The Poetry of Language

- Hrant Ignatovich, although the literary interview genre is relatively new, it has managed to acquire genre conventions. But I want to break the accepted order and immediately ask you the question with which they usually end the conversation. What are you working on now?
- I am rereading my article about Western Armenian novelist Hakob Mndzuru. Mndzuru's work, which is excellent in itself, attracted my attention also because it provides rich material for thinking about the paths and fate of Armenian literature, true and false innovation. A porter, a baker, a day laborer, in his old age he sold candles in the Armenian church. I see Mndzuru as a lost messenger of the old Armenian village in the new times. Almost the same age as Tumanyan, he was eleven years older than Charents, but this is how he describes the Armenian village of the past and the beginning of this century - and that village was preserved as it was in the days of Kuchak and earlier, in the times of the Bagratunis and the Arab invasions, and even before that, in the times of Xenophon - it seems that in this day he is the witness of the realities of the past centuries and is their messenger to the literature of the future. in
Hakob Mndzuri died at the age of 92, and his death went as unnoticed as his literary life. It could not be otherwise, because the Western Armenian part of our people, whose biographer and advocate he was called to be, no longer existed. In the tumult of the First World War, they wiped out the Young Turks from the face of the world with their diligence and care. In addition, Mndzuru was not considered a true writer because of his tireless ethnography. A son of the purple mountains of Mdzur, he described his territory with the accuracy of a field guard, never forgetting to mention what his compatriots ate, how they dressed, how they sowed and what they reaped... Meanwhile, what was considered a disadvantage was an advantage. Our bare and bare historiography can be dressed up with the clothes preserved by Mndzuru, and all our people living and working since the time of Xenophon can be fed with the food preserved by Mndzuru. He has given us a geography, a description of the ground on which our literature stands, he has given our literature a taste and a smell. Mndzuri is an encyclopedia of rural life, in a completely non-metaphorical sense of the word, and Armenian lexicographers will always refer to its volumes. Not a tree, not a spring, not a flower, not a joke or incident was neglected, not hidden from his eyes and ears, smell and touch. All the characters and all the voices gathered in his heart of the future poet and in the muscles of the village teacher and reaper. And for all those sounds, calls and scents, it has become a storage place... There is no suitable word. Whether that color photography was a conscious "preparatory" work for future literature, or was done in anticipation of future trials, is a separate question. The problem is not that one way or another that world had to disappear, the problem is that before the disappearance it managed to impress the soul of his son and the chronicler as it is.
- In other words, do you think that Mndzuri was consciously working for the future, so to speak, taking into account the spiritual requirements of tomorrow?
- No, it doesn't happen like that. We all work for today. Some of us take the future with it, most of us stay in the present. Mdzuri is tomorrow's favorite. And if tomorrow, no later than tomorrow, an Armenian, even if one of a hundred, wants to see the path taken by his fathers and his people, wants to find his roots, then in yesterday he will find a clear space filled with peaceful light, the space of Hakob Mndzuru, and in that space a peaceful, kind, hard-working people guided by matriarchy, and the light, which is called conscience, will always be there and will be endlessly filled, empty, until this the masters and servants of the world are mothers.
- And what is your own relationship with geography and ethnography of rural life?
- Very simple and, I think, in the accepted order, just like Hakob Mndzurun.
- In one of your interviews, you called yourself a "photographer" and a "reviewer" of Tsmakuti, I admit, it surprised me. Because in my opinion, you have never been a reviewer anyway, not even in the novel "We Are Our Mountains". Only at the first casual reading, I perceive the novel as a light allusion to "holy" morals, which, almost with a simple testimony, fixes some of the reasons for the current "differences" between the "city" and the "village".
A second reading reveals a poignant social novel—small, fragmentary, but novel. Ales Adamovich said during one of the discussions of Moldavian prose that Moldavian literature, unlike Belarusian, "preserved its music" as a prototype, and it is not only a literary phenomenon. It has a life style behind it and a means of "economy". Here, the novel "We are, our mountains" explains, at a serious enough level, how, as a result of what social changes, the peasant disappears, how the special "Patriolic" type of consciousness and self-awareness changes. Agree, everything clearly exceeds the requirements of the review, whether you consider the type, lyrical or documentary... Moreover, even when you clearly see that the basis of two different temperaments is the same "source", you still feel the importance of differences, that is, the difference in the idea that this or that character serves. If we take as a starting point, let's say, the underlying vital fact, one cannot disagree with I. Zlotowsky's assertion that "In the novel "Autumn Sun" and in the story "Your Lineage" is "the same mother". In both cases his father is the Prince, and the son is the same son, and the whole lineage through whose branches his memories (and reproaches) spread is the same lineage." But in my opinion, despite the purely biographical similarities, that is to say, overcoming the signs of documentary and allusion, they are completely different works. "Autumn sun" is a family novel, and the story "Ko tohm" ("Our clan of clowns"), which at first glance seems to be a family story as well, claims not without grounds to be the meaning and summary of realities of a much higher, much more general nature. And this, of course, cannot be expressed in our perceptions of the main heroines of those works.
- Of course, I know that I am not a "photographer" and I am not a "reporter". And if I call myself this way, it is only because I am convinced that each of us, you, me, and my little son, are already generalizations, the fruit of humanity, and that life, as they say, in its natural form, is already literature. Paruyr Sevak has such lines. "Shakespeare takes life // With his tragic dramas... // And we, you and I... play art // And... with such conviction // That even Cervantes' hero did not have..." For example, what did I know from my childhood books in the 1930s? about famine, collectivization, war, Yerevan flood. Everything seems to be nothing. And so, by a strange turn of events, I came across a manuscript, the notes of the carpenter Zakeyan, a semi-literate man. In that manuscript I found such vivid details that I became a direct witness of those events. One episode in particular impressed me. Zakean's family had many children, and the collective farm provided them with a living allowance: a cow. The cow was sick, it had to be slaughtered immediately, but there was no one. the father was lying on the verge of death, they had to call the neighbor or the uncle. The meat was saved, they sold it, keeping only the head and legs, because everyone knew that the father was dying wherever he was, and they would have to sacrifice him.
Literary reportage and artistic photography teach us to respect the kind of literature that life itself creates without the help of professional writers. I can't start my work without having a specific temperament, a specific destiny. Without the original, I can't invent anything fictitious. Need a boost? Beginning: Well, and then, as a rule, nothing remains of the prototype. Nevertheless, many of my heroes know their "ancestors" in separate ways: biographical, situational, that are part of that "number". They recognize the preserved details, not noticing that nothing remains of the original outline.
- But those of your readers, who are not aware of these details, consider your characters mainly autobiographical, such is the emotional conviction of your "first person"...
- Perhaps. The story is indeed often "first person," and the "author's side" speech flow, the eyewitness narrative form, has incorporated something of my own style of thinking, speaking, telling. In the beginning, it's true, it was very early, I really thought that my "first face" would be my "me". It turned out differently. my written, perhaps already conceived works do not fully fit me personally. Feeling that, I left the game as a "first person".
- And Arayik, the younger brother of Hrant Karyan, from the story "Skizb", is there nothing of you in him, most importantly, vital? Only a child with artistic tendencies can see the world as a boy sees it, feel the currents and contrasts of the world in that way...
- You are right, there is really a lot of me in Arayik, but from my childish self, from my childhood experiences.
- Is there a lot of biography in your essay?
- There is, of course, ordinary writing, that is, what was created on the basis of what was seen, noticed, heard, is understandable, transformed and supplemented, enriched and condensed by imagination. But there is also direct biography. Let's say Simon, Aghun's husband ("Autumn Sun"), has a lot from my father. Like Yeghish, my father always wanted to give something to us, his children. His hand was always reaching for his pocket, and his pocket was empty... Arayik's attitude towards his mother is from the children's warehouse, and the girls in red swimsuits and the river are from there. But all these are separate details, facts, feelings, not a whole with all its complexity and scope.
- Yesenin hesitated for a long time, as evidenced by "Mary's Keys", which one to choose: a horse or a cow image for his symbolic flag of Blue Russia. However, he found it impossible to make that sign the "sign of aspirations" (i.e., a horse's head), the coat of arms of the Russian steppe man. From here.
Oh Motherland... happy!
And make time
The prettier the better
There is nothing in your cow's eyes...
(literal translation)
That symbolic role in your works is claimed, and seemingly with equal rights, both by Gomes, by the hapless Alcho, and by his short-legged Orange Basket, the personification of the wild element of nature, whose power is felt so acutely and dramatically by all your characters, even the docile pack-horse Alcho. Which of those three contenders would you choose if you were to draw Tsmakut's "emblem"?
- In my Tsmakut, the most mine is my Alkho. Or rather, people who have Alkho in their hearts. In all its manifestations. Those who can be called the sinew of life, because life rests on them. Those who can say about themselves: everything is transient, but we remain. Such is Andro from "The Orange Herd" (story series "Bernadzier"), such is Avetik from "Your clan". And Simon from the novel "Autumn Sun". But all those alchoyanisms, sorry for the inflexible novelization, are not the center of the plot in the works mentioned. In the trilogy I have conceived, the story of such a man, on whom the world rests, will be central as the basis, on which the trilogy will be built. I have almost written the first part. Conventional name: "Takh". But the core is the fate of a completely different hero, also a native of Tsmakout, unlike Andro and Avetik, he goes against life, trying to create himself based on ideal beautiful, but, alas, abstract, no longer modern ideas about honor and morality. And does not want to make even small concessions to life - stingy, impure, but mobile and very vibrant. He is sitting on my neck, that Rostom, who has made himself an apostle, a victim of his high principles, and I cannot get rid of him in any way...
- If you hadn't warned me that the central character of "Takh" is a Tsmakutzian, based on your description, I could have thought that it was a Conradian or Jacklondonian type of hero: masculine, stoic, romantic... Is there no violence on the material, are you not forcing him ideas that are not characteristic of the given psychological structure?
- There are, aren't there, people in the world who live, work, suffer and even commit crimes without asking themselves whether all this is moral or not. They are like a plant - they are that way because they are that way. But there are other people, those who constantly control themselves with the human question: am I doing the right thing? Such are some of my fellow villagers, on whose example I wrote to my Rostom. I am sure that the most painful questions in the world can be answered without leaving Tsmakut, literally without leaving Tsmakut. I am sure that each Tsmakut represents the whole complexity of the world. But, I repeat, Rostom will not be the main character of the trilogy. The last part of it is a novel about a man whose life depends on him, although, of course, he does not doubt that the world is held by him. By the way, he has many prototypes, including my paternal grandfather.
- The very one who gave birth to "Your tribe" Avetik?
- That's him. He had a lot of scoundrels hanging around his neck: his family, his brother's wife and sons, my mother's aunt... He was the ancestor of a great family. And he would have loved my other grandfather, Ishkhan, the man who is the prototype of another of my heroes, who forced his daughter to marry him, someone rude and indelicate... This could not be expressed both in his attitude towards his son, and in his attitude towards us, who were his grandchildren... However, I cannot think of him without tenderness. Do you remember "Papi" by Hamo Sahyan? You translated, you must remember.
- Of course I remember.
My grandfather planted it
Shivers of our village,
My grandfather exploded
The horses of our village.
My grandfather from our village
He lined the walls
And all wills
I was stoned alone...
- And then?
- And then...
Another day when suddenly
knees bent
Stunned by surprise
He blushed with shame.
He left the battle
And held his breath
And then the sweat
The front is frozen.
And the grandfather is in the groove
lay down and slept
Blend into the soil
That he fed himself.
- My grandfather also belonged to that tribe of people, people who know how to talk to the land. His face, I don't know why, I don't remember, although I was fifteen years old when he died. But I well remember his garden, which looked like the clean and detailed watercolors of European naturalists: beautiful, well-kept lawns, a few rose bushes. Not only my grandfather's garden, everything was beautiful, even the cattle. The buffalo was beautiful, it looked like it was wearing makeup. And his heifer was like him, a pchruhi. Even when, after the rains, the herds of the village returned from the pasture up to their chests in mud, my grandfather's thoroughbreds managed to stay clean. I don't know why. But it was.
Already in his old age, my grandfather, although he could calmly cultivate his beautiful garden, became the beekeeper of the collective farm. The apiary was very big. After he died, about two years later, all the bees died. The beehive is about fine skill and fine relationships. Unfortunately, the ability to distinguish a regular bean from a pilaf bean is becoming rare. And if we sit with folded hands, sigh, complain and console ourselves with the bitter sweetness of nostalgia, I am afraid that even such modest, but requiring knowledge of the subtlety of their production, food items such as honey and black pepper, will become acute shortages, and then disappear from our table altogether... My grandfather used to prepare all kinds of things in the apiary. And the women, on whose shoulders the heavy burden of the war years, always chose his rakes, his shovels, because they were beautiful and light, convenient for work.
Recently, I have started to notice that I instinctively try to make my handwritten page as clear and beautiful as my grandfather's garden, which is preserved in my childhood memories...
- It seems to me that there are two types of writers. One part tries to see and reproduce as quickly as possible, everything that is emerging. A classic example is Ivan Turgenev. Others try to preserve for the future what is about to disappear. Looking at the situation, sometimes the first ones, sometimes the second ones appear in the epicenter of reading attention. Now, in my opinion, readers are interested in writers like Valentin Rasputin, their Matyora disappearing under water, like Hakob Mndzuri, the "advocates" and "ambassadors" of the departing world in the literature of the future.
- You are too rigid in the formula... It is too categorical, in my opinion, and the combination you suggested, Tsmakut-Matyora, although there is something, if we don't "dig", there is something. After all, with such people as Sahyan's "Grandpa", the special culture of manual work, which was the accumulation and culmination of many centuries of experience, is leaving. And when I think about my writing debt - both to that huge farming culture and to the Mohicans of old Lori, where there was not a single centimeter of uncultivated land in Tumanyan's time, not transformed into an earthly paradise and where now there are not even wild walnut trees - I understand my writing and filial debt like this: Lori (both as a geographical concept and as a psycho-moral world) should not disappear from the face of the earth...
- I completely share your concern, I admire your stoic and romantic attitude to "honor's responsibility". But how to relate it to the fulfillment of your duty before today's Tsmakut?
- My new, not yet published work, "Tashkend", is today's Tsmakut, its present, as I understand and see it, its face. That title, by the way, sends the Armenian reader on the trail of Axel Bakunts's old review, "Katzanov". Aknark tells about the restoration of the old, already covered with grass, which once connected the Armenian hinterland with the wider world, about the end of the centuries-old solitude, about the Armenian peasant coming out of his skin and breaking away from his roots.
It is not by chance that I called my Tsmakutian series a chronology for myself, not only for the sake of purely aesthetic correct orientation. Chronology is not a novel, you won't throw out a single day. And I wrote that work with pleasure, although some things from what is happening today in the village and with the villagers are neither close to my mind nor to my heart, there, in my Tsmakut, a new generation of free-eaters, a new squad (call it whatever you want) was born. And the predators, the "princes", have shrunk and at the same time multiplied, multiplied, like weeds or sparrows. That human stuff is hard to work with. This is why I return to Tsmakut of my childhood more often than I should. But, I assure you, it is not simple nostalgia for the past.
- In that case, perhaps it is appropriate to use the option that Andrei Voznesensky suggested: nostalgia for the present.
- Maybe... Saryan used to say: Renaissance masters loved this wonderful world because they had just discovered it, we love it because we are afraid to lose it.
- Hrant Ignatovich, have you ever tried to turn to another topic? It looks like you almost dared in "Hangover". Don't you want to have a more serious and long relationship with the energetic life that beats under the windows of your Yerevan apartment? Doesn't that life tempt you?
- Tempting. Do you remember "Provincial Sunset" by Axel Bakunts? I would like to write something like this. In other words, from urban life, urban prose from today's life in Yerevan. Let's say that in the Moscow episodes of "Khumhar" the experience of my life in Yerevan was used, the experience of working in the film studio here. By the way, in the new version of that novel, I have almost completely removed everything that is directly related to Tsmakut. In my opinion, if it has not become better, then it is more drastic and evil. Rural scenes created "sentimental" moments in the story, distracted from the main story, shifted the emphasis.
- What is the main thing?
- I wanted to write about the end of adolescence. I wanted to see the beginning of the hero of our time, not with the current, positive, but with the old, Lermontov perception of that "phantom".
- I don't seem to catch the connection...
- Why? You were once compared to a bird straying from the flock...
- As well as a juniper (almost an oak leaf that has been torn from its own branch) with a bush that clings to the steep slope of the Blue Mountain, a prodigal son who has no return to the lost paradise of patriarchal life, where the forest lives in the shadows with a simple and well-established life.
The hero of "The Hangover" probably has selfishness and ambition in common with Lermontov's hero, but both in a romantic, not a pragmatic way, because pride is not the basis of self-centeredness. Do you remember what Lermontov wrote? "In me I feel... an insatiable greed that devours everything on the way. I look upon the sufferings and joys of others only in relation to myself, as food which sustains my mental powers." Hence the perception of happiness as saturated pride...
That is, a temperament that is the exact opposite of "alcho-like", whose vital mission is compassion, the ability to share suffering, even at the expense of giving up one's own joy.
- But look. he is desperately trying to preserve his inner "alcoholism", resisting the temptations of the big city and his "sweet life"... And if you haven't seen it, it means that my hand was weak, which I don't rule out at all, because "The Hangover", where there are parts I like, is still not an accomplished, dead-end work as a whole...
- And how do you evaluate the perception of "village writers" as a separate literary platoon?
- In the conditions of a huge country, the formation of such a "platoon" obviously has its meaning, at least that wording, "rural prose", with all its conventionality, was not invented by critics, but was born by the dictates of life. No matter how you fall, the fact remains the fact. the literature that we hastily, perhaps not so successfully, labeled rural, exists, and as Valentin Rasputin rightly observed, "was able to trace precisely the nerve endings of that vast body we call 'the people'." This is the reason for my abiding interest. Although, nevertheless, certain tones in the work of some novelists with a rural orientation cause alarm.
- What exactly...
- The old, pre-revolutionary "village writers", I don't mean only the Russians, as if they were saying. "There are people there too." Some of those present confirm, of course, not directly, but it means. "People are only there, in the village." Naturally, I cannot agree to such a question, with all my agrarian inclinations, both creatively and purely humanly.
There is no such strict division of literary forces in Armenia. And no one calls me a village writer. Despite this, I am a sworn village scribe.
- You are such a convinced and consistent "village writer" that... Your prose narrows down to traditional rural problematics. Yes, the Tsmakut chronicles are the basis: the fates of Tsmakut residents by birth, positive temperaments, innately "patriotic", true folk - the bread and salt of the country. But besides the "lifelong" residents of Tsmakut, the heroes who grew close to the fields and barns of Tsmakut, there are Hrant Karyan and Little Uncle ("Bernadzier"), as well as his cousin. Thinking about the fate of his little uncle (the youngest son of the family is obliged to stay in Tsmakut all his life, to protect his father's hearth, and he needs to go to Tbilisi because the girl he is in love with lives there), that young man asks a question to himself and to the whole of Tsmakut, which could not pass through not only Andro and Avetik, but also the Prince. “And who invented that bread fight? And why shouldn't a person be able to relax his nerves? We stand apart like trees, each for us, each taking his share of the sun and casting his own shadow. So how does it happen that the world, silent as a forest, becomes a kennel? He is going to Tiflis - let him go to Tiflis."
That side question in "Bernadzier" becomes the main, plot-forming one in the novel "Autumn Sun". Tsmakut, which even Gevorg of "Khumhari" still seemed to be "silent", turns out to be a community that is closely connected by only one thread - a non-judgmental, blood-blooded hatred towards a stranger, who is already unacceptable for that reason, Aghuni...
- If you want to protect him so much from Tsmakut's ill-considered dislike, protect him. But if you want to build the defense according to all the laws, that is, taking into account the author's idea and desire, do not forget that there are not only righteous and only guilty in any of my works. First, and secondly, in that novel, the idea of ​​an old work was felt, albeit very fleetingly. I started and didn't finish... It was called "Princess Nana's Bridge". The action takes place in Tsmakut, but at that time Tsmakut appeared to me not as a world, but as a small mountain village - a patriarchal paradise. I wanted to show how evil and energetic people come to that paradise: brides from other places, shoemakers from Tbilisi... They come and destroy the world of old Tsmakuti. Or rather, that world is being destroyed in them. I "grew" out of that romance so quickly that the novel got old before I got halfway through... Maybe I need to learn to write fast so I don't get ahead of myself. And I don't know that. And I will probably never learn. The hand has to do the work, but the hand lacks speed... While I think, the plot, thought out to the last detail, suddenly gives a new look. The same Aghun. in her character, the evil and eager daughter-in-law consumed herself. But that novel, or rather, its main character, who is unable to cope with either her fate or her character (she wants to, but she can't), became an impetus for a new idea. I have already said that I thought of a trilogy, the hero of the first part of which is the stoic from Tsmakut, there will be another part. I want to write about those people who do not understand what they are doing, do not know, like Aghun, what will come out of their words and what will follow their actions. How many such people are around! They live and don't know why they do what they do, why they act like that... I face them every day, I suffer because I have to communicate with them. I'm sorry, but I understand. to write about those "doers" is to write about life that goes on by itself, ignoring the efforts of those who, like my Rostom, are consciously trying to steer it in a certain direction...
- In my opinion, the collision is generally characteristic of your prose, here it is also the problem of individuality, his self-awareness and self-determination. We already feel the first signs of rebellion against the heavy power of Tsmakut, against the "world" that does not recognize the rights of individual self-determination up to the point of secession, for the sake of one's own right to feelings and thoughts. In Hrant Karyan's "millions of clicks", although they may not be so serious yet ("the world of the sweet life did not accept Hrant Karyan, Hrant Karyan did not accept the sweet life"), in the delicate issues that the Little Uncle's cousin is suffering from, and the main thing is in the anxiety, the pre-thunder anxiety that the story "Nzhuygs, nzhuygs" brings. Let's say this is the moment. The younger uncle, who has already managed to go to Tbilisi and marry a citizen girl, takes the orange stallion out of the herd to occupy his soul with something. Unable to tame him, Little Uncle is forced to shoot "his horse" in order to fulfill his vital and plot mission, "and then obey no one." Maybe I'm exaggerating, I'm taking a tone higher, but it seems to me that that episode, like an allegorical mirror, i.e. not directly, but in a metaphor, reflects the fate of Little Uncle, who kills love in himself for the sake of family, dynastic duty. Moreover, if we go forward in the footsteps of the "Orange Basket", that is, look at the ramifications outside the fable and above the fable, we inevitably come to the conflict, which, changing its form, but not losing its "essence", passes from case to case, explaining the tragedy of the soul of many of your heroes.
- It's interesting. What do you mean?
- The allegory of the plot - Alkho's clash with the orange, free-riding stallion and stallion, behind which is the eternally insoluble conflict between duty and desire, the sweetness of temptation and the burden of responsibility. It seems to me that this contradiction immediately reaches the secrets of the characters' hearts, immediately comes to the surface of the story with noise and fury, as, for example, in the scene of the "drunkenness" of the "Hangover" or the meeting of Little Uncle and Orange Basket, who was sold and became the "prima donna" of the circus in the city. I quote: "And I felt that I was also pushing that horse. And seeing his fat, daily scratched, washed, oiled mane, I felt that I hated him, and that in me was a hard pack-horse, a pack-horse torn with wrinkles, beaten by children, scorned by the stallion, the stallion's terror in his sinews, and straw in front" ("The Orange Basket"). At that moment, the hero of the "Orange Hammock" hates not only the overly full present of the former Orange, but also his past childhood delight, when the hammock was for him a symbol of will, freedom from burden, not a horse, but only free movement, a "yellow fire" of temptation that slides across the face of the earth. No less acutely, the same situation is played out in "In the beginning". The burden that the boy has put on his shoulders is so heavy that, frantically doing everything that a man should do, in whom, as you said, "Alcho sits", he cannot but respond to the "orange calls", responding tensely and passionately, responding with his whole being to the girls in red swimsuits, who appeared from another life, a life that is free from the humiliating struggle for bread, the beauty that is not obliged to serve the benefit... As a result, a rather unique collision arises. Rebellion against the power of Tsmakut is complicated by rebellion against that rebellion... Without stoicism, that is, the ability not only to reconcile with the weight of the burden, but also to bear it without losing face, you cannot really endure...
- And it seems to me that our dialogue, Alla Maksimovna, is turning into a trilogy, it seems to me that you are not arguing with me, but with some third person...
- You reacted quite accurately to this "deviation", at this moment I am really arguing not with Hrant Matevossian, but with those of my colleagues-critics who consider you a singer of "the immortality of his lineage", of some formless and endless life that without conflicts and endlessly passes from one existence to another. In order to see your Chronology from an epic point of view, a lot of things have to be erased: your romanticism, your maximalism, your "self" (even "not directly"), your philosophy, which is divided part by part into the heroes, as well as those heroes of the Tsmakut series who dared to break away from the "clan" and start a special, separate life, i.e. Hrant Karyan and Gevorg Mnatsakanyan. In principle, the appearance of such a fate and such a psychological type in prose with an agrarian orientation is not such a big news. In Viktor Astafev's novel "King-Fish", for example, one of the openly negative characters, the selfish Goga Gertsev, is almost directly accused of Pechorinaism. Akim (the Russian version of your Andro) stands against him as an accusation and example. So, what is unexpected is not the situation, but your attitude. Astafev convicts Goga Gertsev without the right of appeal. Moreover, Astafev, knowing perfectly well where the Akims appear from, not only does not know, but also does not want to know, what circumstances give birth to super-tsevs, modern anti-maxim-maximists. Meanwhile, you are interested in both the modern romantic self-centered type and its "origins" - causes, antecedents, etc.
- I am not at all sure that I know where the modern pechorins begin. "The Hangover" is a temperament, not a temperament story. I am generally attracted to strong temperaments, the clash of passions, the tense drama of life.
- And you were never interested in historical plots? History could fully satisfy your demand for strong personalities. Moreover, during the development of historical plots, your childhood experience could have served you well, because you managed to live during the remnants of the old, almost feudal farming culture and the life and lifestyle based on it, that is, practically the old village, about which your highly valued Hakob Mndzuri wrote...
- Perhaps the story is ordered for me, although sometimes it tempts me at the level of judgment, it fascinates me with almost unlimited freedom of action, variety and richness of plots. But every time I start, I stop myself. or rather, I am stopped by my fear. The fear of faking it. You need to know your material thoroughly to write. From the inside. I can, of course, reach the papal, maybe even pre-papal times with imagination, but not further. The Great History already begins there, to touch it is to engage in artistic "blindness", that is, to impose half-knowledge, approximation of assumption, non-knowledge. And the truth.
- But when working on "almost history", I mean the times of our grandfathers, you have to assume, guess, fill in imagination, reconstruct, add missing links, lost details.
- I am forced, of course. But there are relatively small gaps between two already well-known details. I easily fill in what is missing with the "blueprint" stored inside me, the light of my, personally only my, memory. And history, the great, distant history, is a darkness that I cannot illuminate. You can't make an elephant out of a tank. And vice versa. Although, for some reason, each of us seems to make sense of the past. While that past is meaningful at the level of the past, on the scale of its contemporaries. Kobo Abe, explaining the origin of his parables, said: when my idea is not embodied in the material of the reality around me, I locate it somewhere free of both temporal and national specific environment. Something similar happens in current historical parables. The inspiration is not determined by certain circumstances, and the form is born not by a difficult victory over the resisting material, but by free invention, the author's performance skill.
In some of today's historical works, I am surprised by the lightness with which their heroes, mostly of tsarist origin, destroy, kill - and this with the author's full consent and enthusiasm - thousands of people through various ventures for personal power. One of our chroniclers of the fifth century, addressing another prince of Armenia, says: "You kill living people, and you make a thing, an object, a God for yourself." That is a level of humanity. In general, what is commonly called artistic historiography raises some doubts in me...
– Even "War and Peace?" Even The Captain's Daughter?
- Tolstoy writes about the events that happened two decades before his birth. In the novel "The Captain's Daughter", Pushkin does not pretend to tell the whole truth, does not hide that he only wants to touch the historical material and openly hides behind the genre. Apart from everything else, in the legacy that ancient Armenia left to today's Armenians, I am most attracted by the cultural part. And I think that priceless heritage is not only food for national pride, but also a severe test for national self-love, if, of course, you don't educate it correctly. Every page of that legacy, every khachkar and every foundation stone tells us, our heirs. "Who are you present..."
- In one of the interviews, you said that the most powerful creative impulse for you is the poetry of the Armenian language...
- Yes, not only the language, but especially the poetry of the language. And it is in one of the most perfect poetic systems that were created under the Armenian sky that one should look for all the "ends" and all the "beginnings" in that universe, as real as the physical world. The personality of my people has found full artistic expression in the language. It's been a long time dream of mine to penetrate that world. However, I dared to do that only when writing "Tashkent", I "handed over" the entire territory of the novel to the country club, where nothing but smoke can be seen, where you can only hear.
In addition, language is actually the most complete "feature" of popular memory. And popular morality. The secret of Tumanyan's or Pushkin's greatness is that they guessed it before their contemporaries.
Sometimes it seemed to me that I could tell how a stone feels when the sun leaves it, what a lonely pear tree thinks... And write in such a way that it would interest not only me, but also someone else. It turned out to be slow prose, so slow that that slowness began to conflict with my own temperament. I began to notice that my handwriting was falling apart, that I was doping on the spot, that I was tired of bringing the "subconsciousness of the material" to life. And now it all bores me so much that I miss the movement.
Every writer has his little "secrets", his means of self-healing and self-salvation. So I, trying to save myself, stuck to my mother's story. how his father, after whom I "plastered" my Prince, was shot by someone from behind the tombstone-crossstone. I found myself in the element of the popular language, I dived into the language sea, that whirlpool took me, took me... Something similar, although in a simpler version, happened with the novel "Autumn Sun". But in both cases the basis was the monologue, one voice in the monologue, one type of linguistic consciousness prevailed. And in "Tashkend" pluralism is a principle.
- And it seems to me that you started with polyphony, I mean "We are, our mountains".
- If you listened to how my fellow villagers speak, I'm sure that the recording of that polyphony (it's at the level of an old novel, I don't want to judge the new one, I feel it's hot, I don't know if it worked or not) would seem vague and inexpressive to you.
- What dialect do they speak in Tsmakut?
- In the Lorva dialect, which has long since become pan-Armenian, because long before my birth, my genius compatriot Hovhannes Tumanyan wrote in that dialect. He turned the language of his region into a literary one, so the language that seems common to everyone now is a native of Lori, like Tumanyan... However, the problem is not the dialect, not the vocabulary of this or that dialect, although that factor is no less important, but the word series of the story, its pages, what the narrator emphasizes and what the narrator omits.
When I write, I am deathly afraid that I will succumb to the sin of stylization, that I will speak neither my language nor the language I speak to myself, within myself. And I'm not only afraid of paper. If suddenly I talk, for example, to my father, trying to give him a tone in his own language, it will not bring us closer, but separate us. And I know that he will think during that time. if you are in a city coat and gloves, why is your tongue "horseman"? Modern plots, by the way, do not satisfy me also because part of their language satisfies me, only a part. They do not awaken in me the great Armenian, which, I am almost sure of it, is hidden in the recesses of my subconscious, slumbers there, unremembered and unnecessary... I can't penetrate there by forcing myself. Only the Great Obstacle, the Great Need can open those secrets. Only he can unlock the inherited storehouses of linguistic memory. Memory is a strange thing in general. I seem to remember a lot of things that I couldn't remember anyway. For example, the neighbor's black cat with cloudy and evil eyes. He must have been a hopeless scumbag because he was often beaten, once by my father, once by my younger uncle. That cat disappeared before I was a year old. And here I remember the war purely emotionally, without details. red heat, cold and hunger. But even that - and in general everything that I, as it turns out, remember - remains deaf and dumb in me, until I am alone in front of a white paper. That's where my memory comes in. And that's not how it works...
- So, you accept the influence of Armenian poetry. And another?
- Another, our bare and bare historiography. The experience of our old timers is what I would like to combine with my experience. What dialogues! And what a brave simplicity of handling the material! You look at it: bad taste that has not found its genre, naivety of simple testimony. And suddenly, it seems that within just a document written according to the rules of its time, you discover a genius dialogue, a precise and capacious solution to a complex psychological condition, a small tragedy with an almost Shakespearean charge.
- Ancient Armenian chronicles are sources that are beyond the boundaries of their own literature. And what have the efforts of your fellow artisans contributed to your quest?
- Without Armenian poetry, starting with Kuchak and Narekat, ending with Hamo Sahyan, my prose would not be in its current form.
- You are not unique here. The new Georgian prose probably found itself so quickly also because it incorporated the experience of Georgian poetry with unusual efficiency. I think many novelties of Russian prose have the same origin. Therefore, more certainty is desirable.
- I owe Charents my, if you can say so, principled democracy. I can say exactly what Axel Bakunts gave me. I can mention quite certain works of Bakunts that had a direct influence.
"Mirror", "Provincial Sunset" and of course "The Humble Girl". Bakunts was returned to Armenian readers only after 1956, but I got to know him, or rather, his literary style, earlier, back in 1952, when I read "Taras Bulba" in his translation, not knowing who the translator was. What a feast it was, a veritable feast of language! Among the great Armenian writers, Bakunts was the first to give self-expression to the part of the people that remained without a language, and transferred the right to vote to mediators, who told the city and the world about the languageless. Bakunts denied that "about", he was not writing about the people, but from among the people. I tried to extend this principle of being from within, as far as it was within my capabilities, to the entire area of ​​the organic and inorganic world. It means writing not about the tree but from within the tree, not about the horse but from inside the horse. Is that clear? Or not so much?
- Absolutely. It is a barrier that Yesenin felt the need to overcome. Therefore, "I am ready to tell you the field." The field. Not about the field. To feel that way, you have to become a bit of a field yourself.
- That's it. When I wrote my Alkho, I was Alkho myself. Felt like Alkho. Even now, sometimes it seems to me that I am more of a horse than a man...
- Alcho is not the first horse "humanized" in literature. When you once again meet such a character on the pages of a book, a natural desire arises to compare his character with the previous ones, with the characters of Turgenev and Tolstoy's horses. Tolstoy looks at his pock-marked Kholstomer not only with the eyes of a writer, a psychologist, but also with the eyes of a good man, a professional horseman. It's no coincidence that Kholstomer is a bit lackey-like. He loves his master, who loves no one else, and his mistress, and his charioteer. And Alkho is a farmer, but he has a greater sense of his own dignity, violated, not respected by almost anyone except Gikor, but dignity.
- Well, he was both kind and a horseman, that giant. Where can you escape from it? Goodness can also be felt in the peasants depicted by Tolstoy, it is no coincidence that his Anna sees an ax in her hand in a dream.
And then I come across that word a lot: humanization. Least of all I seek to humanize my animals: Buffalo, Orange Zombie, Alkho. I sought not to make them like me, but to be like myself. In the scene of the Rostova wolf hunt, is that already tied, saddled beast or the same Kholstomre humanized? No. Tolstoy's wolf looks at man as simple and evil, far away from his human animal world.
- On your table is Tolstoy's "Selected", and there are many pencil notes on the pages...
- How much he knows about man - here is my immediate reaction to Tolstoy's text. And knowing everything, remains the owner of the whole country, the one in charge of the whole world, on which he looks as if from a "divine height". He looks and sees how small he is, that world, and how much he needs Tolstoy's lordly care and protection. It seems to me in general that optimism, or rather the ability not to fall into despair, is a characteristic of a strong talent. Those who lack this ability destroy, dethrone, despair and infect with despair. And powerful talents, like mighty rivers, flow quietly, not breaking the banks, but feeding and fertilizing. Charents called Narekatsu a "dark genius". There are many dark geniuses in world literature, and much less bright ones. Tolstoy, for all his rigidity, is an enlightened genius. Like Kuchak and Hovhannes Tumanyan from Armenians. There seems to be a sarian light in them. Bright talents know no worse than dark talents that the world is cruel. And they are tragic, and the essence of the story is bright, permeated with a sense of height and perspective. And I think that the main source of that inner light is the hand of creation. Abundance of hands. His extravagance.
- And as an artist, as a master, what attracts you to Tolstoy? What do you learn from it? After all, careful and slow reading is also learned. I am talking about the Master's attitude towards the Master, who work in the same workshop, although with different material and different "method".
- Accuracy of details, the ability not to get lost in them, and the ability to be right in the center here on earth, and up there.
Courage with which he was able to look the truth in the eye. Courage not to allow yourself to be too kind, because to be kind, only to be kind, is to surrender. To praise what is immoral is the task of the royal court. The great Tolstoy also teaches this. And then, I envy his ability not to rush events, not to get ahead of himself, not to step aside, but also not to lag behind his own Mind, not to look back, but to keep going, going, heavy, light, constantly forward...
In one respect, the mastery of the story, its continuity and completeness.
- But that is our perception of Tolstoy today. Contemporaries saw it differently. For them, Tolstoy was "wild" (in B. Eichenbaum's phrase). His plot structures were considered dissonant, irregular. For example, this is what D. wrote. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky about "Anna Karenina". "It's all too episodic, just cursory strokes and strokes." Tolstoy himself, considering his novels as a retreat from the canonical forms (forms that the European novel genre had already found), affirmed: "We Russians don't know how to write novels at all." He even defined the genre of "War and Peace" by contrast. "It is not a novel, less a poem, much less a historical chronicle."
Rereading "Yerkir Nair" by Yeghishe Charents, I was surprised by the coincidence. Characterizing his novel, Charents practically repeats Tolstoy. admits that there are no "basic rules" there, that it is not a novel, but something "alternative".
- And doesn't it seem to you, Alla Maksimovna, that you equate not so identical situations? Tolstoy admits the mere inconsistency of "War and Peace" with pan-European rules, and Charents ridicules the notions of "integrity of form" alien to him.
- And here is what the critic Suren Aghababyan writes about that "poem likeness". "At the beginning, Charents' book leaves an impression of fragmented images and episodes, structural and factual disobedience of events and characters, judgments and observations to a unified thought, a unified plot line. But that is a superficial impression. In fact, if we remember, there are not many such works in Armenian literature where the unity of plot and characters, composition and idea is preserved with such rigor.
The problem is that all great works differ from ordinary works in that they are "enriched with new meanings" during their afterlife (M. Bakhtin). And among those "new meanings", perhaps, there are not only substantive meanings. time is able to reveal the beauty that has gone unnoticed by contemporaries. And the structure, where before they saw only aesthetic chaos...
- I can't look at myself from such a "far". Now, I'm pretty sure that my relationship with plot, and with narrative in general, is pretty dramatic. I doubt that they are not even related. Every time I start a new business, I dream of a constructive, smooth succession. About the story without pauses and jumps, because I'm sure the plot is necessary. It holds the material like a cup, preventing a shapeless puddle from forming. Here I want to be a plot writer, let my plot, in the worst case, not be a classic cup, but at least a skewer... And every time the same thing happens: I see that my horse has gone astray again, and there are disorganized, disorderly pages... Yes, hot, yes, exciting... But, alas, only material. I struggle, I make an effort, I go along the road for a while and even go ahead... But I weaken a little and everything starts again: jams, jumps, pauses, memories, in short, a torn composition: hole on hole, crack on crack...
Something "different" if we remember Charents.
Exhausted, I stop fighting against myself... Then I start to miss the plot again, although I seem to have convinced myself by my own experience that in the case of the plot, I lose myself, I lose my face. And all because I treat the plot, in the old, classical sense, with great respect, equally with the genre. Genres are mankind's greatest invention. The result of painstaking work.
There is so much effort behind the genre formulation: pain, revenge, blood, shame, admiration. How many stories have been told and lived but lost in time without finding a genre. Of course, everything changes, including genre forms... But can an airplane builder not take into account the flight capabilities of an arrow, and an architect forget about the existence of pyramid forms?
But the genre, like the plot, is not given to me. What is "Tashkent" in terms of genre specificity? Tempers - and only. Instant flashes of contact. Brownian motion of passions. But no clear compelling storyline. And no main character. although each participant in the "gathering" can be a main character. Each character is fictional, but only in possibilities, in my authorial conception of him. I can write a long story about each of them, although in Tashkent, at the meeting of the village club, only one dialogue belongs to him. Sometimes just a replica.
But that way too, everyone's conversation with everyone else, is not an intention at all, but a means I thought of, a trick to save the story without a plot, that is, to compensate for the congenital defect.
- And maybe the fragmentation, the lack of transitional plot changes that enable the story to make leaps over many events that are not necessary for the author, that are left out, so to speak, as a dash, this is the freedom in which everyone now sees the features of modern style. What authors, critics, and readers alike need. Last night at the hotel I compared the first and last editions of Bernadzier. The first one didn't have a "Beginning" chapter. You just imported that part into the second edition. But it did not spoil the overall impression, did not spoil the compositional lace. Meanwhile, for Hrant Karyan, an outsider, interested in outside life, appears opposite: his younger brother Arayik Karyan, a person of inner life, moreover, a future "holy person" who carries the knowledge, the wisdom that allows life to be preserved and continued in the face of all external disasters.
- It's good if you think so. But how can I forget that when I wrote that same "Beginning", I did not think at all about the context (in the narrow, technological sense) in which that passage appeared, in the second edition of "Bernadzier", where it appeared and began to "serve" the main idea, if there is one, on a par with the old chapters. I wanted to write a separate, very slow, with many visual and psychological details, a story about a boy who took the responsibility of the whole family on his shoulders, and if you want, the responsibility for the whole world order, even though he is so small and weak that he needs guardianship and protection. That's how I wanted to call the story "The Burden". But then Ion Drutze's novel The Burden of Our Kindness was published, and my translator Anahit Bayandur changed the name with my consent. In "Beginning", as you have already noticed, there is a theme: the birth of the poet. I will write more about Araik Karyan. And I will think about his fate, the fate of the poet and the modern world.
- So, you renamed the story from the beginning, then turned it from an independent work into a chapter of a novel: "Sold into slavery". But the reader does not know that, for him the result is important.
- Well, maybe that "collage", that "cover with patches" that is sewn from sections written at different times, with different states of mind, therefore, with different rhythm and tempo, actually looks almost professional... Parajanov's "The Color of the Pomegranate" (I was the author of the credits of the Armenian version) looks best in the material, in my opinion. The montage, that is, the attempt to impose a primitive chronological order on that pile of gold, that diamond, spoiled him. Maybe fragmentaryness so dear to your heart is the way, one of the ways to new literature. Whether it's hilly or flat, the future will tell. And for now, it's obviously not really worth hiding this new development and you don't need to be ashamed of it as something unsightly. And if I'm honest, I'll admit. the unfinished fragment, unrelated, plotless, and genre-less, is still dearer to me than the finished complete success, for through its incompleteness I see, foresee the future whole. However, I do not give up hope. when I write everything I have thought about Tsmakut, when I finish it, the plot will be composed by itself. It will reveal itself. The inner, the secret, even unknown to me, will become visible to all.
- By the way, how do you feel about already published works? The case of "Hangover" - a radical transformation, is it an exception to the rule or is it the rule?
- To be honest, I don't even like to read what is printed. In order not to see the traces of forced haste... Any work should be copied at least twice. "First hand" doesn't need anything. Sherwood Anderson said somewhere. I have not had the feeling of happiness of hitting the target. I am very familiar with the feeling of not being accurate... I read and see. this piece is well-written, this piece is almost well-written... But to fully, after some time, accept the work that has already been published - never once has this happened. For example "Hangover". One of my few jobs I was happy with. It seemed to me that the work was a lithograph, that is, brought to the highest stylistic perfection within my means. But a few years passed and it became clear. it's just a pile of unfinished material again. In short, even after taking out my own child, I still feel like I own him. A Lord who has the right to transform, reshape, rebuild. And this applies not only to stylistic refinement, but also to more stable things: situation, plot, plot ramifications. Well, I'm not talking about the details, they are all under my control.
And then, narrative literature has not overturned any anti-narrative. And will not break. His time will come. Not for me, right? I will probably never settle my relationship with a real novel. And maybe that form is generally opposed to Armenian. Maybe it is not possible to write a proper novel in Armenian at all. Hakob Mndzuri, for example, followed the successes of world literature with great attention, he did not miss any news, admired and at the same time noted that these powerful rhythms distract us from the rhythm of our own Armenian prose.
- In one of Dmitry Likhachev's last articles, "Notes on Russian", there is, in my opinion, a very interesting observation about the features of "national rhythms". This is what Likhachov writes, summarizing his studies and impressions from Armenian landscapes and Armenian painting. "I will not dare to complement Saryan, but still it seems to me that the landscape of Eastern Armenia is stricter than it is in Saryan's paintings. Forestless mountains that have been furrowed by the rains, rivers, rows of vines, mountains from which stones roll down, dense, bold colors. that nature has absorbed the people's blood... For Russian nature, which is humanized by the peasant, the rhythm of the plowed land, the rhythm of the log walls are characteristic. The rhythm is also characteristic of Armenian landscapes, but the rhythm in Armenia is different. Saryan's painting "The Land" (1969) leaves a huge impression. It is completely layered, bright, undulating layers, quite different from what a Russian artist's rhythm might be. That undulating rhythm is also present in the paintings of the great Armenian artist Minas Avetisyan. In his painting "Parents" (1962) the father and mother are depicted in the panorama of the Armenian landscape. It is surprising that the rhythm of Armenian nature seems to repeat itself in the mental rhythm of people. Even the mountains in the painting "My Parents" have become waves of working rhythm. Armenia's work rhythms are amazingly diverse, as is the work of its people. In Saryan's painting "Afternoon Silence" (1924), squares of plowed fields seem to appear on the ground, as if multi-colored carpets were laid out to dry. The rhythms of the mountains and fields are combined and at the same time contrasted with each other... The richness of Armenia's nature is evidenced by its amazingly diverse reflection in painting. The same artist saw very differently. However, we will always say: this is Armenia... The country's landscape is a similar element of national culture. It is the expression of the people's soul." What can you say about these observations of Likhachev?
- I will say that there is Saryan's Armenia along with other Armenias. It's a must see. Are you familiar with Hakob Hakobyan's works?
- I am familiar.
- So, before him, no one has seen Armenia, which excludes the "craziness" of the lines, which once surprised Andrey Bely in the Armenian landscape. Me too. And now, thanks to Hakobyan, I can see. Although the "heavy root" of Minas is close to me and understandable. As for Saryan, he, with all his decorum, alien to me, is more than an artist. He is an inventor. And a great poet. In the years when Saryan was just starting out, originality was very fashionable. Saryan also "went to the East". To the east. With everyone. Along with everyone. But the end came back to the homeland and that's why it happened. Everyone was moving, but he arrived alone.
- And how would you characterize, since it was discussed, the very essence, the core, the depth of Armenian?
- The famous Armenian architect Toros Toramanian used to say. "The beauty of the art of other peoples is exciting, often exciting and disturbing, and the beauty of our art is soothing, soothing, leading to contemplation." Indeed, combine Komitas, Armenian folk songs, Tumanyan, folk epic, Hripsime temple, the same "Humble Girl" and you will be convinced. Armenian style is strict restraint, almost asceticism (this applies not only to aesthetics, but also to ethics), extreme economy of means of expression. Such is the temperament, such is the way of life. Such is the way of farming. And the stone formula of that essence is the small, ancient Armenian churches - not big, monumental buildings, but just solitary churches with modest interior decoration inside a small world.
- If you are such an enemy of all kinds of extremes, how do you reconcile your belief that the purely Armenian style is strict restraint and your, as I understood, not at all negative attitude to such an elaborate work as "The Color of Pomegranate"? This is where there is no saving. As well as the conventional hero of the film about Sayat-Nova, as well as Kuchak, who, next to the natives (made in purely Armenian style, as you understand), has the most luxurious, oriental one. Everything is there: both styling and excesses...
- Well... let's find out. And let's start with Parajanov. His method is the method of a scientist-artist. he tries to tell about Sayat-Nova's poetry in the conventional language of Armenian miniatures. Now about Sayat-Nova, the hero of "Pomegranate Color". It cannot be said that the style adapted from that allegorical and colorful splendor is purely Armenian. Sayat-Nova was a Tiflis poet. And Tiflis of that time was an international city. Therefore, in this case, it should not be about narrow Armenian, but about Armenian culture and its close relations with the medieval Eurasian Caucasus. One cannot refuse that culture, that mix of styles. It was created by history itself. Take, for example, the architectural complex of Aghtamar on the island of Vana.
The first impression, I say about myself, was. no-no, this is not Armenian at all... But it is not Armenian either. There is also its equivalent in literature, Narekatsi. Narekatsi is all-out luxury, both in feel and style. How excessive he is in everything, even in self-denial. And how he wants to surprise! In addition, both Narekatsi and Sayat-Nova, even Kuchak, although less so, were dealing with a stereotype, that is, working within a certain, assigned canon. In the case of Sayat-Nova, it was a typical troupe block, which was used by all Tiflis poets without exception, both Turks, Georgians, and Persians. All of them. A block that required a degree of mastery to develop. We have no such instrument to measure how much genius energy was drained out to resist that block. Imagine an architect—he's both flamboyant and sly, all in one man—who could build a colossal temple with his data. But reality was extremely poor, in the true sense of the word, and could not provide such a large order to a master, as powerful as a genius. All that fate offered was the only khachkar (tomb, monument). And here, he sacrifices all the energy that would be sufficient for a large construction to break every single khachkar. That's where the intricate, detailed carvings come from. Curls, that is, aesthetics, always appear in dead-end situations, when there is no distant perspective, when there is nowhere to go, when history slumbers. However, their individuality – I mean both Kuchak, and Narekatsu, and Sayat-Nova – was shown even within the framework of the stereotype. Geniuses, they knew when to uphold and when to break the law. However, it is unclear to me how they were saved... How did they find their way out of the impasse?
- It is difficult to answer that, albeit a rhetorical question, but it is unlikely that Kuchak wrote in the times when history was sleeping... Linguists have not yet decided in which century he lived. His poetry proves that the author wrote at a time when Armenia had not yet turned from the "bearded cities of the East" (Osip Mandelstam), and even if it had turned, it was not hidden from history. I think here is not only the resistance to the rule, but also the element of "indifference" to the "magic" of the great Persian poetry, "the red rose that enchanted the world with its fragrance." That is, the element of temptation that needed to be overcome. And that is something different than resistance to the rule. Here, creative energy is not only spent, but also generated.
Let's try to extend that situation to today. Does the influence of great world literature hinder or help the search for the national rhythm of Armenian prose moving towards itself?
- Sometimes it also interferes. Look how hard Armenian writers try to look modern. Meanwhile, efforts should be directed in a completely different direction. The exact opposite side...
- And you regularly refer to the authors of great world literature, referring to one Kobo Abe, one Sherwood Anderson...
- Both Sherwood Anderson and Sholokhov and Faulkner, as well as Cortázar (his "The Chaser" is one of my favorites), as well as Hemingway, as well as García Márquez, are great conversationalists. They have found their national rhythm.
- However. I see in your position some attempt to resist temptation, so it means that the energy spent on resistance is not destructive, but creative.
- It is possible...
- You mentioned that you were the author of the Armenian text of "The Color of Pomegranate", and I remembered that you are also a professional "kinoshnik". How did your experience in cinematography reflect on your prose?
- At first, when I did not clearly imagine all the harmful consequences of my "second profession", the language of cinema seemed familiar. However, I quickly realized that cinema and literature are incompatible, and the combination of these two crafts does not go without consequences. First of all, the most vulnerable is affected: the language. Not being necessary dulls the sense of the word. You start to think with "images", the word is left out of the flow of speech, turns into some kind of super-information, and for me, both the power of the verbal flow, and the expressiveness of the word as an artistic work, and the field of conjunctions that the word is surrounded by are important. imagine a single poppy in a green meadow, that's what the word means to me. And in cinema, you turn from a storyteller, a master of words into a painter.
– Can the ability to think in images be redundant, and even more so, hinder it? Alexei Tolstoy, for example, believed that there can be no creativity without the ability to see in reality, and the novelist must nurture and develop that ability...
- It is clear that I am not against visible details... Detail is an art in itself. The egg bas-relief on the wall of Ohanavank. No cloth and buttons in Gikor's pocket from Hovhannes Tumanyan's story. The chills down your spine from the weapon used to cut off the already dead Haji Murad's head. The appearance of a butterfly or a butterfly-like flower in Saryan's monumental-decorative array... Without details, the idea cannot become an artistic reality. The whole thing is made believable by the details.
Cortasar considers every fact of artistic perfection to be the result of the meeting of the Author and the Unknown. If the fictional fact did not take place, then there was no Meeting. In our tales, brave men returning from demon lands bring with them demon ears, symbols of their Encounter and Victory with demons. It seems to me that the artistic detail is also a sign of the Meeting of the Author and the Unknown. And the sign of victory against him. As for the ability to see in reality, even without purposeful training I can see both the characters, down to all the details of their makeup, and everything that surrounds them.
- And you never let them out of your sight?
- It didn't work before. I wanted to, but they didn't seem to dare to break the border of vision and thinking. For example, in the story "The Beginning" everything is about the eye. It is a pervasive materiality. Certainly not just in that story. All my first works are written like that. the eye followed him, the eye worked better than anything else. And now, this ability of my imagination, or rather, my eye, to give birth to illusions has begun to almost annoy me. A bright exterior distracts from the interior. And I consciously, by voluntary effort, try to limit the activity of vision and memory. The eye should not prevent the ear from hearing. I already said that the new novel "Tashkend" is built entirely on direct speech and dialogues. And I like it very much at the moment, although I realize the extent of the loss. And a lot of things are lost: space, air, color, light. And you can't do anything, it's impossible to have everything and keep everything...
- Hrant Ignatovich, in what do you see the mission of literature, not at this moment, but in general?
- Literature should study life. That is its main mission. I always feel like a student before life. And partly eternally provincial. A find is always a joy, it doesn't matter who "asked" it, the devil or the angel. If there is no study, there is no literature. If we consider the author's knowledge final and a priori, then he has nothing to search for, his task is to combine "something beautiful" from already known, found parts. Literature is just a clearing in the jungle. The jungle is man in all his connections, the Great Unspeakable. And the task of every serious literary figure is to increase that space by at least one square centimeter, not to revel in the space freed from the jungle.
- I didn't quite understand what you said about the devil and the angel. I hope you don't think that literature and morality are incompatible.
- Art cannot be inherently immoral. This is evidenced, and best of all, by the diaries of great writers and the memories of their close ones. If something sticks out of the paper, it's a lie. The lie retreats, does not enter the book. It does not become literature, even if it has a great desire to become literature. Perhaps there is something childish in such maximalism, but how, without this "childishness", the writer in the present circumstances, remembering the lessons that the 20th century taught him, can fulfill his Higher Duty - to protect Man from Man, to protect to the end, even when he thinks it is no longer useful, no longer possible. So how do doctors do it? A lie can move armies, can fool people, can become the basis of a political system, can become a real reality and appear to the writer as if it were Life. But to become literature? Never. As Hemingway said. only one regime cannot have good writers: fascism. Because fascism is a lie, a fake, born of a murderer. So he is doomed to infertility. An artist who does not want to lie cannot live under the power of fascism.
- Achieving the truth requires not only audacity and persistence, but also courage from the "achiever". Do you always dare to tell the ultimate truth about your characters?
- Alas, not always. I wanted, for example, to write about the father's hatred towards his son. Purely biological, not social hatred. I didn't dare. It's terrible. But not only in a person's private life, in the wells of the mental world, but also in the history of mankind, there are moments and situations that fiction should not deal with. For example, the bloody genocide of 1915. Even the brilliant Charents, addressing that topic, experienced failure. So what to expect from other writers? Let's take Kostan Zaryan's "The Ship on the Mountain". I know he is in pain. Unbearable pain. But that pain seems to fade away, neutralized by the touch of artistic speech.
- What do you offer? Silence?
- You can't be silent, that way they destroy not only the person, but also his cry, not only his thing, but also his shadow. However, it is extremely painful. I get physically sick when I think about it, and I don't want to, no, I can't tell about it, about that pain in artistic language, to introduce an element of play, form into the story - in short, art. No, literature is not created from such boundless-infinite pain. That question absorbed a great deal of genius and yielded nothing to the art.
- And Paruyr Sevak with his "Silent belfry"?
- I don't consider that work successful, although the author is a really genius poet.
- The life of your works in literary studies is accompanied by a unique polyphony of evaluations and comments. As a result of those debates, didn't the desire arise to simplify what was written a little, to be more precise, to write in such a way that "you don't lose yourself and you are understood" if we remember Yesenin once more.
- Although both critics and readers often accuse me that my text is complicated, that you have to go through the text like through thickets, I never wanted to make everything understandable to everyone. Before the paper, I think only about the material, about how to get along with the material. And, believe me, there is no snobbery, no arrogance, no condescension towards the reader.
The reader, whatever they say about him, is intelligent, he catches something even in obscure works, learns it, and I am sure he does not lose respect for a complex text. Often he assesses the situation as a whole better than the author, and sometimes he openly disrespects those who play "guard" with him, seeing in them not writers, but people who satisfy reading taste, who do not even think that this taste can change for the better with time.
- The feature of the magazine, which gave us the opportunity for such extensive communication, forces us to ask the traditional question: how do you deal with criticism? Who do you think the criticism is for?
- Criticism is for those for whom literature itself is. Criticism is our attitude towards literature. And it has an equal impact on our reading and writing relationships. Everything is inextricably linked. Literature needs a special, favorable environment for creation, and criticism should deal with the creation of a literary environment. It is said that there was no criticism during the creation of "Sassountsi Davt". It was. The speaker was surrounded by his wife, children, and old people. They were the critics of that time. With their reaction, the narrator checked and clarified his story. Thanks to the presence of women, he avoided harsh remarks about the archenemy. The presence of experienced seniors has restrained the sails of the imagination. The presence of tired workers made the story accessible and accurate. Even today, literature and criticism are linked by the strength of the epic. Lev Anninsky once called me to "love the enemy". A strange virtue, I thought. However, to hate the enemy (it is clear that we are not talking about my real enemies, but literary heroes, towards whom I, as a person, cannot feel anything but hatred) means to appear under his complete power. But it is enough for me to love that "rogue", love as a rare find, I become the master of the situation.
I am happy when I see that my critics are smarter than me, think like me, or rather, in the same direction as me, look in the same direction, but further, and we are doing the same thing together. So the problem is not the lessons of criticism, I don't always use my own lessons, but his sincere desire to help me in such a solitary task as creativity.
  
Alla Marchenko
"Vopros literature"
("Вопросы Литературы"), No. 12, 1980.