.
The American image, the creed of that American self... that you are everything, the power of the world, the universe is in you, that you are a superman, that your abilities are limitless, that you are the one to fall, you are the one responsible for the ups. Hemingway's literature, the literature of American greats is perhaps great in that they brought something to the idea of Americanism, all together painted the image of that great America, the American. Those who were able to embody the idea of Armenianness of Armenians are probably even greater than us.
- However, under the Soviets, our culture flourished, the national culture itself, no matter how much they say Russification, oppression of the national, false internationalism, etc.
- It's a blasphemy, it's a brave stone thrower and a slanderous curse from behind the veil that has passed away. Uniquely, for the only time in history, the idea of cultural-national autonomy was embodied in the form of a state, in the best form. There was respect for your culture due to the empire as well. Yes, we seemed to decorate the ideology of the empire, we were the decorator who should decorate the gospel, but our decoration became so rich that the very value of the gospel was moved to the margin, that book is now valuable because of our decoration.
- For better or for worse, we have independence now, and it seems that no one will take it away from us anymore, the world seems to have come to such a state that it will not allow a nation to disappear, a country to disappear... Don't you think it won't allow it, don't you trust it...
- I think that an aggressive attitude towards Armenia will be a bigger problem for both Turkey and other powerful states than the tolerance of Armenia, the presence of Armenia... At the same time, there are other, slow, invisible ways to kill, there are other ways to weaken, suffocate. From your earth will rise the ability to ensure the presence of a serious power on this planet. It is necessary to stand up culturally and endure this world of ours, stand up culturally and stand up to the peaceful cultural competition of nations. You will endure, you will endure, you will not endure...
Gurgen KHANJIAN spoke
"Republic of Armenia", 16.03.1999