To say “he lived a long and beautiful life,” one must first say that living a short and beautiful life is easy. To the little beauty achieved, kind people rightly add the great beauty that would have been achieved but was not. Yet life is full of other examples: so many splendid, resounding births have ended in silent burials, if not curses. Life’s resistance is an enormous force; so many purposes have been deflected and so many aspirations flattened by it. That is why, instead of “he lived a long and beautiful life,” one wants to say: he lived a long but beautiful life.
He lived a long but beautiful life and faded unexpectedly for us. Alongside the immortality of his luminous work, we had already begun cherishing a sense of his own endurance. Ruined Ani existed, Gosh’s khachkar and the remnants of Zvartnots existed, and among them existed the warm ash of an old great fire, the remnant of the old great Saryan, promising us to be eternal like them, around whom we warmed ourselves.
To say that glory did not become a burden on his shoulders, one must first say that glory finds no perch on shoulders already loaded with the weight of work. He was a labourer, and labourers, when approaching winter finds their table abundant, their cellar full, the hearth burning and the woodshed stacked to the ceiling, rejoice lightly with only one eye; in the other is care for the coming summer. Glory’s warm, pleasant flattery was always at his ears, but never lodged inside them. His ears were constantly full of his own murmured spell. All that time he himself courted the flowers, mountains, the thoughtfulness of faces, the fullness of faces, the vanity of faces, the meaning of masks, fruit and women, and flowers again. Whether glory’s song or noise, the old believers knew how not to hear it, how to deafen themselves in this way. Such a deaf man was the master who turned Gosh’s granite into a khachkar: Tamerlane came, Tamerlane passed, while that master, clinging to his granite, enchanted it for a hundred years until the miracle of the khachkar appeared in the stone.
To say he was a son of this homeland, it is fitting first to say that many proudly declare themselves children of a particular homeland. In such cases, rather than at the speaker, you look up along the height of his homeland, your gaze rising so high your hat falls off. And you understand that you too would live proudly in the security of being that giant’s son or adopted son.
His homeland had no adopted children; instead it had given thousands, hundreds of thousands of its own children for adoption to other homelands. Among those hundreds of thousands he was one of the rare ones, and among the rare the rarest, who recognised his homeland, which nevertheless did not exist, which was more hope than soil and more sorrow than hope. He found his homeland on the road in search of light: with light he found the south, with the south his homeland. Following the light, he went on a pilgrimage to painting’s Mecca, reached painting’s Mecca, blinked and saw that he had arrived in his forefathers’ homeland. It was good fortune. Equally fortunate and natural was the gentle joining of new humanist ideas and his art steeped in great human kindness.
With the fighters at Sardarapat, those drawing irrigation channels from the Zangu, Toramanyan and Myasnikyan, Saryan created a homeland, gained a homeland and became its son. Now we can all proudly say: I am a child of this homeland. Even if no one’s hat falls off when looking up at our father’s height, it will at least be removed respectfully, to stand bareheaded before this small country endowed with Saryan’s art. The old question “Does art have a homeland?” received among us a distinctly Armenian answer: art creates a homeland.
Let us not flatter, let us not flatter the dead, even though in life’s eternity the passing human being deserves the most beautiful and most melancholy words. Our forebears polished granite with difficulty and begrudged spoiling its clean surface with the hooks of letters. Later polishing became easier, and all words faded in epitaphs. On what tomb is the spare inscription wearing away that should have belonged only to Saryan, the pioneer and greatest representative of Soviet art, whose work made a great contribution to asserting this country’s existence before the world—that is, to verifying and impressing upon the world’s refined palate the firm existence of Soviet humanism?
Towards the end he often spoke of the cosmos, eternity, immortality. Matter is immortal, humanity temporary, yet he spoke precisely of human immortality. He wandered in metaphysics, and he had that right, since through his works he had often come into contact with immortality. Immortality was almost becoming a tangibly familiar world to him, while life’s earthly casing, the casing that had returned everything—word, gift and love—to life, grew more fragile and lighter. His body was no longer a good refuge. And the body itself held back behind him. So the empty rocket stage of a spacecraft separates; so a flower scattering its seed releases its seed, its immortality, as it dies.
Blessed is tomorrow’s child through whom Saryan’s eyes will look again.