Though our achievements have not earned us the right to New Year reflections, our age already has. It is unpleasant. I wish I had finished the questionnaire and could go on reading the story of Ivan Ilyich’s “most simple and ordinary and most terrible” life. How Tolstoy strikes at the philistine and freeloader! How his powerful fingers grip him like pincers, straight by the throat; with what joy as writer and citizen, and with what hatred, he pushes Ivan Ilyich into the “black sack”—that official with his impeccable private life and personal record. His father “had made the kind of progress through various departments and ministries in Petersburg that brings men to a position where, although it is quite clear that they are incapable of holding any substantial office, their long service and rank nevertheless prevent their dismissal; they therefore receive invented, fictitious posts and quite unfictitious thousands, from six to ten, on which they live to a ripe old age. Such was Ilya Yefimovich Golovin, Privy Councillor, a useless member of many useless institutions.” That was Ilya Golovin, and Ivan Ilyich was steadily heading the same way, only briefly revealing an affronted philistine’s fang on his kindly liberal face. At forty-five he has leapt and secured a comfortable salary of five thousand roubles, has almost reached useless membership in superfluous institutions. But here Tolstoy’s crooked fingers seize his neck and keep stuffing him into the dark hole: go on, be born again! He protests, calls it unjust, resists, accuses. But the divinely concerned, divinely angry, divinely just master of all Russia and the whole world is uncompromising: persuading, reconciling, stuffing him in—and smiling, smiling! You do not know what lies more strongly behind that smile: a writer’s pride in being able to describe “an ordinary death from inside an ordinary man”, or the discovery of the worm eating God’s world from within—freeloading, outwardly soft, kindly, toothless and accommodating, inwardly sinewy, predatory, malicious and fanged. And the terrifying beauty is that you, the Armenian writer H. Matevosyan, feel this literary titan has taken your hand and is describing you with it. That you are Ivan Ilyich. That here, halfway through life, you have finally slipped a soft cushion of security beneath you, but will not enjoy it, and this is tragic and unjust. That is how it is: true literature is only about me. If it is not about me, it is about no one. We must not hope that people differ and that literature which is not about me will necessarily be about somebody else. And when, at meetings, in their sincere written statements, and in statements delivered through their mouths by the leaders of literary organisations, miners, students, policemen, engineers and border guards all demand that we write about them and accuse us of the constricted narrowness of our subjects, that does not mean we have not written about them. On the contrary, we have written, and written a great deal: laid metre beside metre, our writings would cover the republic’s thirty thousand square kilometres. It means we wrote about them, yet our writings were about neither them nor us nor anyone else under this sun. It was literature without an address. Nobody received that literature.
So who has written about me, and from whom have I received a letter?
The republic lived another year in peace. As an additional—and, to tell the truth, my only—celebration, William Saroyan came here. The nuclear power station grew a little further, the Sevan water conduit advanced a little more. Let everyone be responsible for his own hectare. And who, apart from Leo Tolstoy, has written about me?
Perhaps many have, but I shall recall the letters addressed to me that reached me: Hakob Mndzuri’s Sila; Mushegh Galshoyan’s portraits of the survivors, attempts at portraits (that is a more accurate assessment); Vasily Shukshin’s first volume of stories in his two-volume collected works; Andrei Bitov’s Monakhov Takes Flight; Hryhir Tiutiunnyk’s Three Laments for Stepan; Vahagn Davtyan’s sequence of poems published in your newspaper; from the warm, sumptuous, vibrant Hamo Sahyan of the sixties, glimmers of warmth and splendour. That is all.
These are fragments rescued from literature’s omnivorous termite: bookishness. Before picking up a pencil, I could see this enemy devouring our literature from within, and I wanted to find its Armenian name. I had to consult a dictionary, which said: “The name termite comes from the Greek termes: end, demise.” I am not entirely certain whether this enemy eating the core of our literature is bookishness or something else. But it is more than palpable that, as ruthlessly as a termite, it devours both our prose, which outwardly looks fairly substantial and confident but is hollowed out within, and especially our poetry’s youthful forces.
I am not arguing against drawing on bad books, or for drawing on good ones: good books are books too. I am arguing against drawing on books at all. Good and bad books force themselves between us and our reality—more precisely, between us and ourselves. They estrange us from ourselves: we see our father according to John, according to Mark, Luke and Matthew, rather than according to ourselves. Within the light and the boundaries cast by earlier people and by others, we find the things and situations they found, and never step outside the limits of their light. Yet the world is so vast that one may confidently say all previous culture has illuminated no more than a patch the size of a clearing, a threshing floor, a circus ring.
In a television interview William Saroyan said: “The Armenian person is inexhaustible.” They told him: “Sometimes a writer begins well, but soon runs out, soon exhausts himself.” And he said: “Dear Vahagn… the Armenian person is endless.” Yes, literature is life, tragic and beloved life. How can you live and say you are exhausted? Something else, then, has indeed run out: the charge borrowed from books. That is how books betray us. All books betray you, leave you alone halfway along the road; there are no good and bad companions—your only companion is yourself.
Mndzuri, Shukshin and Galshoyan with his portraits of the people of Sasun will always interest me. Theirs is not the prose of a grand synthesis, but neither is it a synthesis according to, say, Joyce. And for that, I thank them.
I would like Armenian writers, from this coming January onwards, to bring events and incidents from Armenian life, and their own selves, into Armenian literature, so that Armenian readers may finally read about themselves in Armenian letters. I would like those same writers—Joyce, Faulkner, Saroyan, Márquez, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Cortázar, Kawabata, Shukshin and Bitov—to become Armenian books with the full ringing vibrancy of the Armenian language, to be placed on Armenian readers’ tables beside the books of Armenian writers. In the end, that would be good for us too.