A very well-known Moscow official responsible for cinema recently came to Yerevan. At the airport he got into the car assigned to him and entered the city accompanied by those sent specially to meet him. In Moscow too, the emissary had been escorted to the airport. In Yerevan they attentively, with special care, took him up to his assigned luxury suite in a first-class hotel and put him into the bed prepared especially for him. He drank cognac kept for forty years especially for him, ate Sevan trout, a few of which were still being preserved in Lake Sevan especially for this official, looked at Mount Ararat, inspected the ruins of Garni’s pagan temple, ate and drank again, then assembled Armenian film-makers to say that Sergei Parajanov’s “The Colour of Pomegranates” was no good, and that the peasants in another film were not Armenians. From other Armenian films he knew what Armenian peasants were like, while the makers of this film, who had brought their fathers, uncles and themselves into cinema, did not know what Armenian peasants ought to be like. Hence they had filmed Sicilians, not Armenians. Then, with charming infatuation, the official appealed to the Armenian film workers: “Comrades, have you really not noticed the beauty of Lake Sevan until now? Comrades, make a beautiful film about Lake Sevan, and here is a title I propose: ‘The Waves of Sevan.’” Afterwards, to send the well-fed, self-satisfied body of this official, who had eaten well, drunk well and slept well, back to Moscow, his retinue carried him and laid him not in a coffin, as in Leo Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer,” but in the aeroplane seat specially reserved for him. The plane that brought him irretrievably spoiled so much precious oxygen; he himself wasted so much state and personal money—and merely said that the film “The Waves of Sevan” should be made. Yet without his saying so, people already knew that Sevan’s waves came and went, and came and went beautifully.
Now I, an author who has published only one little book, find myself in that official’s position. If I cannot say intelligent things, I must at least try to be sincere, so that tomorrow I am not ashamed of myself, and serious—as serious as the roubles taken from the people and allotted to my trip.
I am to speak about stylisation. And since it seems to me that stylisation is the certain death of literature, and I cannot simply announce something so weighty at once, I want to begin a little further away.
Among Hovhannes Tumanyan’s early works is a story called “From the Days of Famine.” The Lori peasant—let us call him a man of Dsegh, after the writer’s birthplace—works, sees only his own soil, and feels with the back of his head the dry sky above him that promises no rain. He prays to his sky and cherishes his soil with unfailing love. But something very bad happens: the earth and sky betray him. It is truly bad, because this man of Dsegh placed his hope only in the soil beneath his nose. Worse still, drought has struck the villages across the gorge too, with which, yes, secretly even from himself, he had associated his hopes. That is not yet the end of the world, for the world is large and reaches the Shirak fields beneath Aragats, fertile fields which, he believes, are never under drought’s dominion because they are under the moist breezes of kindly Mount Aragats. And the man of Dsegh, ashamed of himself, deeply ashamed—because the man of Shirak is not responsible for Dsegh’s drought—takes a horse and sets out for the edge of the great world he knows. But the terrible thing happens: halfway there he meets starving people fleeing Shirak’s drought to Dsegh. To both the man of Dsegh and the man of Shirak it is unbelievable, because life cannot be so cruel as to bring drought to the entire world they know between Shirak and Dsegh.
The story ends like this: someone brings news that the world is larger than they imagine, and from the distant towns and villages of that great world, wagons of bread are coming for the starving Armenians. They do not want to believe the messenger, because they themselves were to produce their own bread. They have not done so because God did not will it; therefore this is their end. And having no other way out, they are forced to believe there is a Russia rich in bread, whose wealthy Armenians have sent bread for them.
The story was written eighty years ago. Somewhere within those eighty years, the Armenian peasant’s world expanded into the globe, on which stands the powerful Soviet state. The sense of one great common homeland is the most noticeable change in the Armenian’s psychology during our fifty years: he produces bread everywhere except Shirak and the village of Dsegh. The point is that the reassuring sense of a great common homeland also revealed its other, very bad face: irresponsibility for the soil beneath one’s own feet. The peasant lost the sense of his own plot, his attentive love for the very soil on which he lives. Bread is produced somewhere in the great Soviet Union, and hail in Dsegh or drought in Shirak does not concern today’s man of Dsegh or Shirak. The hail and drought do not strike the field that ought to be the result of the earth and peasant’s mutual love and interdependence; hail falls upon some even hostile expanse, and the peasant’s wages, held in the state’s safe, do not get wet or spoil but remain dry. Dry flour will come from some part of our great state. Yet we at least know that in many cases this flour comes not from some part of our state but from abroad, in exchange for its weight in gold. So the matter concerns more than the man of Dsegh. On a section of a state farm in the Chelyabinsk region, where our group of pedagogical institute students worked, the machine operators sat down to play durak and failed to notice it was time to mow the field. Later snow fell on three thousand hectares of wheat that had been cut but not gathered, and the operators continued their game, now with perfectly clear consciences, because snow had fallen for reasons beyond their control.
When did this hostility towards the soil begin? One could speak of hostility towards work in general, but to avoid ranging too widely, let us speak only of the soil. This estrangement between the land and its cultivator probably began in the thirties, deepened considerably in the fifties and became alarming in the past decade. As the country became civilised, the old dependent love of the soil should have grown into a reverence for nature, an inalienable part of Soviet civilisation. Instead, it first became bluster towards nature and then changed into open hostility, a compulsory supplement to the forcible civilising of a backward country. It was also a consequence of our inflexible policy towards the countryside. Today’s Armenia has lost one-third of its old pastures and one-third of its arable land, although it now has as many rural inhabitants as before Sovietisation, plus mechanisation. Be that as it may, today we confront the fact of the peasant’s hostility towards the soil.
But if we leaf through the chronicle of Soviet Armenian literature, we will confront a shamelessly beautiful lie: that the peasantry befriended the soil as separate individuals before, and now befriends it collectively. Literature is the chronicle of a people’s hopes and anxieties. Our literature of the thirties conveys to today’s generation something of the anxieties and hopes of Spanish fascism and Spanish democracy, but does it convey even a couple of chords of those anxieties that today are more than audible and were born in the thirties? How can we respect that deaf and blind literature? And why should tomorrow’s generation respect our deaf and blind literature of today, which has sworn not to remove the cotton from its ears or open its eyes?
If in the work of a writer standing far from revolution the revolutionary leader saw every strength and weakness of his revolution—which was not that writer’s revolution—it means the writer took life in its whole breadth and every fold of its depth. That is the only way to create literature, and thus he whispered into the leader’s ear about his revolution’s weaknesses and the paths to victory. What do we do instead?
We expel from life every component whose presence and analysis would put us in a disconcerting position, take this sterilised life for description and turn it into novellas and stories. The material does not resist us, because all its resisting sinews have been removed; it yields easily, as gelded horses yield easily to a circus trainer. I would not say we deliberately embellish, decorate, beautify our writing and give it a saleable appearance; no. Stylisation appears as a quality of working on and “overcoming” impoverished material. Why, when stylisation comes up, do we first recall works on historical themes? Because even the most attentive investigations do not give authors working on history a complete knowledge of their material, just as no unfamiliar country is fully accessible to any tourist. Thus, for reasons beyond his control, the author working on historical material also takes an impoverished life, which stylises itself. Why is war writing composed directly at the front so truthful and so unbeautiful, while the same authors’ post-war writing is so beautifully false? Because those authors have lost the details of life that were the very essence of those earlier days. Why can an Armenian writer, and a fairly gifted one, not write about his people’s greatest tragedy, the genocide, yet perform brilliant mental exercises with material from Hiroshima? Because the tragedy of the Armenian people is his own tragedy, and that gifted man would simply be flattened and destroyed upon his tragic material, unable to squeeze it into a genre and display the elegance of his knowledge of this or that philosophical school. To me, that very thing—being flattened and dying on one’s own tragedy—would be the material’s sole and most precious form. Conversely, that gracefulness on Hiroshima themes is not worth a penny to me, since we know that mothers weep over their sons a thousand times worse than the women next door. For me, stylisation is the neighbour woman’s formally arranged weeping.
In depicting life, we find ourselves in that neighbour woman’s position. Estrangement enters between us and the material we have taken; it becomes not our son but our neighbour’s son, because we do not take life but deceive others that we do. We deceive them that stylisation is life’s artistic robe, when it is not a quality of life’s artistic treatment but a quality of impoverished life, deprived thereby of the power to resist.
The people call upon writers to be their helpers in building the future. Such helpers are no helpers. Without dealing with life, it is impossible to participate, even merely participate, in building life, let alone its future. In the end it turns out that Leo Tolstoy builds the life of the future with the party and the people; the White Guard Bunin helps the party, while our most talented writer today—not a White Guard, a Soviet citizen, even a party member—does not help his party. In the end it turns out that every good work by every good American writer belongs more to our people and our life, is more about us, than what we ourselves write. It seems to me we are losing our reader; our reader no longer expects anything from us. It seems to me there is no social demand to draw out of us the strength God granted us once. And that is the death of literature among us.
1965.
“Yerkir Nairi”, 16 June 1995.