— Mr Matevossian, do you think we can say today that Matevossian the writer is involved in politics?
— If I am involved in politics at all, my politics is very amateur. Very often I am guided by outward impressions alone. I belong to no movement, organisation or party, never have and never will. Even if a party managed to deceive me into believing that it alone embraced all the nation’s interests, I would still regard it with reservations and try not to subject my personal freedom to it. I cannot say that I engage in politics. If that impression arose from the conversation published in Soviet Armenia immediately before the session, from the paragraph in which I insisted that we must all rally round a strong-willed man—and in that instance the man was Vladimir Movsisyan—then I still believe we must gather round one person. The enemy must not be able to introduce the worm of discord among us. Our situation today is such that we must not play at parliament. Yet we do. Many words circulating in our vocabulary were not born here; they have been brought from civilised countries where every individual and family is protected, and they do not express at all the present condition of our shattered country. What I am saying is barbaric, but we could even hold demonstrations of support for those who have the qualities of a leader, a dictator, who could undertake to lead our people into tomorrow with as few losses as possible—a people who cannot shake off the urge to flee.
— Do you mean that Movsisyan had no bearing on what you said, that you were speaking of the idea of rallying round one person?
— Among yesterday’s public figures, naturally, Movsisyan would have been that organiser, Movsisyan first and foremost. Quite different young men, at their gatherings, see Movsisyans and more in themselves.
— Outside parliament there are differing opinions and assessments of the session’s work. How do you assess it?
— There were bound to be different opinions. Just as the popular imagination and the people’s collective feeling linked their salvation to the gods and heroes they created, here the people linked their hope of salvation to parliament. Yet parliament is flesh and blood of its people. Parliament goes round in circles with its people, shares their troubles and their hopes of a way out. Parliament is no greater than its people.
— You do not seem particularly enthusiastic about the changes in power. That impression comes from your interview in Soviet Armenia. Is it really so?
— At one time I intended to put together and publish a collection of those interviews. Then I saw that it should contain only interviews that had passed under my pen word by word. I do not consider spoken interviews mine unless I have at least edited them. (This interview was submitted to the author before publication.—E. B.) Nevertheless, some of my thoughts remain in the interview you mention, and I do not renounce them. What thoughts in it led you to that conclusion?
— The whole interview gave that impression.
— But there was no parliament then, no new government yet. Perhaps my dissatisfaction is with revolutions in general.
— You mean the movement?..
— Yes, dissatisfaction with the revolution, with the movement. If the question ever arises of creating a new party and joining it, only the conservatives would attract me. I simply do not accept revolutions. I think that after every revolution countries have been reduced to ruins and have regained their feet and their senses only decades later. The same happened to us; I mean not only Armenia but the Soviet Union too. Was what happened the result of movements, the “work” of organisations, or a collapse of its own accord? I do not know. I know only that it will take us decades to recover.
— A public figure from the Armenian diaspora said that if the Armenian National Movement were accepted by the peasantry, it would be an organisation with roots and strength. We know that the ANM lost in the villages; its candidates were not elected. As a peasant yourself, how do you explain that defeat, the failure to accept the ANM?
— I know that the district party committees had indeed become khanates in their localities, with the village as their estate. On that estate their influence was truly insurmountable. Usually I do not open my mouth to curse, and I have never uttered words of cursing. I said this simply so you would know I am aware of the roots of the causes. The peasantry has always been conservative. If you look at Armenian peasants’ participation in zemstvo elections—even without seeking other sources, making do with the figures in Armyansky Vestnik—you will see that our neighbouring peoples, especially the Georgians, were very active. The interests of Azerbaijani peasants were expressed by their beys; ours were almost indifferent. This time too, I think, they were indifferent for the last time. The upheavals have set them in motion; poverty and awareness of their interests will now draw them into politics. And God grant that something like a peasants’ party should arise, able to cushion the clash between the peasantry and the radically minded.
— The characters in your work are at odds with the Soviet system. The village’s harmony was disrupted during the years of Russian rule. This is reflected in your works and in the stories of Bakunts and Tumanyan. Now an opportunity has arisen to free ourselves from that Russian influence. Yet you seem, in contrast, to have adopted a conservative position. Why?
— In Bakunts’s work and mine and that of others, especially Vasily Belov and Rasputin, there is a reflection of the pressure of totalitarianism, which set us, as spokesmen for the village’s interests, against the system and the government. My lack of activity today is probably dictated by the concern I mentioned: every revolution, every movement, comes crashing down upon the peasantry again. In my sanctuary I prayed for the country, for a leader who would slowly, through reforms and without upheaval, take it into new times. So it is explained only by my fear that we should not lose the achievements we have, the level we have reached, the work already done. In short, that those half-ruined barns, the machinery that does not work, the broken tractors should be replaced gradually, rather than our losing even them.
— So you fear we may lose even what we have?
— Yes, we are already losing it, and I fear we will lose more. Unless the instinct for life takes hold of us... We should all feel that alarm, because the village is no longer the village Bakunts saw, or the one I saw. I apologise; I know those hard-working people, worn down by labour, still work with the old conscience. But as a whole the peasant has changed greatly. I do not want to use the word, but there is no avoiding it: the village is no longer the one in which we all placed our hopes. People have become corrupted.
— There are many parties in Armenia today. In your opinion, whom will the people follow—or rather, which party will be able to lead them?
— Perhaps I am an old man, or some form will not let go of me, has enclosed me in its mould and will not let me think freely about this. Perhaps. I think these things called parties are, in general, outdated categories, and they should not be the leaders of life. Every party in every age has suffered from one grave disease: party selfishness. When you turn the pages of history, Dashnaktsutyun seems to have spread its wings wide and might have said it was the nation’s party. But it too was not the party of the whole nation; it could not take all the nation’s interests beneath its wings. Whether the party you speak of will arise here, I do not know. Perhaps we should speak of parties taken together, of their cooperation and mutual tolerance. A truly precise word has arrived: a multiparty system. We must tolerate and accept one another, because only together can we embrace the unembraceable thing called life. No party and no individual—not even the thought of the greatest genius—can be more than a one-winged thing before the breadth of life. Whether it is Marx, Lenin or whoever, they can all touch only one edge of life for a moment. So long live the multiparty system! Long live the mutual tolerance and cooperation of many parties!
— Mr Matevossian, you have contradicted yourself. A moment ago you were speaking of the idea of “dictatorship,” and...
— In one case I started from the world’s experience in general; in the other, from Armenia’s present situation. Before my eyes rose our country, ruined by disaster, filled with refugees. Or perhaps an old image spoke within me again, a popular leader, a General Andranik?
— Can we say that this unclear view results from your not engaging in politics, or rather from being an amateur?
— I do not know. In a Russian writer’s work there is a little girl who trembles from the hatred people feel for one another. The hatred is not hers; people hate one another, but she stands beside them trembling, the hostility passes through her. I am in that position now: in this squabbling, every blow reaches me first.
— In that interview, when discussing the purity of theory, you said, “It is good that we took the path of creating pure socialism.” What did you mean: the socialism built here, or the socialism still to be built?
— As far as I remember, it must have concerned orthodoxy, Dostoevsky’s criticism of orthodox socialists; “socialism” could hardly have had another function in my system of thought. But if you raise the subject of socialism in general, long live socialism untainted by nationalism, which did not live even two days among us.
— Perhaps it is too early to say we are living through the hardest times today. They may still lie ahead. There are calls to seek help from one country or another. Take the disaster zone. We wait for outsiders to come and build houses. Meanwhile thousands of Armenian builders in the disaster zone do not want to build their own homes. The blame for thwarting its recovery today is ours alone...
— I agree entirely. When help is given, the losses exceed the gains. The people will again lose their identity, be alienated from their homeland and their concerns. If the earthquake had occurred in an independent Armenia and the government had been master of its country, the disaster zone would already have been restored. For me, long live the government that turns not to aid but to summoning its own strength.
— Mr Matevossian, in that interview you said we have no national programme or goal. What programme, what goals did you mean? What should that programme be like?
— All of us, every day, every hour... If we have an idle day when we do not remember Van, Cilicia, our past, it is something like salvation, a day saved for each of us. We constantly burn with these concerns and have no way out. At best, in a flight of thought, I imagine that perhaps something like a federation might arise in the future: Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan. It is humanism speaking within me, the poet speaking, not the political scientist. That is what I meant. Give me a national prospect and I, a poet with modest abilities, will grow into a Tumanyan, become Tumanyan. Because Tumanyan had a national prospect before him, an Armenia saved for tomorrow. It is no accident that our cultural titans were born precisely when an actual Armenia did not exist, but the prospect of Armenia did.
— We have formed a very uncertain impression of your political views from your literary works and interviews. Your clear political views are not visible in the press or elsewhere. I will go further: one of the nation’s best writers “did not speak” during the movement, then suddenly decided to become a deputy.
— The first time I sat down to write a speech to deliver in the square, I wrote what others are saying today, two and a half years later. I wrote: “Dear people, unfortunately the leader of our country has spoken to us in Turkish.” Could that be said? It could not. It meant taking away prospects, condemning us, leading us towards escalation. I saw us in a position where any movement would sink us deeper into the swamp. I favoured absolute stillness, but did not have the courage to say: let us not strike. I did not have the courage, I was afraid to say: do not go out to demonstrate, all of this is directed against us. That was my opinion. Others may consider it wrong, but that is how I thought.
— Now you say you were right to remain silent, but perhaps your words were needed then?
— Now they say a writer expresses the nation’s aspirations. They say good writers—I do not share the opinion that I am the nation’s best writer—are those who take the words from the people’s mouths. That is, the writer says a day earlier what the people themselves were going to say. Tumanyan and Charents were like that. In other interviews I have said that I simply burned with my people’s pain and stood still with them. I was not the one who spoke the wise word. At best I saw such terrifying scenes that sometimes I thought of going before the people and leading them in retreat, in flight from this country. Could that be made public? It could not. Today too, this is the reality: on one side they have opened the exit doors; on the other they shake their coat-tails and frighten people.
— Do you mean that Silva Kaputikyan and Zori Balayan were right when they returned from meeting Gorbachev and did not tell the people the truth?
— If they had told the truth, the clash that took place in Baku would have taken place in Armenia. Am I now to feel guilt on my conscience for not leading the people into that clash?
— You spend day after day at the session. Do you find time to write?
— No, none at all. My ears are full of clever and foolish noise. Sometimes I see gifted people who make magnificent speeches. Everything else has become noise in my ears, and I do not know how long it will take for my ears to clear, and the divine tremor, God’s page... Do you remember Tumanyan’s quatrain?
You are an unknown poet, unseen until today,
Without words, you pour out song through radiant glances.
And I, let us say, am a wondrous, fortunate Reader,
Who reads these songs so easily and so deeply.
How much more must my ears and eyes be cleansed before I can read the divine text again!
— Do you mean you have regretted becoming a deputy to some extent?
— Yes. I would still have done what I had to do. I would have had contact with people. Five or so would do a good deed, like heroes, give the village a tractor. Those were the possibilities I was thinking of. I could have done that much simply as a writer.
— Various committees have been formed in parliament. Did you not wish to work on one of them?
— I could have worked in many places, but at literature’s expense. I could have served on the biosphere committee, and I was nominated, but withdrew at the last minute. I am glad Samvel Shahinyan was elected. I could have served on the agricultural committee. There is one committee that has not been created, a committee dealing solely with refugees. I must still fight for it; such a committee must be created.
— Do you agree with the government’s political course and the positions it puts forward?
— It is a realistic policy. The government cannot enter into confrontation. We must put ourselves in our government’s position. We must not forget the circumstances we are in, never forgetting our losses either... To put it briefly, our homeland is in Turkey. We must forget neither that nor the “misunderstandings” that may occur. The republic could be trampled underfoot in a single day. Provocations could arise. In this sense too, I truly stand with my government. And if, say, Levon Ter-Petrosyan finds some expression in my place, my heart simply contracts with delight. For instance, when the word “process” was found for independence.
— But proclaiming the beginning of a process does not seem quite right. Perhaps it should simply have been the process?
— I do not know; perhaps they will explain that themselves. I really am a man who is not moved by beautiful, lofty epithets. I am not that poet. Those songs do not attract me. Though the Sasun people’s songs of longing and exile draw me strongly, I am already a father, to some extent a father to the nation too.
— When the Declaration was adopted, honestly, I could not believe that we had broken away from the Russian Empire so easily, and...
— If I were Russia, I would not let go so easily either. In the sultan’s diaries—I mean Abdul Hamid—it says that the tsar’s capital investments in the Caucasus trouble the sultan: he puts money in, that is, takes possession of the region, creates an empire. A historical union has arisen that is very difficult, impossible, to dismantle. I think the end will be good. Something bad truly has collapsed. The present losses terrify us, the alarm is in us all, but we are going towards... towards America, towards Europe. Europe is coming from one side; from the other we are going to meet it.
— And the Karabakh question?
— The Centre will not give us Karabakh, if we pin our hopes on it. The Centre will not allow a hair to fall from Karabakh’s head, nor will it give Karabakh to us. Alongside Karabakh, Azerbaijan will still face a Talysh question, Lezgin and Kurdish questions, and many others. Karabakh is a card in the Centre’s hand, with which it strikes both us and Azerbaijan over the head. If we enter negotiations and reach agreement, both of us will be freed from a great pain on this road forward.
— In these difficult times, art and literature seem to have been forgotten.
— No, you know, there are good young men. Just as, say, the genocide was destructive for Tumanyan but a furnace, a kiln, for Charents, firing him. So it is now. There are young people who have not forgotten literary work. Very good pieces appear in the literary press.
— Mr Matevossian, how should the land question be resolved? How do you envisage its solution?
— With great difficulty, immense difficulty. You cannot say easily and calmly, with a lord’s generosity: let us return the land to the peasant and be done. What if there is no land? Return the whole Aparan plain and it is enough for two farmers. What about the rest of the peasantry? Professor Manasaryan is right to insist that we must cherish a healthy collective farm, a healthy state farm, and all the other good forms. We must try them all.
— While preserving what is good in what we have, should we seek other forms?
— The collective farm is a dictatorship, they say: let us dismantle it. But what of Chartar, of Karabakh? What if that form of community kept the people tied to their land there? If a group of people managed to get along and live reasonably well, why break it up? We must support them and always leave the initiative to the people in each locality. There can be no single answer here. We are a land-poor country; we may even declare the land national property. We must start from the fundamental question of human freedom and look at the possibilities. Otherwise, say, Sevan goes to the people of Sevan, the fertile Kalinino plateau to its own people—but what about me? What about you?
The limits of your freedom extend to the limits of mine. The land question is a separate question. We will talk about it another time.
Interview conducted by Edik BAGHDASARYAN
Republic of Armenia, 13 October 1990.