A very well-known official from Moscow recently came to Yerevan for cinema issues. At the airport, he got into the car assigned to him and, especially accompanied by those who greeted him, entered the city. He, the apostle, was also escorted to the airport in Moscow. In Yerevan, he was taken with care and special care to a deluxe room assigned to him in a first-class hotel and placed in a bed specially made for him. He drank brandy that had been specially kept for him for forty years, ate trout fish, of which a few were kept in Lake Sevan especially for that official, looked at Masis, looked at the ruins of the pagan temple of Garni, ate and drank again, then gathered the Armenian film workers to tell them that Sergey Parajanov's picture "The Color of Pomegranate" is unnecessary and that the villagers in another picture are not Armenians, because he knows what they look like from other Armenian pictures. are Armenian peasants, and the authors of that picture, who brought their father, uncle and themselves to the cinema, do not know what Armenian peasants should be like, that's why they painted Sicilians and not Armenians. Then that official called the Armenian cinema workers with charming love. "Friends, haven't you noticed the beauty of Lake Sevan until now? Friends, make a beautiful film about Lake Sevan, and here I offer you a title: "The Waves of Sevan". Then, in order to send the full and complacent body of that well-fed, well-drinked, well-slept official to Moscow, the entourage did not place it in a coffin, as in Leo Tolstoy's novel "Kholstomer", but in a place specially allocated to him on the plane. The plane that brought him irreversibly spoiled so much and so much expensive oxygen, he personally spoiled so many state and private funds and all he said was that he should make a movie "The Waves of Sevan". But they knew without him saying that the waves of Sevan come and go and they come and go beautifully.
Now, I, the author who published only one booklet, found myself in the position of that official. If I am not able to speak intelligent things, then I must try to be at least honest, so that I will not be ashamed of myself tomorrow, and I must try to be serious, as serious as the rubles taken from the people and allocated for my business trip are serious.
I have to talk about stylization. And since it seems to me that stylization is the exact death of literature, and since I cannot announce such a responsible thing at once, I want to start a little further.
Among Hovhannes Tumanyan's early works, there is a story from the "Hunger Times". The villager of Lorets, let's say Dsegetsi, after the writer's birthplace, works and sees only his land and feels the dry sky above his head, that it does not promise rain. He prays to his heaven and caresses his earth with unfaithful love. But something very bad is happening. earth and sky betray him. What happened is really very bad, because that person was only hoping for the land under his nose. And what's worse is that the drought has also hit the villages on the other side of the valley, with which, yes, the king secretly had hopes. It is not the end of the world yet, because the world is big and reaches the fields of Shirak under Aragats, which are fertile, which, according to Dseghets, are never subject to the rule of drought, because they are subject to the moist slopes of Aragats bari mountain. And Dsegh, being ashamed of himself, very ashamed of himself, because Shiraketsi is not to blame for Dsegh's drought, takes a horse and sets off to the end of the great world he knows. But something terrible is happening. halfway, he meets starving people fleeing the drought of Shirak to Dsegh. And it is unbelievable for Dsegets and Shirakets, because life can't be so cruel as to make a drought in the whole world from Shirak to Dseg that they know.
The story ends like this. someone brings news that the world is bigger than they imagine, and bread is coming in vans for the hungry Armenians from the far cities and villages of that big world. They don't want to believe the news, because they would have created bread for themselves, they didn't create it themselves, because God didn't will it, so that's their end. And because they have no other choice, they are forced to believe that there is a bread-rich Russia, where rich Armenians have sent bread for them.
The story was written eighty years ago. Somewhere in these eighty years, the world has grown for the Armenian peasant, it has become a globe, on which is the powerful Soviet state and the feeling of a united great motherland is the most noticeable shift in the psychology of the Armenian man of our fifty years, who makes bread everywhere, except for Shirak and Dsegh village. The thing is that the feeling of security of the united great motherland discovered its other very bad side, which is irresponsibility for the land under one's own feet. The peasant lost the sense of his locality, the careful love immediately for the land on which he lives. Bread is created somewhere in the great Soviet Union, and the hail of Dsegh and the drought of Shirak do not apply to today's dsegets and today's shirakets, because the hail and drought do not hit the field, which should have been the result of the mutual love and interdependence of the land and the peasant, the hail falls on some even enemy territory, and from it the wages of that peasant, which is in the state safe, does not get wet and does not spoil, but remains dry, and dry flour will come from any part of our great state. But at least we know that in most cases that flour comes not from any part of our great state, but from abroad, for its weight in gold. So, it is not only about the artist. In a section of a state farm in the Chelyabinsk region, where our group of students of the pedagogical institute worked, the mechanizers sat down to play durachki and did not notice that it was time to mow the field. Then it snowed on three thousand hectares of wheat that had already been harvested and not harvested, and the mechanizers continued to play their game with peace of mind now, because it had snowed for reasons beyond their control.
When did this hostility towards the land begin? In general, we can talk about hostility towards work, but in order not to spread too much, let's talk only about the land. This madness of the land and the farmer probably began in the thirties, but it deepened much more in the fifties and became alarming in the last decade. With the civilization of the country, the old dependent love of the land had to grow, as an inseparable part of the Soviet civilization, into the worship of nature, but it first became a sympathy for nature, and then turned into an obvious hostility, as a necessary supplement of the forced civilization of a backward country. It was also a consequence of our inflexible policy towards the village. Today's Armenia has lost a third of its old pastures and a third of its arable land, while it now has the same population in the countryside as it did before Sovietization, plus mechanization. Whatever it is. Today we are facing the fact of the peasant's hostility towards the land.
And if we were to browse through the annals of Soviet Armenian literature, we would face a shamelessly beautiful lie: that the peasantry used to make friendship with the land individually, but now it makes friendship collectively. Literature is the chronicle of people's hopes and anxieties, our literature of the 1930s conveys something from the anxieties and hopes of Spanish fascism and Spanish democracy to our generation today, but does it convey to us at least a couple of chords from the anxieties that are more than audible today and whose birth refers to the 1930s? And how can we respect that deaf and blind literature, and why will tomorrow's generation respect our today's deaf and blind literature, which has vowed not to remove cotton from its ears and not to open its eyes?
If in the work of a writer standing far from the revolution, the leader of the revolution saw all the strengths and all the weaknesses of his revolution, which was not the revolution of that writer, it means that the writer took life in all its breadth and depth, and that is the only way to create literature, and thus whispered in the ear of the leader of the revolution about the weaknesses of his revolution and the ways of victory. And what are we doing?
We expel from life all those components whose presence and whose analysis would put us in front of a confusing situation, we take a life sterilized in this way to describe it and turn it into a novel and a story. And matter does not resist us, because all the resisting tendons have been removed from it, and matter surrenders to us as easily as castrated horses surrender to a circus trainer. I wouldn't say that we particularly stylize, decorate, beautify and make our writings salable, no. Stylization appears as a characteristic of processing and "overcoming" impoverished material. Why, when we talk about stylization, we first of all remember works with historical themes? For even the most careful examinations do not give authors working on historical subjects a complete knowledge of the material, just as no unknown country is completely accessible to any tourist, and for reasons thus independent of his will, the author working on historical material again takes up an impoverished life, which he stylizes himself. Why the war materials written immediately on the front are so truthful and so ugly, and after the war the writings of the same authors are so beautifully false. for those authors have lost such vital details as were the very essence of the ancient days. Why is it that an Armenian writer, and a very gifted writer, cannot write about the greatest tragedy of his people, the massacre, but is able to do a brilliant meditation with the materials of Hiroshima, because the tragedy of the Armenian people is his own tragedy, and that gifted person would simply cry and die on his tragic material, not being able to put this material into any form of genre and showing his knowledge of philosophical directions. gracefulness. For me, that crippling and dying over one's own tragedy would be the only and most precious form of that material, and on the contrary, for me, this grace on the subject of Hiroshima is not worth a penny, because it is known that mothers cry over their sons a thousand times worse than the wives of the neighbor. For me, stylization is the cry of the neighbor's wife.
When we depict life, we find ourselves in the position of that neighbor's wife, there is a gap between us and the material we take, the material does not become our son, but becomes the neighbor's son, because we do not take life, but we deceive ourselves that we are taking life, but we deceive ourselves that stylization is the artistic cloak of life, when it is not the characteristic of the artistic processing of life, but the characteristic of a life impoverished and thus deprived of resistance.
People call writers their assistants in building the future. There are no such assistants. Without dealing with life, it is not possible to be a participant, at least a participant, in the construction of life, and the future. In the end, it turns out that Leo Tolstoy is building a future life with the party and the people, the White Guard Bunin helps the party, and a non-White Guard, Soviet citizen, even our most talented writer who is a member of the party does not help his party. In the end, it turns out that every kind of American writer's work is more about our people and our life, more about us, than our own writings. It seems to me that we are losing our reader, our reader has no more expectations from us, it seems to me that there is no public bid to withdraw the power once given to us by God, and that is the death of literature in us.
In 1965
"Yerkir Nairi", 16.06.1995.