Before entering these times of war and politics, Vazgen Sargsyan was a good writer. Word, thought, character and action on the white page were so obedient and precise before him, moved so well and carried you along with them, as on a battlefield led by a good commander. He did not squander emotion. Every word, like a trained soldier, was an important and necessary part of the central idea; every character performed its duty superbly. And on the white page our twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old celebrated the joy of victory exactly like a commander who had won a battle. That is to say, Vazgen Sargsyan was a very good writer, a gift granted to only a few at that age. And very good writers can be very good commanders, just as good commanders become good writers: no testimony is needed. This means that the joy of writing, of literature, the delight of telling and building a story, is an inseparable quality of every rising great figure. Words do not die beneath their pens; stories do not die on their tongues—they are born and play as the living deed itself. Nor does the deed die in their hands: it is born, established, strengthened, given to words, to telling, to history. They are fortunate births; in the literal sense they are heirs to logos, the capitalised Word. Their word is deed, and their deed is word.
There is something thought but unspoken, lurking like a night owl in dark souls: that the first to plunge into disintegration and war were those who had failed in their fields of peaceful work. We must say at once, “That is not so,” and seal the mouths of those dark holes. It is not so; and of Vazgen, it is absolutely not so.
It is another matter that those fields of peaceful work did not satisfy even the most successful among us. A heavy nightmare often besieged us; there were moments of mad impulse when you wanted to leave the pen on your desk and rush into the street with a weapon in your hand. What was that? Perhaps your foreboding of approaching catastrophe; perhaps the coming collapse was making itself felt inside us; perhaps it was a desperate protest against our condemnation, in which we had no complicity. Before our lives began, without asking us, it had been written that we must live half-lives, that our labour was aboard a ship destined to sink. All of us could grasp this, but few immediately accepted the challenge of catastrophe and rebirth: those who saw and heard what they saw and heard. That was not the virtue of those few pioneers, just as it was not the fault or failing of many of us, almost all of us, that we delayed. We delayed because we did not see what we saw, became deaf and did not hear what we heard. We did not hear because we refused to believe that fate itself was knocking at our door.
These things would become fault and virtue later, when the new reality, when the full weight of victory and defeat, pressed upon, stained, distorted and simply shattered many of us, and for many became a formative hammering, as red copper is cold-hammered into a statue. They would be labelled fault and virtue later, when our prosecutors donned bishops’ cowls and judged the hour of war and ordeal by the laws of peace and eternity.
In Vazgen, our homeland’s literature was sending into its new reality—its politics, diplomacy, state-building and army-building, its war and peace—the very best it could offer. The man who would be hammered into shape like pure copper; the man born brimming with the delight of victory and joy; the man for whom spiritual rust was contraindicated, rust in the guise of the protester, the complainer, the one always blaming someone else, always blaming you. The man who radiated victory and joy when, on the playing field, he somehow escaped defeat even by a little cheating; when he loaded slate into freight wagons with a Turkish friend and worked up a good sweat; when he had to swim well; when he was to earn a full two hundred and seventy roubles a month; when his opponent was foolish; when his enemy surpassed him in intelligence and strength. Before all of it, before the whole world, he stood with the delight of victory and joy. Delight was the possession of his soul and body. He could sweep even an opponent, even an enemy, into it.
This is no confession before a great martyr. It is a clear recognition today of our need for that great individual, that great optimist, who ought to be standing in our national arena of state and politics today, and is not. His living presence would have given us an entirely different bearing towards one another and the world. His absence fractures our speech, and our step is unsteady.
Yes, faced with treachery, he went wild and turned grey—turned to ash. Yes, he was a man who used his elbows. But what accomplished individual has not been a man of strong elbows? Your Christ and mine? Your Dro and mine? Nzhdeh? Mesrop Mashtots? Kemal Atatürk? Or one of the celebrated generals of the Great Patriotic War? Through simple human vanity and through our mass of ill-wishers and ill will, they force their way with their elbows. We compel them to use their elbows, because in our souls the generals are not they: we are.
We are all generals, we are all saviours, we are all Mantashovs, we are all catholicoi. We drive our ordinary bread-eaters’ lives through society as Mantashov, scattering charity and coins, carried himself to morning service; as the catholicos carries himself above the heads of obedient believers; as generals parade through petrified ranks.
We are all Paul the Apostle. We invite the fallen, the maimed, the disabled to lean on us, to be set right through us, to take refuge in us. They are now our subjects, the inhabitants of our kingdom, and over them we are king and lord. We make them our pedestal, and from our heights can congratulate ourselves that we love them, these fallen, maimed, disabled people, that our kingdom is a kingdom of conscience and compassion.
But those who do not stand obediently before our magnificent generals’ parade are already enemies, members of the enemy army. Those who are not disabled, maimed or fallen are already misguided and lost. We find it difficult, unspeakably difficult, to accept that we are not Mantashov, that Mantashov is not us; that we are not the apostle, that Paul the Apostle is not us. We subjugate with unspeakable delight and submit with unspeakable displeasure.
And so I give praise. Before the memory of a great man, I give thanks and praise to his comrades and comrades-in-arms, who, conquering themselves, became a living passageway for the hero and public figure’s advance. In him they saw themselves, fresh and renewed; themselves, energetic; themselves, youthfully brave; themselves, sober-minded, sensible and resistant to illusions, yet also making illusions material, turning them into real strength, as spirit takes on flesh, as flesh is strengthened by spirit.
Praise to us for being able to honour, to raise up and to believe; for calling and believing that our best will rise from among us and through us.