This collection of Vakhtang Ananyan "When I was still a child" completes to some extent the aquarium of his work, which has always, one can say from the beginning until now, contributed to one thing. that we understand and love our natural world more. At that beautiful distance, which is visible to us when looking through the zooming side of the telescope - at that distance, in some transparent-clear and at the same time seemingly bright-green atmosphere, events, faces, existing and invented things float, which teach us to stop and examine every bush and stone, every bush and scrub that surrounds us. Ananyan's work, and in that work this collection is also, in a way, a biography of the geography of Armenia. Lori and Gazakh, Ararat valley and Sevan-Sevan basin, Zangezur and Daralagyaz, Meghri, Karabakh, Pambak - here is the detailed atlas of everything that we learned with Ananyan's "compilation". Being hunting, these stories seem to have aroused some interest only in the world of hunting; but something interesting is happening. being specifically aimed at this, Ananyan's work makes us love our homeland more than if they were specifically aimed at that. This is explained by the fact that love is usually born from recognition; you go after a bear or a rabbit with this pen, hunt or not (that becomes another question), and in retrospect it turns out to you that you fell in love with a passing pen that was not the author's intention at all. This is explained by the author's good knowledge of the story in question (it is clear that the knowledge should have brought accuracy of description or reliability equal to accuracy).
But neither the entire work of Ananyan, nor this collection (especially this collection) is perfect, nor does it have the height where adjacent defects are not visible or are visible with the smallness of not being visible. In the beginning, the author's stories (many lines in this collection) were purely hunting - hunting adventures, catches, legal things, which for others, non-hunters, still become adventures due to the adventurous nature of that "profession". As in the beginning of the work, so here, the narrator is the passionate hunter and not the philosophical man observing nature. The author has often felt that gap and has often been driven to close that big gap, and has given stories that are almost a direct call to love the animal world, but they are more like a holiday slogan than a beating pulse of every moment. Love for nature has not yet become the blood of the author, although in this collection it appears more often than in previous works. Deer slaughter, fox and wolf slaughter (in this case justified by their predation), bird slaughter, fish slaughter, in short, slaughter of everything that exists in nature, and finally grilled. utility sticks out like an ostrich's butt. and in fact there is no other protrusion. say the admiration of the bear, the deer, the pheasant and the wolf, we needed to see that admiration and not the smoke of the shot that often catches the author's eyes. And if there is that admiration, then the end of it is barbecue. Bear, deer, pheasant, redwood, trout are barbecued, and if there is a shred of admiration, it is for these. It turns out that it is not admiration, but a pre-barbecue mood, figuratively speaking, the author rubs his hands before eating. Admiration fits into this act of contact. Admiration is followed by shooting, shooting by eating, eating is followed by "pity!" that's a shame. Such is the construction of the stories and the author's work as a whole. The evenings of confession and repentance, two hearts under one breast (of a hunter and a poet) do not stop from being like that. The author started writing as a passionate hunter and ends with regret, but this regret is not soaked in Panism. this remains a hunter's regret. In other words, there is no regret that we scored. The chapter "Let's enrich our native nature" attached to the collection is a direct testimony of our thoughts. let's enrich the native world so that we have a target to shoot at. Moreover. let's enrich the natural world so that the national economy has a component income that seems extraneous, but if the work is organized wisely. let's say so much deer, so much mouflon, so much quail meat enter the HUNTING warehouses. Maybe it is really possible to increase the meat of the village by 1000 tons (Czechoslovakia's example shows that it is possible), but the side of the question that interests us is not in the middle, the writer's point of view is not in the middle. regret for the extinct generation of deer is not the regret of a nature writer. And no longer irreparable, because we are dealing with an already ending author.
At the beginning of the review, we said that the author makes us love our natural world. Let's not forget that it is a kind of objective circumstance. the hunter describes how the hunting ground was snowy, with steep wedges and dizzying precipices, how the bear played with the cubs, how the field was trampled, how the horse snorted and flew aside after the shot and how the bear fell down with a roar, etc. served - the neighing of a horse, the snowfall of a hunting ground, the play of a bear with cubs, a field, dizzying precipices, etc. That's how objective it is. But, even if unintentionally, the author has done a useful job and is doing it with this collection. He loves his native nature. It is therefore appropriate to publish this book with a certain selection of stories.
By some choice, because the author himself treated his work quite carelessly. It is so careless that one gets the impression that the author has stuffed what he had at hand into a papka, only doing it as if he grouped it according to sections ("When I was still a child", "Meetings on the banks of the Sevan", "I present them as they are", "In Czechoslovakia", "From things that have passed away", "Miscellaneous", "Let's enrich the native world"). But this division, in its turn, is done too carelessly, and you can legitimately ask why, for example, the story "Aregnaz" is not in the "Miscellaneous" section, it is in the "I present as they are" section, the short story "Shatakhtsi Gelo" is not in the "Miscellaneous" section, but in "From things that have passed", etc. The bad thing is that the sections do not have thematic unity either, they are not organized according to that principle, but having "base" something superficial. Is Sevan's name in the story, so it should be put in the "Meetings on the banks of Sevan" section? It's so stupid that "How Stories Are Written", "Testing Hearts", "About Bogar, Chalank and the "Needle Peeler" Yegho", "Case in the Hopping", "Wild Piglets", "Naughty Creatures" and other similar works would have formed a section, "The Proud Answer" should have been in the "When I was a child" section, "Put your tail out of every pore" hang" in the "Miscellaneous" section. Or why, for example, "I present as is" section is not different, and "Miscellaneous" is not as they are. One gets the impression that in order to avoid a boring, monotonous length, the author divided the collection into sections, and this division turned out to be somewhat arbitrary. It could not be otherwise, because the entire collection itself is a great variety. This circumstance comes to give the appearance of reality to our impression derived from reading that the author has gathered in a folder what he had already written and typed in ancient times. This, in turn, confirms that we are not dealing with a writer-narrator, but a hunter-narrator, albeit one who tells things with flavor in places. We claim this without fear of error, because more than half of the works in the collection are mere incidents, existing or invented incidents, not raised to the level of a work of art. It's unforgivable to name-drop one of our best authors. And, to tell the truth, such low-quality works are not saved by having the cover "I present as they are" or an overview subtitle, because even in reality (not to mention literature) not all existing ones tell, communicate to each other, but the most tasteful ones. Well, imagine how much and with what our memory would be burdened, if the incidents of all our grandfathers were told to us in the same way. We do not think that our esteemed writer would have the desire and time to listen, if he had the urge to tell him all the things he knew, heard, and saw. Therefore, you should not write what you remember. in most cases, what remains in the memory is tasteless. The weakest of Ananyan's stories are not so empty, it is true, in each of them there is a correct observation, a new learned-teaching thing, but isn't it too much or too little for the case to become a story, isn't it the same in writing as it is said in oral speech?
In many places, the author's laudable desire to turn a tasteless conversation into a tolerable story can be seen. he does that mostly with the finale. end with a catchphrase that would save the day. But the bad thing is that he tries to do that with the finale, when he has finished what he has to do. it turns out what the talk about the nail at Munchausen; The pain of Munchausen is talking-boasting-surprising. in this case, what to talk about? let's say a nail. to stop talking, to get rid of the pain of talking and to show that there was a more serious motivation underneath than talking. "This is to say that there is a rusty nail lying on the road, you have to take that rusty nail too, it will be needed somewhere." This is a desire to philosophically justify something that has no other basis, it just hangs in the air. There is also some of this in our people. they tell, they don't know what they are telling and after they finish, they keep quiet for a while and say, "You're telling me now." What did you say? You didn't say anything. he just wants to wrap the reason for his chatter around your neck. as if it is your wish to speak. Many of the stories in Ananyan's collection are in this independent, "You say now" state. that is, they don't say anything. in the middle is the confused author, who attached to the tasteless conversation what he said is that what is a rusty nail lying on the road, you have to take that rusty nail too, you will need it somewhere (see "The Hedgehog and the General's Wife" - what does the author say: that there are no game animals that are haram and halal? This "problem" is not too much of a problem and which Ananyan persistently pursues in this yet another story-review-memoir - "In the footsteps of Hovaz", "Only to the heart", "Journey to Arzakan", "The inhabitants of Ambroets mountain", "Lands and people", "My friend Varazdat", "Watermelon" (which, by the way, is a very scattered work), "The abduction of a powerful prince", etc. etc.).
In several stories, and especially in the last section of the collection, the author links the blame for the decline of the fauna with the tsarist autocracy. we understood that the tsar oppressed the proletarians, skinned the peasants, pitted the Turks against the Armenians, and the Russians against the Jews. but why blame the extinction of the fauna on the tsar? The logic of the author - "well, someone who didn't think about the people, would he think about defenseless animals?" is very superficial. it turns out that our government, which thinks about the people, has logically thought a lot about defenseless animals as well. The fact is, and the author himself knows it well, that fauna is one of the neglected areas and severely affected in the Soviet order. To claim otherwise is nothing more than superficial patriotism. It's also funny. It's cheapening. And it is still good that the decline of the fauna is not connected with the cult of the individual. Whatever it is. such lines should be deleted from the collection. such lines cannot be imposed on a schoolboy.
The nine reviews-articles of the section "Enriching our native nature" should be combined into one review-article, because, due to differences in facts, often even facts, they repeat each other. Or else, you should take only one of them, removing the other eight from the collection.
With a not strict choice at all, we propose to publish only and only the following works (the ones that are not remembered take many objections, first of all, the fact that they are not artistic, at least, as a case, the fact that they are not taste-smelling): "About Bogar, Chalank and "needle skinner" Yegho", "Avelordd", "Don't hang your tail through every hole", "Watermelon" (after carefully reviewing and clicking), "How to write short stories". Trying Hearts, Orphan Duck, Old Overcoat (title changed), Sea Boy (among others, this was the only work in which a face appeared), Presenting As They Are series except one (The Hustup Breathed), In Czechoslovakia series except two ("Dialogue in the Aviary", "Creatures of the Countryside"), "Chatni's Burial", "Shatakhtsi Gelo", "The wolf also has his account", "Lost and found again trust", the following from the "Miscellaneous" section. "Naughty Creatures", "Barefoot", "From the Boar's Weapons", "The Besieged", "The Moral Victory of the Farmers", "Creatures of the Farm", "A Case of the Shroud", "A Round of Yerevan...", "Wild Piglets", "On the Edge of the Abyss", "Enemies of the Sheep", "Slap", "Three Days Among Snakes", "Excessive Caution" and "Let's Get Rich" any of the native…” section—so only forty-seven essays and stories.