Armenian writer and State Prize winner Hrant Matevosyan is well known to those who value literature. He explores different outcomes. The Master, for example, tells the fate of forest warden Rostom Sargsyan, who stands against the cynicism and indifference of those destroying faith, love and hope. In The Hangover the writer portrays urban life. Different stories, different destinies, all united by Hrant Matevosyan’s remarkable talent and his view of the world, grounded in a sense of the human being as a child of nature, a child of his country…
“Born in a God-forsaken village far from civilisation, how did you become a writer? When did you first sense your gift?”
“Perhaps at twelve or thirteen. Once we children were sent to the fields to gather greens for pickles and meals. Life was hard, we saw no meat for months, so every edible plant was used. The village children returned with great bundles of all kinds of herbs; one clever boy even caught a hen gone wild. Everyone came back with full hands, only mine held nothing. While my peers searched for greens, I climbed from hill to hill to see what lay beyond the mountains. From below, they saw me, a little boy, climbing high hilltops. That was enough for my childish ambition.
“…At fourteen I found myself in the city. Do you remember Tumanyan’s story of a father wanting to bring his son out into the world? They walked to town, and all the way the son turned back towards his village and home. So did I: I kept looking back. Longing never left me, kept pulling me home. It elevated and illuminated everything connected with home in my memory. My mother seemed no longer a peasant woman but the Mother of God who had fed me; my father was the image of a peaceful mower who had taken me beneath his dependable wing, shielding me from every evil and injustice. That longing, that desire to reach the foundations, to tell everyone so that many could share my feelings, formed my wish to write.
“Another memory: our village teacher’s wife died. She was no relative of mine, another woman, another mother, not even from our village; she had come as a bride. Our class was taken to the funeral to make a large attendance. All the children stood quietly aside, and suddenly, in that silence, I began to weep uncontrollably. I do not know what happened: whether I touched death’s mystery or placed myself in the teacher’s position, his dead wife’s or the orphaned children’s. I remember they spent a long time bringing me round, sprinkling water, even giving me several slaps to restore my senses. Why did I feel another’s grief as my own? Perhaps there was already a poet inside me.”
“Poetic temperaments are countless, but very few become writers. Certain conditions are probably needed for qualities of the soul to become a gift for writing.”
“In our house there was a real reverence for paper, ink, books, everything associated with the word. My mother passed it on to us. She believed that if she had not managed it, at least her children should be able to emerge from darkness through books.
“Parents were then allowed to attend lessons, even specially invited. I still remember stammering and stumbling through the textbook’s talentless Russian writers’ talentless texts in equally talentless Armenian translations. I remember being assigned to recite at a school event:
“Homer sang of Achilles,
Ferdowsi of Rostam Zal…
“As soon as I reached the praise of Stalin, I felt ashamed, blushed and fell silent. Fortunately Vardush, the club manager, came to help: she jumped forward, spread her arms and continued herself. Such poems could have turned me away from literature, had it not been for my mother. She was a splendid storyteller, not merely telling but acting out entire performances. Sometimes I distinctly sense her intonation in my writing, even her speech’s rhythm. If I depart from it, something has been written wrongly.”
“Hrant, you write a great deal about village people. Do they read your books in your native village?”
“They read them, even retell them to one another. Sometimes they take offence. After The Master they were upset with me for a long time: they found allusions to themselves where I had suspected nothing. Others recalled secret stories I had only guessed at and hinted at in the novella. A harmless text suddenly ‘brought to light’ secret small and great sins nobody had known.”
“Do you think someone living comfortably can create?”
“Of course, if the soul is deep. Especially with a good education and upbringing. Were not Tolstoy and Tumanyan comfortable, at least as we understand it? That is precisely why their literature is whole, rather than born of a half-starved author’s sense of inadequacy, as happens now.”
“Yet writers are commonly thought to be well provided for…”
“What are you saying? Writers live unbearably. If they were well provided for, they would not seize on random subjects or turn out literary hackwork, writing empty screenplays and dramatisations…”
“Now both writers and readers are absorbed in memoirs. How do you regard that?”
“Just as true literature belongs to a few chosen people, not all recollections are literature, in my opinion. When they come from a real artist’s pen, wonderful surprises occur not only in the memories but in the authors’ inner world. Andrei Bitov once said he believed Pushkin, preparing to write about Peter, unexpectedly became a tsar himself. His vocabulary changed; he began to speak royally. In private life too, fate played a cruel joke: poet and tsar both, as is known, said on their deathbeds, ‘Higher, higher!’ As Bitov writes, Pushkin died as a tsar. I think the poet had brought the tsar under his sway, profoundly recognised and understood his personality, and received him into his heart.
“But Pushkin was a genius. Documentary prose is generally written by mediocre writers, and much of it is doomed to fail. It is impossible to write adequately about real individuals, because they have already come into being once. A person is created once by God and essentially needs no second reproduction in literature or another art. Neither people nor works repeat themselves.”
“Then it is not altogether good when a writer’s fate becomes material for a work after his death?”
“Exactly. For that reason alone a completely different figure appears before us in memoirs. And then… An artist is, ultimately, in life’s whirlpool and at the same time distant from it. That is the instinct of creative self-preservation. Artists have a sense of their own helplessness, of being superfluous and overlooked. Perhaps because a person is alone by nature. Though I see nothing bad in either solitude or collectivism. Each chooses the way of life close to them. Of course we are all alone in birth and death; even the closest person is unlikely to want to share my death. Nevertheless we reach out to help one another. Losing loved ones, we lose a part of ourselves and suddenly realise that each of us is made up of many near and dear people.”
“From time to time you go to the village: to work, or simply to rest from the city?”
“It is hard to say. You see the conditions in which I work and rest. The neighbour’s child spends hours learning music behind the wall; street noise, constant rallies, whose participants I am powerless to help with anything, even a wise word.”
“But not everything is so hopeless…”
“In old times, when a wolf attacked a flock, they threw it the mangiest goat. Sometimes, unsatisfied with easy prey, the beast fought the shepherd and might even bite him. They believed it was a rabid wolf’s bite, so death was inevitable. If the man did not die on the fortieth night, the crisis had passed and a long life awaited him. On that night the whole village gathered around the shepherd’s hearth. All night people feasted, the zurna and duduk played, they sang, danced, told interesting stories, ate and drank. They did not let the shepherd sleep, afraid he would not wake again. In the morning he was alive and well. They dressed him, filled his bag with food and wine, gave him a dog to help and saw him off to his waiting flock. Our people today, like that shepherd on the fortieth night, await dawn. You and I, like his guests, talk of various things, hoping dawn will come all the same.”
Interview by R. ARMENYAN.
Trud, Moscow, 9 May 1990.