“At the meeting between Gorbachev and Russian intellectuals, Rasputin said something like this: ‘All our misfortunes come from a lack of culture, from having no culture. Culture is threatened by disease. That disease is worse than plague: it is immorality, the disease of immorality.’ Society truly is losing its morality, and that is the greatest danger facing us. This continuing moral decline must be stopped. That is what troubles me: can we withstand it?”
“Even before that meeting between Gorbachev and Russian intellectuals, when giving interviews to Russian journalists I noticed that for the people they demanded spiritual nourishment much more than bread, bread and work. Rasputin’s words are another formulation of that long-familiar statement. But I am a peasant; consider me a little Marxist too: let us give the people that work, that food, and only then speak of culture. After all, by an entirely different road, the worship of material things, the West approached culture and the spiritual world much sooner than we did, we who were a country of ideology and wanted to approach culture by way of culture. Between us and that culture still lie the crops, fields and vegetable gardens that should have existed and do not.”
I feel as much as you do that even in our present condition, in this poverty, culture and discipline could have checked this universal crisis, this erosion of the soul. But now it is a question of the path; I think we once spoke about it: again it is a question of dictatorship and military order, which under our present expansion of democracy, amid the unfolding global procession of democracy, may seem barbaric. We truly are entering a dead end: on the one hand we should have achieved things through military order, emerged from our present state with fewer losses; on the other, world democracy has poured over us abundantly, like a flood. We truly are in a dramatic situation.
“The very idea of a people stripped of morality terrifies me. The consequences can already be felt...”
“We should have expected this day, this malice, this cruelty, this poverty. Should have expected it; it had to be so. The drama of our situation is that television, the press, in short the world of words, whose enchanting manifestations arose elsewhere, has come and imposed itself upon us under these conditions of accelerating television, newspapers and communications, while we are the poor relation. Our souls should be soaring, or are soaring, in the world of symbols created by the West, in the clear skies of work and freedom, while our minds are still in this Asian rubbish. Our situation truly is tragic. Again we must turn insubstantial hope into a sail: that our people’s moral structure will be stronger than the storms striking us today, and we will stand. There are losses. On one side America has opened its doors in the guise of paradise; on the other the Asian savage strikes. There are losses, but we must accept them and turn our hopes again towards the people who will remain tomorrow, upon whom tomorrow’s Armenia must blossom.”
It will be so, I know it will; I see tomorrow’s picture in yesterday’s real pictures. Yesterday the young people of my ‘abilities’ had fled the village; we had left it to our school’s lazy and weak pupils. Years later, from my spheres of ‘world literature,’ ‘fame’ and ‘greatness,’ I fell into the world of my ‘backward’ friends, into the village, and what did I see? They too had made their civilisation blossom there, and... there was something moving and dear. I saw scenes I do not want to expend now, because I cherish the hope of writing them someday. But I saw they had remained the same moral sons of the soil, preserved their character as peasants, as Armenian people. It was as though they even knew we would return our unfortunate, imperfect offspring from the city to them, to the village, and they would be fathers and elder brothers to them. Through the example of what I saw I want to cherish the thought that even those remaining will suffice for the country to be called Armenia again and to be an example of morality to the world, a measure of morality.
“I don’t know, you surely remember: Dostoevsky has a work about an official. He shows the filth of the surroundings, the atmosphere, and seems to lead us through it. Describes the individual’s annihilation in the confusion, snow and ice of Petersburg. On the one hand that problem of the individual’s annihilation, which seems to have existed in every age—yet we know the individual has not been annihilated—reassures one and...”
“I do not know now whether we were right to take Russian literature and the East generally, the world on this side of the Carpathians, but here we can stress one certain thing: the clash of empire and individual, of collective and individual, the individual’s destruction. That literature exists, and glory to its creators; they turned our sympathy towards the individual. But our understanding of it would be incomplete if we did not say that on the other side they went towards worship of empire, say worship of Peter the Great’s will. Perhaps it took a different form among us: our nostalgic gaze today towards Tigran the Great’s times is the same gaze as, say, Pushkin’s approach to Peter. Look at the broad picture that emerges: on one side, cherishing the individual in the West made Western civilisation blossom, again so powerful that it seems no collectivist social order ever existed there. A federation of individuals there, a society of units lost in the mass here. Something to think about; another time we will speak of it longer. Perhaps every country is the child of its culture: culture is not the country’s child, but the country is the child of its literature, of the word. Perhaps that is my variation on the biblical ‘In the beginning was the Word’; perhaps I am mistaken, but confronting the facts ultimately leads us to such a conclusion. The West is Shakespeare’s heir, the Western countries Shakespeare’s sons. I give Shakespeare’s name in place of the Apostle Paul, Cervantes and all the others: the West is Shakespeare’s son, Australia, New Zealand, America, England... Wherever Shakespeare, say, gave people possibility, did not seal them away, opened those possibilities—to fall like Lady Macbeth into hell’s abysses and rise like Hamlet to the highest spheres. But when Tolstoy, say, confronted falling and soaring, he rejected the fall. And by restraining the fall he effectively limited the boundless horizons of human action. At another time, rejecting all other readings, he would even have to edit the Gospels, turn them into something else, into one country—one faith—one Gospel. That is a subject; if you can, explore it within yourself, find the true answers. But my impression is that our so-called great culture ultimately resulted in our country’s tragic condition today, whereas their country is an expression of their culture. Where did we begin? Find the threads...”
“We were speaking of the individual’s annihilation. Let me continue; my thought was left unfinished. On the other hand I think the hour of the individual’s destruction truly has come, a ‘famine of the spirit’ devouring the ‘last Mohicans.’ Perhaps it is pessimism, but for some reason I think the doors out have closed; those horses running free can never return, Alkho groaning under his burden no longer exists and, it seems, never will again.”
“But perhaps today’s course, today’s moment, is so dark it truly blocks our view of future horizons. There is no need to dwell on that and despair. Perhaps it really is the transitional period from which the individual’s flowering begins. Alkho, another, Aksel’s working people, the figures brought to life to some degree in Armenian literature, may find different manifestations tomorrow; perhaps you will not even recognise that they existed yesterday too and were yours. In Saroyan’s Fresno we saw an Armenian farmer; the only sign of a tiller of the soil was a little dust on his feet. With four nephews he did everything: flourishing orchards, a factory, competitiveness across America... I do not want to accept that people must leave here to become like that. I want to cherish the hope that they will become like that here, and today opportunities are opening for the enterprising Armenian.”
“Faulkner said national upheavals have a positive effect on a nation’s literature. Will our upheavals affect our literature, our art? You spoke about those figures yet to be created...”
“In another interview, when the question was why I fell silent, why Armenian literature today has been left aside, stripped of its face, I did not find the answer. Now your example of American literature has helped me find it. American literature truly flourished under conditions of crisis for America. Faulkner, Saroyan, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Caldwell and others who today are American literature’s golden treasury...”
“The same can be said of Latin American literature.”
“Yes. Our older generation truly proved useless in the movement, and that is how it had to be. I hope lads are truly sprouting who will be the trees of tomorrow’s literary forest. I have already said once what the genocide became for Charents and what it became for Tumanyan.”
“Our nation is like a person unable to find a place in life. Searches, searches, struggles, but cannot find it, cannot arrive.”
“Our aspirations, yours too, exceed our possibilities, and that makes it seem so tragic. I too cherish a longing for the whole Armenian homeland from here to Izmir, without denying the Turks, of course. I want that atmosphere of friendship, hypocrisy and trade. I too have hardened; under those heavy blows I too have said that we are all simply Sultan Hamid’s bastards, born of his coercion, his violence. He made us like this. These conditions create our heightened state: tooth for tooth, eye for eye... But on the other hand we can see ourselves in this real world, and the image of another real homeland stands before us: your flourishing American community, your Armenian community in Russia that will flourish tomorrow... Here those human possibilities open before the individual, and tomorrow I have a homeland in Russia; accordingly the whole world is my homeland of the Armenian people. That homeland is a reality under today’s speeds. If in yesterday’s world on foot that given, united Armenian homeland was a reality, all the more is it real today and tomorrow. All that remains is for one wise call to awaken us all simultaneously across the world, one lullaby to lull us simultaneously, and it would be very good if that call came from here, from the lap of the Masises and Aragats. But I truly do not deny it, I believe that if not today then tomorrow Erzurum will be mine too, Van will be mine too; tomorrow my lads, my children will climb Masis’s summit with Turkish mountaineers. It will happen. Such doors onto tomorrow must be opened, light will strike from there, and we will go that way.”
“So we too must pursue the ‘spiritual Armenia’ dreamed of at the beginning of the century, and live by that hope?”
“As much as you, I would like a great material Armenia instead of ‘spiritual Armenia,’ land beneath my feet, my dogs beside my herds and my sons standing on my border. It would not be bad. But if we call life not destruction, explosion and negation, the business of idlers, but daily work, continuous work, continuous sweat, even work for work’s sake, then a place opens for our generations’ continuous progress, their unceasing journey towards that ‘spiritual Armenia.’”
“When people speak of the peasant, for some reason I cannot see the peasant in isolation: I picture the peasant, the earth and God. That was the wrong order. I should have said God—peasant—earth. Now that system has been disrupted; there is no bond between God and the peasant, between the peasant and the earth.”
“Let us exclude the rest of the world beyond our borders, not speak of the Earth, or else thank God we are not alone in our misfortune. The Russian peasant is in our condition too. Let us take that much consolation. Our situation truly is unenviable; we do not have even fifteen per cent of our people in the village, have no peasantry. And those who are there are not comfortably placed: the world marches in confidence and abundance, while you are still on your poor slopes with spade and hoe. You have no land, no livestock, nor are you yesterday’s stubborn worker. But let us say a difficult thing: consider even the earthquake a blessing for opening a field of work for so many of us unemployed, and consider it a blessing that whenever we step outside our borders we are hit on the nose. So we return to our ruined, poor homeland. This is Armenia, and there is no other Armenia.”
“I think you expressed that thought on another occasion. If I am not mistaken, you said our people have been left alone, and that brings its good side, brings spiritual independence, spiritual autonomy. Has that now come, or is it yet to come?”
“It is yet to come. Still, something very clear happened this summer. Let us even consider the gas being cut off a blessing. They showed who they are and who we are, so that we find our place. We are finding our place.”
“You seem to contradict what you said at the beginning: first we need the material, yet now you say cutting off gas is a blessing; that is, they cut off the material and we must withstand it through spiritual independence.”
“Let us find the unconditional answer together. In a besieged citadel there is order and a straining of spiritual, mental and physical capacities, and we are precisely a besieged citadel. Either we will be weak and the epidemic will devour us, or we will be wise and overcome it. I think we have won more than once, and we will live again. We will sow tomorrow’s bread ourselves, keep our livestock ourselves, be both the workers and the masters of our land.”
“What effect do you think the artistic word can have on society’s state of mind? How far is a person of art or literature responsible for what has happened to the nation?”
“As much as you, I feel the need for that great, radiant word that brings optimism to the people. Today, at this moment, that is much more the task of political leaders. Our literature, our Word, has given what it could and now awaits its echo. I feel the need for a political leader, a leader who fills us with optimism and gathers the nation. Call that leader Christ if you wish, or General Andranik, who would cry out and lead.”
“So it is not the person of literature who should say that word?”
“We spoke of it indirectly a little earlier: for Jefferson to be born, Shakespeare had to exist. Jefferson is Shakespeare’s son. Our literature and art should have had the duty of creating the atmosphere in which a political leader’s image could rise, of saturating the surroundings with the word that would sound from that leader’s mouth as God’s Word. How far have we fallen short, how much have we given that they did not hear, how far do they and we live our national Armenian life... How far do others’ powerful voices prevent us from hearing our own voice?”
“In the end, then, it must be the people’s word, and the people must help, raise up the person who speaks that word.”
“Culture and people together should have created the atmosphere from which the politician would take the word, seemingly as God’s Word, and return it to the people.”
“What I am saying takes us back to the beginning of our conversation, to the loss of morality, to that idea of the individual’s destruction. One good deed is done and we drop everything to talk about it. What was natural for centuries we now parade on a camel’s back: ‘Look, look, that is the Father Christmas smiling at the child.’”
“As the Russians say, we keep going round and about. Round and about, but never reach the very core. I bear some blame, because even with those thoughts within me I constantly used them up or expressed them through someone else; I did not write them with my own hand, or spent them unripe, before the thought had matured, squandered myself. But I feel the need for it. It must be said without being spent, without being squandered. If you have followed it, on television, in the press—our present press, thank God, is almost all truthful or plausible—everyone squanders and wears away that same central idea, and the central formula seems not to be found. I too feel I am waiting for that word of Moses. Moses took noise to Mount Sinai and brought back a voice. Among us all this is still noise, not clearly formulated. A voice is needed; I feel the need for it. I even see myself as culpable for not prompting someone else, so my thought would seem something they could continue and they could say it.”
“Why is there such an impulse today towards the church, towards various creeds? Perhaps it is the lack of that word, or are we going towards our roots?”
“We will neither encourage nor obstruct that movement of the people. It is a pilgrimage into yesterday’s forbidden zone; tomorrow many things will fall into place, and the movement will not be on that scale. Religion will find its rightful place in culture, and that is all. In hard times people have always flowed to God’s feet.”
“For some reason I have the impression that when God or the Bible comes up, you avoid speaking.”
“I have a personal fault, purely my own: when I see everyone talking about something, I fall silent. But when it is forbidden to everyone, I am the first bold fellow to step forward. Yesterday that would have applied to Dashnaktsutyun when it was a banned, persecuted party: all my actions were to bring it into the open, permit it, raise the question of its rights; now everyone says that, and it seems I have nothing more to do there. Or to God; it is the same. I regard the question of God as a cultural question. It is discussed in our commission too, with proposals to cast Armenia back into the Middle Ages. There is a Levon Shant in everyone. But Shant himself, by realising his drama Ancient Gods, freed himself of his nostalgia, his longing for the past. Today’s people lack that literary gift and want to act out their ‘ancient gods’ about the Middle Ages and God with a real people. That is misguided. If we have a task in that field, it is simply to give children that culture as a school subject: the history of religion, of religions. Let us have broad-minded children. Only that, as cultural history.”
“Are your parents believers?”
“My parents are Armenian peasants: believers one day, not believers for two.”
“What will you present to readers in the near future?”
“My task before myself will be to withdraw from parliament, isolate myself somewhere, provide my family with six months’ bread and truly be able to give myself to a month of pure silence, to forget all this and enter the world where I was before this turmoil. It truly was a world, and to enter it truly takes a worthy effort.”
Interview conducted by Edik BAGHDASARYAN
Lusavorich, 4 December 1990.