On the Eightieth Anniversary of His Birth
It seemed that he was someone endowed with a certain gift for prose, afraid of troubled times and of troubling the times; that he sat somewhere neither very far from life nor very close to it, secretly looked at life from behind his spectacles so that no one would notice him looking, found certain incidents neither very painful nor quite painless upon which stories could be built, and without love or hatred wrote his tales about the Armenian King Pap, David of the Ploughman’s family, war, the building of a town and the cow Tsovan. It even seemed that he was not himself of life, or even looking at life, but an observer, observing it. Observing and making his stories, which were merely enclosed stories, rather than a battle against life and for life.
Yet he was constantly at the crossroads of theoretical disputes and vital clashes in literature and life, and his works are not the impartial testimonies of a chronicler but moulded from his unalloyed hatred and gentle love. That these works seem like the impartial testimony of a detached observer speaks of only one thing: Stepan Zoryan was a powerful master of epic prose. If Armenian prose discovers points of contact with the worldwide standard of prose as such, it does so almost solely through Zoryan’s work. Before Zoryan, with minor exceptions, the notion of action and character suffocated in the lukewarm swaddling of adjectives, judgements and poetic embellishment, unable to undo its bonds. Today, after Zoryan and with the standard he established, it has become entangled in a slightly more intricate trap: stylisation. That stylisation seems beautiful, seems a new stage in the development of our prose, but in reality it is a siren’s song, and to succumb to it is the certain death of epic prose.
Anyone and everyone can wrest its rightful glory from Zoryan’s prose, but only for a day or two: the crown returns again to its lawful owner, Stepan Zoryan, author of “Tsovan,” “War,” “Hanes,” “A Winter Night,” “King Pap,” “Ghachan,” “The Engineer’s Mother,” “The Fence,” “The Railway,” “The Story of a Life,” “A Book of Memories” and “The Apple Orchard.” Glory, too, needs nourishment, and the bird of glory will circle, furrow after furrow, behind this tireless ploughman of our native literature for a long time yet.
He brought into literature not the occupation of his farming compatriots—each in his proper place—but their farmer’s conscience and serious attitude towards their work. Each time he sat before the white page with the believing seriousness with which peasants solemnly plough: do not deceive, so as not to be deceived; give all you can and receive all there is; at least do not deceive, so as not to acquire the habit. And words never betrayed him: every word came and sat in precisely its place, thus ceasing to be a word and becoming a person, an object, a movement—true literature, which the supposedly contemporary currents and subtle undercurrents of the times could not bend or deflect. The current, the undercurrent, the time are your own self as a contemporary writer; fidelity to your writer’s self is fidelity to the spirit of the time. Zoryan was always faithful to himself and always profoundly contemporary, even when he was considered a “fellow traveller.”
His Brother Martin is the author himself; his David of the Ploughman’s family is the author himself. King Varazdat is an honest, somewhat simple native of Karakilisa; his princes grow angry and astonished exactly like his grandfathers; his Pavstos is a Karakilisa intriguer, just as in our epic the princes of Sasun—Sanasar and Baghdasar, Mher and David—are Sasun shepherds and farmers.
Zoryan populated our literature with a great army of people like himself: taciturn, hardworking, honest, thoughtful labourers. These were his loves. And with a great multitude of people who defile the world God created: these were his hatred.
Zoryan lived a fairly long life, yet saw none of his works die. With negligible losses they accompanied their creator throughout his beautiful life; when his weary body bowed to the earth, they continued beating their wings towards future generations. Fifty or sixty years is a good trial period for prose. In the sixties of our century, he believed in literature and, with his “Book of Memories,” created portraits of his predecessors, the great and lesser benefactors of our culture. He created them with his own deep respect and gentle love. Only someone who believed in our future reality and the power of its literature could speak of predecessors in that way.
Three years ago Zoryan died, and suddenly we noticed that Isahakyan, Demirchyan, Shirvanzade, Tumanyan, Teryan were gone, had died… They had lived in Zoryan.