Hrant Matevosyan is a powerful presence in contemporary Soviet Armenian prose. His name is associated with its most genuine achievements in both substance and form.
Born in 1935 in Ahnidzor, a village in Lori near Dsegh, he came to Yerevan at fifteen to study. At first he worked as a typesetter while attending the Abovyan Pedagogical Institute. He worked as a proofreader and then an editor, before going briefly to Moscow to take screenwriting courses.
He has appeared in the literary press since 1960. In 1967 his collection of stories and novellas August was published. Recently the collection Trees appeared, as did a volume of English translations of several works, published in Moscow.
Matevosyan’s works have also been translated into Russian and highly praised by Russian literary critics and readers.
To introduce our readers to his reflections on various literary questions, as well as his accomplished body of work, we arrange to meet him for an interview.
With a warm handshake he invites us into his study. Photographs of Hovhannes Tumanyan and Charents preside over the bookshelves. Soon an absorbing conversation begins between us. He is deeply concerned about the fate of Lebanon’s Armenians. He expresses his fear that the crisis of the Lebanese Armenian community is endangering the diaspora’s historical role.
After reading our questions he rises and begins pacing the room. Gathering himself for a moment, he starts to speak. His speech is vigorous; he speaks with deep conviction and restrained emotion.
“As one of the vigorous practitioners of Soviet Armenian prose, whose name is associated with several of its essential strengths, we would like to hear from you about the prose writers of your generation, their creeds and Soviet Armenian prose in general. What successful works have appeared in recent years?”
“Gurgen Mahari, Burning Orchards; Abig Avagyan, Southern Fever; Aghasi Ayvazyan, Tiflis; Zorayr Khalapyan, Where Were You, Man of God?; Mushegh Galshoyan, Miro of the Valley; Hovhannes Melkonyan, Interrogation; Perch Zeytuntsyan, Claude Robert Eatherly; Vardges Petrosyan, Armenian Sketches. Altogether, sixteen hundred pages. Have I forgotten fine passages and other accomplished writers? Certainly. Otherwise we would open the door to an endless list and limitless boredom. So let us be stricter and single out what I consider the finest works: the Orchards, the Fever, Tiflis, all three about their authors’ birthplaces. All three about the tearing apart of our national dream. Avagyan’s Longing from the Fever cycle and Ayvazyan’s Tiflis I would put in a collection of the twentieth century’s finest stories if I were suddenly given the right to assemble such a collection. As for the Orchards, I value it for affording an opportunity to speak and converse about our lost homeland. I say with sorrow that none of these three successes has Minas Avetisyan’s quality and Armenian character, yet all three attain quality and stature through that very Armenian character. I do not mean attributed success, derived from the connections writer–reader, book–audience, author–response, which entitles many of our authors to call themselves successful writers and would entitle some Segal—did I remember the name of Love Story’s author correctly? God knows, though only yesterday he was the leading author in the book market—to look down from his print runs and fail to recognise Saroyan and Faulkner. No, I do not mean that success, but success in the workshop, in the kitchen of writing—how else can I put it to be understood?—created in the spheres of author, homeland and Armenian character. Whether the Tondrakians’ fox brand or the branding of a cross, patriotism has been stamped on our literature’s breast since Khorenatsi’s time, and it is not at all strange that nearly all the achievements of our fifteen-hundred-year literature are cast from the pure gold of Armenian identity. That is our literature’s sole obligatory condition, and it does not touch, clash with or offend other interests or nations, because the more Armenian identity, the more humanity; the more about me, the more truly about you—towards our depths, our depths. Today’s world literature is growing from literature about the world in general, literature telling of others, into literature of confession, self-confession, and in the depths we are all pure and alike in that purity.”
“In poetry and prose alike people speak of ‘old’ and ‘new’ conceptions and generations, of classical realist and modern abstract, so-called ‘innovative’ tendencies. How does this question appear to you? It would be interesting to know your opinion of each side’s creed and literary harvest, if we may put it that way.”
“To live under the same roof with a Turk for a thousand years without understanding that he will slaughter you, and even after being slaughtered refuse to believe it has happened—and then, boasting of your ability to comprehend the world, propose the language of abstractionism? That is childish, to say the least. Abstractionism claims to speak about all people, or about the largest possible groups of people, yet in reality it says nothing about all people, about groups, or even about a single person, because a human being is eternally new, always unique, endlessly elusive. Everyone deserves, if not love and respect, then at least profound attention, which would eventually bring the artist face to face with a being truly lovable or truly contemptible. But that being would never grow into an abstraction, because it would remain itself, only itself, unique in every case. I do not know what lies more behind these abstractions: fear of looking reality in the eye, inability to understand it, objectless love of humanity, objectless hatred of humanity, or a lordly disdain for us who travel on foot. In any case, they abstract us, the strangers, but they do not abstract their mothers, their sisters or themselves. So it is a question of perspective.”
The seventeenth-century Turkish traveller and geographer Evliya Çelebi passed back and forth through Armenia ten times, yet in his five-hundred-page book there is not a single Armenian name, not a single Armenian individual: the rayas are plump, the rayas are handsome, the rayas are hospitable; we ate well, we drank well, this humble servant received two male slaves and a female slave too; we got up and went on. Xenophon came from the south with the Greek army, crossed Armenia and emerged at the Pontus—and along the way there is not a single Armenian individual: the byres are warm, a hospitable people live in warm houses with openings in their roofs, we drank beer, the appointed guide was a handsome youth, I took him as my slave. There you are. And yet Çelebi’s younger contemporary Yeghia Karnetsi, a native of that same Erzurum whose boys of ten or twelve—before they grew beards—Çelebi so admired for their appearance, yes, that very Yeghia Karnetsi had gone to Russia at that very time on Persian business and on his Armenian mission, and was imprisoned there. For, as it turns out, he was not merely a human being but an individual, and in Nizhny Novgorod he had criticised the unchristian conduct of the tsarist authorities. Honour and glory to him: a French admiral, standing on his French cruiser, within his secure French shell, out of purely Christian compassion and his own high human virtue, risking his naval career, saves six thousand head of Armenian Christians. Yet to prove, even in part, that they were not simply six thousand heads, however freedom-loving, but six thousand unique individuals, sufferings, desires, dreams, wills, weaknesses and so on and so forth, required years of work by you, the Armenian editor of the Musa Dagh Memorial Book, and your friends, also Armenians, native, local Armenians who had themselves taken part. Yes, it is a question of perspective. Yes, it is not a question of form. It takes civic courage to dismount from your count’s steed and at least enquire: who was that soldier who died, that one single soldier from the ten-million-strong Russian army? What was he, why did he live, what was his calling? (Tolstoy, Hadji Murad.) And it takes a great human conscience, lying on your count’s secure deathbed, surrounded by hundreds of relatives and doctors and thousands of admirers, not to forget those who die alone and abandoned: ‘But how do those poor peasants die? What do those poor peasants do when they are dying?’ The modern abstract, so-called innovative perspective is as old as Xenophon. It is indifference to another’s sorrows and joys. In the poetry of the innovator Charents I know nothing newer than the Tagharan cycle and nothing older than Poézozurna. The same applies to Tumanyan’s quatrains, the same to Abovyan’s maslahat novel. And if someone is truly an innovator, he is an innovator for himself: you cannot turn his innovation into a movement and herd everyone with any sort of gift towards it, saying, here is the path of the new, follow it. Literature is the expression of my unique self without loss. Find a way of expressing your own self; my path is mine alone. Find your own path.
“How would you explain the relationship between writer and reader? Do you not think that an attentive, inquisitive reader can act as a critic for a writer? How do you assess the Armenian reader in general?”
“Stepan Zoryan has a wonderful story, The Readers. It is the First World War; in a monastery courtyard in one of our small towns they are reading Mshak and talking about Japan, Trieste and Trento, the Carpathians and a thousand other things. But what they are saying, and who is right or wrong, is neither interesting nor, above all, comprehensible to an old woman standing beside them. She keeps asking the same question: ‘Is there nothing in the paper about my child?’ ‘Haven’t they written even a little something about our child?’ ‘Dear Father, isn’t our boy’s name written anywhere in that wretched newspaper?’ And they go on talking about their Trieste and Trento, the small stature of the Japanese, Italy’s memorandum. The Armenian reader, all of us, are in that old woman’s position. What the world’s writers and our own do or do not write interests us little. We keep waiting for a piece of information, a scrap of news, a yes, even a no, about our child, our father, our mother, our own condition as people who have been wronged. We look for a distant, dim, trembling ray of hope, and want to regard as a trick of sight and hearing that terrible no which humanity and history—history already—pronounced on our being in the right and the enemy in the wrong. The unalloyed delight of pure art is unknown to us. It is a gift granted to the children of great nations, free from the complex of having been wronged—would that God granted them at least the complex of the wrongdoer. We could not overcome and step beyond the low, rickety, paltry fence, collapsible with a single kick, erected by Mahari the politician supposedly to mark the boundaries of his creed. Yet the novel’s elemental force, the uncontrolled force of his literary talent, had widened the boundaries of that estate and made it a Homeland... Yes, we did not cross that fence and could not see the great art, and thus the great patriotism, which gave Burning Orchards its weight and truly great spirit. Is this cruelty towards the writer or merely the reader’s predicament? Cruelty or predicament, that is how things are. That is how things are: history has made the relationship between our writer and our reader what it is. This is the relationship between the writer and reader of a small nation. The reader has endowed his writer with all these functions and expects from him, if not answers to all his national questions, then certainly some engagement with them. For the Armenian writer this is not so terrible: Tumanyan and others have provided an example.”
“What is the state of contemporary Soviet Armenian drama? Has any work appeared in recent years that commands recognition? Do you see grounds for the further flourishing of drama in the homeland?”
“We should certainly place our hopes in the theatrical work of Zorayr Khalapyan and Perch Zeytuntsyan. Theatre is a field that demands a person’s entire strength. I would like to see Zeytuntsyan and Khalapyan devote themselves exclusively to theatre, so that their powers could blossom fully.”
After reading John O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and other great playwrights of the Soviet Union and abroad, you, a son of the Armenian people, feel humbled by what your national theatre has achieved so far.
I made an attempt at a play, entitled The Neutral Zone. They say it did not succeed. I think it succeeded at least in part. But that is not the point. I noticed that self-display is not characteristic of our national temperament. If I had been a strict realist and submitted to the natural emphasis dictated by the characters, all my protagonists would have kept silent, or at least would not have spoken about the central issue. Can you advance the action that way? Can you make a theatrical performance that way? Perhaps the fault lay in my not knowing a form that would fully reveal our national character. Perhaps a day will come when we too create forms that disclose it completely, as, for example, Mokats Mirza, Pepo, Anush, The Daredevils of Sassoun, Komitas’s songs and others do.
“It is well known that, through mutual translations of accomplished works, the literatures of different peoples gain access to one another’s finest traditions and values. With that in mind, how do you assess our translated literature, both in the choice of authors and in the quality of the translations?”
“The question is entirely justified. I fully share the concern I hear in it. The translations are simply careless. Of contemporary literature, nothing by Faulkner has been translated, nothing by Márquez, very little by Saroyan. I cannot list everyone. There are many people with a capable pen. Perhaps they did not write well on their own account, perhaps they are not good authors, but they could be of great use in translation, even using Russian as an intermediary language—though, of course, translating directly from the original would be preferable.”
I am a writer. I read Russian. I have read the world’s classic literature, both what I named and what I did not, in Russian, but I feel the need for that literature in Armenian as I feel hunger or a lack of air. There is a subtle point here: there are turns of phrase, concepts and constructions that would need to exist in Armenian for me to feel these authors helping me in my work as a writer.
We should not expect too much of translated poetry, particularly since we have a rich and genuine poetry of our own. The occasional good line in translation should be accepted as a gift of fortune. As an example, in parentheses, let us mention Vahagn Davtyan’s translations of Burns, made from Russian. But in prose we must both expect and aspire to high-quality translation, and make it a sphere of national endeavour. That would be equivalent to possessing prose of our own, because Armenian would expand, breathe and grow stronger in those translations.
“What is your opinion of Armenian diaspora literature in general, and of its prose in particular? How do you envisage its future? Can works written by Armenian diaspora authors in foreign languages, on subjects unrelated to Armenian life, be called ‘Armenian diaspora literature’? Do you think the homeland takes sufficient interest in diaspora literature? Which names in prose mean something to you?”
“Every small achievement of Armenian diaspora literature, every living tremor, even a single living inflection, is an immense joy to me. Encountering Vahan Tekeyan, Hamastegh, Mndzuri and Shahan Shahnur was a true celebration for me. Of course it was an illusion, but I felt I was a son of a great homeland, and that literature was being created in corners of that great homeland unknown to me. Later, of course, I saw that this homeland did not exist, and that the works created in the diaspora were solely the fruit of their authors’ superhuman efforts. They say being Armenian is a burden. I would say being an Armenian writer is a killing burden.”
The literature of Armenians speaking from within the shell of another language is already, in their own words, a ‘retreat... without a song’; more precisely, it is nostalgia not free of affectation, voiced from the secure protection of another language and another state.
Literature is a field of social, economic and political activity, like aircraft construction, coal mining, the oil industry or atomic research. Will the diaspora have the strength to support its literature materially, to encourage it, to free its most gifted people from every other concern, just as the aircraft designer is solely an aircraft designer and the atomic scientist solely an atomic scientist? That is only one side of the question. Let us say in parentheses that even the Armenian homeland, with its statehood, its own character and its flag, struggles to carry its cultural burden. This culture was created by a great people who were subsequently annihilated, and a small part of them cannot carry on its shoulders the whole culture created in their days of wholeness and strength. We have Narekatsi, but no Narekatsi studies; we have Tumanyan, but no Tumanyan studies. There is a culture, but no interpretation of that culture.
Now the other side of the question. In 1915 the US president Theodore Roosevelt said that his country did not need half-Americans. Fifty years later, in connection with Jews’ pro-Israeli aspirations, Poland’s leader said of Polish Jews: we do not need half-Poles. Nations are closing themselves within their shells; the cosmopolitan spirit of the beginning of the century is shrinking and withdrawing from the international stage, and God knows in which country tomorrow the Armenian diaspora’s survival as Armenians will be tolerated.
After all this, will the Armenian diaspora writer find the strength within himself to put forward his own creed concerning the homeland and his particular Armenian national identity? Saroyan would say: God knows.
Will the instinct to preserve his kind, and the rebellion that makes him a defender of the dishonoured, arm the Armenian writer with enough strength to remain at his literary post?
“Dear Matevosyan, you have already won esteem and affection as the ‘strong man’ of contemporary Soviet Armenian prose. With the stories you have published in the literary press over many years, and especially your recently published collection August, you have established your resonant voice and distinctive style, like our springs and our sky, sinewy and reflective, like our mountains and our rugged landscape. The characters you create are Armenians, distinctively attached to their soil, mountains and virtues, and at the same time simple, hardworking people, strong in their sense of justice, in their thoughts, inner lives and deeds. It would be a great pleasure to hear your reflections on your literary creed, your principles and your creative journey.”
“Let us regard those beautiful words about me as, rather, the fruit of your longing for great literature about our people. My personal opinion of myself is this: I have passed an examination and been admitted to literature. That is all for now. What will I do? What do I want? My wife told me this, but I feel as though I had seen it myself a thousand times. We have a district in Yerevan called Shilachi. After the genocide, the remnants of our shattered flock came and found shelter there, in Shilachi. There was love again; there were marriages again; sons were born just in time to fall at the front in 1941, in the war against Germany. Now there are those houses of clay and stone, Yerevan’s dense summer heat; German prisoners of war are opening up and paving the street now called Nar-Dos. A mother, an old woman, keeps standing beside those prisoners and weeping over their captivity, though her son’s killer may be among them. My wife says that whenever the postman entered the district with a ‘black paper’, a scream would hang over hot, clay-built Shilachi. Then silence would fall, and the prisoners would grow mute and stop working. They had started the war; they were to blame. But did the district’s Armenian mothers from Constantinople feel that guilt, or did they not? That is not what matters. My wife says they always cooked food for the prisoners from whatever they had; only on the day they received another ‘black paper’ did they take offence and withhold the Germans’ meal. That was their only revenge. And only you and I, Armenians, know the measure of our mothers’ love.”
If I can capture in literature even a little of our unique, great, humane, unresentful image, kind as God himself, I shall consider my work as a writer justified at least a little.
At times I have had moments of satisfaction with what I have done, and believed the praise, but each time I returned to life I saw, breaking into a sweat, that what I had done was paltry, nothing beside that great figure called the Armenian. Make of it what you will, but I am certain that if some organisation of united nations ever considers it necessary to create a symbolic figure of the world’s conscience, it must create that figure in the image of an Armenian, an Armenian peasant, and set it on Armenian soil. To make clear what figure I mean, let me first mention Vahan Teryan’s Land of Nairi cycle:
“So joyless, so like weeping
Are my country’s songs, so sorrowful.
The foreign man will not understand us,
The cold foreign woman will not understand us.”
Glimmers of that figure, often faint, often slight, can be found in the works of Mndzuri, Hamastegh and Bakunts.
“How do you understand the relationship between literary criticism and imaginative literature? In your view, is our criticism successfully fulfilling its ‘mission’?”
“The young American writer and critic Tom Wolfe, speaking of the leaders of abstractionism Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, considers their immediate opposition to the Pop Art movement a gross tactical error. Wolfe says: ‘This is Greenberg’s enormous mistake. Greenberg, who had once put forward modernism’s exact slogan, “Every innovation seems ugly at first”, should have understood that in an age of avant-gardism no art critic can block a new style’s path by frontal attack, because he himself will be declared outdated, out of touch with the times, and thrown out of the arena. In an age of avant-gardism the only way to fight a new style you hate is to leap over it, ahead of it, and from that advanced position point out the abyss towards which the current of the new style is moving. Greenberg understood too late that this was how he should have acted.’”
I favour criticism of this kind. Let my critics look in the direction I am looking, see farther than I do, and show me the danger or the safety that lies in that distance. So far very few of my critics have spoken from the standpoint of my interests, from within me, and broadened my field of vision. Literary criticism does not directly create literature itself, but it can create exceptionally favourable conditions for it.
In my view there has so far been only one such instance among us: Hrant Tamrazyan’s analysis of Commander Shavarsh.
“Our last question. What new plans do you have? What work are you writing now? Have you thought of writing a broad, expansive novel? Finally, do you intend to bring out a new volume soon?”
“My collection Trees appeared recently. I already have two unfinished novels: Princess Nana’s Bridge; the second may be called Tsmakut. At present I am working on a long novella with the provisional title Dead Light. I have written a hundred and twenty pages; there will probably be as many again. I have many plans and little physical strength. I have only just understood what literature is. As our folk song says, I have only just found ‘the subject of my song’. My wish is to have great physical, bodily strength to bring my visions into being.”
M. VIGENYAN
Kanch (Beirut), 14, 21, 28 April 1979.