For forty days now he has not been with us, beside us. So many things have happened in these forty days, festive and tragic. So many words have been spoken on different occasions—congratulations, consolation, warnings, promises, appeals, assurances. Perhaps that is precisely why the absence of Hrant Matevosyan is so visible, so palpable. The absence of a man whose quiet words could cut through the crowd’s noise and the hysterical cries of the “fathers of the nation.” The absence of someone who, by God’s grace and through his talent, could not only rise above the day’s vanity and everything called “the struggle for life’s necessities,” but could make us rise above that vanity too, make us think about who we are and where we are going, discover and feel our own identity.
This interview was recorded a year and a half ago. Reading it, you feel how much we miss Hrant Matevosyan’s words. His wise words. Above all, how much we miss the man himself...
“Have Armenians had a political idea common to every age, a shared unity and a purpose for their Armenian identity?”
“In your question I hear an answer to the Germans’ accusation that we have not received ideas that would allow us to unite, to be united, to take shape, to become a nation. And that this is the reason for the Armenians’ tragic fate. If your question is about rulers—Peter the Great, Bismarck, the French, the Americans—and you want to compare your people with them, then I think your question is wrong. We should not fit their image onto ourselves, like the frog in the tale that swelled up to become a buffalo and burst. What exists has always been what we were capable of. And thank God we have not disappeared, have escaped destruction, have been liberated and in today’s procession of peoples walk, if not with the very great, then not with the small and vanished either.”
“Then let us rephrase the question: what was the Armenians’ spiritual idea, what did we live for?”
“Perhaps then you can tell me: what is the Russians’ idea, what is the spiritual idea of the Germans, the Turks, the Persians? Where does the presumption in that question come from? As though a people had been loaded like an artillery shell with whatever charge a ruler or a national imperative wished. It is not so. Not quite so. The question assumes that a people, a nation must be loaded with some idea and directed. That is not a democrat’s attitude; it is one of the stereotypes of the past. As though human essence were nothing, a person merely a living creature, and the creator somewhere above filled that creature with content and pointed it in his chosen direction. I reject that presumption. I believe God, king, hero and knight exist in every person. We should not expect our kings from the outside world, where the Arsacids came from, or God from heaven, descending like Christ, or superhuman deeds from heroes, as though there were no hero and knight within each of us. I do not understand that presumption. I am a peasant’s son; I see God in my father and the Mother of God in my mother, and I see nothing else.”
“But why did Armenians create their own church, their own alphabet?”
“That was our parents’ church: our forefathers’ great sense of statehood showed us how to live without being absorbed into the Byzantine church. For that purpose small ritual differences were found. So we went from paganism to Christianity, from Christianity to national Christianity, and became distinct from the Orthodox. Among the Orthodox we are not Orthodox, among pagans we are not pagans. And we preserved a distinct Self. We understood that we must have our own Self, our own people, that we must not be absorbed. Although we suffered greatly for it. We were punished and acquired enemies, for example the Persians.”
“Why did Armenians attach such importance to it?”
“That was the course of history, of social development. Even peoples with the same roots, Ukrainians and Russians, differ from one another; a Polish Slav does not consider himself Russian, and before our eyes such closely related peoples are fighting in Yugoslavia. We are part of the world and, like everyone, incline towards an identity of our own. If an American does not even consider his English to be English, if those two peoples grew and matured through the same Shakespeare, that means it is humanity’s only path. Just as a child beginning life says ‘I’ and wants that ‘I’ affirmed, the national Self is affirmed too.”
“And what is that Self like?”
“To answer, we would have to gather everything our writers have written about us. In brief: we are those who always resist.”
“Do you mean moral resistance?”
“Yes, moral resistance. For our cultural distinctiveness, our own song, our own place in the universe.”
“What ideas do you think lead this world into the future?”
“Respect, reverence for us all, God’s children. For the great and the small, man and woman, the black person, the hunchback, the blind—respect for everyone alive: that is the idea born in England and spread across the world. These are Berkeley’s and Shakespeare’s ideas that the universe, the world, are above all subjective. In its practical consequences that idea gives immense value to the individual. It seems that whether the Self exists or not, the world goes on existing. Yet how much importance is given to that Self, to the person, to their eyes and abilities. That very philosophy of the Self, that way of perceiving the world, has today become supranational and spreads worldwide, subjecting royal dynasties, state authority and rulers to itself. Of course the tyrant, the king—seeing God in himself—and the animal inclination to violence and brutality are still strong in people. It is very difficult to master all that, because it takes new forms. But life follows its course. As the Chinese say, the flower must bloom, every nation will find its place and every person will be God.”
“But the same idea, on the other hand, rejects individuality, levels everyone’s qualities.”
“But that is a blessing, and it is beautiful. It gives authority a divine, solar power. In Tumanyan’s words, ‘The sun sees no shadow.’ It is wonderful when state institutions, relations within the state and every person are endowed with such a sunlike gaze.”
“Are Armenians also bearers of these ideas?”
“Armenians have been ill-fated, and anyone acquainted with Armenian history should be glad that Armenians still exist: we are not equal in strength to the world’s powerful. But our cultural inheritance shows that we have the strength to compare with anyone. I saw a marvellous sight on the shore of Lake Parvana: a small child came out of the water and began to dance for her little goat. No one was there; she came out in her finest clothes and began to dance for her goat. Hardly anyone remained in the village either; it was deserted. Our individuality is endowed with that child’s impulse. But I know no other peoples who lack it. Such a little girl could be in the Karakum, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, Africa. No one, ourselves included, can lack that universal human attraction. I know no uncultured nations. Culture is a way of living in this inhospitable, excessively cold, excessively hot world, amid hostility. Culture is simply a way of life. A Bedouin lives in the desert thanks to one camel: weaves a tent from its wool, lives on its milk, washes with its urine. The camel is used from its bones to its breath, keeping the Bedouin alive in the desert, and that is called camel culture. The Tatars obtained all that from the horse. Culture is everyday life, human everyday life. The same happens in America today. Everywhere culture has become civilisation and, first of all, everyday life. Culture is a way of living, not an ornament of life.”
“But one gets the impression that Armenians are tired and prefer to fulfil their cultural needs elsewhere.”
“Don’t simplify, don’t accuse. Tomorrow you yourself may ask for a visa. Don’t forget: a state has collapsed—a great, united state, a great empire of which we were all citizens. A part has broken away from the country like a reptile’s tail that still moves. There is no work: that is the most terrible problem. Alas, Armenians abroad do not shed tears out of homesickness.”
“But some think it is precisely the absence of an idea that haunts them, and they seek or invent ideas. Do you consider that useless?”
“It is a heroic pose. Because of it, before our eyes peoples have entered struggles, drenched themselves in blood and perished. Thank God our ideologues and statesmen have not succeeded in drawing the country and people into ideas and leading the country towards misfortunes and disasters. Before our eyes are Chechnya, Yugoslavia, the Kurdish movement—national catastrophes, tragedies; they flared up through the very nationwide charlatanry you are talking about.”
“Two hundred thousand Armenians have joined sects, probably because they are seeking some idea.”
“It is a great pity they have joined sects. Forgive me, I must put it bluntly: it is the work of foreign intelligence services, a way of breaking up all unions, whether the Writers’ Union, the Soviet Union or a Union of Churches. They want to break up all the bonds and unions that still remain.”
“If the prevailing trend in the world is democratisation and giving everyone their due, where do those dark forces come from?”
“I do not know where they come from. But if today we can understand our Self and give it its due, we will do what others did through self-repression. Peter the Great was a ruler of violence; he suppressed centrifugal forces and created the Russian Empire. In the same way Martin Luther, exalting national religion and overcoming other impulses, endowed the German nation with power. It is done either through external violence or by imposing violence upon one’s own individuality. Machiavelli said that even so-called written ideas, those of Moses or Christianity, any great idea, have not established themselves in life without violence, without the use of force. The result outweighs the losses, a greater result than under absolute freedom of individuality and favourable circumstances.”
“But peoples’ constant desire for independence and the world’s present desire for globalisation contradict each other. Is a clash ahead?”
“A senseless and destructive clash. Globalisation is doomed to defeat, like Christianity or Islam. They ruled across the world, led towards one God and one idea, but every nation created its own religion and its own Christ. There have always been forms of globalisation of one kind or another, and peoples have always been able to turn worldwide ideas into their own.”
“Christian globalisation gave nothing less than Christ, while taking away some national characteristics. But today’s globalisation simply takes away the national, and what does it give in return? Civilisation?”
“That is, it gave Christ and took away Astghik and the other ancient gods. Now, by uniting political and economic processes, they have a great and luminous ambition: to eliminate wars, clashes between nations, borders. On the other hand, peoples retain their eternal desire to express themselves beneath a single shared dome, their desire to have their own culture, their own language. So if we manage, thank God. If we do not, we do not. But we must question whether globalisation is everything and can answer the questions of an Armenian, a Chukchi or anyone else. ...It turns out, for example, that literature in Spain is created in five languages: we knew one united Spain, yet there are five languages there. They have not lost their distinctiveness.”
“Over the past twenty years culture has weakened throughout the world, lost its importance...”
“That is how it had to be. The situation in the Soviet country was simply a little different, and we did not feel it so strongly. Outside it, art had long been drawn into everyday life. The visual arts no longer exist independently; they have been drawn into town planning, for example. Americans, Canadians and Europeans find the visual arts in their gardens, courtyards and entrance halls. They are unlikely to return to their former confines. That is why it seems there are no more Rembrandts or Mozarts. In their place emotional richness has increased. Entire peoples no longer experience emotional thirst. For now they are satisfied. It will be so for a while. And at that new level new Mozarts and Rembrandts will arise.”
“In Armenian history and culture I have always felt that what we know is merely islands in a vast sea. What matters most, the essential, is hidden: there is an Armenian Atlantis that has vanished into the depths of time but still exists in the depths of our souls. Wise people told me that this is a feeling of the future, not the past. Have you ever felt anything like that?”
“May your feeling be true, and may that secret remain and be reflected in each of us, awakening immortality and the ability to resist. We must strive ‘not to be lit by another’s light,’ as Charents said in the poem At the Crossroads of History—there is a very harsh, disrespectful attitude there towards our ancestors who tried to ape world history. In the future too we must strive to create our own image on our flag; we must have the image of our own God and our own place in the procession of peoples.”
“What is that image that should be on our flag?”
“When I was young and spoke more confidently and boldly, I said: if the UN ever decides to erect a monument to humanity’s conscience, it should sculpt the image of an Armenian.”
“What distinguishes an Armenian’s conscience?”
“Vasily Belov and I will say the same thing about our peoples. And both of us will affirm our Self. But someone else must then say how my god differs from Vasily Belov’s god. What matters is that deep in our souls we are all very alike. In those depths that have not yet taken shape as images, have not yet revealed themselves. What I am saying is that we must move towards the universal, towards the depths.”
“Have I understood correctly: Armenian conscience is closer to conscience as such?”
“Yes. I am not a woman, not Russian, not an aristocrat; I was born in a village, yet I see Anna Karenina within me. Literary success lies in reaching the truth. It is what is about me. There is not much such literature in the world, but it is literature about me and has no other addressee. I think my literary successes and those of Armenian literature prove it. A Chinese reader will read it and say, ‘This is about me. I am Chinese, yet I understand it as though I had been born and raised in Armenia.’ There is a depth in the human soul where all the conflicting ‘ideas,’ as you call them, coexist. And that depth is above them all. For example, Christianity and Islam seem to seek each other’s destruction, but deep down there is the same aspiration, the same search for God, the desire to create something higher than oneself and to exist within what one has created. In one’s own history. The course of history has brought all totalising ideas to the human being’s feet, and that is beautiful.”
Even the national idea can be regarded as violence against a person if it dares to deify itself, to place itself above the individual’s well-being. There must be constant mutual accountability between the ideas of I and We, in terms of what better serves the affirmation of one’s own Self in eternity. The stronger the I, the stronger the We. The Russian word svoloch comes from svolakivat, ‘to drag together,’ and means the lower class: such-and-such a lord had so much ‘svoloch,’ four hundred of them, and none had a name. They were all Ivan’s ‘svoloch’; the person was forgotten. But history, time, broke those bonds and gave each person their name, made their Self absolute.
“It is interesting to think how people will cooperate. Before, they were told ‘you must,’ and they themselves knew they must. And they were ready to go to their deaths.”
“Yes, it is interesting how during the Second World War English aristocrats managed to do something together without losing their aristocratic character, their names or their past. So it is possible. Or the America of billionaires, where each has the wealth of a state. They can combine their efforts for shared interests while being together and separate. I hope every Armenian understands that they are nothing unless they voluntarily belong to the national community.”
Jews in Russian literature, for example, are each a unique great figure, yet together belong in some way to Jewish eternity. So it is possible. We Armenians scatter and will go on scattering, yet in something we remain, and at decisive moments of fate we will awaken and return to our homeland.
Just as for Jews Israel is a refuge, something fleeting, an image, a symbol, Armenia too will endure as a refuge in the space of history rather than as a goal. We will always be able to preserve some things so that at a cruel moment of history Armenians may remember they have a homeland. A place to flee to. A shelter. A root. I do not know the word.
Half of us is on the ground, half in the air, half in Los Angeles, half packing our things, yet we belong to one another, and that belonging gives us inner strength.
Ara NEDOLYAN
Novoye Vremya (New Times), 30 January 2003.