Our national past of a century ago repeated itself in our own days. That return of the past seemed bound to diminish—and in many cases did diminish—the passionate, engaged interest of literary circles and the wider public in that past itself, in its literature, even in its documentary record. The new, relived past did not need to be presented through intermediaries to those of us experiencing it again today, and many names and figures who were meant to be the principal characters of the day’s history moved into the margins of contemporary history. It seemed that Khachik Dashtents belonged in the margins too, but that did not happen. His Khodedan and The Call of the Ploughmen, a panorama of our national life from 1890 to 1920, more documentary than fiction and more artistic than documentary, seemed destined to have done their old soldier’s duty and withdrawn from the battlefield. Yet they have not withdrawn; they have lost none of their lustre.
That means Dashtents created his own artistic reality out of our national reality of that time: a reality whose encounter brings only joy and delight. The same could not be said of our present-day encounter with the reality of a century ago.
Every encounter with this man, on any occasion—through his magnificent reawakenings of Shakespeare, his poetry or the epic narratives mentioned above—has filled you only with joy and pride: in your own Armenian language, your own history, your own upright stance before your reality and your national life. And it is natural that today’s bewildered person should wish to have beside him the noblest, most splendid and most upright among the many figures of his past, as Khachik Dashtents was.