Our people’s intuition had reached a terrifying thought: our soil had grown old, could no longer bear our heroes’ feet, was giving way beneath them. It was only an intuition, unconfirmed by reality, or those confirmations were trifling incidents beside what would come to be called 1915. Our last battles were lost in crushing defeat; military geniuses became pitiful commanders; the last small bands of our fighters drowned in blood in the gorges; the flags that summoned new regiments were torn apart. And the splendour of dreams that had nourished generation after generation, by some grotesque sleight of hand, turned into a wretched reality: ten thousand versts of land and seven hundred thousand orphans. A condition, in other words, in which one wishes, involuntarily wishes, that the patient would die; and that wish is more than humane, because recovery will not make the patient well.
And glory to that inspired generation which, like God the Creator, made a homeland for us out of nothing. It was the glorious generation of Alexander Myasnikyan, Aghasi Khanjyan and Aramayis Yerznkyan, of Charents and Mahari, Kojoyan and Saryan, Toramanyan and Tamanyan, Acharyan and Abeghyan, Alexander Spendiaryan and Arshak Chobanyan—an elite regiment thrown into battle at our most tragic moment, when we might lose even our last opportunities to be a nation and a country. The tormented people apparently summoned the forces of its future as well; otherwise two decades could not have given us so many great figures. It was a heroic generation of vanguard fighters, and as with true vanguard fighters, its dense ranks reached our time thinned, wounded, mauled, torn apart, treacherously struck from behind—and, astonishingly, still inspired. Mahari was still on his feet and did not notice that he could barely stand. Such are people possessed by a single purpose. The purpose enchanted and drew him. His exhausted body struggled to keep up with his striving, then fell behind; then, somewhere in the fifties, his spirit left that treacherous body and for years soared bodiless towards its purpose. And it arrived, and bound great literature firmly to great patriotism. In those distant years when our dreams were being shattered, the god of poetry had whispered a great secret to Mahari: through literature we must reclaim what we cannot hold with regiments of warriors. Sometimes through “guerrilla warfare,” sometimes through feigned retreats, and finally through a brilliant battle, he wrested his Van from obscurity and restored it to his homeland. That Van of the great writer, and thus great patriot, Gurgen Mahari is now indestructible. It is not only a part of Armenian literature that can no longer be stolen, but a part of Armenia’s future reality as well. It is a launching ground towards the real Van. It is the valley drawn out of the great darkness of Western Armenia by Mahari’s light, which will draw to itself generation after generation groping in the dark.
That curly-haired young man, the Mahari of distant years, had the textbook “Meghraget” and his father’s pistol in his hands as he fled. He exchanged the pistol for bread, while the “Meghraget” of his childhood was carried away by the waters of the Bandimahu at Berkri. Then he took a sack of earth and brought it to us by difficult roads, to spread beneath the feet of us Arshaks who were coming to terms with our lot.
He never took advantage of the ringing atmosphere of oath-taking to recite solemn vows and become a patriot that way. He joked, mocked, laughed, ignored the ceremony, because recruits and those who have once betrayed take oaths, while he was an old pilgrim of Armenian patriotism’s arduous vow. He felt no need to adorn himself with patriotism; he felt the need to be freed from the heavy suffering of difficult patriotism.
Beneath his mask, beneath his mockery and laughter, is the ceaseless murmur of his longing, and the sum of those murmurs is a cry of pain and horror against all of us—all the guilty and innocent, foolish and wise, decent and presumptuous:
“Where is my irreplaceable one, where is my Homeland?”
Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, 16 July 1995.