Despite the fairly active presence of our magnificent seven, Paruyr Sevak was a man with a calling, a man who was awaited. He was called as a son who cherished the honour of his home, as a teacher and master teacher to those same seven and to many other, very different groups of seven: to free the time of his country and theirs from the stigma of barrenness in word and deed.
No one after Charents, no one else, spoke about our word as much as Sevak did. That means he was called to transform minds: he summoned his fellow workers in the world of words to their feet, stirring the whole free world of language to rebellion.
Sevak was called, and he came. He was a man people were expecting: with only half a word from him, society would hear the breadth and fullness of the voice it had been waiting for. He was a man people had awaited: the country that had lost its word and its freedom wanted to find its voice through its son, and it found that voice—or believed wholeheartedly that it was finding it, because it thirsted to find it.
He did not disappoint. With the fresh breath of a pure breeze, he entered all our homes and public squares. Across the entire Armenian world and the vast empire, he shook us awake, called on us to shake ourselves awake, and revealed our power to overcome the stupor of submission and death, to take charge of our fate and fulfil our calling as free human beings.
Paruyr would have been only seventy-five today, and he would have been here. But renewers like him, whose effort and suffering, whose anxiety and protest, history and prophecy were directed towards steering our ship of fools away from destruction, we expelled from that doomed time, from that ship of fools. The country of the mutilated word, the word subjected to violence and defeated by it, collapsed. That country is not their country; Paruyr Sevak is not its inhabitant.