I am very fond of one of the stories he tells. His son Davit was very small when they first took him to Ahnidzor, Hrant’s native village. The child went straight towards the dog. It was a large sheepdog that disliked strangers, and both Hrant and his wife Verzhine called out in alarm, ‘Stop, don’t go near!’ But Davit announced, ‘What are you afraid of? The dog won’t bite me, it’s OUR dog.’ ‘You know the dog is ours, but the dog doesn’t know you’re one of us.’ Yet the dog, it turned out, did know. In an instant it sensed that the boy was ONE OF ITS OWN, ONE OF US.
The story has a sequel.
At school Davit is assigned an essay on a story by Avetik Isahakyan. The eight-year-old boy writes that what he liked most was the relationship between the man and the dog, and analyses that relationship closely and in detail. His teacher is astonished: the child has uncovered a strand of the plot that no literary scholar had noticed.
Now Davit is a tall young man, taut as a string, with eyes ‘black and large as tears’, and hands as expressive as his father’s. He studies at the university’s philology faculty and understands literature no less well than he did as a child. His father Hrant, recalling this story, asks me:
‘Have you ever seen a calf come out of the byre for the first time and begin discovering the world? It looks around and gradually takes in what it sees, object by object. Here is a bush, two... no, three leaves on the bush. It stops, thinks, studies... understands. Goes on. It sees some Hrant sitting with a book. Why are his eyes moving? Isn’t that frightening? No, it’s all right... he seems kind. It can go on. Here is a dog... And suddenly it is terribly frightened. The dog, to show it is master here, flicks its tail twice. The calf runs off in terror. The cow leaps over the dog and rushes to help the calf. The dog politely steps aside and sits down like a good-natured lady of the house.’
I used to take my children to my father’s house for long stays so they could learn to perceive the world in that way. I think that is why they became perceptive, capable readers. The entire verbal texture of world literature, from the Bible to today’s ‘village writers’, is born of rural life. Whatever a person reads, the village teaches that alphabet of understanding literature: the Armenian a for aygi, garden; b for borr, bumblebee; g for get, river. You are a city dweller; a mule means one thing to you and another to me. I know everything about a mule: what it looks like, what it eats, how it sleeps, how it is harnessed.
‘You wrote, “If the flood of legend were repeated, like Noah I could recreate the great cultures of agriculture and animal husbandry...” When you were “learning”, living your “alphabet”, did you think this knowledge would later be necessary to you in a direct, physical sense?’
‘How shall I put it... I first felt freedom when I went to the city in 1950. Freedom to me was release from everything that seemed like maternal cruelty. My mother was born in a small town but married in a remote village, a day’s journey away on horseback. And resentment of her fate lived within her. She wanted me to realise the possibilities she had never realised, and she was preparing me for another life. She was preparing all three of us for another life, but I was the eldest and had to clear the way. What mattered most to her was that I should do well at school. She wept bitterly when I got a failing mark. She rejoiced at my good handwriting: she could not write herself.’
I became a writer thanks to my mother. What a mother I had... You will find no such wonderful storyteller anywhere. What characters she created, what situations, each more alive, uninhibited and free than the last. And all authentic, precise, apt. My mother said birds sing most in spring, when the fledglings appear; they sing for them. We were her fledglings, and in our wooded backwater she was our world of culture—television, radio, theatre, cinema, in a word, the world. She could not read or write, knew no poems by heart, but every minute she created a word, new, fresh, apt, wherever she found it. Once we were gathering potatoes together, large, white, choice potatoes. You gather a whole heap and it collapses, rolling into the black earth. I say, “Mum, look, the potatoes are as big as a child’s head.” And she says, “What do you mean, as big as a child’s head? Are you a janissary or a criminal—is a child’s head a potato to you? They’re like suckling piglets, aren’t they?” Do you understand? In that comparison she expressed everything: the potato’s delicate pinkness, like the thin skin of a newborn piglet; the fact that it could be eaten; the way they scattered and ran away before your eyes, like little piglets. She expressed colour, movement and size. And said it in passing, without a moment’s thought. She had no linguistic barriers, no stereotypes. People in the village generally used to speak very well. There were inarticulate people, of course, but they stayed silent, stood and smoked. And if someone had important thoughts, others expressed them. In speaking, my mother created not only language but a model of the world. She entered so deeply into a role—creating different situations, showing the child, look, there are people like this—that she began to live those roles herself. She not only opened the world to us but broadened her own monotonous life. And her only education was the village alphabet...
‘Her only education? But people like your mother are part of an ancient civilisation, a culture created over centuries. Now all that is left to us is to open museums of that culture and take our children there. Do you know what I want to ask? You have been writing about the village for thirty years, building your ark. Is there anything left for us?’
‘A person’s lineage, his family: to my mind that is the foundation of the world, what still remains. Once, when I was young, I rushed away from my mother and my fellow villagers towards others, more “cultured”, more “educated”. I thought friendship stood above everything. Then the return home began.’
I am going to tell you something bitter. You already belong to my children’s generation, and if not I, who else will tell you... I, my contemporaries, we are a lost generation. When all ties were severed with those who had lived before us, who had brought us to this day, we entered a false, invented life. We were brought up on false values, though we were told they were true ones. We entered life speaking words that were not our own: not only were we not taught to speak and think independently, but on the contrary, those who could do so were taught not to; other people’s words were put on our lips. If you look carefully you will see that our literature too is largely false, not a reflection of life but literature made of literature.
The first conscious feeling in my life was fear. Fear of being killed by the fascists. Then came hunger. I will not speak of it in detail; it is a forbidden subject for me because I am writing about it now. I will only say that I know what an egg is, what a treasure a single egg is. I continue to feel its beauty and value against the backdrop of millions of hatchery eggs.
What lay behind my childhood fear, my hunger? A family photograph hung on our wall in a beautiful frame. Once I happened to discover that beneath it was not cardboard but another photograph. Do you know whose? Litvinov’s. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Photographs of political leaders had been sent to the village club, and my father, as a carpenter, had been asked to make frames. While he was making them, an official came from the district centre and said Litvinov’s portrait was not to be hung up; it should be thrown away and another hung in its place—I do not remember whose. But Litvinov’s photograph was glued to good, sturdy cardboard, which you could not find in the village, so my father put it in the finished frame and our photograph on top. I did not then know who Litvinov was, but that was how politics seeped into our lives. It was politics that in late autumn, in the cold, schoolchildren gathered rose hips in the surrounding forests, scratching their hands bloody. To this day I see not a heap but the great red hill of rose hips we piled up before the school. Politics had so thoroughly permeated our lives that we did not even see it was politics. You ask why and how the bonds of kinship were undermined... In 1945 the policy of developing Siberia began. A programme for resettling peoples was devised. You would not ask or persuade people to settle Siberia. Resettle them, and that was that. Each republic had its resettlement quota. And Armenia, which had lost so many people in the genocide, the war and the repressions, was to send three hundred thousand people to Siberia. But Armenia’s dictator of the time—and despite his crimes our unfortunate people are grateful to him to this day—that dictator went in to Stalin and said three hundred thousand was too many, it could not be done that way. And he persuaded the father of peoples to reduce the number to a hundred thousand. Thank you for not making it three hundred thousand... But where were you to find a hundred thousand? Each district was assigned a compulsory number. And if someone from my little village, where everyone is related, had to be exiled, what was left for me? Arrange for my brother’s son to be exiled, not mine. What could I do? How could I keep them from coming to my house? Do you understand? In such conditions, what loyalty to one’s kin...
‘And the family? What happened to the family?’
‘I had a great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather. His name was Hovhannes. He had a young wife. He took her hand, sat his daughter on a donkey, and went wherever his eyes led him. He decided to look for land where he could live in peace. They walked and walked and reached a large clearing in the forest. They built a house with their own hands. They went to mow other people’s hay, and later acquired so much livestock themselves that they had their own herdsman. Grandpa Hovhannes’s wife raised six sons and two daughters. She was their doctor, cook, tailor, priest and book. Then they had children, grandchildren. And that woman became the matriarch of the whole village. I often think women created our heroic epic. Sisters, friends and neighbours would sit weaving carpets, waiting for the men, telling one another stories about themselves, their husbands and fathers-in-law. They missed their husbands and in their husbands’ voices composed love songs about their wives, their children, their return. Around them ran those women’s small children, and in their presence one must not cry or speak sentimental, tearful words, because a man must grow up manly. So true, manly, heroic poetry was created. Created by women.’
Now tell me, what hope do you think there is that a modern girl, the most educated, the best brought up, will become a matriarch, become Eve? The woman who carries the family on her shoulders, thanks to whom a family lives alone in a forest clearing, is no more... There is no one to create an epic now...
‘And what did the father do in the family?’
‘The man was the MASTER in the family. What do you think is the first, natural value? I will tell you: the first natural value is independence. In the past a man relied only on himself. He fed his family with his own hands. He owed nobody anything, depended on nobody. He himself fed, clothed and brought up his children, managed his property and his money: so much for food, so much for the children’s education, so much for the church, so much for charity.’
And we—are we masters on our own land? What can we do? Feed our children? But we do not sow grain. Our wages? What can you buy for a hundred and forty, all right, two hundred roubles? The state has taken on our duties, leaving us money for food and clothes. School will bring up the children for us. Sow grain? Bread can be bought in a shop. We have relied on the state for everything so completely that we have entrusted even charity and compassion to it. And the result? No compassion, no education, no proper care for the sick. An emergency arose: the refugees from Sumgait. Did the state see to their needs? We went from house to house ourselves, collecting clothes and money to help them. Another example, forgive me if it sounds crude: there was Martiros Saryan, a beautiful, white-haired, noble old man. How he was loved! He died. They thought: he was not just a grandfather and father, he was a national figure, the state would look after him. They took him to the morgue and did not give the right person a ten-rouble note to take care of him, do what was needed... In the coffin he lay so disfigured by death that not a trace of his noble beauty remained...
Even God could not be created without a father and mother. Even Jesus Christ had to have parents. Full-fledged parents among us have been, and are, those in whom a sacred distrust lives: I myself, and I alone, bring up my children; I feed them.
To feel himself master in his family, he must at least be able to manage his own money. He must have bread, work and a decent wage.
‘And to feel himself master in the state?’
‘The family is a small state. The master of a state must first of all have land of which he himself is master. From an aeroplane I see what our mountain slopes have become. We were made to plough deeply, yet the soil layer was very thin, and after such ploughing the rains washed the soil away in scarcely a year, leaving bare mountains. What sort of master am I if the ground is literally going from under my feet?’
The master is a guardian. To preserve anything—land, nature, family—you must be strong. The weak destroy, out of inward laziness, unwillingness to think and create. Draining Sevan’s waters onto the plain was far easier than thinking and discovering what could be done to preserve a unique lake. The strong preserve. But when certain people want to replace God, when they say only they know WHAT IS NEEDED and everyone else must obey, and everyone else stops relying on themselves, the number of strong people dwindles. You are taking responsibility? Wonderful, lead us. We have stopped working and thinking independently; we have opened our mouths in expectation of words and bread being put into them. And so there is no initiative locally. Human possibilities are suppressed. The whole country has become a province. Look: I am wearing no clothes made here, in Armenia. The elementary skill of making beautiful, comfortable clothes and shoes has been lost. The province creates nothing. Answers for nothing. In the province there is no independent, creative thought.
Marietta Shaginyan wrote that in the twenties Yerevan was a Weimar. After the revolution the finest representatives of Armenian culture came to Yerevan from all over the globe. Now we go to Moscow and Leningrad to study. Life seethed in old Tiflis: Italian opera came on tour, there were painters, newspapers were published. Local newspapers reprint the central ones; music is brought, if it is brought at all, from Moscow. The province has only one exit, in one direction: from here to the Centre. On every other side we are enclosed by walls, borders, and there is no fresh air. The province becomes a swamp. The Centre drains it of all economic and cultural strength, while those who remain lose their value to the Centre.
We want to live our own lives; we want the right to our own opinion, sometimes different from the Centre’s.
...After the war many repatriates came to Armenia. They returned to stay for ever. Yet in the seventies many of them went back. Why? Because they were sick of dragging out an existence. It was we who had lived that way all our lives; they knew what normal living meant. If people want to live without petty everyday problems, that is NATURAL. At last we must understand this. For so many years we have lived somehow or other, exploiting enthusiasm and spiritual values, and now those high ideals have been devalued. People are tired of shepherds who are worshipped today and turn out tomorrow not to have been prophets. The role of shepherd and prophet has been devalued. People do not believe them, do not want them, good or bad, do not want them. People want to live their own lives, by their own judgement.
It is criminal thinking: let them leave, there will be more for us.
In their time the repatriates brought elements of a culture more developed than ours. Thanks to them, the culture of our everyday life improved.
With their departure we will not, of course, lose that material standard of everyday life. But with each one’s departure I personally, Hrant Matevosyan, a human being, an Armenian, a writer, lose a part of my home, my homeland, myself. I grow poorer. I am a poor master if they felt uncomfortable in my house, those who came with love and kindness, hoping to stay here for ever.
‘You know, Hrant Ignatovich, you have changed. When I used to come, you spoke reluctantly “for publication”; journalists found you difficult to interview, you rarely answered the phone, avoided meetings with readers. Now I know our conversation is not your only one in the central press this year; as I see it, you scarcely hide any more.’
‘Let me say... my generation is already of an age to be fathers. I accept our Union, this world, as my home, and my generation and myself as its father. Yes, we really do not live so comfortably; not all of us have good work... But we no longer have the right to take offence, just as the father of a family cannot take offence at the meagre table in his own house. First, we too are to blame. Second, our time has come to enter that house with some positive energy. We have sung in someone else’s voice since childhood. It is time to have a voice of our own and say our own words.’
Hovhannes Tumanyan has a story: in 1895, during the genocide, refugees from Sassoun came to the Catholicos in Etchmiadzin. With them was an old priest whose entire family had been massacred, eleven people, and he was already eighty. He asks the Catholicos: what am I to do now? And the Catholicos answers, “And what am I to do? In your house in Sassoun alone I have lost eleven people. How many have I lost in Zeytun, in Constantinople? They are all my family.”
When I was twenty-five and had a father over me, I could allow myself to rebel, to play at rebellion. Now I cannot. Although for many years literature here was degraded to the role of politics’ servant, we must enter life as fathers, as though nothing had happened. From this chaos, despair and wreckage we must restore the world, restore ethics. For us literature is already fatherhood.
Recorded by Marina ARISTOVA
Semya (Moscow), 29 June 1988.