Among Paruyr’s predecessors, perhaps only Tumanyan and Charents laid so many obligations upon literature: what the word must be and what it must not be. Their message, exhortation, call, the passion in all of it, and often their almost constant anger are more than understandable today. Sons of a history of defeat, with defeat an enduring presence in their own past and their people’s—while the prospects of time lay open before other peoples, almost every nation, and behind their own lay only the black, plague-ridden desolation of the past—they sought, through Armenian, to charge the individual human being, the Armenian, with confidence in forward movement and the future. They rightly saw the calling of the Armenian Word in this; any other view was, for them, heresy, a flaw, feeble-mindedness.
All who worked in language, history and action were called to bring forth and send into the future a human being, an Armenian: upright, fearless, disowning not a single step of a two-thousand-year journey, sharing the horizons ahead with the powerful as an equal among equals.
They, and Paruyr after them and before us, succeeded in their mission. Our human being stands before the coming days in an entirely different posture from the one possible without them; our people brought forth entirely different sons from those they would have brought forth in their absence.
Paruyr swept through his decade like a storm, like a simoom, managing to enter every or almost every home and soul, driving the stupor from our homes and souls and awakening us all before the calamity to come.
The presence of Paruyr the man, Paruyr the poet, Paruyr the publicist, philologist and historian was his generation’s good fortune and disquiet together. With him present, scholars and scholarship, the public figure and statehood, poetry and the word found the strength to display an entirely different energy, effort and devotion from what they would have shown—God forbid—without his swift, whirlwind ascent.