In the long-standing struggle between the West and Russia, the eternal struggle of “I” and “we”, in which the “I” was adopted by the West while the “we” was from the outset the fate of every Easterner; in the struggle of the imperial ideologies of collectivism and individualism, of nationalism and internationalism, in which both, through their denials, tended towards violence and tyranny — with their Armenian homeland they were compelled, with his Armenian homeland Aksel Bakunts was compelled, to remain in the camp of “we”, Russia, collectivism, the East, internationalism. He was compelled to submit himself to that demand of the homeland, of homeland-making, which is no less a violence than any other. And even if that camp were destined for crushing defeat, nightmare and darkness, in Charents’s words, to embroider the darkness of the homeland’s night.
Together with his homeland, he had to put to the test, in himself and through himself, all that orthodox apostleship of his time. He had to deny life in itself, self-sufficient, independent life, and surrender to the higher imperative of the idea; reject the “I” and the whole world of yesterday’s “I”, give the “I” over to the social mass, and in the new world found his writer’s world from that mass and through it. Of the whole past of himself, his homeland and the world, he was to remember only the myth of the building of Babel’s tower, in order to circumvent the unavoidable: the failure of the new tower-building.
All this they did. “I” and “we”, the human being and community, idea and reality, nationalism and internationalism, pressure and eruption: all of it tried and tested its authenticity through Bakunts’s literature, was documented and affirmed by his stamp. Often, even when it appeared in the guise of reality, it was punished and banished from his book’s bounds, because reality itself is often false.
Through the work of Alexander Bakunts — fighter and agronomist, modern enlightener and scholar, nationalist and internationalist, faithful founder of the new tower-building who, through his writer’s calling and literary achievement, brought down what he himself had founded — the tense, tragically heroic epoch of the First World War, genocide, revolution, civil wars, healing and rebirth forms a true panorama. Each episode of it bent and took shape through the effort and suffering of all its sons. There is uncorrupted sorrow over the destruction of the old world, pure and innocent hope that the new world rising and straightening itself will be better, bitter laughter at the vice that led the doomed to destruction, and love filled with smiles and tenderness for everything and everyone who are passive, almost vegetal, almost nonparticipating participants in this life, as though they were the earth itself, the soil and ploughed field themselves, rather than even the ploughman.
Faithful as the first Christians, with a puritan’s faithful integrity, he was to separate his own and his homeland’s past, banish the past from the present. But his negation became affirmation, his renewal became an oath, his rejection an invitation to draw closer. He filled his country’s present with the past. Through that very negation, that very rejection, even through mere mention, he, they, granted full citizenship to their own and their homeland’s yesterday. Something very similar had happened two thousand years before him and them: they gave God resurrection and eternity by killing him.