We didn't reach it by merit, but by age we reached the right to have a New Year's thought. It's unpleasant. I wish I had already filled out the questionnaire and continued reading the story of Ivan Ilyich's "most simple and ordinary and most terrible" life, how he hits Tolstoy, the city-dweller and free-spirited man, how he takes the powerful finger-tweezers, the straight butt, with what delight and hatred of the writer and citizen, he stuffs Ivan Ilyich into a "black bag" of an impeccable personal life and record. Mr. official, whose father "had the promotion in various St. Petersburg departments and ministries, which brings people to a situation where, even if it is openly seen, that they are not capable of holding any position, yet they are not expellable due to their long service and rank, and therefore they receive false positions and false thousands, from six to ten, and live with it until old age. Among them was Ilya Yefimovich Golovin, a secret adviser, a useless member of many useless institutions. That's how Ilya Golovin was, and Ivan Ilyich was steadily going for it, the benevolent liberal's face showed only the fang of an injured citizen for a moment, in 45 he jumped and pulled down a soft rosary, 5,000 r., he was about to become an unnecessary member of unnecessary institutions, but then Tolstoy's crooked fingers did not untie his neck and stuck it. they plug the dark hole - go and be born again. He complains, he considers it unfair, he resists, he accuses, but the divinely concerned, divinely angry, divinely just master of all Russia and the whole world is unyielding - he persuades, reconciles and pushes, and with a smile, with a smile. And I don't know what's behind that smile, the writer's pride in being able to describe the "ordinary death from within the common man" or what the writer found the worm eating God's world from the inside, outwardly soft, benevolent, toothless, adaptable, inwardly fierce, predatory, evil, fanged voraciousness. And the shockingly beautiful thing is that you, the Armenian writer Hr. It seems to Matevosyan that the titan of literature is holding your hand and describing you with your hand. That Ivan Ilyich is you? That in the middle of your life, you barely pulled the soft pillow of security under you and you will not enjoy it, and that is a tragedy and unfair. That's right - real literature is all about me. If it's not about me, then it's about no one else. One should not hope that people are different and the literature that is not about me will definitely be about someone. And if during the meetings, as well as in their sincere written speeches and the speeches given by the leaders of literary organizations, the miners, students, militiamen, engineers, border guards all demand to write about them and accuse us of the restricted narrowness of our topics, it does not mean that we have not written about them - on the contrary, we have written and written a lot, and our writings will cover meter by meter the 30 thousand square kilometers of the republic. the stretch—that is, we wrote about them, and our writings were not about them, not about us, not about anyone else under the sun. It was unaddressed literature. No one received that literature.
So who wrote about me and who did I receive a letter from?
The republic lived in peace for another year, as an additional and frankly the only holiday for me, William Saroyan was here, the nuclear power plant was built a little more, the Sevan aqueduct appeared a little more, and let everyone be responsible for his hectare, and who wrote about me, except Leo Tolstoy?
Maybe many, but I remember the ones addressed to me, Hakob Mndzuri: "Sila", Mushegh Galshoyan: remaining portraits, attempts at portraits (the assessment will be more correct this way), Vasili Shukshi, the first volume of two-volume stories, Andrey Bit: "Flying Monakhov", Grigor Tyutyunnik: "Three laments for Stepan", Vahagn Davtyan: poems. series published in your newspaper, from the warm, gorgeous and vibrant sixties Hamo Sahyan, bursts of warmth and luxury. The whole thing.
These are scraps that have survived the omnivorous termite of literature, bookishness. Before picking up a pencil, I could see the image of that enemy devouring our literature from the inside, I wanted to find his Armenian name, I had to turn to the dictionary, and in the dictionary it was written: "The name termite comes from the Greek word termes, end, end". I am not quite sure whether the enemy that eats the core of our literature is bookishness or something else, but the fact that it ruthlessly eats away like a termite both our prose, which looks full and confident on the outside, but is eaten inside, and especially the youthful forces of our poetry, is more than significant.
It's not about coming from bad books and it's not about coming from good books, good books are also books - it's about coming from books in general. It is about the fact that good and bad books are pushed between us and our reality, precisely between us and ourselves, they alienate us from ourselves, we see our father according to John, according to Mark, Luke and according to Matthew, not according to us, in the light and limits thrown by the ancients and others, we find things and situations that they found, and we do not go beyond the limits of their light, the world is so big that for sure you can say that the entire previous culture only illuminated a place the size of a clearing, a pot, a circus arena.
William Saroyan said in a television interview. "Armenian is inexhaustible." They told him: "It happens when a writer starts well, but ends early, runs out early," and he said. "Dear Vahagn... the Armenian man is endless." Literature, yes, is life, tragic and dear life, and how can you live and say that you are exhausted? One thing, indeed, then, has run out and run out of charge taken from books. This is how books betray. And in betrayal, half way you are left alone by all the books and there are no good or bad companions - your only companion is yourself.
Mndzuri, Shukshin, Galshoyan will forever be interesting authors for me with their portraits of the people of Sassoon, theirs is not the prose of a great synthesis, but it is not a synthesis according to, say, Joyce, and for that I thank them.
I would like Armenian writers to bring an incident from Armenian life, touching and themselves, to Armenian literature, so that the Armenian reader will finally read about himself in Armenian letters. I would like those same Joyce, Faulkner, Saroyan, Marquez, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Cortazar, Kawabata, Shukshin, Bitov to become Armenian books with all the ringing vibration of Armenian, to be placed on the table of the Armenian reader, next to the books of Armenian writers, in the end, it would be good for us too.