Political thought, for the most part—apart from a few rare sober individuals, or perhaps many who nevertheless do not reveal themselves—apart from those rare individuals, has still not descended from the mountains of Sasun. The phrase is not mine. It belongs to someone looking critically from outside at the time, at history, at our reality. An exact phrase. I adopt it unchanged: we have not descended from the mountains of Sasun. Emotionally, almost none of us has descended from the mountains of Sasun.
The heavy defeat suffered at the beginning of the century was so fateful for us that it seems the nation’s questions were settled then. We cannot ignore the fact that we did, nevertheless, have a rebirth: the Republic of Armenia emerged—the three republics can be considered one republic. If you like, I will add the short-lived Yerevan Region of 1820–1837, subsequently renamed because other regions appeared as well. I see this whole history as a single whole: the nation emerged out of nothing, had cultural and political giants, revived its memory. All this is the past. If you want to know, after 1828, in the last two centuries, Khorenatsi and Narekatsi were born anew, as were our memory and our history. Perhaps we were too. Our memory and our future. That is, we had a Day. A Moment. An Hour. And if you exist in this hour, that means you have both a past and a future. Your existence decides it. We had our culture’s golden age during these two hundred years, from Abovyan onwards, with Western Armenian intellectuals, historians, journalism, literature and poetry—including Raffi, Tumanyan, Isahakyan, Teryan, Charents, A. Myasnikyan, A. Yerznkyan, A. Khanjyan, A. Kochinyan, G. Harutyunyan and Y. Zarobyan—a group of people who managed to bring a republic into being. I remember them with gratitude, because I too am their descendant. I had the ordinary person’s attitude to power, a disdainful attitude. If you are a writer, you must be in opposition. Then my elder fellow writer Vahagn Davtyan taught me a fine lesson. Kosygin had said something to Anton Kochinyan in Moscow; I applauded: “Ha! Serves him right!” V. Davtyan gave me a sideways look: it is your state, outsiders are reprimanding your own. From that moment, before an outsider, friend or enemy, I sweat, blush and feel ill at ease in place of my leader; I feel them to be people taking my step, standing in my place before a difficult situation.
How true or untrue is it that we have remained at the beginning of the century, have not walked with humanity, have not let our wound heal, have not kept pace with humanity, have remained in the past? There is a great deal of truth in it. Our foot has been heavy with the burden of the past; the burden of the past has hung from our foot. Not to mention that our territory is not strong enough to keep and occupy all its sons, to prevent emigration—yesterday for migrant labour, today to America and Russia. We lack the living space to avoid seeking work elsewhere and to keep a family prosperous. Yet it is true that psychologically we have remained at the beginning of the century, remained a people of revenge, unaware of new dangers because our gaze is turned towards the past. Here my idols must become those younger than me, the strong who grew up without national complexes, who mentally went around the danger and looked at the time through the eyes of someone belonging to it. A new generation will come; I entrust my guidance to them. My hope is with them. With what guarantees do we enter the twenty-first century? For me, the greatest guarantee is that the enmity of certain neighbouring countries will become a heavier burden for them than tolerating us, than leaving us alone. More precisely, the Turks’ aggressive attitude towards us will become a heavier problem for them than for us. I think they must neither exaggerate our importance nor disregard it nor see us as diminished; in their aggression they must not imagine that they will remove this embankment from their broad road to the east. We must conduct ourselves at least so that they reckon with us as an obstacle. The rest are difficulties that pass. Only then will we have partners in progress. Otherwise we will become an ulcer on their body and on the world’s body. That word “ulcer” is very painful, because I would like my daughter, my son and my grandchild to be free citizens in the world, in a procession of equals, without national complexes, without being an ulcer. We are called to make identity our principle. We are not invisible among the powerful, nor among the very smallest; the world is full of peoples smaller than us, with many problems, on the verge of disappearance. We do not exaggerate our rights or swell like the frog that wanted to grow as large as an ox. Life. And we will grow stronger. Endurance is in our blood.