No one but Paruyr Sevak can answer who Paruyr Sevak was:
…Life mocks Shakespeare
With its tragic dramas…
While we — you and I… play at art,
And… with such conviction
That even Cervantes’s hero did not possess.
Paruyr Sevak was the struggle made flesh for a serious and whole, uncorrupted and power-bearing word, and the embodied anxiety over the collapse of which we all became witnesses and victims.
He knew that a corrupted word, a corrupted idea, would take revenge like a wounded beast. With calls, exhortations and the lash, he pulled and drove us all towards the sources of free, uncorrupted, whole, living speech.
After Charents and before Márquez, after Charents, before Márquez and alongside his large, Union-wide cohort of the great Thaw, he was the one among us who saw this truth clearly: the surest way to kill a human being, a country, socialism, is bad literature.
“In the beginning was the Word” was not an idle biblical turn of phrase for him, but a faithful acceptance of the mission of the great word that, millennia before us and for entire millennia, through the evangelists’ pens created Christ the God and, through Christ the God, led whole peoples and epochs; and that a thousand years before us, through the hand of the great Ferdowsi, recorded the word’s creative mission: “By thirty years of effort I revived Persian, and from my Persian Iran arose.”
Paruyr’s taut effort was filled to the brim with that awareness of himself and his word, of us and the word of us all, and he managed to draw us all taut. With his arrival, his fifteen-year resounding passage, bursting like a spring-bearing wind into every home and soul, he made the word, all our expectations of the word, the image of past, present and future within our word — that is, the image of our God at the head of our march — part of public life. He, or all of us through his pioneering work and his unsettling presence that gave us no rest, made culture a component of the life of the whole society.
This happened because each and all of us hold a firm conviction: the defeat of countries and armies is preceded by the defeat of their cultures. Like believers in Muhammad, culturally strong nations contemplate amid an uncultured, unbelieving mass, and defeat — not defeat, but slaughter — is inevitable.
Paruyr was the concentrated, profound understanding of this reality.
He was the young man we had been waiting for. On no other occasion did the world of the Armenian language grow so instantly into a great hall breathing love and dignified pride as it did with his arrival.
There was the great Saryan, the great Khachaturian, the great Saroyan, Bagramyan and others, but he was the man we were waiting for: he was to gather all of them, and many more of his own and other peoples, around him before the great collapse, in the hope of preventing it.
He was loved, revered while alive; he became part of the spiritual world of each and all of us. On no other occasion did any of us draw such an immense procession of mourners behind him. He created himself from our expectations and became an inseparable part of our shared life today.
His living presence at seventy-five would only have swelled the ranks of the upright, the lofty, the unbroken who exist today also through the tireless efforts of Sevak, who died at forty-seven.
18 June 1999.