Do Not Disown Your Brother

In a time of turmoil and debauchery
Brothers do not judge brother...


-You once said that you can't write about Ekhren because you can't be impartial. Can you write about it today?
Levon Asatryan, "CHI" journalist

- Yes, I said something like that, I also did it a decade or two before I said it. our revenge destroys us, under the burden of our past our fragile shoulders give way, every single time our path of a person who came to this world gets lost, goes astray and gets lost. Later, with the comparison of the identity and the case of Belarusian Ales Adamovich and Turkish subject Hakob Mndzuru, I think I did not make a bad theory, roughly like this. it is different when you turn your back on your Slavic brothers and demand an account from fascism for your ashes Khatin, and completely different when you live in a country where the executioners of your child and parent, village and country are glorified and erected a statue.
It was said so, and yet, if not the confidence of the rear secured by the "Slavic brothers", the Union and the sympathy of the whole world, there was at least the hope of confidence, when the Armenian historian wrote "The Young Turks before the judgment of history" or "Cilicia", he still had power, a certain confidence of power, the status of a citizen of the empire spoke to us in a completely different language. when Adamovich's "Khatin" or Romm's "Ordinary fascism" flare up beyond the limits of my strength as an Armenian man, are we going to change our language, will we stand in front of this world that has become so angry at once with a different language and attitude?
Please, don't take my words as poetic fluff, because if there is a more serious person than a poet and it is an Armenian diplomat, an Armenian political scientist, national parties and the whole society, then we are both standing in front of the same wall, we are under the same blockade, and we both have the same task: to break through the barrier.
But the fart is fart only for us. for those who are beyond parakh, where or whom we aspire to is not parakh at all - it is a state border defined by bloody and bloodless victories. And the Turk is only for me a symbol of evil, I am only for me a symbol of the victim - for them it may be completely the opposite, or perhaps they judge not by these symbols, for them, perhaps they have other symbols of evil-good, dangerous-safe, harm-harmless, our endless suffering of the little one may have tired them, if not certainly disgusted them. Let us be sure of only one thing, that the besiegers are not our brothers of blood and faith, or even if they are, they will turn their backs on us in the face of the difficulty of the problem, they will pretend not to understand or we will really be incomprehensible. The true book is available to each and everyone of us, each and every one of us is available to the true book. if I consider that book a good book about my brother, if I consider it a book about my daughter, it is a missed book. the narrator has been dishonest, and the book has punished him by being born dead, just like the naturalist and his experience, like doctrine and society, which have left whole stories of mutual punishments. Like a true book, with the clarity of a natural science problem, like a doctrine extracted from society and given to society, our behavior and our policy of genocide must be built first and only on the basis of honesty, honesty first and only towards the object in question, honesty kind of in itself, itself for itself, and in that case we will have broken the barrier, we will be understandable to everyone and everyone. A little fraud, a little inaccuracy, missing an unknown in that equation with so many unknowns, and the problem will punish us, the problem will punish itself.
The Turk, no, will not recognize the genocide, will not accept that he is a genocidaire, he will not accept his communist - he will not accept his nationalist. I face every morning with heavy reluctance the day of the claimant—he, his political scientist, poet, student, diplomat—why should he take the trouble to remind every member of his great race that he is mired in guilt and debt; the Turk will not divide his land, will not divide his whole. So, is it worth pouring effort and sweat on a stone that won't crack and vice versa, it will crack us, holding on to a rock that doesn't show a sign of exit? It's not worth it, but we can't help going, we can't help but sweat and sweat. We can do one thing for sure - think about our children and not go crazy, he said, bring us to a size, bring us to our size, place us within the limits of reason, pull back the black veil from the face of our children before the day of God, do not build a wall of mourning and suffering around the whole society and every individual, it doesn't matter, they don't live beating their heads against that wall, they see anger and lamentation in their day of song and hymn, hidden in a modest corner.
We can do this much, and this much is not less, but it is unforgivable to miss this much, we miss it, we miss it again.
It is not about the benefits we will gain from the enemy and it is not about the losses we will inflict on the enemy and not even about hindering his march to the east - it is about our behavior towards ourselves. we speak and act like a tribe for the recognition of genocide, we kneel on our unburied dead with the great and the small of the tribe and we do not see that we are wasting the tribe itself - the ability and the living breath of the tribe. we hope for justice and God and recompense and claim and we do not see that the claimant himself is exhausted.
We should have thought about the claimant and not the claimant. We should love this Motherland, take care of today's worries. Otherwise, it is possible that the demands will be satisfied tomorrow, and there will be no claimants in the middle, especially since this has already happened once. We give you the land of Shushi from Yerznka, but you have no people.

- Please give your definition of "intellectual" and say, in your opinion, do we, as such, have intellectuals or not? What is your opinion about modern intellectuals? And can those people who witnessed the murder of "Paplavok" and kept silent about the truth be called intellectuals?
Naira Mamikonyan, journalist, "Aravot"

- Intellectuality as an essential component, characteristic, quality of our spiritual life and behavior, and intellectuality as a caste, a class, preferably an elite, which embodies a standard, gives a face and face to its time, keeps the government and society accountable to itself. due to the absence of a broad national-state life, we never had the second one, and now you and I bring his glorious image of the real owner of the country, the uncrowned king, to the world of our misery from Russia, Germany, Scandinavia, not from our past, or, so that our past does not seem too poor, let's say that we already had that intellectuality, the uprising and the revolution turned the country upside down, there was already that intelligentsia - 88 happened.
Churchill said that the nobility will cover the English Channel with its blood and will not let the enemy set foot in Britain. Of course, it's sad that we don't have and never had that class, that elite, defining the homeland with its blood, defining the country with its behavior, that class of intellectuals, but what's more painful is the decline of that noble and noble human quality, the retreat of that characteristic, which was to be an inalienable component of each and every one of us, that with hundreds of mouths for thousands and thousands of nights has written poetry. and once somewhere he did not utter an obscene word, that he set a limit to our work and speech and to distinguish from the unnatural and excessive as a real boor. That fearful moderation, that obligatory obligation to the moderate made us notice that maybe there is no need to look for our nobility in blood-soaked straits - our intellectuals and intellectuals might be the Armenian man himself, the Armenian peasant, my father, my grandfather, who was both the owner and the farmer of his house in this landless world, was both the prince and the shepherd of this crownless country.
I don't know, in my time, let's say, the "Paplavok" accident broke out in my presence - it wouldn't have broke out in their presence, far from intellectuals and intellectuals. Let's say, in the presence of Sos Sargsyan, that discreditable scandal unfolded and exploded - in the presence of fathers and grandfathers, it would have been a different evening of tolerance and conversation. Isahakyan and Demirchyan, let's say, were present, sitting at a table facing each other, chins on hands, yes, hands on the heads... and the warmth of the hall - educated, restrained, orderly, and the harmonious conversation of saxophone and piano, yes, because the president of the republic is present...
I don't know, this expulsion of a polite person from each of us, this violation of each other's borders, this as if a housekeeper, but really a violent invasion of each other's borders - of course, it would turn into utter poverty and it would turn into lowliness, lowliness, turning the performance of the provincial club into a real drama of defiance and murder. "The boys were drunk, they stopped the carriage - the minister's carriage... they got off the carriage and spat in his face... what about the drunk minister... Dro also called the police station, he lied, or he would - he hit him on the back in the presence of a drunk person." You and I with the famous leader of our "Paplavok" say wow and let's go. Or did you remember the Dzampano of "The Road", a thick and impenetrable animal of savage power, which is ridiculous for a joker and a poet, which in turn is an incomprehensible excess for a heavy-hearted animal?
 - Did Rostom own this country? Will it have? Or is the odd rider's heart broken beyond repair and we cross?
Lisa Chagharyan, journalist
- Wasn't it Vano, wasn't it Vazgen... or will we keep our memories again in the red mists of the times of Vardan and the worlds of Chenat, from where the smell of intrigue and blood, let's be safe, will not hit our noses. Did we know there would be? I, for example, was not sure. I said army and I saw a Turkish or Russian army, I said victory - the triumphal arch was standing in other horizons, I said minister and commander - the commander was riding a horse in the distant nights of Rshtunik, the "minister" was writing on ancient parchment with a pen in his hand. The living statures of Vano and Vazgen, rising and strengthening hour by hour, were confirmed in our days, among us. And now, in front of our day, that blindness, that impotence of sight, that sin of desolating the nearby and making the distant flower bloom is in vain. sanctity is sanctity, but I have always looked at the past with reservation and with confidence at the present. A building hearth is more sacred to me, even if its door is closed in front of me, than any saint. Karapet, even if the doors are open in front of me. In 1989, 1990, a child from Abovyan went missing, let's say he was a teenager, the parents' alarm was on the radio for weeks, then I heard that the boy was found, I think in Karabakh or on the road to Karabakh. for me, long live that nameless child and not even Nzhdeh.
No beauty and race has left itself unstained, let's wait, create, call, be ourselves a little more - and it will come or has already come, it is among us.

- If war starts tomorrow, what words would you say to those going to the front?
Armen Baghdasaryan, political commentator

- Only victory, I will say. defeat will become an old witch and stick to your back, on whatever side you go: Georgian, Russian, Chechen, Greek, Persian, even Turk, you are a good man, aren't you ashamed, what you did, they will say, it's a girl, you're crowned by the church, you can't divorce, or it's your mother, she's the one to bring you, you have to. drop it, I'll tell you, puppy, you started shamefully, are you also shamefully closing the history of your race? one victory, and your life will become a steed, take you in its saddle, and horizons will open on all sides of you, and the Georgian, the Russian, the Chechen, the Greek, the Persian, even your enemy will greet you with loving support. only victory, I will say. both defeat and victory are from man, they are man himself, victory is a radiant man, defeat is a darkened man, your eclipses have already been darkened by your ancestor, you have no place to darken anymore, your black ones have already worn out by your ancestor, will you once wear your red? you are only given victory, be a man before yourself and ride.
- Why are we so evil?
Samvel Mkrtchyan, translator

- Is your Saryan evil, Komitas, Charents, Tumanyan, Myasnikyan, Garegin Nzhdeh?... which of our few expressed individuals indicates evil? on the contrary, they are all characterized by something that reminds me of the Biblical Prodigal son. Can't you say a parable about Anarak's brother, who did not give him pleasures and adventures, did not relate to the limits of destruction and decline, did not waste and was wasted, did not enter the world of his father's losses and longings, etc., but silent and nameless, always present and absent from the world of his father's longings, he is on the road from home to home, from home to home, he keeps his father's house. All of our success really comes down to that image of the Proverb.
Are we talking about the rest of us and the masses, those who gassed around Saryan, who was rising every day, ate Charents, expelled Komitas from here, hundreds of articles and handouts against Tumanyan...etc., and those whom we call people? It's not evil, it's poverty, incompetence. The saxophonist in Cortazar's story gasses and smashes the instrument at the moment when he thought he was entering the upper sphere of secrets, a mysterious luxurious palace, but at the last moment the doors were closed right under his nose. This is the bitterness of being rejected, Tumanyan said bitterly and gave the reason with our history of trampled Armenians, I say inability. Impossibility for the artist to fall into the world of Saryan, the poet into the world of Charents, the scientist into Hambardzumyan, the worker into the world of high productivity, the peasant into the vast and lush big farms and herds, etc. perhaps they are not different worlds, it is one and the same luxurious world of the successful and satisfied, surrounded by the world of the rejected-embittered.
To be a little more thirsty than we are, to give ourselves a little more at the age of endowment, not to rely so much on the community, not to tolerate weakness as much as we rely and tolerate and are tolerated, to work as much as a Jew, a German on our unit, on our child... then, two days' bread and the prospect of a two-day process, and you see how your evil, my inability, Tumanyan's embittered eyes is becoming the kindest, most beloved people in the world. two days' bread, a prospect of two days' course, and what a wonderful people rose from the really bitter time of the twenties, the people of my parents; a little effort on ourselves and a two-day perspective of the process, or even the illusion of a perspective, and see what an upright, fair-minded, what a brave people will rise up, the people of my sons.

- Recently an Italian diplomat came to Armenia, he went to his homeland and wrote. "I went and saw a people who turned their backs on themselves." Do you agree with that stranger?
Naira Zohrabyan, journalist

- Tolstoy, they say, was very angry when they called "tragedy" on every occasion. Russian torpedo boat Tsushima sinks to the last ship - a "tragedy". Russian nationalists in Tula turned Jewish shops upside down: "tragedy". At the open-air public banquet of the tsar's coronation, a thousand people were trampled underfoot: "tragedy"... he was divoting and grimacing: "trageeeedy, tragedyedy", what a writer's widespread tragedy, when they are ordinary apicarism, revolutionary confusion and utter poverty. let them be a little in order, they wouldn't be destroyed, they wouldn't be broken, they wouldn't drown in the stampede.
The tragedy is that it is not included and not restrained, against your will and effort, it expands and goes for itself and takes you with it.
But ours is now truly a tragedy, with your hindsight after so many years not revealing the beginning and the beginnings, not marking the end decades away. What is happening, what will happen, I don't know. Let me use Bergman's example. he talks about art there, we will read about the country, the homeland. he says, art is no longer the old hissing, coiled, biting, beautiful snake - art is the empty bag of an old snake that died a long time ago, was eaten by ants, moves due to the bustle of ants and gives the illusion of coiling, and I am one of those ants inside, he says.
Here we are, willingly or unwillingly, participants in our tragedy, each of us is gnawing at his own stake inside and does not see the whole thing - with his head down for himself alone, with parties, gangs, mafias... with profit, sacrifice, blood trade, mere military action!, taking bread from each other's mouths, making each other cry... - our core we are in the chest and we don't see the whole thing, to see the whole thing we would have to be outsiders like your Italian.
The success of those parties, entrepreneurs, etc. and others should have been the success of the nation, that is, of all of us. fences were raised, there were gatherings, parties and groups were formed, etc. But the whole nonsense is that the whole is not strengthened by it, the whole as such has ceased to be, that the parts of the whole no longer belong to each other, we no longer belong to each other.
In the field of brilliant victories against each other, we have left a confused country, which looks at us as strangers and we look at it as a stranger. So that it wouldn't be like that, so that we could all find each other, belong to each other... But it didn't happen and it won't happen. Vazgen was not killed so that we read each other's homeland again. Demirchyan, Ter-Petrosyan, Siradeghyan were not driven from the arena so that all of us would have our homeland in the arena again and we would all be its sons.

- I mean, we all wrote the script of your 27, Nairi was born in a bloody atmosphere, did 27 capture that atmosphere or does it continue?
Anna Israelyan, "Aravot"

- I will try to answer your question with an example taken from the history of the Turks. if it will help, well, if it cheats Turkishly as always, as a fact it will become the property of at least a little wider circle. In one year of 1912-13, the Turks had two Balkan wars and lost both very quickly. during the second war, when the Greco-Balkan forces were encircled from all sides and Thessaloniki was about to fall, that very important port for the Turks, the Turks' Saint-Petersburg, which they thought was the only cruiser, the Young Turks sent not to strengthen the defense of the city, but to remove their exile from the city, Abdul Hamid, their enemy, against whom they had been in a bloody fight for thirty years and four years before they had overthrown, who had hit and almost destroyed Polis with a heavy wave of counter-revolution two years ago. This sultan, his family, broke the ring and was taken out of Thessaloniki. Their enemy should not have fallen into the hands of their adversary, their exiled sultan would not be a prisoner of the enemy even now - in the safe depths of the earth, Bursa, he should have lived out the rest of his human years. on state wisdom, that he did not hand over to the enemies of Turkey, who was removed from the affairs of the state, he did not strengthen the enemy of Turkey, he dethroned the sultan. the weighty possibility of his revenge, the factor of his revenge and possible revenge was not included in the barracks of the hostile forces.
Here he cheated. And I only wanted to see and understand that the Young Turks were not driven into hostile captivity, they were not exiled even though the sultan dethroned them, that was a heavy stone on the road of the royal carriage and an extra burden on the state treasury. But nothing. both exits remove a sphere of national honor and government shrewd calculations that is incomprehensibly far from us.
Ours is not that, we are not that. We, the persecuted and the persecutors, do not have our Turkey above our heads, we are not its subjects, we are not afraid of its harshness and we are not humanized by its love. Our pursuit will be until the end, until the dead end, until the destruction, until the "camp of incense" and our persecution will only be fangs at the impasse, only turning the horn into a sword at the impasse, passing the head of the "army of incense". There is no obedience, there is no negotiation, there is no game and playfulness - is it a weakness of the mind, a weakness of the language, which can be explained roughly like this: the centuries-old absence of the ruling national elite has deprived our descendants of both the behavior and language of the enmity-friendship rulers. it is explainable, but it is a national vice, because what would end in a fight of tongues, ends in blood. Tumanyan used to say: "You have quarreled, blood is evil." Here is the great lack of grace in this "talking"...
I remembered Faulkner's story. so that the "case" of the dishonored and the dishonored within his tribe is not sealed with the blood of one of them, the chief of the tribe arranges a cockfight in the middle, and so that only the dishonored will win for the sake of justice, the chief of the tribe puts out his cock against the cock of the dishonored. Don't see how the scorned one screams with each blow of this one, what joy he exults with the fall of another, don't see what a dance he dances on the lifeless bird. it will dance, trample, crackle, stomp, lose to the ground, it neither was nor is, but here it is, sweaty, victorious, satisfied with its grudge.
Ours - should I say heaviness of breath, lack of effort to carry our really heavy burden of man and society with a light heart, to "give our pain to the south wind" or is it some unwillingness to tear himself away, some of our dialects still say, free himself from the not-at-all royal arrogance of humiliating everyone else but himself, of bringing his foot of the victorious king. He couldn't win, he couldn't get a foothold - he won't tolerate the other's very presence, he will destroy it. He could not obey, he could not negotiate - he will remain silent and take revenge silently.
Tumanyan stigmatized our open arrogance and equally Asian vindictiveness as a "disease", a disease of revenge. "What's even more disgusting is that our man likes to take his revenge and strike at someone else's hand, always in the dark."
The Turk has a good word. "The traveler will be on his way." The national disaster of October 27 should have been revealed, closed, sealed, consigned to history on the 29th, and we should have been on our way to the poor in spirit for three years, hell, having all of us guilty and innocent in the same march, conspirators and ignorant, confused by the enormity of the disaster and those who secretly examine our human quality. Of course, that would be self-deception, but there are paralyzing things, in front of which it is impossible not to sneer without public self-deception. for example, the guilt of the Armenian genocide placed the Turkish public opinion in a narrow circle of the ruling party of the time and it remained on its own course. for example, the German people attached the hell of the Second World War to a couple of their madmen and took to their own recovery. from all the decades of blood and torture, our Nikita Khrushchev took an odd 37 and from all the armies of mental and physical slaughter, a couple of generals, the remaining two hundred million of us would remain in our decades' parade. Corrections - now, corrections - on the way, arguments and bargaining - later, guilt and regret - with time, with generations. In all three cases, in all thirty-three and three hundred and thirty-three cases, the society did not split, did not split, did not tie itself to sin and the time of sin, did not lose sight of itself - preserved the dignity of its union and process.
I could answer your question like this. "The atmosphere, no, it was not filled. there are still ambushes, castles will still be blown up, there will still be bloody reprisals, Armenia and Armenia, Armenia and Armenia still have a long way to go to separate from each other", especially since Vano threw years ago. "The field of privatization is minefielded in us", and what Vano said so succinctly are truths to be written in stone. Or I would answer like this. "There will be no explosion either in the parliament or elsewhere. After strengthening the guards, locking the gates and leaving the disgruntled mourners outside, they will be on their own. And in both cases, you would not be dissatisfied, because in both cases, many cases and faces from our future reality would be included.
But the thing is that the atmosphere itself has been paralyzed in us. the pioneer has already paved the way, and it is very possible that tomorrow some idiot will repeat it for the same progress and make it a third, but the thunder of those disasters will no longer roll across our national sky, our nationally united body will no longer be torn apart, those gunshots will be on our nationally dead body, those explosions will sound to us like the news of an unfortunate accident that may or may not have happened in a distant country. A foreign land, an airless space, where realities and things float without their weight and meaning, or some kind of lunar landscape, where you give a voice and your voice is not heard? On October 27, this is what the military leaders of the 27th found Armenia, after the 27th, this is what we and the country became.
On the 27th it was still tolerable. It was a predicament that did not exist in the history of the world and existed only in the heads full of black nightmares, but one could draw parallels with self-delusion that this, this, this has happened in such and such countries, and take comfort in that. but what happened in these three years, the irreparable loss that fell layer by layer from our national image, the contamination of the national general image that covered all of us with layers and folds, and in how many decades Sarya and Komitas and Tumanya and Abovya and Charents will clean up with effort and pain... this loss, this discrediting of sovereignty, history will not forgive us, just like the earthquake. did not forgive the falsity of our structures.
- You once said that if humanity loses its morality for some reason, it can be restored by the lifestyle of "Tsmakut" residents. The inhabitants of Tsmakut are in literature, but in real life, whose character can be used to restore the lost morality?
Tigran Hakobyan, former journalist

- Tolstoy sends a very forward-looking young officer, who turned his back on the emperor and his high-rankings, to the world of his childhood, where he has a niece, I think it's an aunt's daughter, a girl who trembled in the hatred of others for each other, who made her laugh, for example, she pretended to swim on dry land, so that a smile would appear on the faces of her cousins, who were crushed by hostility. Before his death, Tolstoy's flight was also to his youth, to the Cossacks and the Caucasus, and he died along the way. Tumanyan devoted himself to our legends and conversations, Hemingway to Africa.
You are preventing my escape now and you are doing well because you are preventing it - "it is literature", "they are in literature", "in whose image can the lost morality be restored in real life", who should we rely on, who should you and I cling to so that the mud does not catch our feet? In our old villages, they used to say ushab, the buffalo is a water, swamp animal that can cut the Sevan by blowing, the mud would catch its legs and suffocate the buffalo.
Since the day of receiving your question, whole multitudes of literary and real faces, an endless line of our own and foreign acquaintances and strangers have passed in front of my eyes, gone round and round, as if rounding the mountain, diluted, given irreparable losses, returned to pass again, give losses again, brightened or darkened, large or worn, with masks and lost faces to return again. I remembered Tushin most often, it was Tushin, wasn't it, the name of Tolstoy's captain, who pulls the burden of war like a lever and, drying his wet feet by the fire, is silent like a lever in the face of remarks and reproaches, and it is imperceptibly natural for both him and his superiors that he carries the burden of work and reproaches, in short, he is a man of work, he and the work always find each other and each other. they breathe. I often remembered Christ himself, often Haji Murad, the condemned Chechen general. sometimes my contemporaries, my friends, my parents, all of our mothers, who suffered the torment of saints, in that row sometimes stumbled for a couple of minutes, according to Mndzuru, "the Hripsimes and the Gayanes did not suffer the torment of our mothers to be a saint". And all the while an image of my old days, wondrously fresh, colors and sounds sweetly ringing, such as are found only in childish souls, stood before me, allowing none of the many images of its kind to take its place.
In the hazy May sun of the mountain, in the hollow of two hills, in a place completely barren, where no turd had ever been set before us, a man - one of the special post-war men whose breath brought peace to everything living and inanimate - and a boy among the many post-war children - the two of them set up a tent. It is understandable that the village leadership mentioned that clean alpine meadow, where the complete absence of thick weeds proves that the first inhabitants here were that man and that boy, but the boy himself chose the place for the tent. where will the buffaloes stand, so that it will be easy for the cat, where will the tent be pitched, so that the place is covered with mud, and protected from the winds by the skirt of the hill, and there is no room for another tent above it. where to open the floor for the toaster so that it opens easily and does not draw water.
But you don't know what a tent is, yours and mine are different, you open-pull-push your light tents, we tied our heavy-shell tents. Ours was warm in the cold and cool in the sun, yours in the cold and rain nothing, tolerable, in the sun an intolerable herring, but ours didn't drip in the rain either, if a good bulge was stretched and the skirts were tightly gathered. In our time, few people had a tent, our Jahel family of Kham Sarvor, for example, didn't have one, that guy had an old and big house before the war and still had it, perhaps the last of the mountains, the big tent of their tent disappeared, Tumanyan says in one place a dagga, in another place he says: "Akhchi, godless, sit in the tent", "It's enough, achchi, come in, daghe", it was heavy. the package with two men, especially if it rained, they could hardly put it on the cart, but it could not be left in the mountains; they would take shelter, make an open fire inside, let them go, it would burn.
Now there is something difficult for me: to make you understand what is a willow, what is a kurdzen and what is a chegh, and I can't find the Armenian of the frame, the skeleton is not beautiful, but the picture was so clear at the beginning - an eleven-year-old boy of an uncle and brother, just two of them tying a tent. The Chech of their big tent, which accommodated five children and their grandmother, their grandmother, in the tent, and could receive a couple of guests for a day or two, even before the war and before us, their Chech came from the Crimean Turks, the boy's travels did not go that far, it was then, in the middle of the summer of 1989, that when the boy returned from Georgia, he suddenly realized that he was among the Turks, he pretended that he should be among the Turks, asking the truck drove to the door of his acquaintances from the summer of 1946, from 1936 and even before that, to the door of the acquaintances of their big house, he said that he was himself, he was passing by, he remembered, he was entertained, understandably, they put a companion next to him, until they brought him to our Kazakh border. It was after that, in the fall of 1993, that he called from Ararat, he was calling from Ararat, he was on the road to Karabakh, if he didn't go, he would give the car to someone else, he would damage it, go... "Won't you tell Vazgen?" then he called that he was going, neither not going nor going, both are inconvenient, but if he goes, at least he will be with the car. it was after that, I think, in 1998-1999, that they took the car from him, as if they were well informed that he was able to establish a house and build an economy in the bare desert. but now it's 1946, the end of May 1946, he's only eleven years old, he pitches a tent with his uncle, he cut down the willows one by one, cleaned them, pulled them out of the thicket, he plucked the willow tree from the willow trees himself, and I still don't know which tree will be the willow tree, even though I'm half a year older than him, five or six months at the age of eleven is a huge time. there is a man in our house, and the ura, krdzen, tent are the things he knows, and the man in their house is himself, his father did not come from the army.
In the story "Yeghjeru" Tumanyan calls it a brnut, we are a brmut - they, where the ground is well-fertilized, the trees take away light from each other, push each other down, they rise and rise with the density of reeds, the canes swing far in the sky, especially if you are only eleven years old and even short among your peers, the brmut is that thicket of jahel bokhis. tall: jahel, straight, upright bokhin, as if it were a reed: shamb, ghamish, kamish. Ghazhi is more flexible, but our forest does not have ghazhut and ghazhi. Chegh... now I thought that the Turks of our old time hardly tied themselves to such a small job: cutting a thousand pieces of chamois one by one, one thousand pieces one by one and tying ten thousand pieces together in three places. They probably gave their ghamshkuts to their boshas, ​​they were probably the ones who cut the shamb and tied the cheg for the nomads.
I don't know, that boy taught me Ghazhi, Urg, Chegh, Kurdish, I know Ghazhi, Chegh, Urg, Kurdish.
We used to push the willows into the ground in an oval shape, bend them, bring them together from the opposite sides, and tie them tightly with rope. Kurdzen is a strip of bark the width of a girl's ribbon, maybe from lychee, maybe from another tree, the Russians of the North may have woven their trech from kurdze, our hermits may have wove their kurdse with kurdze, I don't know, before the introduction of chemical ropes, we used to bend our arms, tie them with kurdze ribbon at the crossing points, and the frame of the tent was already ready.
Two eleven-year-old boys, although they are inseparable friends, but individually eleven, each eleven, two boys and a man, one of the odd post-war men, the carcass will now be pulled over the carcass, and the carcass will not run to one side, it will not spit on its back like a cattle leaving the place, then the neck of the carcass, the skirts, will not be girded around with a wide belt, so that the buffalo cubs they will not chew the skirts of the tent, the pigs will not pull, and they will enter through the door and say: "Good day... why are you still sleeping, it's time for dinner" even though there is no one and nothing inside. Then there will be silence, they will stand or sit like that for a while, in the silence, the light childish hissing of that boy, who broke his nose falling from a buffalo and after ten years the army doctors of Yerevan will have to fix it, and in a couple of minutes the spirit of that big family should slip out of the ancient tomb and sit silently there, as if he had been there for a long time, the place has been his for a long time, the boy has been his since the day he was born, and the uncle and the other boy here, although they helped very well, they are not really his, now they will go out and go to their places.
The buffaloes will slowly climb up from the warm pastures of the valley, stand at that door in the evening to be milked - to be milked or to listen to a few soft words or not to be left unattended in the valley or not to leave that door unattended, who knows. The dog, after two days, will come before the horse and nan, although there are already other tents, will circle around that tent, look through the threshold and, although there is nothing and no one there, run to meet the horse and nan, as if he has found their home, is standing there. The uncle's horse, before the nan and the dog, will come loaded and, although he is the uncle's horse and they have their own house on the mountain, will lean from the saddle and stand at that door, because that load and that tent belong to each other. Then, the beautiful, charming, green face of the beautiful old lady Sanahnets will be seen, but that's after. two days later, now the uncle and the nephew's ten-year-old son are tied to the tent, hard, heavy, as if not for four months, but for an endless time, and in every word and growl of the uncle, in every movement, there is distress for the brother who went and did not come back, for everyone who went and did not come back, they left their affairs to one uncle. and be troubled in his speech, whatever he says, is the longing of his brother and the love of this tizukes.
I am standing next to them or perhaps opposite to the place on the other hillside where our cabin will be on the mountain, and I do not know that their friendship of the big and the small, the elder and the child, when nothing is lost from the special words of the elder, from the heavy and firm kneeling, from the stingy and stiff movement of the hand, as if the hand is a gourd and moves under the black earth, from the intense blushing and tired sigh, nothing is lost, the whole is filled in the boy, and nothing of what the child does and does is lost, the whole being drawn into the elder's being, as a pride for the nephew and as a thank you, that friendship, the dearest of all friendships, impresses itself on me and will follow me to this day.
My uncle has just arrived either from the Kazakh Turks, where the sheep of our villages were wintered in those years, or from the construction of Sevanhek, where he was pulling stone with a bullock cart with German prisoners of war, I don't remember, I only know that he would have come from both places disgusted and tired, and all he wanted was a good bath and a couple of days' sleep, that's all, here in the village and still at his brother's house. was the worry. Ekav saw that here they both know his fatigue and have the dignified awareness that no matter how much he is a man and an uncle, one cannot become a burden on someone else's shoulders, one cannot be a burden at all, and here he is only asked to have his good breath here, so that the little ones sit beside him and watch, and they will already shear the other sheep themselves, hang the tent door themselves, dry the toaster. they will cut the place themselves, with their peaceful anger they will talk to the ox themselves, and the ox will submit, they will say about the Turks of the foggy, duman valley, "our Turks of the valley" in their calm peace, even though they are only eleven years old and "they have never been among the Turks in their whole lives."
I don't remember that boy during our games in the summer of 1946. he was on his business as a man of the house, where his father and uncle would be. Even now, I have not overcome my fear of the Turk, the Turk's dog, and the Turkish settlement, but I remember him coming from the valley. He went to see if Kor Ahmad came to the mountain that year. Why was his eye swollen? He was stung by a bee. So he already looked after their beehives himself, they didn't ask others anymore. Then, even if he didn't go, the buffaloes were going down to Turk's valley, the pogrom and the buffaloes were there. Kor Ahmad may have said. "Itch, boy, is that you? Are you calling me an itch?" he laughed and perhaps said. "Mine was stung by a bee, but your name is Cor." Kor Ahmad might have said. "Do you know why the bee stung - it saw the honey, you eat it secretly from Kor Ahmad, it stung?" or something else like that, which meant nothing, it was just a simple sign of coexistence.
The last time we met with that guy was last August. "It's okay, it's life, don't think too much," he said. What were we going to do that we are not doing, this is what we are doing. You know the ponds of the city, those three lakes, which were above each other, were filled with silt by the floods, the mayor gave it to the people. I have been planting beans in my place for two years, now it is a well-flowered bean. There are also potato growers, but I make my potatoes in the villages of Stepanavan. Agarh: I don't drink store-bought agarh - I hand-pulled it. Don't make everything a thought, let's live life. - He laughed. - We are mowing Maymech grass, I am folding all the jackals. they smoke, they can't stand under the sun."
I am sure that those big and small people were and are in your lives. they are not big enough to be seen from my and your places and from all sides, but there are many, in each of our lives, at least a few, and many of us and all of us are that little big person, he has always been and is in us and in us, as a father, friend, wife, son, stranger, people.
Andranik Tsarukyan from Beirut, a very good writer, an honest publicist and a sober politician, who stood head-on with your question and did not leave, suggests from the series "There were and there were not" in his documentary "The Great and the Others" volume. those nameless little ones were in Paris, Zurich, Rome, Yerevan, and my famous life was becoming a parade, now they are gone, they are gone, and my fire is burning, without them now I will die.
With business reality, if they were to express themselves and become, say, Kirk or Tchaikovsky, with the practicality of reality, they are not marked and marked, it is against them, the ordinary, ordinary, anonymous people, their body does not accept doping, neither earthly nor heavenly stimulant, it is against them, they also avoid pens, but they have one great advantage: they are many, they are the people, the people themselves, who are free from immorality as originates from alienation, otherwise our life would not be life and there would be no life at all.
We have nothing to do with them - let's say they're ugly and we make them mature, let's say they don't know what the motherland is, let's say they don't know who and what they are, and we make them patriots, let's say they are unbelievers and we bring them to faith, with their regard, no, we can't have a rescue mission, but with our own regard, we have something to do - at least sometimes look at ourselves through their eyes.
Just like this, to look at us with their eyes, to be sure that they are next to us and look at us sometimes with the eyes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sometimes with the eyes of our distant youth, who has not left us and will not leave us until the end of our days, sometimes with someone else, and to correct our behavior, our course, our behavior according to him, them, the people, and beware of hurting his soft obedience of the land, and be afraid of making him bitter, and be afraid of his from flattery.
Vazgen had that boy in his soul, Vazgen was a poet and probably saw that boy watching him from the top of that hill. Karen Demirchyan knew the heavy weight of popular attitude and was afraid of losing even an ounce of that weight. Catholicos Vazgen had formed a whole retinue of our ancestors and our future ones around him and made his behavior as a prince by them and for them. On a white horse, Andranik kept himself under the gaze of the people, otherwise he was defeated and old a long time ago. they were all human beings who could say "God is with us" when they set foot on the battlefield, but it was not bad that we did not populate the void of the moral tabernacle with a departure from them and even with the images of Tumanyan or Alexander Myasnikyan. instead, we had an exact formula.
According to the people, the lost morality can be restored with our own characters created by the people.

- At one time, you urged Levon Ter-Petrosyan not to resign, saying that it would set Armenia back for three years. Do you think your prediction came true?
Armen Dulyan, Azatutyun radio station

- If, of course, I considered his Muslim side to be so open and sensitive to any admonition, if the authorities are generally governed by our admonitions, if they do not know everything from the very beginning. If that were the case, I would now ask you to go and exhort this other person to do such and such things.
It's not like that, but if you say "urgent" and "three years", I will answer.
Sadly, yes, sadly, the pillars of the house seem to be bulging with each newcomer, each one who leaves takes with him opportunities and prospects that seem to be his own opportunity and perspective and not that of the republic and his successor, unfortunately, it was not the prediction, in this case my ambition of the black prophet would at least be satisfied, but a simple reading of the history books. the Cochinian stability and peaceful progress were not tolerated in those old, already thirty-year old days and were replaced by the Demirchyan government, ten years later, the Demirchyan peace and reserved caution in the face of reconstruction times were not beneficial, and again ten years later, already the Ter-Petrosian stability. to whom, to whom it was not beneficial - perhaps to those who cannot imagine this country without the prosecutor's presence. now, with discredited sovereignty, with industry that does not try to stand up from the "dead place", emigration, maybe it is beneficial or even not beneficial, who - I don't know, maybe we will ask our KAK and influential parties, if they are of course our parties and our KAK and not a party and KAK on us, if they are anything at all.
How beautiful was Mexico, yes, that she spread her skirts over her earthquake and did not bring the dust of the earthquake to the nose of the world, nor did she accept the world's sympathy and help. How beautiful was Chile's Pinochet, who gathered all the chaos and noise of the country into a stadium and sifted ten years of peaceful silence on the country. How beautiful it is to be a citizen of a great and willful country. How beautiful it is to rise from the earth and on the earth in a masterly manner and become a human before the image of the earth, become a human being, be proud of the strength of your foundations.
Our predecessors only realized that they had inherited a country "three years" after they came to power, after three years they became human only in front of the image of this country, the love and care of this country, the people of this country were only painted on their faces after three or four years, and it is natural that I would assume the same for the new ones. they are not guarded by order, they will become human before the image of the earth, they will wrinkle before ugliness and they will blossom before beauty.
But I missed it. what three-four, seventy-three-seventy-four, I was to "predict", excluding the reality of Soviet Armenia, as if they were passing through an uninhabited wasteland, as if that time had never happened, I should have gone down into the depths of the century, the time of open passions and silent ambitions, where the people are just a faceless and nameless mass of silent land, and the evil games of their sons are passed over them without a murmur.
- Don't you ever have a Marquez-like urge to pick up the tape recorder - and get back to journalism where you started?
Ruzan Khachatryan, Azatutyun radio station

- Armenian literature has never had that ruthless brutality of abstraction, so that sometimes it would go down to the street with a tape recorder in its hand to check its veracity. Armenian reality did not lack evils, and "evils" were written in Russian. There are plenty of us who cut off the mother's nipples, and "Civil War" was filmed in the far West. The most law-abiding taxpayer in Turkey is the Armenian owner of the kennels, and Armenian literature mutters "Humble Girl" and "Our Mothers". The reality of phantasmagoria, nightmare, delirium has unfolded and blossomed here - our reader should have recognized the delirium of our reality in other levels, in other languages, in other societies.
Is this the vice or the virtue of our literature? It is a vice or a virtue, but it is so, it has been so from the beginning. The Armenian man who lost his king and kingdom took refuge in Armenian literature, and ours was an apostolic writing of healing, hope, consolation, hope and faith. Is it not partisanship in its own way, is it not the same biased literature, will the literature be biased, will it be biased literature? It won't happen, and from the sea of ​​reality that unfolded and is still unfolding since 1988, not a single incident or event had its precedent in Armenian literature, so that you could say: this is what fell here from this page, and October 27 was a complete surprise for Armenian literature, but never for Armenian reality.
Intentionally, I forget a couple of important facts of Armenian literature: Charents' "Yerkir Nairi", "In the Four Paths of History", "The Vision of Death", Bakuntsi's "The Sunset of the Province". they exist, as they are - "We have passed through the four paths of history without a rudder and without an idea, surrounded by endless fire of others" - but they are not the backbone of our literary attitude towards our reality, ours, I repeat, is an attitude of healing.
I understand your drive to be validated, repaired, reborn or, if nothing else, completely destroyed, I am familiar with one or two of your experiences, and I can say I sympathize with you. But I am the same old itch. reality has been showing me a different face for ten-fifteen years now - I am back to my old images. In these new times of yours, several times, I have seen whole, complete films, I have heard a pure, rustic, thoughtful and serious Armenian melody - open your movie camera and recorder, and you have a documentary film "Armenian Land" and an Armenian hymn. I know the charm and power of the authentic, I know that there is a current of "new journalism" with its Norman Maillor and Michael Arlen, and such a current is well underway among us, but I will not give in to that authenticity, because I have never been the "invalid".
Do you remember "Andrei Rublev" by Andrei Tarkovsky? I'm sorry I can't get along without big names. they are my life: that Beckett, that "Copper Horseman," that "Haji Murad," that "Dante's Myth"... Otherwise the countryside and grayness would ignore me, as they do. It's not a good movie, it's a great movie. done in defiance and for the glory of a great nation and state, done with great will and overcoming the heavy resistance of matter. Andrei Rublev doesn't paint "The Last Judgment" there, he doesn't want to paint it, he mumbles, the monastery is standing, other parts of the Gospel are on the walls, the white wall of "The Judgment" is waiting for his nightmare, and Rublev is here - he doesn't want to be the parent of that nightmare. Tarkovsky left room for another interpretation there - as if the princes of time extract our grace from us for their monasteries and take out our eyes so that our eyes do not give colors and shapes to other walls, but I understand what I understand. I will not paint a mural of "The Last Judgment" so that there will not be a final judgment. we find what we are looking for - I will not paint "Doomsday". we seek darkness, we find darkness - I will not cover your world with my darkness. "It was from the beginning", our word becomes a deed, let my "Judgment" never open in the depths of the layers of white plaster.
You say, what about Dali, what about "Guernica", what about "The Vision of Death", what about "Charker"... Don't say "what about Dali", because he did not spread before him the land where Dali himself touched and settled, but other people of a completely different worldview.
... Both Tumanyan's front-line diaries of Western Armenia and his lament "With My Fatherland" refer to the same 1915. "Before emigrating to Shataketz, they slaughtered their old fathers and mothers and the sick - buried them with their own hands - that's how they came." "There were people from other places, they brought their old parents on foot." "Little 10-12 year old kids slapping their younger brothers and sisters. 4-5-year-old children traveled 30 times a day." And then. the poets of the filthy mouth will praise your new life with new songs, new speech.
My new homeland!
A mighty motherland.
I didn't want to see his classical-ceremonial speech broken by your journalistic style and I didn't present the speech in its luxurious, feminine, militarily organized form, but in this way we are forced to have a different attitude, a different attitude, a different process than the reality of the diaries. - "Min suddenly cries, some of them start following him, while some calmly look at them, around them and continue to eat - some think philosophically silently."
Saryan was able to recall his nightmarish impressions from the same places of the same 15 fifty years later, only when he was whispering "cosmos, cosmos" with the astronauts and admired more than them the unique beauty of the earth, which was also his creation. and his life as an artist brought "Flowers of the City" and the glorious "Iosif Mantashov" from the same 15. if you have the book, open it and admire it again - is the world so good without it, is a person so unmoved? If you say that in 1915 Saryan was not faced with this reality of the endless charm of the world and man, but this, and testify to Saryan's own memoirs about the unburied dead, his blond, long-chewed teenage mother - you turn the artist's and our 1915 into a white wall: death and silence. Don't make it, he didn't make it, don't make it either.
In the same place where we are now, a hundred steps here or there, in those times, our famous Kostan Zaryan lived. dead from the red Turks, he came to crown his native country with the sky of European culture: Velasquez, Dant, Spain, Baudelaire, Hellenes... but this gray province of peasants has neither the strength nor the desire to raise its head. cold, trash, right in front of the window, behind the partition, a silent family of a Turk, Chekists and a Russian Chekist in the Turk's house, who shares his day-care worker and the Turk's wife equally with the Turk, commissars, Astafyan, cold, sunless, cold, gray last ten days of January, the red army on Astafyan's head, the leader's red coffin is gloomy, rescued from the gray mass of the army in his head, that now, with a command of a restrained voice, he must take a step and cover the city with his widow's grief. The leader, the One, died in Red Moscow, and the country became an orphan, and the red funeral, of course, is now also in Moscow, what is the red coffin here for? it is so. all over the country, the red coffins should be placed, the commissars in leather jackets should stand in a guard of honor and take a silent oath, the red Chekists... that's right, the reality here at that time is exactly that and not this one, which is right here and from this time, rose like a flock of doves, like a clap of cymbals.
A swollen girl slapped her swollen hip with her hand
And a cheerful and golden voice asked from above.
A thousand roses shot around, beside,
A thousand poppy seeds, and a spring day, and a rainbow.
Charents, yes. Charents, "1921, May, Yerevan". And or - the same funeral with that red coffin.
We hit the bullseye and the response was awesome
From country to country the thunder roared,
And in the fields millions, crystals
The rebellion grew and grew.
Or, "I am my sweet Armenia" our national anthem, our soldier's oath, a cry, a lament... - "unripe glory", "white Ararat", "flower like a snake", "dragon-voiced owl", "iron writing books"... these are words that are woven together and become a nervous system for newcomers, that build on each other and become a backbone for generations, that are upright and tall human posture. and they become a language perhaps also for the Turkish woman who silently shared the daily wage between the Chekist and her husband, or even for the actual Nairt, who was, and still is, and always desperate, always covered in worry, sometimes looking from the depths of the hawker's gaze, and their gazes sometimes stuck to each other - her, the hawker, the Nairian reality itself, and his the one who opens another Nairian reality before the upright, unyielding person of the future.
Tomorrow, just tomorrow, when that other reality begins to become a real reality, and especially after forty years, when it will be an established and ruling reality, the other, the real reality of yesterday, please, by the right of the chronicle of its time, in the form of a book, in the form of a testimony, can be browsed, argued, contested, complained, accused, in short, live its modest life of a book, but never replace the present with itself. The present was formed under other hands, warmed by other views, the gardens of the present are not your gardens, and your eye becomes the evil eye of a fairy tale on the present.
We have the national right to remember General Franco's name here. This land had battles like the Spanish Civil War eighty years ago, like a general, the owner and son of the country, who gathered the remains of all the martyrs from all corners of the country in a valley and erected a cross in front of all corners, put a cross on everyone, believer and unbeliever, righteous and sinner, and this people had that son and master, Alexander Myasnikyan. We know the Spanish war a little from history books - communists and partisans drink each other's blood in a life-and-death struggle, and a lot from the American novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" - the bells toll for you, with every Spaniard who dies, something in your soul dies, with every one who leaves, you are robbed.
And we know our war a little from our history textbooks, movies, memoirs, testimonies - communists and allies drink each other's blood in a life-and-death fight, and a lot from the same novel - with every death you die, with every axe-wielder you die, with every argument your face darkens, with every death sentence you become the executioner, inciting your party members. you give the arena to madness - the bells toll for you, the bells toll for you, robbed and slain.
Our speech about that reality of the time was a stupid repetition of the same madness, we don't need to make a sound from that speech, but here is our task - we invited to the arena the high man of reason and tolerance, the knight of reason and tolerance, Alexander Myasnikyan, a neo-Nakhichevan, a Lazarian, a friend of Teryan, a communist, a frontman, the founder of Belarus, a Leninist, the one for whom party orthodoxy was a personal vice and partisan obstinacy an ass.
The mist of time's distance does not enlarge him - he is enlarged by the closeness of our time and his. "We didn't have a homeland for centuries. - And he gave us a homeland" (Charents). Only in a foreign land, only the enemies of a nation would slaughter each other like that, as we slaughtered each other before his appearance. The one at whose feet he spread the homeland, that's the one he called to sobriety.
It is a consolation that he was eliminated neither by our nationalists nor by us. But here we have nothing to console ourselves that we defeated Alexander the great Myasnikyan transformed by Vazgen and Demirchyan with our own hands. Vazgen, yes, had so much sobriety that he did not let his fiery personality embody the image of tolerance and intelligence - that image was going to be Demirchyan in our national arena, and Demirchyan, to his great credit, had that sobriety not to surrender himself to the same image of energy and practicality - this was already Vazgen's element.
You say, what will be the end?
Their overthrow is not the overthrow of that character. their defeat, Vazgen and Demirchyan, no matter how well chosen by the enemy, was only their destruction. we will call, and the same figure will rise from us and with us: a man of reason and tolerance. With his dominant presence, we will be a people with a different attitude and a different homeland.


"Fourth Power", NN 166-172, 2002