Vakhtang Ananyan’s collection “When I Was a Child” brings a measure of completeness to the aquarium of his writing, which has continually, one might say from the beginning until now, contributed to one thing: helping us understand and love our native landscape more deeply. At that beautiful distance seen through the distancing, diminishing end of binoculars, in a transparent, clear and at the same time seemingly bright-green atmosphere, float events, faces, things that happened and things invented. They teach us to stop and examine every bush and stone around us, every path and thicket. Ananyan’s writing, including this collection, is a kind of living portrait of Armenia’s geography: Lori and Kazakh, the Ararat plain and Sevan, the Sevan basin, Zangezur and Daralagyaz, Meghri, Karabakh, Pambak. Here is the detailed atlas of the whole we have learnt from Ananyan’s “compilation.” Being hunting stories, they would seem likely to arouse some degree of interest only in the world of hunting. But something curious happens: precisely by concentrating on that, Ananyan’s writing makes us love our homeland more than it would if it concentrated expressly on making us love it. This is because love usually grows out of knowledge. You follow this path after a bear or a hare, kill your quarry or do not—that becomes another matter—and when you look back, you discover that you have fallen in love with the incidental path that was never the author’s purpose. This is explained by the author’s intimate knowledge of that path: plainly, knowledge should bring precision of description, or a credibility as good as precision.
Yet neither Ananyan’s writing as a whole nor this collection—this collection in particular—is perfect, nor does it reach the height at which accompanying flaws are invisible or small enough to disregard. His early stories, and many lines in this collection too, were purely hunting accounts: adventures, incidents, ordinary occurrences that nevertheless become adventures for others, non-hunters, because of this “profession’s” inherently adventurous nature. Both in the early work and here, the narrator is the passionate hunter, not the philosophical observer of nature. The author has often felt this gap and tried to plug the great crack, producing stories that are almost direct appeals to love animal life. But they resemble festive slogans more than a pulse beating at every moment. Love of nature has not yet become the author’s blood, although in this collection it pulses more often than in earlier works. Slaughter of deer, slaughter of foxes and wolves—in this case justified by their predatory nature—slaughter of birds, slaughter of fish, in short slaughter of everything in nature, and finally a barbecue. Utilitarianism sticks out like an ostrich’s backside; in fact, nothing else sticks out. Take admiration for the bear, deer, pheasant and wolf: we needed to see that protruding admiration, not the smoke of the gunshot that so often clouds the author’s eyes. If there is admiration, its end is the barbecue. The bear, fawn, pheasant, brown trout and Sevan trout are destined for the grill, and any scraps of admiration are directed at them. It turns out to be not admiration but a pre-barbecue mood: figuratively speaking, the author rubs his hands before eating. Admiration fits inside that act of rubbing. Admiration is followed by a shot, the shot by eating, eating by “what a pity”: the regret of a full belly. Such is the construction of the individual stories and of the author’s work as a whole. Evenings of confession and repentance do not change it, nor do two hearts beneath one chest—the hunter’s and the poet’s. The author began writing as a passionate hunter and ends with regret, but this regret is not steeped in a pantheistic feeling; it remains the hunter’s regret. That is, what a pity there are none left to shoot. The appended section “Let Us Enrich Our Native Natural World” directly confirms our point: let us enrich it so that we have targets to shoot at. More than that: let us enrich it so that the national economy gains an income that seems incidental but, if sensibly organised, becomes a component of it—so that, say, workers’ supply warehouses receive so much venison, so much mouflon meat, so much quail. Perhaps it really is possible to add, say, a thousand tonnes of game to the meat supplied by the countryside: Czechoslovakia’s example says it is possible. But the aspect of the question that interests us is missing: the writer is missing, the writer’s perspective. Regret for a vanished generation of deer is not the regret of a writer who reveres nature. And this is now beyond correction, because we are dealing with an author whose creative work is approaching its end.
At the beginning of this review we said the author makes us love our native landscape. Let us remember that this is, in a way, an objective circumstance. The hunter describes how snowy the hunting ground was, with sheer spires and dizzying abysses; how the bear plays with its cubs; how the field was trampled; how the horse snorted and shied after the shot; how the bear collapsed with a roar, and so forth. The author pursues the shooting and the collapse, while what stays with the reader is what served him as air and background: the horse’s snort, the snowiness of the hunting ground, the bear playing with its cubs, the field, the dizzying abysses. That is the objective effect. Yet even if unintentionally, the author has done useful work and does so in this collection: he makes us love our native landscape. For that alone, it is worthwhile publishing this book too, with a definite selection of stories.
With a selection, because the author himself has treated his work rather carelessly. So carelessly that one has the impression he put everything he had to hand into a folder, doing no more than apparently grouping it into sections: “When I Was a Child,” “Encounters on the Shore of Sevan,” “I Present Them as They Are,” “In Czechoslovakia,” “Things of the Past,” “Miscellaneous,” “Let Us Enrich Our Native Natural World.” Yet this division too is extremely careless, and one may legitimately ask why, for example, “Aregnaz” is not in “Miscellaneous” but in “I Present Them as They Are,” why “Gelo of Shatakh” is not in “Miscellaneous” but in “Things of the Past,” and so on. The trouble is that the sections lack thematic unity; they were not assembled on that principle but on some superficial “basis”: is Sevan mentioned in the story? Then it must go into “Encounters on the Shore of Sevan.” Yet it is obvious that “How Stories Are Written,” “We Test Hearts,” “About Boghar, Chalank and Yegho the ‘Needle-Wearer,’” “An Incident on Virgin Land,” “Wild Piglets,” “Mischievous Creatures” and similar pieces should form one section; “The Proud Answer” belongs in “When I Was a Child,” and “Do Not Hang Your Tail from Every Hole” in “Miscellaneous.” Or why are the pieces in “I Present Them as They Are” not miscellaneous, and “Miscellaneous” not as they are? The impression is that to avoid a tedious, monotonous length, the author cut the collection into sections, but the cutting proved exceedingly arbitrary. It could not have been otherwise, because the whole collection is itself one great miscellany. This gives substance to our impression from reading it: the author gathered into a folder whatever old and new material he already had written and typed. That in turn confirms that we are dealing not with a writer-storyteller but a hunter-storyteller, even if he tells some tasty things here and there. We insist on this without fear of error, because more than half the collection’s pieces are merely incidents, real or invented, not raised to the level of works of art. That is unforgivable in one of our best, established authors. Frankly, such weak pieces are not saved by the heading “I Present Them as They Are” or the subtitle “sketch,” because even in life, let alone literature, people do not tell one another everything that happens, only the most interesting things. Imagine how overloaded our memory would be, and with what, if all our grandfathers’ casual incidents reached us through their telling. We do not think our respected writer would have the wish or the time to listen if one of us took it into his head to tell him everything he knew, heard and saw. So you should not write everything you remember: often what stays in the memory is the most tasteless of the tasteless. Ananyan’s weak stories are not quite that empty; it is true each contains a sound observation, something newly learnt and instructive. But is that not far too little for an incident to become a story? In writing, is it not the equivalent of what in speech is called dull?
In many places one can see the author’s commendable desire to turn a dull conversation into a tolerable story. He mainly does this through the ending: finish with a meaningful remark that might save the piece. The trouble is that he attempts it through the ending, after his work is done. It becomes like Munchausen’s chatter about a nail. Munchausen’s affliction is talking, boasting, astonishing. What should he talk about this time? Let us say a nail. Finish talking, relieve the urge to talk, and show that underneath was a more serious motive than talking itself: “What I mean is that even a rusty nail lying in the road should be picked up—it will come in useful somewhere.” This is a desire to give a philosophical basis to something that has no other basis and hangs entirely in the air. Our people have this too: they tell a tale without knowing why, finish, pause a little, and say, “Now, as you say.” What have you said? You have said nothing. He simply wants to hang the reason for his talkativeness around your neck, as though he spoke at your request. Many stories in Ananyan’s collection stand alone like this, in a state of “now, as you say”—in other words, they say nothing. What remains is the bewildered author, who has attached to a dull conversation his “what I mean is that even a rusty nail lying in the road should be picked up—it will come in useful somewhere.” See “The Hedgehog and the General’s Wife”: what is the author saying? That there are no “unclean” and “clean” game animals. Is this tiny “problem” not far too small, this problem Ananyan doggedly pursues for the umpteenth time in story, sketch and memoir: “On the Leopard’s Trail,” “Only to the Heart,” “A Journey to Arzakan,” “The Inhabitants of Mount Ambrotsner,” “Winds and People,” “My Friend Varazdat,” “Watermelon”—incidentally a very scattered, wandering piece—“The Abduction of the Prince of Trout,” and so on and so forth?
In several stories, and especially the collection’s last section, the author lays the blame for dwindling fauna on nothing less than Tsarist autocracy. We understand that the tsar oppressed proletarians, flayed peasants, set Turks against Armenians and Russians against Jews. But why burden the already burdened tsar with the disappearance of wildlife too? The author’s logic—“Well, if he did not think about the people, would he think about defenceless animals?”—is very superficial. It follows logically that our government, which thinks about the people, has also thought a great deal about defenceless animals. Yet the fact is, and the author knows it well, that fauna is one of the neglected fields and has suffered severely under the Soviet system itself. To insist on the opposite is nothing but superficial patriotism. It is also ridiculous. It cheapens the work. And it is fortunate that the decline of fauna is not linked to the cult of personality. Be that as it may, such lines should be deleted from the collection; they should not be offered even to a schoolchild.
The nine sketches-articles in “Let Us Enrich Our Native Natural World” should be combined into one, because, despite differences in facts—and often even repeating the facts themselves—they repeat one another. Alternatively, only one should be retained and the other eight removed from the collection.
With a selection that is by no means strict, we propose publishing only the following pieces. Those not mentioned invite numerous objections, chiefly that they are not artistic and, even as incidents, have no flavour or savour: “About Boghar, Chalank and Yegho the ‘Needle-Wearer,’” “The Superfluous One,” “Do Not Hang Your Tail from Every Hole,” “Watermelon”—after careful revision and compression—“How Stories Are Written,” “We Test Hearts,” “The Orphaned Duckling,” “A Remnant of the Past”—change the title—“The Boy of the Sea”—incidentally the only piece in which a character appeared—the “I Present Them as They Are” series except for one, “Khustup Brought to Life”; the “In Czechoslovakia” series except for two, “Dialogue at the Poultry Farm” and “Fearless Creatures”; “Chatni’s Burial,” “Gelo of Shatakh,” “The Wolf Has His Own Reckoning,” “Trust Lost and Found Again.” From “Miscellaneous,” the following: “Mischievous Creatures,” “The Barefoot One,” “Among the Boar’s Weapons,” “The Besieged One,” “The Moral Victory of the People Who Work the Land,” “Beautiful Creatures,” “An Incident on Virgin Land,” “A Walk Around Yerevan…,” “Wild Piglets,” “On the Edge of the Abyss,” “Sworn Enemies,” “A Slap,” “Three Days Among Snakes,” “Excessive Caution”; and any one piece from “Let Us Enrich Our Native…” Thus, forty-seven sketches and stories in all.