Mushegh Galshoyan was a man awaited, a man people were waiting for in our social, political and artistic life. He was the one we had been waiting for, and his untimely loss was truly a loss to our national life and to the life of the whole Soviet Union.
The need in our days for the handsome, principled, intelligent Aksel, cut short in his ascent; the stony, dry, harsh land that yields so much stone that half its area must be given over to piles of stones cleared away to let the grain breathe, a land where livestock are already gnawing roots in June; the crumbling, abandoned village, signalling a great collapse that became the impending catastrophe in Artsakh; history, distorting yesterday’s faces and events behind our distorting lens and placing an heir to that distorted outlook in our present reality; the citizen losing his identity, his national feeling and his morality, estranged from his country, building villages and towns only for them to fall apart and already poised to flee—all awaited their prosecutor and advocate, their witness and historian, the one who would tell us about them in their own language.
He came, and was heard and loved.
Miro of the Gorge and the clouds over Mount Maruta, flowering stones and Bovtun, the publication of The Call of the Ploughmen with a magnificent epilogue—and, as the true epilogue, a city council deputy’s speech: an accusation and an injunction.
The Turk will be there; everyone in the world has their own Turk. Look to yourself.
The earthquake will come. Do not build your house to collapse.
There are no free nations. In your captivity, do not become a serf, and let what you build in your country not be the work of a slave. Through your work, become master over your master.
He came to bring about our moral rebirth, and to entrust weapons and the homeland only to our moral integrity.
He left, and left us grieving. Truly a man who was awaited, truly a fortunate man.