‘Master.’
‘We shall accept your “master” provisionally.’
‘Very well. There are writers who avoid their own time, avoid using features characteristic of their time and place, even giving their characters contemporary names. They turn to allegory and other devices, apparently hoping to extend their work into eternity. In your view, can a work’s life be prolonged that way?’
‘Those are all points of approach, and every one has achieved such great successes that speaking against one or another would be narrow-minded. We can speak only of our preferences. I consider it honest to concentrate on the real, the authentic, your own place and time: concentrate, and see all times and the whole world within them. The historical moment you inhabit contains every moment of history, including the future. The moment in which you live, whose child you are, contains the lives of your grandparents and grandchildren. Of course, by concentrating on their own time some may remain essayists, documentarians, newspaper writers. Whatever else you accuse such writers of, you cannot accuse them of dishonesty, and that is already good: there is civic conscientiousness, courage too.’
‘So it takes a gift, talent, to fit yesterday and tomorrow into today?’
‘It takes courage and responsibility towards yourself and your time, yes, to see yourself as Movses Khorenatsi today, your contemporaries as Arshak or Vardan Mamikonyan, instead of avoiding yourself and your time and wandering in timeless times and placeless spaces.’
‘Mr Matevosyan, Soviet censorship, about which artists complained so much, has disappeared. What has changed, and has the change been beneficial?’
‘I hesitate over that question, remembering the torment and suffering involved in bringing almost every publication of mine into being, how much time and energy it took from the best years of my life. Yet at the same time I thought the fault was mine too: if my work had been as perfect as an egg, a flawless, closed whole, no one would have dared intrude into it. I judge a little differently: society should help the writer advance. If society records itself through the writer’s mouth, society should help writers, not hinder them, because literature is a capricious, difficult place where one in a thousand who try succeeds, perhaps none; what is needed is help, not obstruction. We should probably distinguish two things: censorship is needed after all, but it must know its place and not obstruct. Russia has always had censorship; the communists inherited it. Pobedonostsev halted publication of The Kreutzer Sonata; Hadji Murat was published posthumously. Remembering all its crude barbarity, I nevertheless think we need an outside eye, another person’s eye on our work. There was Thomas Wolfe and there was Maxwell Perkins. From Wolfe’s heap of manuscripts he separated out a novel, a novella, a story. Let us be Wolfes and look for our Perkins. Obstruction, no; punishment, certainly not; but let us all understand that there must be some mutual responsibility. Publication has become easier, no one holds our hand back, but we are not boys scribbling on garage walls, bringing everything that crosses our minds into public. So some supervision is necessary. Goncharov, the author of Oblomov, was a censor; Sundukyan, I think, too…’
‘In other words, a censor who does not prohibit but indicates a certain standard and maintains taste?’
‘Yes, something like a synod.’
‘Returning to your literature, did Soviet censorship nevertheless harm it?’
‘Greatly, and always.’
‘Did you ever, for instance, have to take the censor into account as you wrote a phrase, feel his silent presence and move a word elsewhere or remove it altogether?’
‘The panorama of what is called Soviet literature was a picture of striving to push the inquisitor’s heavy breath away, of being sullied and distorted by that effort, of expressing itself incompletely, at half strength and with half the truth. The country should have belonged to speech, to us, to the Word; it belonged to the army. One does not build a country with an army; the country, and the army too, are built with the word: “In the beginning was the Word.”’
It was the country of our incomplete word, our unfree, suppressed speech, and it collapsed.
I do not think it would be crude to distinguish it this way: if not a censor, then at least an editor, an outside, second eye, is needed by all of us and each of us. You say the reciter of our epic had no censor; I say he did: the children listening would not let him ramble into impropriety or indecency.
‘And the fact that the field opened abruptly and the free world’s “improper and indecent” influences poured in unchecked—you consider that dangerous, yes?’
‘Through influence, Russian wanted its own Shakespeare and got Pushkin; Armenian wanted its own Pushkin and got Tumanyan. The new times wanted their own War and Peace and Tumanyan, and got And Quiet Flows the Don and Yeghishe Charents. For two hundred years English-speaking America sought a literature of its own, not English but American English, and got it. There are many examples. Languages, nations and times have that enduring pride: to remake themselves and create their own. You and I will rely on that constant number of select readers who demand from us something other than what the surrogate called mass culture offers today; it is not worth speaking of or against it, it is beside the point.’
‘Thank God, such readers exist among the young too. I was not certain at one time, but recently, when I spent time with students, my opinion changed. Interestingly, the good readers are mostly girls.’
‘Because God has entrusted them with responsibility for preserving the hearth.’
‘Perhaps. Or have the boys been sifted into business, into concerns about earning money…’
‘Perhaps. But you said girls, and a warm wave of memory brought beloved names: Tumanyan’s Princess Mariam, Charents’s Armenuhi Tigranyan, Dostoevsky’s Anna Grigoryevna, Tolstoy’s daughter and wife—knights of jealousy and literary honour, without whom those great figures would not have been what they were. Now perhaps it is the same: our schoolgirls, jealous guardians of honour, expect from us unfailing devotion to literature, the literature of our conscience.’
‘With that in mind, how do you view the question of a writer presenting life as he sees it, as opposed to a writer who compromises, conceals the reality he has seen and embellishes it to give the reader optimism?’
‘Has your experience as a reader not told you how insatiably “life as it is” is read, yet what desolation it leaves behind? I have experienced that admiration and outright robbery.’
A writer’s unassuming testimonies, documentary accounts, are very dear to me. Illiterate people’s accounts of their lives are very dear. Literature will probably follow that road now too. American literature turned towards documentary writing thirty years ago—Vietnam diaries and so forth—and the movement called New Journalism emerged. If we lack the power of analysis and abstraction, we should at least have the courage to transcribe life.
‘Nevertheless, do you accept that for great aims—the future of a country or a generation, for instance—a writer may not tell the whole truth, may distort what he has seen? Or must a true writer follow the truth whatever the cost?’
‘Literature—let us remember Charents’s “Ode Dedicated to the Brave Traveller”—is a process of discovery, not a distribution of what is known, with this part of what has been found made public and that part concealed. You set out with your reader and search, find or do not find, come to know or do not come to know with your reader. With. If the reader did not come with you, you are not a writer, you have not set out, you seek nothing and will find nothing good or bad. With Dostoevsky we find demons in our own conduct and souls and rejoice in our own discovery; in that way physicists rejoiced with a shudder when they saw the face of death in the splitting atom. But could they have refrained from splitting it? Can we stop at the brink of revealing the truth and deprive ourselves of the joy of discovery?..’
‘Through the boldness of his search, Dostoevsky inspired the “peoples” not only of literature but of other fields.’
‘He travelled along the edge, always along the edge, shaking the boundaries, and expanded the boundaries of more than literature.’
‘Does the size of a country or nation not matter? I mean, if the unbounded freedom of Dostoevsky or another like him was not dangerous for vast Russia with its many millions, could it have been dangerous for us?’
‘Of course, our literature bears that gift and that flaw of unfreedom. From Khorenatsi onwards our writer has shouldered the task of restoring statehood; the country’s future, the state yet to emerge, took refuge in our literature. Political thought claimed much of the writer’s attention, and we undoubtedly suffered losses in pure art, in artistic purity. The avant-garde spirit that should have belonged to our musician, painter and writer appeared in others, making you think even of your own person’s timidity. But it is history, not the individual; it is fate. We had no country, no tsar, no Boris Godunov whose story we could reveal as Pushkin did. We looked at our Boris Godunov from another perspective; the absence of statehood held back and restrained our genius.’
‘In that case, can one say that Narekatsi was somewhat outside civic life, lacking a sense of citizenship and homeland? You read him and do not see the Armenian, the citizen concerned about his country.’
‘I have spoken of this on another occasion.’
The empire collapsed; we lost the status of its citizens. With the loss of that status, this small country will also lose the confident, commanding, elevated voices Narekatsi, Tumanyan, Isahakyan and Charents possessed. And Narekatsi… Narekatsi too was a son of the worldwide Christian empire; his empire stretched from Iran to Europe, and he was part of it.
‘Meaning that in working for the Christian empire he was also working for his Christian homeland?’
‘There is Belinsky’s precise formulation: “Pushkin is the answering call to Peter the Great.” Across a hundred years Pushkin and Peter call to one another: Peter planted the boundary posts of those mighty territories and calls for substance to be given to his territories and those of the Russian language. A hundred years later Pushkin answers his call with his Little Tragedies, Poltava, The Bronze Horseman, Don Juan, his history of Pugachev… So too with Narekatsi. And let us never forget that Narekatsi’s Armenia was a powerful Armenia: there was the Artsrunis’ Vaspurakan, the Bagratids’ Shirak-Gugark; it was a time of national awakening. Moreover, all or almost all the region’s powers formed that inseparable unity we today call a shared cultural field.’
‘They say opera is a dying art. There seems to be a rational kernel to that view: opera houses function, there are admirers and lovers, yet it seems a museum exhibit. They bring out the same classical operas, show them and put them away again; if new operas are written, they arouse no particular interest, do not enter that museum collection. Could something similar threaten literature?’
‘No, opera lives. Whether or not new opera is written, humanity’s effort to present the old anew deserves appreciation too. As for literature… It has only just, barely, found its language, written only the first gatherings of its new volume. What talk can there be of its closing? Literature is a property of language and will die only with language, when language no longer wishes to become literature—that is, to express itself at its best.’
‘Every age will need to express its feelings and thoughts through literature, yes?’
‘Of course. Every day we see how much the people love the beauty of speech: a quarrel, an obituary, whatever it may be, or simply a conversation—how they want their phrase to be supple, capacious and complete! This is the people’s inclination to express themselves through art. Before the invention of writing and printing, language worked, and not badly, certainly no worse than our written literature. There are people who do not know the letters; sanctified faces come before me, people for whom this should not have been their business, yet who reach towards culture, towards something elevated and beautiful. Why speak of literature’s end when literature is the highest, most difficult, most exact, most fully realised expression of that striving?’
A working old man, my father’s age or older—you should have seen what he had used to decorate the unplastered walls of his hundred-year-old house: Vysotsky, Catholicos Vazgen, Sakharov, Komitas, the American president, Charents, Hovhannes Tumanyan…
And what they had said about life and Armenia… “Dear Hrant, you are there too,” and what the all-Union magazine had said about me. From the head of the divan to the ceiling, three entire windowless walls. He is gone now; his grandchildren or great-grandchildren are in the old ancestral house, and we may be certain they paste their own Saroyan and Charents over the old pictures.
‘Do you watch television? Are you satisfied with its quality and taste?’
‘I do not like it, no. We have always looked back over our shoulder: may we do this, may we say this, will Moscow allow it, Constantinople, Shah Abbas, the king?.. Now there is no Moscow, no Constantinople, no king; the kingdom has been given to you. So is that who you are, was that all you wanted and did?..’
‘Then a king is needed?’
‘Then a king is needed if we cannot serve before ourselves as before a king.’
During the period of enthusiasm I had a very difficult conversation with an intellectual in high office. He was a man with support; we had gone to Alaverdi in connection with his candidacy as a deputy. There we put friendship aside, sat down and talked. I said: very well, Moscow is gone, the system no longer exists. Yesterday we were careless, saying: if we slip, Moscow will correct us. Today can you awaken within yourself that power, that final authority beyond which there is only God? He said he could. He could, I could, the president of the republic could… Yet it turned out we could not; it turned out we still felt a need for someone above, someone else higher still. And we are to blame. If we are a country, if we have taken responsibility for the airwaves, we must maintain them so we feel no need for a higher authority.
‘However much we talk of democracy, at least in this period there is a need for a strong hand. If a superman could be found…’
‘Transition is always placed on a strong individual’s shoulders. For it to be orderly, a strong personality is necessary, a factor of decisiveness. For our second republic, terrified, scattered and already nearly lost, that strong personality was Myasnikyan. As an outspoken ideologist he was no Trotsky, no Shahumyan, no fiery figure; he simply placed himself at the centre of this poor homeland and became the central pillar of our collapsing house. In his importance he now exceeds all those figures distinguished by theory and ideology. “What do you mean, we have no one over us? We have someone like Alexander Fyodorovich” (Mahari–Charents).’
‘Literature too is a place for strong personalities: Saroyan, Faulkner…’
‘Saroyan laughed wonderfully at Faulkner and ideologists generally, didn’t he? “Bill Faulkner, if that white girl goes to that black boy and that black boy comes to that white girl, what business have you between them?” Faulkner has powerful stories; he knew how to make an invention convincing, how to convey a child’s perception, what a pause is. That is whom we should have called Master.’
‘There is a view that Hemingway wrote no great work because he feared failure. But is that really so?’
‘Hemingway gave me a great deal; consider him a friend of my youth. I cannot agree that he wrote no great work. Today, if I need someone to trust, if I need a brother writer, I remember him.’
The American image, that American creed of the self… The belief that you are everything, the strength of the world and universe is within you, that you are a superman, your abilities limitless, you are to blame for your fall and responsible for your rise. Hemingway’s literature, the literature of the great Americans, is perhaps great because they brought something to the idea of Americanism, together moulded the image of that great America, the American. Among ours, perhaps the great ones are those who could embody the idea of the Armenian’s Armenianness.
‘Nevertheless, under the Soviets our culture flourished, our national culture itself, however much people talk of Russification, the suppression of the national, false internationalism and so on.’
‘That is abusive talk, brave stone-throwing and loudmouthed curses from behind a curtain that has already gone. For the unique, only time in history, the idea of cultural-national autonomy was embodied in the form of a state, in its best form. There was respect for your culture thanks to the empire too. Yes, we seemed supposed to embellish the empire’s ideology; we were the illuminators meant to ornament the Gospel. Yet our ornament was so rich that the Gospel’s true value shifted into the margins; that book is now valuable because of our ornament.’
‘For better or worse, we have independence now, and it seems no one will take it from us any more. The world seems to have reached a condition in which it will not allow a nation or a country to disappear… Do you not think it will prevent that? Do you not trust it?..’
‘I think an aggressive attitude towards Armenia would be a greater problem for Turkey and the other powerful states than tolerating Armenia, Armenia’s presence… At the same time, there are other, slow, invisible ways of killing, other ways of weakening and suffocating. From your country there must rise a capacity that ensures the presence of a serious state on this planet. We must come into our own culturally and withstand this world of ours; establish ourselves culturally and withstand the nations’ peaceful cultural competition. If you endure, you endure; if you do not…’
Interview by Gurgen KHANJYAN
Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, 16 March 1999.