He himself would use only one of these epithets — either quiet or kindly. He would not write “either-or”. He would not write “only one”; he would write “one”. His astonishingly firm prose does not enchant through the wavering illusion of emphasis. His word “apple” is an apple, a fruit; “the fragrance of the oleaster” surrounds the tree exactly as a fragrance does. Meanwhile, poetry’s dubious swords and lightning bolts take whole auditoriums away from you; the mere sound of “homeland” robs you of a reader, praise of pleasure draws a reader away. Yet, without exaggeration, the whole world writes, and the whole world writes well; and so, lest you “fall mute in the concert of this world, fall mute”, you want to explode the word, the feeling, the emotion, to put a bomb in place of an epithet, to say universe, interplanetary… But in Zoryan’s gentle prose an apple orchard is simply being cut down, a dog has simply gone out into the fields to die, a spring has been destroyed, snow is simply falling, a ploughman has simply lost the strength in his arms because his son is absent. His “morning” is morning, his “wine” wine, his “cavalry” cavalry. He has no words “I love”, “philosophy”, “homeland”, “I hate”, “beautiful”, yet he is wholly love, philosophy, patriotism, hatred and beauty. He alone would have the authority to advise, “When the dactyl pulls, rein it in,” because his many-volume work, and his long life too, are a living “rein in the dactyl”.
And how beautifully a log smoulders: it keeps fire within it for months. More alluring than the flame is the warm ash; his smokeless, flameless prose holds you with the warmth of that ash. And what rain do the fields desire? When lightning cracks too often, villagers frequently say, “It is thundering; perhaps no rain will come.” Often they also recognise the lightning of the downpour that sweeps everything away. And they smile when a cloud silently approaches another cloud, when the clouds grow heavy, descend, and the rain the fields desire sifts down with a soft rustle. Beyond the distant mountains, the sheet lightning that people in Lori call tsovian sometimes silently fades; then it fades once more, the rain slowly draws back upwards towards the clouds, and a green, washed, clean world of sunlight opens: this is a quiet, kindly, longed-for rain. This is Zoryan. From the rostrum of the last congress, his truly great demand for writers who are artists rather than mere composers of texts was again heard quietly among the words spoken for the occasion. And his last work, Varazdat, again entered our literature quietly, a literature whose ploughman, sower, irrigator and field watchman he himself had been.
We lost Charents at forty, Bakunts at thirty-eight, Tumanyan at fifty-four; Zoryan was approaching eighty… No, the good die in vain.