If we are at all capable of mastering our passions and obsessions, then Vahagn Davtyan conducted his life as a man, a public figure and a poet according to the law of the golden ratio, so familiar to architects.
His relations with people and events arose from the golden ratio or found their way back to it.
No expert or scholar can testify to his weakness as a scholar; no poet can say that his elemental force was less fierce; no editor can claim to have published a bolder newspaper or journal; no one can boast of having been more sensitive to personal or national pain. And yet everyone — all of us — agrees: more learned than our most learned, bolder than our boldest, more abundant than our fullest torrent, he never, anywhere, on any occasion, destroyed either his right bank or his left.
The constant presence of peaceful strength did not allow him to become a rebel or an insurgent. Rather, beneath the shelter of his great elders, his splendid people and his vision of that people, he cherished and revered everything that gave this people’s republic a form harmonious with the nation’s historical mission: two successful lines by an unknown writer, the growing stature of the young Armenian generation, the curves of arches, a singer’s records, or the integrity of some official.
He and his generation were condemned to spiritual barrenness; they were to leave a spiritual desert behind them. So it had been decreed from above, for the tyrants of thought and armed force had from the outset allotted them only a presence in the margins of their book. In Charents’s words, they were to embroider the darkness of the sky:
— As a girl of genius
Might embroider the darkness of the sky.
But they — that Charents, that Paruyr, that Hamo, Vahagn, Silva, that Shiraz, and the entire generation — planted and brought into bloom a spiritual orchard.
Like our ancient manuscript illuminators, they had been called upon to embellish the main text. Yet they made the margin itself into substance: the faceless, colourless homeland of Armenia, the nameless, faceless human being. They took shelter in that very margin, and the great book of the past seventy years is precious today precisely because of its margins.
And glory to him and his generation.
His restrained, powerful, clear-headed presence never once allowed any of us to open our mouths and crown him with words of homage. Only now, taking advantage of his silence, let us say:
What a vast, what a black void is the place he has left behind — the place of the poet and public figure, the refuge of our entire cultural inheritance and of every living tremor.