First, factory by factory, the entire industrial economy; then, department by department, the whole system of administration; and now the spiritual sphere as well?… And all for one thing: to saw up a machine worth a million, tear down a structure worth a billion, and extract ten roubles’ worth of gold for myself.
It’s not good, lads. It’s very bad.
And if the folly of abandoning and looting factories carried the delusion of harming the empire rather than ourselves, if the smashing of departments carried the illusion of victory over the accursed regime rather than over our own poor heads, then here, in the spiritual sphere, we must have no illusions: this is our own grievous defeat. It testifies to only one truth: we are no different from the modern-day alchemists who melt down a machine for ten grams of gold, or the wretched bureaucrats who were convinced reformers because rebuilding would leave them plenty of ownerless, unwanted material from the old structure. No different at all: the frenzy of plunder, of grabbing and running, has seized us too.
Can we have become so corrupted, so forgetful of whose successors we are, so ready to disown our calling, to drive our fellow writers to the doors of courts and authorities?… To mock the court and judges throughout one’s work, to remain free of and distant from those in power throughout one’s life, and then seek one’s justice from them? Is it not obvious that they were waiting for the hour of their revenge, that to them, for ever, “those writers are worth nothing”? Would it not have been far better to sully our own parents’ names? For a parent is the parent of our individual person, while a writer…
You will yet have daughters and sons who will separate themselves from the multitude of hucksters, reach for something high and spiritual, find it in great Armenian literature and become its devoted servants. Their aspirations will not wander unclaimed and unaddressed: they will know that they have a refuge, that they are not the subjects of their soulless, homeless peers. Why, having fallen so low and seeing yourselves buried, do you also see Armenian literary life as dead?
Can one be so lacking in faith?
Can one be so heedless of duty? Once a century, once a millennium, our great spirits await a word about themselves; the nation gathers for celebrations around their names. Are we the ones to speak that word? By what right, as fallen people?
Can one be so unjust as to destroy something that has barely been brought into being over centuries, something created by the great Tumanyan, Isahakyan, Teryan, Shant, Aghbalyan, Charents, Demirchyan, Zoryan, Bakunts?… Why, for what? Because in advanced countries writers do not belong to unions, or belong to several unions? That suits them. But how long will we keep looking at others’ houses and pulling down our own, listening to others’ words and forgetting our own, becoming captive to others’ images and trampling our own sacred image?
The Writers’ Union has existed and will exist.
There will be one Writers’ Union, with one leadership, and its daily bread will be contacts and relations, proposals and demands, acquaintance and friendship, debate and dialogue with writers here and everywhere, with their unions and with those outside unions. This leadership will be deprived of its bread as punishment, say, for Narekatsi’s silence today, for this isolation from other countries and literatures, for this foolish irresponsibility flooding the airwaves and the book market. Otherwise, who is to blame—which union, which of the unions?
The Writers’ Union must exist, even if its role in a literary work and a writer’s life is zero, because… just imagine that this zero of a Union did not exist. I am not addressing the dark imagination of judges and those in power; I am speaking to the many, the very many, who claim literature and the writer’s virtue for themselves and their nation. I do not know: without that Union my stomach turns and my head spins; I see myself exiled from my homeland, from my time. And I think I am not alone.