The Poetry of Language

— Hrant Ignatovich, although the literary interview is a relatively recent genre, it has already acquired conventions of its own. I would like to break with the usual order and begin with the question that generally closes the conversation. What are you working on now?
— I am rereading my essay on the Western Armenian prose writer Hakob Mndzuri. His work, wonderful in itself, has also caught my attention because it offers so much material for thinking about the paths and fate of Armenian literature, about genuine and false innovation. A porter, a baker, a day labourer, in his old age he sold candles in an Armenian church. I see Mndzuri as an envoy of the old Armenian village who has lost his way in the modern age. Almost a contemporary of Tumanyan, he was eleven years older than Charents, yet he describes the Armenian village of the past and the beginning of this century — a village that had remained as it was in Kuchak’s day, and earlier still under the Bagratunis and during the Arab invasions, and before that in Xenophon’s time — in such a way that he seems, even today, an eyewitness to the realities of bygone centuries and their envoy to the literature of the future.
Hakob Mndzuri died at ninety-two, and his death passed as unnoticed as his literary life had been. It could hardly have been otherwise, for the Western Armenian part of our people, whose biographer and advocate he was meant to be, no longer existed: amid the turmoil of the First World War, the Young Turks had diligently and meticulously wiped them off the face of the earth. Nor was Mndzuri considered a real writer, because of his tireless ethnographic work. A son of Mndzur’s violet mountains, he described his region with the precision of a field watchman, never failing to note what his fellow villagers ate, how they dressed, how they sowed and what they harvested... Yet what was considered a failing was a strength. With the clothing Mndzuri preserved, we can dress our barefoot, naked historiography; with the dishes he preserved, we can feed our entire people, who have lived and worked since Xenophon’s day. He gave us geography: a description of the ground on which our literature stands. He gave our literature taste and smell. Mndzuri is an encyclopaedia of village life, and not in any figurative sense; Armenian lexicographers will always turn to his books. Not a tree, a spring, a flower, a joke or an incident was neglected; nothing escaped his eyes and ears, his sense of smell or touch. All those images and voices gathered in the heart of the future poet and the muscles of the village teacher and mower. For all those voices, calls and scents, he became a storehouse... There is no suitable word. Was this recording of colour, sound and the visible world a conscious piece of “preparatory” work for future literature, or was it undertaken with a foreboding of the trials ahead? That is a separate question. The point is not that, one way or another, that world was going to disappear. The point is that before disappearing it managed to impress itself on the soul of its son and chronicler just as it was.
— Do you mean that Mndzuri consciously worked for the future, taking into account, so to speak, the spiritual needs of tomorrow?
— No, that is not how it happens. We all work for today. The future takes some of us along with it; most remain in the present. Mndzuri is one of tomorrow’s chosen. And if tomorrow — no later than tomorrow — an Armenian, even one in a hundred, wishes to see the path his fathers and his people have travelled, wishes to find his roots, he will discover in yesterday a clear glade filled with quiet light: Hakob Mndzuri’s glade. And in that glade he will find a peaceful, kind, hardworking people governed by mothers. The light called conscience will always be there, endlessly filling and pouring out, for as long as the masters and servants of this world are mothers.
— And what is your own relationship with geography and the ethnography of village life?
— Very straightforward and, I think, quite conventional: much the same as Hakob Mndzuri’s.
— In one of your interviews you called yourself Tsmakut’s “photographer” and “sketch writer”. I admit that surprised me. In my view you have never really been a sketch writer, even in the novella We and Our Mountains. Only on a first, cursory reading does the novella seem a light sketch of “pastoral” ways, recording, almost as a simple testimony, some of the reasons for the present “disagreements” between “town” and “country”.
A second reading reveals a sharply social novel — small and fragmentary, but a novel nonetheless. During a discussion of Moldavian prose, Ales Adamovich said that Moldavian literature, unlike Belarusian literature, had “kept its muzhik” as a prototype, and that this was by no means merely a literary phenomenon: behind it stood a way of life and a way of “running the household”. Now, We and Our Mountains explains, on a sufficiently serious level, how the peasant disappears and through what social shifts, and how a particular “pastoral” kind of consciousness and self-awareness changes. Surely all of this plainly exceeds the demands of a sketch, whether lyrical or documentary... Moreover, even when you can clearly see that two different characters have the same “original source”, you still feel the significance of their differences: the difference between the ideas served by each character. If we take, say, the underlying fact of life as our starting point, we cannot disagree with I. Zolotussky’s assertion that “both in the novella Autumn Sun and in the story Your Clan there is ‘the same mother’. In both cases her father is Ishkhan, the son is the same son, and the whole clan along whose branches her memories (and reproaches) spread is the same clan.” Yet to my mind, despite these purely biographical similarities — signs, that is, of a documentary or sketch-like basis that has been transcended — they are entirely different works. Autumn Sun is a family novella, whereas Your Clan (Our Clan of Clowns), seemingly another family story at first glance, has good grounds for aspiring to interpret and sum up realities of a far higher, far more general order. Naturally, that cannot fail to affect our perception of the leading women in these works.
— Of course I know that I am neither a “photographer” nor a “reporter”. If I call myself that, it is only because I am convinced that each of us — you, I, my little son — is already a generalisation, a fruit of humanity, and that life in its so-called natural form is already literature. Paruyr Sevak has these lines: “Life makes a mockery of Shakespeare // With its tragic dramas... // While we — you and I... play at art // And... with such certainty // As even Cervantes’s hero never possessed...” For instance, what did the books of my childhood tell me about the famine of the thirties, collectivisation, the war, the Yerevan flood? Seemingly everything, and yet nothing. Then, through a strange turn of events, a manuscript came into my hands: the notes of Zakeyan, a carpenter, a barely literate man. In that manuscript I found such vivid details that I became a direct eyewitness to those events. One episode particularly stayed with me. Zakeyan’s family had many children, and the collective farm had given them a cow as aid in kind. The cow fell ill and had to be slaughtered at once, but there was no one to do it: the father lay dying, and they had to call in either a neighbour or an uncle. They saved the meat and sold it, keeping only the head and feet, because everyone knew the father would die at any moment and they would have to provide a funeral meal.
Literary reportage and artistic photography teach us to respect this literature that life itself creates without the help of professional writers. I cannot begin work without a particular character, a particular fate at its heart. Without a living model, out of thin air, I can invent nothing. I need an impulse. A beginning. After that, as a rule, nothing of the prototype remains. Still, many of my characters recognise their “forebears” in particular details — biographical or situational — that belong within that “almost”. They recognise the surviving details without noticing that nothing of the initial outline is left.
— But those readers of yours who do not know these details regard your characters as largely autobiographical: such is the emotional persuasiveness of your “first person”...
— Perhaps. The narrative is indeed often in the “first person”, and the flow of speech “from the author”, the eyewitness’s way of telling a story, has absorbed something of my own way of thinking, speaking and narrating. At first — admittedly, that was very early on — I really did think that my “first person” would be my direct “I”. It turned out differently: the works I have written, and perhaps even those I have already conceived, do not, after all, contain me personally in my entirety. Once I sensed that, I stepped out of the game as its “first person”.
— And Araik, the boy in Beginning, Hrant Karyan’s younger brother? Is there really nothing of you in him either, nothing of what matters most, of what is vital? Only a child with an artist’s inclinations could see the world as that boy does, feel its ebbings and the contrasts between its states so acutely...
— You are right. There is indeed a great deal of me in Araik, but it comes from my childhood self, my childhood experiences.
— In general, is there much that is biographical in your prose?
— There is, of course, the ordinary work of writing: things created from what one has seen, noticed or heard, naturally transformed and supplemented, enriched and concentrated by imagination. But there is also directly biographical material. Simon, for example, Aghun’s husband in Autumn Sun, has a great deal of my father in him. Like Yeghish, my father always wanted to give something to us, his children. His hand was forever reaching towards his pocket, and the pocket was empty... Araik’s feelings towards his mother also come from the storehouse of childhood; so do the girls in red swimsuits and the river. But these are all individual details, facts, experiences, rather than a whole in all its complexity and scope.
— Yesenin hesitated for a long time, as The Keys of Mary testifies, over which image to choose for the symbolic banner of his Blue Rus: a horse or a cow. In the end he found it impossible to make the “sign of aspiration” — a horse’s head, that is — the emblem of the Russian man of the plains. Hence:
O homeland... a happy
And hopeless time,
There is nothing more beautiful, nothing better
Than your cow’s eyes...
(literal translation)
In your works, three figures lay claim to that symbolic role, seemingly with equal rights: the Buffalo, the unfortunate Alkho, and his opposite, the Orange Mare, the embodiment of wild natural forces whose power all your characters feel so keenly and dramatically, even the obedient packhorse Alkho. Which of those three would you choose if you were drawing Tsmakut’s “coat of arms”?
— In my Tsmakut, what is most truly mine is my Alkho. More precisely, the people who have Alkho deep within their souls, in all his manifestations. Those one might call the sinew of life, because life stands upon them. Those who can say of themselves: everything passes, but we remain. Such is Andro in The Orange Herd, from the Packhorses cycle; such is Avetik in Your Clan. And Simon in the novella Autumn Sun. Yet all these Alkho-like people — forgive the clumsy coinage — are not at the centre of the plots of those works. In the trilogy I have conceived, the story of such a person, someone on whom the world rests, will be central: it will be the foundation on which the trilogy is built. I have almost written the first part. Its provisional title is The Bull Buffalo. But its axis is the fate of an entirely different character, also born in Tsmakut. Unlike Andro and Avetik, he goes against life, trying to shape himself according to ideally beautiful but, alas, abstract and now outdated notions of honour and morality. He refuses to make even the smallest concessions to life — mean, unclean, but mobile and very resilient. That Rostom sits on my neck, a self-appointed apostle, a victim of his own lofty principles, and I cannot get free of him...
— If you had not told me that the central character of The Bull Buffalo comes from Tsmakut, your description could easily have led me to think of a hero in the manner of Conrad or Jack London: a manly stoic, a romantic... Is this not doing violence to the material? Are you imposing ideas foreign to this particular psychological makeup?
— There are people in the world, after all, who live, work, suffer and even commit crimes without asking themselves whether any of it is moral or immoral. They are like plants: they are what they are because that is what they are. But there are other people who constantly examine themselves with the human question: am I acting rightly? Some of my fellow villagers, on whose example I based my Rostom, are like that. I am convinced that one can answer the world’s most painful questions without leaving Tsmakut, literally without stepping outside Tsmakut. I am certain that every Tsmakut represents the world in all its complexity. Still, I repeat: Rostom will not be the trilogy’s principal character. Its final part is a novella about the person on whom life rests, although he himself, of course, never suspects that he is the one holding up the world. Incidentally, he has many prototypes, including my paternal grandfather.
— The very grandfather who gave rise to Avetik in Your Clan?
— The very one. He had many freeloaders hanging round his neck: his own family, his brother’s wife and sons, my mother’s aunt... He was the forefather of a large clan. And he must have hated my other grandfather, Ishkhan, the man who became the prototype of another of my characters, who had forced his own daughter on him as a daughter-in-law — a coarse, tactless woman... That could not but affect his attitude towards his son and towards us, his grandchildren... Yet I cannot remember him without tenderness. Do you remember Hamo Sahyan’s Grandfather? You translated it; you must remember.
— Of course I remember:
My grandfather planted
Our village’s saplings,
My grandfather shod
Our village’s horses.
My grandfather built
Our village’s walls
And set the stones in all the threshing sledges
Entirely on his own...
— And then?
— And then...
One day, when suddenly
His knees gave way,
He froze in astonishment,
He flushed with shame.
He let go of the plough handle
And held his breath,
And then the sweat
Grew cold upon his brow.
And in the furrow Grandfather
Lay down and fell asleep,
Mingling with the earth
That had nourished him.
— My grandfather too belonged to that breed of people: people who know how to speak to the earth. For some reason I cannot remember his face, although I was fifteen when he died. But I remember his garden well. It resembled the clean, detailed watercolours of European naturalists: beautiful, well-tended beds, a few rose bushes. It was not just his garden; everything of my grandfather’s was beautiful, even his livestock. His buffalo was a beauty; her eyes looked as if they were lined with kohl. And her heifer took after her, a little coquette. Even when, after the rains, the village herd came back from pasture covered in mud up to their chests, my grandfather’s fastidious creatures managed to stay clean. I do not know why. But that is how it was.
Already an old man, although he could have gone on quietly cultivating his beautiful garden, my grandfather became the collective farm’s beekeeper. It was a very large apiary. After his death, about two years later, all the bees died. An apiary depends on delicate skills and delicate relationships. Unfortunately, the ability to distinguish ordinary grain from grain suitable for pilaf is becoming rare. And if we sit with folded hands, sighing, grumbling and consoling ourselves with nostalgia’s bitter sweetness, I fear that even such modest foods as honey and black pepper, whose production nevertheless requires knowledge of the subtleties of the craft, will become acutely scarce and then disappear from our tables altogether... At the apiary my grandfather made all kinds of things. And the women who bore the heavy burden of the war years always chose his rakes and his spades, because they were beautiful and light, comfortable to work with.
Lately I have begun to notice that I instinctively try to make my handwritten page as clear and beautiful as my grandfather’s garden, preserved in my childhood memories...
— It seems to me there are two kinds of writers. Some try to see and reproduce, as quickly as possible, everything that is only just emerging. Ivan Turgenev is the classic example. Others try to preserve for the future what is about to disappear. Depending on the circumstances, first one group and then the other finds itself at the centre of readers’ attention. At present, I think readers are particularly interested in writers such as Valentin Rasputin, with his Matyora vanishing beneath the water: like Hakob Mndzuri, they are “advocates” for a departing world and its “envoys” to the literature of the future.
— Your formulation is too straight a line... The comparison you propose, Tsmakut–Matyora, also seems too categorical to me, though if we do not “dig into it”, there is something there. After all, with people such as Sahyan’s Grandfather, a distinctive culture of manual work is passing away, a culture that had become the accumulation and culmination of centuries of experience. When I think of my duty as a writer — to that immense agricultural culture and to the last Mohicans of old Lori, where even in Tumanyan’s time there was not a centimetre of ground left uncultivated, untransformed into an earthly paradise, and where now even the wild walnut trees are gone — this is how I understand my duty as a writer and a son: Lori, both as a geographical concept and as a spiritual and moral world, must not disappear from the face of the earth...
— I entirely share your concern and admire your stoic, romantic attitude towards the “responsibility of honour”. But how does this relate to fulfilling your duty to today’s Tsmakut?
— My new, as yet unpublished work, Tashkent, is today’s Tsmakut: its present, its face as I understand and see it. Incidentally, the title sends the Armenian reader back along the trail of Aksel Bakunts’s old sketch Along the Path. That sketch tells of restoring old paths, already overgrown with grass, which once connected the Armenian hinterland to the wider world; of the end of centuries of solitude; of the Armenian peasant breaking out of his own skin and tearing himself from his roots.
It was no accident that I called my Tsmakut cycle a chronicle, for myself, and not merely to establish the right aesthetic bearings. A chronicle is not a novel: you cannot leave out a single day. I wrote this work with pleasure, though some of what is happening in the village and to its peasants today appeals neither to my mind nor to my heart. There, in my Tsmakut, a new generation of freeloaders has appeared, a new detachment — call it what you will. And the predators, the “ishkhans”, have grown smaller while multiplying, proliferating like weeds or sparrows. It is difficult to work with this human material. That is why I return to the Tsmakut of my childhood more often than I should. But I assure you, it is not simply nostalgia for the past.
— Then perhaps Andrei Voznesensky’s formulation would be appropriate: nostalgia for the present?
— Perhaps... Saryan said that the Renaissance masters loved this magnificent world because they had only just discovered it; we love it because we fear losing it.
— Hrant Ignatovich, have you never tried turning to another subject? In The Hangover you seem almost to have taken the plunge. Would you not like to have a more serious, lasting relationship with the energetic life pulsing beneath the windows of your Yerevan flat? Does that life not tempt you?
— It does. Do you remember Aksel Bakunts’s The Sunset of the Province? I would like to write something of that kind: about city life, urban prose drawn from present-day Yerevan. Even in the Moscow episodes of The Hangover I used my experience of life in Yerevan, my experience of working at the film studio here. Incidentally, in the new version of that novella I have removed almost everything directly connected with Tsmakut. In my opinion, if it has not become better, it has become sharper and angrier. The village scenes introduced “sentimental” moments into the narrative, distracting from the main point and shifting the emphasis.
— What is the main point?
— I wanted to write about the end of youth. I wanted to see the beginnings of a hero of our time, that “phantom”, understood not in the present-day, positive sense, but in the older, Lermontovian one.
— I do not think I quite follow the connection...
— Why? You yourself once compared him to a bird that has strayed from its flock...
— And also to a juniper bush — almost an oak leaf torn from its native branch — clinging to the bare slope of the Blue Mountain: a prodigal son with no way back to the lost paradise of patriarchal life, to where the forest lives a simple, settled life in the shade.
What probably brings the hero of The Hangover close to Lermontov’s hero is selfishness and ambition, but both in their romantic rather than pragmatic form, because his self-centredness is rooted not in advantage but in pride. Do you remember what Lermontov writes? “I feel within me... an insatiable greed that devours everything it encounters; I regard other people’s sufferings and joys only in relation to myself, as food that sustains my spiritual strength.” Hence the understanding of happiness as sated pride...
In other words, a character directly opposed to “Alkho-likeness”, whose calling in life is compassion, the ability to share suffering, even at the cost of renouncing one’s own joy.
— But look: he struggles desperately to preserve the “Alkho-likeness” within him, resisting the temptations of the big city and its “sweet life”... If you did not see that, it means my hand was weak. I by no means rule that out, because although there are passages in The Hangover that I like, as a whole it is still not an accomplished work, one that has found its way out of the impasse...
— And what do you think of “village writers” being regarded as a separate literary platoon?
— In the conditions of an immense country, the formation of such a “platoon” evidently has its meaning. At any rate, the term “village prose”, for all its limitations, was not invented by critics but arose at life’s bidding. However much one twists and turns, the fact remains: the literature we hastily, and perhaps not very successfully, christened village prose does exist. As Valentin Rasputin rightly observed, it “proved able to locate accurately the nerve endings of that immense body we call ‘the people’”. That explains my enduring interest. Still, certain shades in the work of some prose writers with a village orientation do cause me concern.
— Which shades, exactly?..
— The old, pre-revolutionary “village writers” — and I do not mean only Russians — seemed to say, “There are people there too.” Some of today’s writers assert, not directly of course, but this is what it amounts to: “People exist only there, in the village.” With all my village leanings, both creative and simply human, I naturally cannot agree with that way of putting the question.
In Armenia there is no such strict division of literary forces. And no one calls me a village writer, although I am a committed one.
— How can you be such a convinced and consistent “village writer” when... Your prose is cramped within traditional village concerns. Yes, its basis is the Tsmakut chronicles: the lives of people born there, positive characters, innately “pastoral”, genuinely of the people — the bread and salt of the earth. But alongside “lifelong” Tsmakut residents, characters who have grown into its fields and granaries, there are Hrant Karyan and the Younger Uncle in Packhorses, as well as the uncle’s nephew. Thinking about his younger uncle’s fate — the youngest son in the family is obliged to stay in Tsmakut all his life and preserve the paternal hearth, yet he desperately needs to go to Tbilisi because the girl he loves lives there — this young man asks himself and all of Tsmakut a question that could never have occurred not only to Andro or Avetik, but even to Ishkhan: “And who invented this struggle for bread? Why should a person not be able to relax his nerves? We stand apart like trees, each on his own, each taking his share of sunlight and casting his own shadow. How does a world standing quietly like a forest turn into a kennel? He is going to Tiflis — let him go to Tiflis.”
This incidental question in Packhorses becomes the central, plot-shaping question in Autumn Sun. Tsmakut, which even Gevorg in The Hangover still thought of as “standing quietly”, turns out to be a community tightly bound by a single thread: an unthinking hostility shared by blood relatives towards a stranger, someone unacceptable for that reason alone — Aghun...
— If you are so eager to defend her against Tsmakut’s unreasoning hostility, defend her. But if you want to build the defence according to all the rules, taking the author’s conception and wishes into account, do not forget that none of my works contains only the righteous and only the guilty. That is the first point. The second is that an old project made itself felt in this novella, though very fleetingly. I began it and never finished... It was called Princess Nana’s Bridge. The action takes place in Tsmakut, but at the time Tsmakut seemed to me not a world, merely a small mountain village, a patriarchal paradise. I wanted to show how evil, energetic people enter that paradise: brides from other places, cobblers from Tbilisi... They come and destroy the world of old Tsmakut. More precisely, that world is destroyed within them. I “grew out of” this romantic plot so quickly that the novella aged before I could reach its halfway point... To keep from overtaking myself, I probably need to learn to write quickly. But I do not know how, and probably never will. The hand has to do the work, and the hand lacks speed... While I ponder, a plot worked out to the last detail suddenly puts forth a new shoot. Take Aghun: in her character the evil, energetic daughter-in-law has exhausted herself. But that novella, or rather its principal woman, who cannot come to grips with either her fate or her character — she wants to, but cannot — became the impulse for a new conception. I have already said that I have planned a trilogy whose first part has a Tsmakut stoic as its hero. There must also be another part. I want to write about people who do not understand what they are doing, who, like Aghun, do not know what will come of their words or follow from their actions. How many such people there are around us! They live without knowing why they do this, why they act that way... I encounter them every day, and it torments me to have to deal with them. I grow angry, but I understand: to write about these “people who act” is to write about life, which moves forward of its own accord, paying no attention to the efforts of those who, like my Rostom, consciously try to steer it into a particular channel...
— To my mind, this conflict is characteristic of your prose as a whole. It also involves the problem of individuality, of self-awareness and self-determination. We already sense in Packhorses the first signs of revolt against Tsmakut’s oppressive authority, against that “world” which denies the individual the right to self-determination, even to separation: a revolt for the right to one’s own feelings and thoughts. We sense it in Hrant Karyan’s “millions of torments”, though these may not yet be entirely serious (“the world of the sweet life would not accept Hrant Karyan; Hrant Karyan would not accept the sweet life”); in the subtle questions tormenting the Younger Uncle’s nephew; and above all in the unease, the pre-storm unease, brought by My Steed, My Steed. Take this moment: the Younger Uncle, who has already managed to go to Tbilisi and marry a city girl, takes the orange stallion out of the herd to give his soul something to occupy it. He cannot tame it and is forced to shoot “his horse” so that it can fulfil its purpose in life and in the plot: “never again to submit to anyone”. Perhaps I exaggerate, pitch it a tone too high, but this episode seems to me like an allegorical mirror: indirectly, through metaphor, it reflects the fate of the Younger Uncle, who kills the love within himself for the sake of his duty to family and clan. Moreover, if we follow the trail of The Orange Mare further, looking at the branches extending outside and above the plot, we inevitably arrive at a conflict which, changing form but never losing its “essence”, passes from work to work and explains the inner tragedy of many of your characters.
— Interesting. What do you mean?
— The plot’s allegory: Alkho’s clash with the free orange mare and stallion, behind which lies the eternally insoluble contradiction between duty and desire, the sweetness of temptation and the burden of responsibility. It seems to me that this contradiction sometimes reaches the hidden recesses of the characters’ hearts, and sometimes emerges on the surface of the narrative with noise and fury, as in the “drunkenness” scene in The Hangover, or the Younger Uncle’s meeting with the Orange Mare, who has been sold and become a circus “prima donna” in the city. I quote: “And I felt that I too was becoming a stranger to that horse. Seeing her fat rump, groomed, washed and oiled every day, I felt that I hated her and that the packhorse was firm within me — the packhorse tormented by gadflies, beaten by children, scorned by the stallion, with fear of the stallion in its sinews and straw before it” (The Orange Mare). At that moment the story’s hero hates not only the former Orange Mare’s overfed present, but also his own past childhood delight, when the mare symbolised freedom of will, release from the burden: not a horse, but pure free movement, the “yellow fire” of temptation gliding over the earth. The same situation is played out no less sharply in Beginning. The load the boy has placed on his shoulders is heavy precisely because, while frantically doing everything a person with “Alkho inside him”, as you put it, must do, he cannot help responding to the “orange calls”. Tautly and passionately, with his entire being, he responds to the girls in red swimsuits who have appeared from another life, a life free of the humiliating struggle for bread, to beauty that is not obliged to serve usefulness... The result is a rather distinctive conflict: revolt against Tsmakut’s authority is complicated by revolt against that revolt... Without stoicism — not merely the ability to accept the weight of the burden, but the capacity to carry it without losing one’s dignity — one really cannot endure...
— I am beginning to feel, Alla Maximovna, that our dialogue is turning into a conversation among three. It seems to me you are arguing not with me, but with some third person...
— You have responded to this “deviation” with complete accuracy. At this moment I am indeed arguing not with Hrant Matevossian, but with those fellow critics who regard you as the singer of “his clan’s immortality”, of some shapeless, endless life passing without conflict and without end from one existence to another. To see your Chronicle from that epic perspective, one must erase a great deal: your romanticism, your maximalism, your “I”, even the “indirect” one, your philosophy, apportioned among the characters, and those characters of the Tsmakut cycle who dared to break away from the “clan” and begin a special, separate life — Hrant Karyan and Gevorg Mnatsakanyan. In principle, the emergence of such a fate and psychological type in village-oriented prose is no great novelty. In Viktor Astafyev’s novel The King Fish, for example, one of the plainly negative characters, the selfish Goga Gertsev, is almost explicitly accused of Pechorinism; Akim, the Russian counterpart of your Andro, is set against him as a reproach and an example. Thus what is unexpected is not the situation, but your attitude. Astafyev condemns Goga Gertsev without right of appeal. Moreover, while knowing perfectly well where Akims come from, Astafyev not only does not know but does not wish to know what circumstances produce Gertsevs, modern anti-Maksim Maksimyches. You, however, are interested both in the contemporary romantic, self-centred type and in his “origins”: causes, preconditions and so on.
— I am by no means certain that I know where today’s Pechorins begin. The Hangover is a character, not the history of a character. In general I am drawn to strong characters, clashes of passion, the intense drama of life.
— Have historical plots never interested you? History could fully satisfy your demand for strong personalities. Moreover, your childhood experience could serve you well in developing historical plots, since you managed to live among the remnants of an old, almost feudal agricultural culture and the life and daily practices based upon it: effectively the old village described by Hakob Mndzuri, whom you value so highly...
— Perhaps history is closed to me, although sometimes, at the level of reflection, it tempts me, enchants me with its almost unlimited freedom of action and its wealth and variety of plots. But whenever I set to work, I stop myself. More precisely, my fear stops me. The fear of falsification. To write, you must know your material thoroughly, from within. In my imagination I can reach back to my grandparents’ time, perhaps even my great-grandparents’, but no further. Beyond that begins Great History, and to touch it is to engage in artistic “sleight of hand”: to offer half-knowledge, the approximation of conjecture, rather than knowledge and truth.
— But even when working on “almost history” — I mean our grandparents’ time — you have to suppose, guess, supplement with imagination, reconstruct and add missing links and lost details.
— Of course I do. But there the gaps between two already familiar details are relatively small. I can easily fill what is missing from the “drawing” preserved inside me, by the light of my memory: mine, personally mine alone. History, however — great, distant history — is darkness I have nothing to illuminate. You cannot turn a tank into an elephant. Or vice versa. Yet for some reason each of us thinks that we are making sense of the past. That past, meanwhile, has already been understood on the level of the past, on the scale of its contemporaries. Explaining the origins of his allegorical parables, Kobo Abe said: when my conception cannot be embodied in the material of the reality around me, I place it somewhere free of a specific temporal or national setting. Something similar happens in today’s historical allegorical parables. The conception is not determined by particular circumstances, and the form arises not from a hard-won victory over resistant material, but from free inventiveness, the author’s skill in execution.
In some contemporary historical works I am astonished by the ease with which their heroes, mostly of royal origin, destroy and kill thousands of people — with the author’s full consent and encouragement — through various undertakings for the sake of personal power. One of our fifth-century chroniclers, addressing yet another ruler of Armenia, says: “You kill living people, and make a thing, an object, your God.” Now that is a measure of humanity. In general, what is commonly called literary historiography raises certain doubts in me...
— Even War and Peace? Even The Captain’s Daughter?
— Tolstoy writes about events that took place two decades before his birth. In The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin does not claim to tell the whole truth, does not conceal that he merely wishes to touch upon historical material, and openly takes shelter behind the genre. Besides everything else, of the legacy ancient Armenia left to today’s Armenians, it is the cultural part that attracts me most. I think that this priceless legacy is not only nourishment for national pride, but also the severest test of national self-esteem, unless of course that self-esteem is properly cultivated. Every page of that legacy, every khachkar and every foundation stone asks us, its heirs: “And you, the people of today, who are you?..”
— In one of your interviews you said that your most powerful creative impulse is the poetry of the Armenian language...
— Yes, not simply language, but precisely the poetry of language. It is in this, one of the most perfect poetic systems created beneath the Armenian sky, that we must seek all the “ends” and all the “beginnings” within this universe, as real as the physical world. In language, my people’s individuality has found its complete artistic expression. It has long been my dream to enter that world. But I only dared to do so while writing Tashkent: I “gave over” the entire space of the novella to the village club, where nothing can be seen but smoke, where all one can do is listen.
Besides, language is in fact the most complete “selected works” of the people’s memory. And of the people’s morality. The secret of Tumanyan’s or Pushkin’s greatness is that they grasped this before their contemporaries.
Sometimes I thought I could describe what a stone feels when the sun leaves it, what a solitary pear tree thinks... And write it so that it would interest not only me but someone else as well. The result was slow-moving prose, so slow-moving that its sluggishness began to clash with my own temperament. I started to notice that my handwriting was deteriorating, that I was marking time, that I was tired of bringing “the subconscious of the material” to life. Now I am so bored with all of it that I long for movement.
Every writer has his little “secrets”, his ways of healing and saving himself. So, trying to save myself from myself, I seized on something my mother had told me: how someone had shot from behind a khachkar gravestone at her father, from whom I later “sculpted” my Ishkhan. I found myself amid the elemental force of the people’s speech, plunged into the sea of language, and that whirlpool carried me away, carried me... Something similar, though in a simpler form, had happened with Autumn Sun. But in both cases the basis was a monologue: one voice spoke, one kind of linguistic consciousness predominated. In Tashkent, however, polyphony is a principle.
— It seems to me you began with polyphony. I mean We and Our Mountains.
— If you heard how my fellow villagers speak, I am sure that this recording of their many voices would seem faint and inexpressive to you. I mean at the level of the older novella; I do not want to judge the new one. I feel that it is still hot, and I do not know whether it has worked or not.
— What dialect is spoken in Tsmakut?
— The Lori dialect, which long ago became common to all Armenians, because well before I was born my brilliant fellow countryman Hovhannes Tumanyan wrote in it. He made his region’s speech literary, so the language everyone now thinks of as shared comes from Lori, like Tumanyan... But the point is not the dialect, nor the vocabulary of one dialect or another, though that matters too. It is the verbal fabric of the narrative: its inflections, what the storyteller emphasises and what he passes over.
When I write, I am terrified of falling into the sin of stylisation, of speaking a language that is not mine, not the language I speak to myself within. And I fear this not only in front of the page. If I suddenly spoke to my father, for example, trying to strike his tone in his language, that would divide us rather than bring us together. I know he would think: if you are wearing a city overcoat and gloves, why do you speak like a “stable hand”? Incidentally, contemporary plots also fail to satisfy me because a part of the language is quite enough for them, only a part. They do not awaken in me that great Armenian language which, I am almost sure, is hidden in the recesses of my subconscious, sleeping there, uncalled upon and unneeded... I cannot force my way in by taxing my brain. Only a Great Obstacle, a Great Need, can open those recesses. Only it can open the inherited storehouses of linguistic memory. Memory is a strange thing altogether. I seem to remember much that I could not possibly remember. For instance, the neighbour’s black cat, with its cloudy, malicious eyes. It was probably hopelessly cross-eyed, because it was often struck, now by my father, now by my younger uncle. That cat disappeared before I was a year old. The war, however, I remember purely emotionally, without details: the red heat, the cold and hunger. But that too, and indeed everything I eventually discover I remember, remains deaf and dumb inside me until I am alone before a white sheet of paper. Then my memory switches on. It does not work of its own accord...
— So you acknowledge the influence of the poetry of Armenian. What else?
— Our barefoot, naked historiography. The experience of our ancient chroniclers: that is what I would like to combine with my own. What dialogues they have! And what a bold simplicity in their handling of material! You look and see tastelessness that has not found its genre, the naivety of plain testimony. Then suddenly, inside what seems merely a document written according to the rules of its time, you discover a brilliant dialogue: a precise, capacious resolution of a complex psychological state, a little tragedy with an almost Shakespearean charge.
— The old Armenian chronicles are sources outside literature proper. What have the efforts of your fellow craftsmen contributed to your search?
— Without Armenian poetry, from Kuchak and Narekatsi to Hamo Sahyan, my prose in its present form would not exist.
— In that you are not original. New Georgian prose probably found itself so quickly in part because it absorbed the experience of Georgian poetry with unusual fruitfulness. I think many innovations in Russian prose have the same origins. So greater specificity would be welcome.
— I owe to Charents what one might call my fundamental democratic outlook. I can say precisely what Aksel Bakunts gave me. I can name specific works of his that had a direct influence.
The Pheasant, The Sunset of the Province, and of course The Girl Khonarh. Bakunts was returned to Armenian readers only after 1956, but I encountered him, or rather his literary gift, earlier: in 1952 I read Taras Bulba in his translation without knowing who the translator was. What a celebration it was, a true feast of language! Of the great Armenian writers, Bakunts was the first to give a means of self-expression to that part of the people which, left without a language, had handed its right to a voice to intermediaries, who then told the city and the world about the voiceless. Bakunts overturned that “about”: he wrote not about the people but from within the people. As far as my abilities allowed, I tried to extend this principle of being within to the entire organic and inorganic world. It means writing not about a tree but from within a tree, not about a horse but from inside a horse. Is that clear? Or not quite?
— Perfectly. It is a barrier whose need to be overcome Yesenin felt keenly. Hence: “I am ready to tell you the field.” The field. Not about the field. To feel that way, you must become a little of the field yourself.
— Exactly. When I was writing my Alkho, I myself was Alkho. I felt as Alkho felt. Even now I sometimes think I am more horse than human...
— Alkho is not the first “humanised” horse in literature. Whenever one encounters such a character on a book’s pages, there is a natural desire to compare its character with its predecessors, with Turgenev’s and Tolstoy’s horses. Tolstoy looks at his piebald gelding Kholstomer not only through the eyes of a writer and psychologist, but also through those of a landowner and an experienced horseman. It is no accident that Kholstomer is rather like a lackey. He loves his master, who loves no one, and his master’s mistress and boorish coachman. Alkho is a labourer, but he has a greater sense of his own dignity: trampled upon, respected by almost no one except Gikor, yet dignity nonetheless.
— Well, that giant was both a landowner and a horseman. There is no getting away from that. The landowner is felt in Tolstoy’s portrayals of peasants too; it is no accident that his Anna dreams of a muzhik holding an axe.
Besides, I often encounter that word: humanisation. Humanising my animals — the Buffalo, the Orange Mare, Alkho — was the last thing I wanted. I tried not to make them like me, but to make myself like them. In Rostova’s wolf-hunting scene, is the beast, already bound and thrown across the saddle, humanised? Or Kholstomer himself? No. Tolstoy’s wolf looks at the human being simply and malevolently, from its own animal world, very far from the human one.
— There is a volume of Tolstoy’s Selected Works on your desk, with many pencil marks on its pages...
— How much he knows about human beings! That is my immediate response to Tolstoy’s text. And knowing everything, he remains the master of the entire earth, responsible for the whole world, which he seems to survey from a “divine height”. He looks and sees how small that world is and how much it needs his, Tolstoy’s, commanding care and protection. In general, I feel that optimism, or rather the ability not to surrender to despair, is a sign of strong talent. Those who possess less of that ability destroy, overthrow, despair and spread despair. Powerful talents, like powerful rivers, flow calmly, not devastating their banks but nourishing and fertilising them. Charents called Narekatsi a “dark genius”. There are many dark geniuses in world literature; luminous ones are far fewer. Tolstoy, for all his severity, is a luminous genius. Among Armenians, so are Kuchak and Hovhannes Tumanyan. They seem to possess a Saryan-like light. Luminous talents know no less than dark ones that the world is cruel. They themselves are tragic too, yet the essence of their narrative is light, permeated with a sense of height and perspective. I think the principal source of this inner light is the gift of creation. The abundance of that gift. Its generosity.
— And as an artist, as a craftsman, what attracts you in Tolstoy? What do you learn from him? Attentive, slow reading is also a way of learning, after all. I mean the attitude of one Master to another, working in the same workshop, though with different material and a different “method”.
— Precision of detail, the ability not to lose oneself in it, and the capacity to be right at the centre, both here on earth and up there above.
The courage with which he could look truth in the eye. The courage not to allow yourself to be too kind, because to be kind, merely kind, is to surrender. Praising what is immoral is the task of a court minstrel. Great Tolstoy teaches that too. And I painfully envy his ability not to hurry events, not to overtake himself or step aside, yet not to fall behind his own Thought, not to look back but continually to go, to go, heavily or lightly, always forward...
In a word, his mastery of narrative, its continuity and wholeness.
— But that is how we perceive Tolstoy today. His contemporaries saw him differently. To them he was a “savage”, to use B. Eikhenbaum’s expression. His plot structures were considered disharmonious, irregular. Here, for instance, is what D. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky wrote about Anna Karenina: “All of it is too episodic, merely fleeting brushstrokes and dabs.” Tolstoy himself, regarding his novels as departures from the canonical forms already established by the European novel, asserted: “We Russians do not know how to write novels at all.” He even defined the genre of War and Peace through negation: “It is not a novel, still less a poem, still less a historical chronicle.”
Rereading Yeghishe Charents’s Land of Nairi, I was struck by the coincidence: in describing his novel, Charents virtually repeats Tolstoy. He admits that it contains no “elementary rules”, that it is not a novel but something “of another form”.
— Do you not feel, Alla Maximovna, that you are equating situations which are not altogether equivalent? Tolstoy merely acknowledges that War and Peace does not conform to pan-European rules, while Charents mocks notions of “formal wholeness” that are alien to him.
— Here is what the critic Suren Aghababyan writes about this “poem-like quality”: “At first Charents’s book gives an impression of fragmented pictures and episodes, of events and characters, reflections and observations structurally and factually unsubordinated to a single idea or plot line. But that is a superficial impression. In reality, if we think back, Armenian literature contains few works in which the unity of plot and characters, composition and idea is maintained with such rigour.”
The point is that all the greatest works differ from ordinary works precisely in that, during their posthumous lives, they “are enriched with new meanings” (M. Bakhtin). These “new meanings” may not be confined to content: time can reveal beauty that escaped the notice of contemporaries. And structure where previously only aesthetic chaos was seen...
— I cannot look at myself from such a “distance”. Right now I am entirely convinced that my relationship with plot and with narrative in general is rather dramatic. I suspect that the relationship does not work at all. Whenever I begin a new work, I dream of an orderly, flowing continuity, a narrative without pauses or leaps, because I am certain that plot is necessary. It holds the material like a cup, preventing it from becoming a shapeless puddle. So I want to be a writer of plots: at worst, let my plot be not a classical cup but at least a skewer... And every time the same thing happens: I see that my horse has strayed off the road again, and the pages are unorganised, disorderly... Yes, warm; yes, moving... But, alas, only material. I concentrate, make an effort, follow the road for a while and even make progress... But I relax a little, and everything starts again: blockages, jumps, pauses, memories; in a word, a ragged composition, hole upon hole, crack upon crack...
Something “of another form”, to recall Charents.
Exhausted, I stop fighting myself... Then I begin to long for plot again, though my own experience seems to have convinced me that with plot I lose myself, lose my own face. All this happens because I hold plot, in its old, classical sense, in great respect, just as I do genre. Genres are humanity’s greatest discovery, the result of painful labour.
How much effort stands behind the shaping of a genre: pain, vengeance, blood, modesty, delight. How many stories have been told and lived through, only to vanish into time without finding their genre. Of course everything changes, including the forms of genre... But can an aircraft designer disregard an arrow’s capacity for flight, or an architect forget that the forms of the pyramid exist?
But genre, like plot, eludes me. What is Tashkent in terms of genre? Characters, and nothing more. Momentary flashes of contact. The Brownian motion of passions. Yet not one clearly sustained plot line. Nor a principal character, though every participant in the “gathering” could be one. Each character is novelistic, but only in potential, in my authorial conception of him. I could write an entire, extensive story about each of them, though in Tashkent, at the gathering in the village club, each has only a single dialogue. Sometimes just one line.
Yet this form too — everyone talking to everyone — is not an intention at all, but a device I devised, a way of saving a plotless work, of compensating for an inborn defect.
— Could fragmentation, the absence of transitional plot links that allows the narrative to leap over numerous events the author does not need, omitted, so to speak, as a dash, be the very freedom in which everyone now sees the features of a contemporary style? A freedom needed by authors, critics and readers alike. Yesterday evening at the hotel I compared the first and latest editions of Packhorses. The first had no chapter called Beginning. You simply inserted that fragment into the second edition. Yet it did not spoil the overall impression or damage the lacework of the composition. Meanwhile Hrant Karyan, a man of the outer world interested in external life, acquires an opposite: his younger brother Araik Karyan, a man of the inner life, indeed a future “holy man”, bearing the knowledge, the wisdom, that allows life to survive and continue through every catastrophe of the external order.
— It is good if that is how it seems to you. But how can I forget that when I wrote Beginning I was not thinking at all about the context, in the narrow, technical sense, in which the fragment found itself in the second edition of Packhorses, where it began to “serve” the central idea alongside the older chapters, if there is a central idea there? I wanted to write a separate, very slow story, with many visual and psychological details, about a boy who has taken responsibility for his entire family on his shoulders and, if you like, responsibility for the whole order of the world, though he himself is so small and weak that he needs care and protection. I meant to call the story The Burden. But then Ion Druță’s novella The Burden of Our Kindness appeared, and my translator, Anahit Bayandur, changed the title with my consent. As you have already noticed, Beginning contains the theme of a poet’s birth. I will write more about Araik Karyan. And think about his fate, about the fate of the poet and the contemporary world.
— So first you renamed the story, then turned it from an independent work into a chapter of a novella: “sold it into slavery”. But the reader does not know this; what matters to the reader is the result.
— Well, perhaps this “collage”, this “patchwork quilt”, stitched from passages written at different times, in different states of mind, and therefore with different rhythms and tempos, really does look almost professional... In my view, Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates — I wrote the intertitles for the Armenian version — looks best as raw footage. Editing, the attempt to impose a primitive chronological order on that golden, diamond-studded heap, spoiled it. Perhaps the fragmentation so dear to your heart is a path, one of the paths, to a new literature. Whether it is a hill or a hump, the future will show. For now, apparently, there is indeed no reason to conceal this new growth or be ashamed of it as something ugly. And since I have become frank, let me confess: an unfinished fragment, disconnected, plotless and without a genre, is still dearer to me than a finished, complete success, because through its incompleteness I see, foresee, the future whole. I still have not given up hope: when I write everything I have conceived about Tsmakut, when I finish writing it, the plot will form of its own accord. It will reveal itself. What is inward, secret, unknown even to me, will become visible to everyone.
— Incidentally, how do you feel about works already in print? Is The Hangover’s radical reworking an exception to the rule, or the rule?
— To be honest, I do not even like reading what has been published, so as not to see the traces of forced haste... Any work should be copied out at least twice. What is written “first-hand” is good for nothing. Somewhere Sherwood Anderson said: I have never felt the happiness of hitting the target. That sense of inaccuracy, of missing the mark, is all too familiar to me... I read and see: this passage is well written, this one almost well written... But accepting an already published work as a whole after some time has passed — that has never happened yet. Take The Hangover. It is one of the few works of mine I was pleased with. I thought it was carved in stone, brought to the highest stylistic perfection within my powers. A few years passed, however, and it became clear that it was once again merely a heap of unfinished material. In short, even after sending my own child “out into the world”, I continue to feel that I am its master, with the right to alter, recut and rebuild. That concerns not only stylistic polishing, but more stable things too: the situation, the plot, the plot’s branches. As for details, I need hardly mention them: they are all under my authority.
Besides, no anti-narrative has abolished narrative literature, nor will it. Its time will come again. Not for me, admittedly: I will probably never settle my relationship with the true novel. Perhaps that form is altogether unsuitable for Armenian. Perhaps a proper novel simply cannot be written in Armenian. Hakob Mndzuri, for instance, followed the achievements of world literature very attentively, missing no new work, admiring it while also observing: these powerful rhythms lead us away from the rhythm of our own Armenian prose.
— In one of Dmitry Likhachev’s recent articles, Notes on the Russian, there is what I consider a very interesting observation about the distinctive qualities of “national rhythms”. Summing up his studies and impressions of Armenian landscapes and painting, Likhachev writes: “I would not dare to supplement Saryan, but it nevertheless seems to me that the landscape of Eastern Armenia is harsher than it appears in his canvases. Treeless mountains furrowed by rains, rivers, rows of vines; mountains from which stones roll down; thick, rich colours: this nature has absorbed the people’s blood... Russian nature, humanised by the peasant, is characterised by the rhythm of ploughed land, the rhythm of log walls. Rhythm also characterises Armenia’s landscapes, but in Armenia it is different. Saryan’s painting The Earth (1969) makes an immense impression. It consists entirely of stripes, bright, undulating stripes, altogether different from a rhythm an artist of Russia might create. This undulating rhythm also appears in the paintings of the wonderful Armenian artist Minas Avetisyan. In his My Parents (1962), father and mother are shown against an Armenian landscape. It is striking that the rhythm of Armenian nature seems to repeat itself in the spiritual rhythm of the people. Even the mountains in My Parents have become waves of a rhythm of labour. Armenia’s rhythms of labour are remarkably diverse, as diverse as the work of its people. In Saryan’s Afternoon Silence (1924), squares of ploughed fields seem visible on the ground, as though multicoloured carpets have been laid out to dry. The rhythms of mountains and fields combine while also opposing each other... The wealth of Armenia’s nature is shown by its astonishingly varied reflection in painting. The same artist has seen it in very different ways. Yet we will always say: this is Armenia... A country’s landscape is likewise an element of national culture. An expression of the people’s soul.” What can you say about Likhachev’s observations?
— I would say that alongside other Armenias there is Saryan’s Armenia. It has to be seen. Are you familiar with Hakob Hakobyan’s work?
— I am.
— Before him, no one had seen that tempera-soft, velvety Armenia, excluding the “madness” of lines that once astonished Andrei Bely in the Armenian landscape. Neither had I. Now, thanks to Hakobyan, I see it. Though personally I feel closer to Minas’s “heavy root”; that is what I understand. As for Saryan, with all his decorative quality, alien to me, he is more than a painter. He is a discoverer and a great poet. When Saryan was beginning, originality was very much in fashion. He too “went East”, towards the Eastern, with everyone, alongside everyone. But in the end he returned to his homeland, and that is why he came into his own. Everyone was moving; he alone arrived.
— Since we have come to it, how would you describe the very essence, the core, the depth of the Armenian?
— The distinguished Armenian architect Toros Toramanyan said: “The beauty of other peoples’ art is moving, often stimulating and disturbing; the beauty of our art brings peace, calms and leads to contemplation.” Indeed, compare Komitas, Armenian folk songs, Tumanyan, the folk epic, the church of Hripsime, The Girl Khonarh, and you will see: Armenian style is strict restraint, almost asceticism — and this concerns ethics as well as aesthetics — an extreme economy of expressive means. Such is the character, such the way of life, such the form of agricultural culture. Its formula in stone is the small, ancient Armenian church: not great monumental buildings, but solitary churches with modest interiors, within some little world.
— If you are such an enemy of extremes of every kind, how can your conviction that a purely Armenian style means strict restraint be reconciled with what I understood to be your by no means negative attitude towards so ornate a work as The Colour of Pomegranates? There is certainly no economy there! Nor in the stylised protagonist of the film about Sayat-Nova, nor in Kuchak, who alongside hayrens written in the purely Armenian style as you understand it, has work that is thoroughly sumptuous and Eastern. Everything is there: stylisation and excess...
— All right... Let us sort it out, beginning with Parajanov. His method is that of a scholarly art historian: he tries to tell us about Sayat-Nova’s poetry through the conventional language of Armenian miniature painting. Now for Sayat-Nova, the hero of The Colour of Pomegranates. One cannot say that this style, numbed by allegorical and chromatic splendour, is purely Armenian. Sayat-Nova was a poet of Tiflis. Tiflis in his day was an international city. So here we should speak not of something narrowly Armenian, but of Armenian culture and its close connections with medieval Transcaucasia. We cannot renounce that culture, that mingling of styles. History itself created it. Take, for example, the architectural complex of Akhtamar on the island in Lake Van.
My first impression — I speak for myself — was: no, no, this is not Armenian at all... Yet this too is Armenian. It has its counterpart in literature: Narekatsi. Narekatsi is all splendour, in feeling and in style. How excessive he is in everything, even in self-denial. And how he wants to astonish! Besides, Narekatsi and Sayat-Nova, even Kuchak, though less so, dealt with a stereotype: they worked within a particular, prescribed canon. For Sayat-Nova it was a typical ashugh block used by every poet in Tiflis without exception: Turks, Georgians, Persians, everyone. Working that block required a demonstration of one’s degree of mastery. We have no instrument for measuring how much energy of genius was expended in resisting it. Imagine an architect who is also a foreman and a stonecutter, all in one person, capable of building a vast temple. But reality was too poor, in the literal sense, to give the craftsman a commission so great, so equal to his genius. All fate offered was one single khachkar, a funerary monument. So he sacrifices all the energy that could have sufficed for a great building to carving one single khachkar. That is where the intricate, minutely worked ornaments come from. Curls, that is, aestheticism, always appear in a dead end, when there is no distant prospect, nowhere to go, when history is slumbering. Yet their individuality — I mean Kuchak’s, Narekatsi’s and Sayat-Nova’s — manifested itself even within the stereotype. Geniuses, they knew when to observe the rules and when to break them. Still, I do not understand how they saved themselves... How did they find a way out of the dead end?
— That question, even if rhetorical, is difficult to answer, but Kuchak hardly wrote at a time when history was slumbering... Philologists have still not established which century he lived in. His poetry proves that he wrote when Armenia had not yet turned away from “the bearded cities of the East” (Osip Mandelstam); even if it had turned away, it was not secretly from history. I think there is not only resistance to the canon here, but also an element of “not being indifferent” to the “enchantment” of great Persian poetry, to the “red rose that bewitched the world with its fragrance”. An element of temptation that had to be overcome and passed through. That is already something other than resistance to the canon. Here creative energy is not only spent but generated.
Let us try applying that situation to today. Does the influence of great world literature hinder or help Armenian prose, moving towards itself, in its search for a national rhythm?
— Sometimes it hinders too. Look how much effort Armenian writers expend trying to appear modern. Yet their efforts should be directed elsewhere altogether, in precisely the opposite direction...
— And you regularly turn to the authors of great world literature, referring now to Kobo Abe, now to Sherwood Anderson...
— Sherwood Anderson, Sholokhov, Faulkner and Cortázar — his The Pursuer is one of my favourite works — as well as Hemingway and García Márquez, are splendid conversation partners. They have found their national rhythm.
— Nevertheless, I see in your position an attempt to resist temptation. So the energy spent on resistance is not destructive but creative.
— Possibly...
— You mentioned that you wrote the Armenian text of The Colour of Pomegranates, and I remembered that you are also a professional “film person”. How has the experience you gained in cinema affected your prose?
— At first, when I had no clear idea of all the harmful consequences of my “second profession”, the language of cinema seemed close to me. But I quickly understood that cinema and literature are incompatible, and combining these two crafts does not pass without consequences. Above all, the most vulnerable thing suffers: language. When it is not needed, the feeling for the word grows blunt. You begin to think in “pictures”; the word drops out of the flow of speech and becomes some kind of super-information. What matters to me is the power of that verbal flow, the word’s expressiveness as an artistic creation, and the field of associations surrounding it. Imagine one single poppy in a green meadow: that is what a word is to me. In cinema you turn from a storyteller, a master of the Word, into a painter.
— Can the ability to think in images really be superfluous, or even a hindrance? Alexei Tolstoy, for example, thought that there could be no creation without the ability to see in reality, and that a prose writer should nurture and develop that ability...
— Obviously I am not opposed to visible details... A detail is art in itself. The relief of an egg on the wall of Hovhannavank. The scraps of printed cotton and buttons in Gikor’s pocket in Hovhannes Tumanyan’s story. The chill running down your spine from the weapon used to cut off the head of the already dead Hadji Murad. The appearance of a butterfly, or a flower resembling a butterfly, within Saryan’s monumental decorative mass... Without details, an idea cannot become an artistic reality. The whole becomes believable through its details.
Cortázar regards every instance of artistic perfection as the result of an Encounter between the Author and the Unknown. If the artistic fact has not come into being, there has been no Encounter. In our tales, brave men returning from the lands of the devs bring back the devs’ ears: symbols of their Encounter with them and their Victory. It seems to me that an artistic detail is likewise a sign of the Author’s Encounter with the Unknown, and a sign of victory over it. As for the ability to see in reality, even without deliberate exercises I see both my characters, down to every detail of their appearance, and everything that surrounds them.
— And never lose sight of them?
— In the past I could not. I wanted to, but they seemed unwilling to cross the boundary of sight and mental contemplation. In Beginning, for instance, everything is directed at the eye. Material substance throughout. Not only in that story, of course: all my early works were written that way. The eye led the way; it worked better than anything else. Now this capacity of my imagination, or rather of my eye, to produce illusions has begun almost to irritate me. A vivid exterior distracts from what is within. I consciously, by an effort of will, try to limit the activity of sight and memory. The eye must not prevent the ear from hearing. I have already said that the new novella Tashkent is built entirely on direct speech and dialogue. At present I like that very much, though I recognise the extent of the loss. A great deal is lost: space, air, colour, light. There is nothing to be done: you cannot have everything and preserve everything...
— Hrant Ignatovich, what do you see as literature’s mission, not at this moment but in general?
— Literature must investigate life. That is its principal mission. Before life I always feel like a pupil, and in part an eternal provincial. A discovery is always a joy, no matter who “served it up”, the devil or an angel. Where there is no investigation, there is no literature. If we regard the author’s knowledge as final and a priori, then he has nothing to search for; his task is to combine “something beautiful” from parts already known and found. Literature is merely a clearing in the jungle. The jungle is the human being in all his interconnections, the Great Inexplicable. Every serious literary practitioner’s task is to enlarge that clearing by at least one square centimetre, rather than feast in the space freed from the Jungle.
— I did not quite understand what you said about the devil and the angel. I hope you do not think literature and morality are incompatible.
— Art cannot be immoral in its essence. The diaries of great writers and the recollections of those close to them testify to this better than anything. If something remains outside the page, it is a lie. Lies retreat; they do not enter the book. They do not become literature, even if they desperately wish to. Perhaps there is something childish in such maximalism, but without that “childishness”, how can a writer in present circumstances, remembering the lessons the twentieth century has taught him, fulfil his Highest Duty: to protect Man from man, to protect him to the very end, even when he thinks it is useless now, impossible now? As doctors do. A lie can move armies, can fool peoples, can become the basis of a political system, embody itself as reality and appear before the writer as though it were Life itself. But become literature? Never. As Hemingway said, only one regime cannot have good writers: fascism. Because fascism is a lie, a counterfeit born of a murderer. It is therefore condemned to sterility. An artist who does not wish to lie cannot live under the rule of fascism.
— Acquiring truth requires not only daring and perseverance from the “acquirer”, but courage too. Do you always dare to tell the ultimate truth about your characters?
— Alas, not always. I wanted, for instance, to write about a father’s hatred of his son: purely biological hatred, not social hatred. I did not dare. It is frightening. Yet not only in a person’s private life, in the wells of the inner world, but also in human history, there are moments and situations that literary fiction should not touch. The bloody genocide of 1915, for example. Even the brilliant Charents failed when he turned to this theme. What, then, can one expect from other writers? Take Kostan Zaryan’s The Ship on the Mountain. I know that he feels pain, unbearable pain. But that pain seems to fade, to be neutralised by the touch of literary language.
— What do you propose? Silence?
— One cannot remain silent: that way not only the person is destroyed, but his cry; not only the thing, but its shadow. Nevertheless, it is too painful. I become physically ill when I think about it, and I do not want — no, I cannot — tell of it, of that pain, in literary language, introduce into the narrative an element of play, of form, in a word, art. No, literature cannot be made from pain so boundless, beyond all limits. This question has consumed many efforts of genius and given nothing to art.
— What about Paruyr Sevak and his The Unceasing Belfry?
— I do not consider that work successful, although its author is truly a poet of genius.
— The life of your works in literary scholarship is accompanied by an exceptionally varied chorus of assessments and interpretations. Have these debates ever made you want to simplify what you write a little, or rather write so that you “neither lose yourself nor go misunderstood”, to recall Yesenin once more?
— Although critics and readers often accuse me of making my text difficult, of forcing them to push through it as through thorny thickets, I have never wanted to make everything understandable to everyone. Before the page I think only of the material, of how to find a common language with it. Believe me, there is neither snobbery nor arrogance nor contempt for the reader in this.
Whatever may be said about him, the reader is intelligent. Even in works he does not understand, he catches and absorbs something, and I am sure he does not lose respect for a complex text. Often he judges the situation as a whole better than the author; sometimes he openly disrespects those who play “hide-and-seek” with him, seeing them not as writers but as caterers to readers’ tastes, who never even think that those tastes might change for the better over time.
— The particular nature of the journal that has made this lengthy conversation possible obliges me to ask the traditional question: how do you regard criticism? Who, in your view, is criticism for?
— Criticism is for those whom literature itself is for. Criticism is our attitude towards literature, and it affects our relationships as readers and writers equally. Everything is inseparably connected. Literature needs a special environment favourable to creation. That is precisely what criticism should concern itself with: creating a literary environment. People say there was no criticism when David of Sassoun was being created. There was. The storyteller was surrounded by his wife, children and old people. They were the critics of that time. Through their responses the storyteller tested and refined his tale. The presence of women kept him from using harsh expressions about a sworn enemy. The presence of experienced elders restrained the sweep of the sails of imagination. The presence of tired workers made the tale accessible and precise. Today too, literature and criticism are bound with the strength of the epic. At one time Lev Anninsky urged me to “love the enemy”. I thought: a strange virtue. Yet to hate the enemy — obviously I mean not my actual enemies, but literary characters for whom as a human being I can feel nothing but hatred — is to place oneself entirely under his power. But as soon as I love that “scoundrel”, love him as a rare discovery, I become master of the situation.
I am glad when I see that my critics are more intelligent than I am, think as I do, or rather in the same direction, look the same way but further, and that together we are doing the same work. So it is not a matter of criticism’s lessons — I do not always make use of my own lessons either — but of its sincere desire to help me in so solitary an undertaking as creation.
  
Alla MARCHENKO
Voprosy Literatury
(Questions of Literature), No. 12, 1980.