‘We had already agreed to have this conversation when I read Hovhannes Yeranyan’s interview with you in Arar. Before we begin, I think a small clarification is needed. As a reader, two things in that interview offended me: the “pinpricks” and the assertion that “much in your work has become outdated”. And you agree with both.’
‘If there had been freedom of the press, freedom of speech, the empire should not have collapsed. In the souls of sensitive people, writers and poets, before their eyes, the country’s disintegration was unfolding, and they could not cry out, scream, answer that grotesque reality with a grotesque response. Lines, phrases and works have survived from that time as things that slipped through, things that looked like misprints—but, I repeat, things that slipped through. Paruyr Sevak used to say: better to be a skilled blacksmith than a jeweller…’
It was indeed a place for a blacksmith, a place to forge, to hammer out new gods for the new times. Yet writers were allotted only the place of those who decorate the margins of orthodox Marxism. All the successes Soviet literature achieved looked like oversights. Otherwise, if that is not so, if conditions had been different, if literature had not been assigned the role of the party’s helper but the party had been made literature’s helper, that monstrous phenomenon called dissent should never have arisen in the country’s history. And the intelligentsia should not have gone underground, at best speaking in pinpricks and often, through confrontation, finding itself abroad. Whatever the case, the blame is theirs. They stifled the cry of the country’s son at the time, and now what we witness today has come to pass. Otherwise, nations whose genius had soared through the centuries, which had repeatedly shown that their cultures could reach the world’s summits, would not have found themselves beggars, petitioners, cultural subordinates before the West. And the great figures who should have been born here were born in the West. It is no accident that, instead of revering their own Márquez, readers became admirers of the West’s Márquezes. In other words, we were placed at a disadvantage beside our fellow writers in the West. Our hands were held fast, while they created their literature in freedom; their literature came to drive our literature of half-spoken words away from the reader and take our place before the readers of our nation. So that young man’s observation is correct. Breakthroughs did occur, of course, but once again they looked like oversights.
‘In 1960 Sovetakan Grakanutyun magazine published your essay “Ahnidzor”. In Grakan Tert the literary scholars Levon Hakhverdyan and Suren Aghababyan welcomed your arrival in literature as a writer, and then…’
‘As far as I remember, the initiative was Levon Hakhverdyan’s. He probably brought Suren Aghababyan into it too—a man who burned for literature, who felt all life’s pains as deeply as a writer. They liked my essay. They were honest and remained honest to the end, especially Suren Aghababyan, with his later efforts to defend me and open a path for me again. If those two names emerged in the publications, acts of baseness emerged afterwards too… But my generation defended me. Boys and girls came up to me as though approaching a hero. And I conducted myself in a way worthy of their love. I could not retreat; I had to continue, especially since I had made my so-called great discovery. There is a small chapter in “Ahnidzor” called “The Bear”. There I understood for the first time: it is us, our bear; a third party has no business here. That is where We and Our Mountains came from. I wrote it almost simultaneously, in 1960–61, when I was twenty-five. You have no business here, do not poke your nose into our affairs: when you force your way between a person and their work, the person will turn away from the work and the work from the person, and both will grow bitter. That is my contribution: with my older colleagues and my contemporaries, I managed to stir the fire of self-determination a little.’
‘But how did “Ahnidzor” escape censorship’s all-seeing eye and appear without cuts or alterations?’
‘No, there were alterations. There was a chapter entitled “The Children”, ten or twelve pages; they removed it. However much I tried to publish it, they would not allow it. So it was not without alterations. But let me say, they did not read essays. There was something strange. The higher-ups, the authorities, exaggerated and made absolute the work’s tendencies; they took every innocent word as an allusion against them. They raised the uproar, although at the time the Russian press was almost flooded with work of that kind. The problem had been noticed, Moscow encouraged it, but our ignoramuses did not even ensure Moscow’s standard. It was no accident that later Moscow had to defend me, Razmik Davoyan or someone else in this province against those who rejected us here. Strange, isn’t it? Here Martiros Saryan was to be denied, and Moscow had to come and tell Armenian artistic thinkers and Armenian statesmen: a giant is living among you.’
‘Now I am thinking of something else. What a terrible uproar followed “Ahnidzor”! Today, of course, there would be none. Not because the concerns it raised would no longer be relevant. Simply because no one would pay attention to the question you had raised. The uproar then and today’s indifference to matters of public importance—which would you prefer?’
‘When Solzhenitsyn had just been expelled, he said: there they have readers, here they have literature. There they oppress it; here literature is not persecuted, but there are no readers. I would still prefer freedom—the freedom that also existed among us, in which Tumanyan rose and Charents, Bakunts and the others worked until 1937.’
I would have been very fortunate if they had not watched me here with four eyes and I had simply done my modest work as a writer. Under that heightened scrutiny they distorted my work, made me out to be sly and wilful, deformed what I had written. Let me tell you a memory dear to me. I was publishing something harmless in Grakan Tert. I was also the newspaper’s proofreader and production editor. A page had gone for clearance and was not coming back. I went downstairs. The censor did not know me by name and said: “Dear brother, weren’t those two tormentors enough? Now another has been added.” The poor censor’s two tormentors were Paruyr Sevak and Gurgen Mahari; I was coming along as the third. I feel a little flattered now that they put my name beside theirs and issued instructions: beware of these three.
‘Some interesting figures: your first book, August, was published in Armenia only in 1967, when dozens of your books had already appeared in the Soviet Union and abroad. Your second, The Trees, appeared eleven years later. It seemed that a writer known throughout the country was barred from entering Armenia.’
‘The first book should have appeared before 1967. They typeset it, then broke up the type…’
‘On whose orders?’
‘Among themselves. Those who did it would probably have said the Central Committee; I do not know. Somehow, with great difficulty, it was published. In short, Moscow once again opened its doors wide. Suren Aghababyan got We and Our Mountains published in Literaturnaya Armeniya, and the Moscow reviews made me something noticeable here in the eyes of my own people. After that the attitude changed a little. I was not in a hurry to submit a second book. A book is sacred to me; you cannot simply turn it into a stream of production. I was especially moved by Isahakyan’s trembling hand: at eighty he was still correcting his texts, still changing a word, a letter in old pieces. In short, The Trees did not become a complete book. “Mesrop” had been thrown out of August. It was in the “Packhorses” cycle; the fine fellows threw it out, although it had already been published in Moscow and won Druzhba Narodov’s annual prize. “Mesrop” first appeared in Armenian outside the country, in Andranik Tsarukyan’s weekly Nairi in 1969. In the book of 1977, it and the novella The Hangover once again ate up my life. Those fanged creatures, who are still here now, who retrospectively see themselves as heroes of yesterday’s public square, do not say what they did. They published the book four years late. They made me sick of myself, of them, of writing and the pen. It was simply loathsome. What they did! They ruined The Hangover. What happened to The Hangover is why that young man considers me a writer of pinpricks. In one night they cut fifty pages and sent it to print that way. They changed the cover, the paper, the price… In one night they brought out some seventy-eight-kopeck book. And I am not someone who will then go back and patch it all together again.’
That entire process was disgusting.
‘Did you not restore it in your two-volume collection?’
‘No, I could not. Mushegh—dear, dear, dear Mushegh—sent the book down to the printing house without touching so much as a comma in my manuscript, then left his job. After he left, they began examining his work. I was among that work. They brought my book back from the printing house and tore it apart, wrecked it. The essay “Metsamor”, “Mesrop” and The Hangover. They simply killed them. I had to repeat passages from “Mesrop” in The Hangover, whole stretches. If you will not let me say it here, I will say it somewhere else all the same. Of course I prefer freedom, of course freedom, even indifference, certainly—but not that heightened, hostile attention.’
‘And nevertheless, those works ought to have reached the reader in their original form.’
‘What I still have to do, what I have not done, is more precious to me even than what was published incomplete. I no longer go back to the past. Better to do it elsewhere, do something else, wrest something else from the unknown. These works are there to some extent, and not there; they seem to be alive, able to speak a little for themselves. No, I will not do it.’
‘Your prose is the kind that requires a certain level of understanding to be fully grasped. Was there no reason to criticise readers’ level?’
‘I know what you mean, but consider that ten people in a thousand attain that level, and that is enough. Whether it is five per cent of the nation or ten, it is a constant that gives birth to literature and preserves it. I have no complaint about its level.’
‘Let me ask: do you include the literary scholars of your time in that ten per cent, or not?’
‘If I undertake my own analysis, it will be rather long. Perhaps it was a distorted version of world culture, politics and history that reached us. Again the problem comes from Marxist-Leninist doctrine, in which the peasantry was seen merely as the working class’s ally. I do not know what role the intelligentsia was given, but workers and peasants were never on an equal footing: the peasantry was condemned to destruction. Then the collective farm, which was a form of communal ownership, was also destroyed, so that peasants could be made labourers on the land and deprived of property. Criticism, something like a state institution, had turned its hand towards that too. But the country’s dismemberment was so obvious that those charged with condemning village prose came to its defence. In other words, in defending the village and village prose, they were defending the country itself, the homeland itself, the human being.’
‘So they acted out of an awareness of the need?’
‘I used to say: on this land, in this Armenia, wherever you put your spade, a garden can grow; wherever you set your pen, a song can emerge. In every modest girl there is a queen, in every man a brave soul, a toiler, a creator. In short, just as God is in everyone, everyone deserves attention and respect. I said: I know the village well, so I write the village; you write what you know. Our life, in every one of its spheres, deserves literature. My rural patch is not among the unworthy ones. I write this, you write your own; I do not hinder you, so do not hinder me.’
‘According to the thematic publishing plan of Khorhrdayin Grogh, your latest novel, Takh, was to appear in 1991. It is still not here. Will it finally appear? If so, what will it bring, what new characters will join Tsmakut’s vivid, colourful gallery?’
‘I do not know myself what it will add or bring. The work is unfinished. I had shut myself away to write when Sumgait erupted, then the earthquake, and so on. It will sound a little grand if I say that I was to be the prophet of these people, of this life; now I will simply become the chronicler of their dark days. Life has overtaken me. Immorality accumulated and accumulated, and this black flood burst forth. That is what the work was about. Before the anxieties that have now become polluted air for us, before those anxieties, this country’s son—who is partly me, perhaps partly you and everyone else—wanted to become that moral figure who, in Isahakyan’s and Sahyan’s words, says:
Weary gulls, alight upon my shoulders,
I stand firm as a rock.
Paul the Apostle: “Come to me, you who are weary and broken…” That is the figure I was striving to create—call him Christ, a prophet or Don Quixote, if you like… Much of the work is done; so much effort, talent and beauty has gone into it that it cannot be left unfinished. Now I must somehow finish it. Working is difficult, very difficult. It requires isolation. And to be able to isolate yourself, you must be as perfect as an animal or as wise as a great sage. Of course, another time I may put it differently: when will this noise leave my ears, when will my eyes, which see these dreadful images, be cleansed of this rubbish—my eyes, my ears, my nostrils… William Saroyan: “The rubbish was eating me; I struggled for a long time, then surrendered.” Will I too resign myself…
‘Today Hrant Matevosyan and his literature are accepted unreservedly in Armenia…’
‘Do not believe it.’
‘I also mean those who have not understood your literature. They accept it all the same.’
You will have noticed that during the first ten minutes of a new play you are hostile, and the actor and director must certainly take that into account. For the first ten or fifteen minutes the actor is wrestling with you. When will you surrender? Will he bring you down, or will he fall? Glory to those actors who can gather the audience into the palm of their hand by the seventh or eighth minute. It is the same with writers: every newcomer is met with hostility. Who are you to come and be a god over me? It is very natural. As if Teryan were not enough, now you are coming too? What are you that I should become your admirer, your reader, with my entire household? Who are you to be my prophet, take my time, become a book I read at my desk? We should consider this a rule, the way all of us do—or do not—accept one another. Nevertheless, at some point that coldness breaks. And if they accept you and wait, you must continually make their expectations worthy of being readers before a great divine text. Could you remind me of Tumanyan’s quatrain:
And I, let us say, am a wondrous, fortunate Reader,
Who reads those songs so easily and so deeply.
That is how it is: there is God’s text, whose readers are the most fortunate among us; they merely gather that heavenly text. God grant that we may be that pupil, that reader, the one who is always learning.
‘A good reader forces you always to rise above yourself, and that is undoubtedly difficult.’
‘It is terrifying. Once you have earned that loving regard, it is simply terrifying. Your slightest error should already drive you from the public square in shame.’
‘I would like you to speak about the writers you love.’
‘Charents. One good volume. One good volume of Tumanyan. Teryan.’
Oh, days will come more sorrowful still,
And cruel, cruel, crueller yet…
Lament will fall silent in the inconsolable heart,
And boredom will settle like dust…
How many words he brought!.. How many words he brought! Not one concept he brought has vanished; they went on to permeate all Armenian literature. It is the same with Charents and Tumanyan. These are ours: Tumanyan, Charents, Teryan. There are works of Tolstoy’s I love; from time to time I return and reread The Cossacks and Hadji Murat. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a work of terrible power. I like to return to Dostoevsky in thought: I do not love his texts, but the abstraction rising from them. I tried returning to the older writers who had filled my youth and saw that they no longer gave me what I needed; I want a book for my desk today. There are hours when even Tumanyan is not enough, a place that even Holy Scripture does not fill. I would write the parable of Job anew; today we are in Job’s situation. No, I would not write it anew; I would translate it anew. There. I once loved Saroyan very much, Hemingway; I loved Faulkner’s stories. In short, as a young man growing up in the anticultural atmosphere of this province, I found great nourishment even in the tiniest crumbs of world literature. But I have no book for today’s desk. Charents holds up a little. Did you see how many books have appeared in recent years? The strongest remained Charents’s unpublished drafts:
A toothless man with an ape’s skull
Sat on my bare chest, choking me.
Poison dripped from his lips onto my face,
And his name was “Tenderness”.
‘In Ahnidzor—in the Tsmakut you created—many of the models for your existing and future works have lived and still live. Do you go there often? How do they receive your work? Are they pleased or displeased with the portraits you have made?’
‘You should have asked that twenty-five years ago; I would have answered. Many of them were still there, and I cherished their immortality. I knew they were people, that a human being is passing through, brother; I knew they would pass. Every person who leaves simply robs me and goes. Whether a new Ahnidzor will arise, I do not know. Yes, how did it happen that yesterday’s boy living among them is not a shepherd, a ploughman or a blacksmith among them, but has gone to Yerevan to do his own writing—and still finds fault with them? In general there was this attitude, like a Muslim’s: hiding one’s face from the camera, avoiding books, considering writers informers… At the time they received We and Our Mountains with considerable hostility. “Ahnidzor” too, though it was about them and for them. After they saw the film, their attitude warmed. It turned out they had not read it; they had heard about it from this person and that. Well, they are village people; they say: all right, what use are you? Look, they say, Hovhannes Tumanyan got a road opened to his village after his death; let us see what you will do for yours.’
‘And my last question. It is strange, but since 1988 I have very often heard the same question: “Why does Hrant Matevosyan not come and speak at the rallies?” As though he had not said in his work everything they want to hear from Independence Square.’
‘So the people were going to the demonstration in the square, dressed up and adorned; our paths crossed. They said: if only Shiraz were here! Shiraz or Paruyr. Now they were gone, others were there; they could do nothing, could not speak. In the end, what becomes of what we have done and what we have yet to do? Are we needed or not? I do not know. Literature becomes something superfluous. Of course, every one of us, from adult to child, is obliged to sacrifice themselves for the homeland, for one another, for our common life. That is not the point; the point is that the writer is the salt of the nation. Hovhannes Tumanyan is the nation’s substance; the nation takes shape around him. Once a nation has provided its daily bread and water, its daily courage, toil and sweat—in other words, attended to all its concerns—it wants something higher too, does it not? Even the last watchman sits down, and you see him writing Armenian history with the pages on his knee, sitting in Tiflis or Los Angeles. Another does not write Armenian history; he writes Anush. We entrust our essence to writing. Through us the nation seeks its divine word. We create the atmosphere in which a people becomes a nation. Armenian writers created this environment; national substance is ultimately our creation. But will our present condition enter our literature?.. The courage for it seems to belong only to the Western “avant-garde”. Salvador Dalí, for instance. Do you remember Civil War? An ugly, monstrous creature tears off its mother’s breast with its monstrous fingers. A dreadful cry of pain, is it not? They were brave, answered life’s questions bravely, cursed those who provoke civil strife and devour the country, the earth beneath their feet, themselves. Our life has faced such conditions a thousand times, and we have had no one to express them. We have not been brave lads, we have not been courageous. That is why, above all, I wish every newcomer who takes up a pen courage, devotion to truth and boldness. Above all, boldness. Charents and Tumanyan were brave in that way.
Interview conducted by Frunzik KIRAKOSYAN
Banber, 5 April 1994.