Zoryan

The people of Musa Dagh have a saying: “On horseback, he forgot God; pulled off the horse, he forgot the horse.” Let us therefore try not to forget the horse before God’s image, nor God’s image on horseback. Let us try to see our Zoryan against the perpetually moving background of world literature and reality, both clear and chaotic. A difficult position for a man to whom our literature owes so much, one of the founders of the literature called Soviet, certainly one of the founding members of this republic whose citizens we are... But I do not create this difficulty; I simply do not want to see my Zoryan isolated from great literature.
A touching, comic scene worthy of the young Zoryan’s pen still flickers before my eyes. A resident of an insignificant seaside village, a former sailor who had served in the war, went to ask the naval border guards for a couple of cartridges for a salute. Watch in hand, he came and stood on a coastal rock: at precisely nine, when artillery salutes thundered in the Union’s capitals and hero cities in honour of Sailor’s Day, he too would fire his cartridges in his insignificant village. I do not now wish to arrange a little salute of local significance, although I love Armenian literature and Zoryan in particular. A difficult position for me, which I approach without too much displeasure, since I do have a door through which to escape. As soon as my position grows cramped, I shall say: at least a hundred pages of great literature belong to Zoryan, the literature called the golden treasury—The War and The Apple Orchard, Winter Night and Ghachaghan. And Stepan Zoryan’s name is deeply engraved for all time upon the brow of the Armenian short story, as Anton Chekhov’s is upon the Russian short story.
The times when a national culture ruled alone within national borders are over. State borders do not assure a national cultural figure a monopoly; creators in every language and every national style create before all peoples, speakers of all languages, of other spirits and styles. The powerful beauty named World Culture enters your ancestral estate, inherited from your grandfathers and still earlier forefathers, with the merciless entitlement of the powerful and beautiful, and... she is very merciless. She does not pity your mistress of the house, called Native Culture. She does not say that for six hundred years—six hundred, a complete span in which any nation or nationality may rise, grow strong, establish itself and pass away, a nation’s entire life—for six hundred years this people had neither the right nor the means even to preserve the embers of its cultural hearth, let alone kindle it. For six hundred years it laid no stone upon another, never once patched up a monastery for itself, remembers not one number or date from those six hundred years; huddled amid dung fuel and rags, neither alive nor dead, it lived without space or time. Its culture saw neither shelter nor tenderness above it; on the contrary, it lived beneath the enemy’s hostile gaze, suspicious at best, always green with enmity. And if we are to speak of a state’s attitude, that hostile relationship of the enemy to this country’s culture was raised with prophetic foresight to the level of state policy, since the cradle of hope for an identity of one’s own is rocked first by song, then by parties and the popular masses. By song we mean the whole: song and poetry, building and architecture, picture, book and history—in a word, culture. And the rulers’ prophetic hatred of culture above all is more than understandable.
One’s heart turns to stone with envy and despair, admiration and respect, when one singles out even one or two of the many facts in Armenian and Russian culture that place themselves side by side.
We too repeat the Russians’ proud words with pride: Pushkin is the answer to Peter the Great’s call a hundred years later; across a hundred years they call to one another and understand one another. And immediately the other question arises: whose call does Tumanyan answer, who is Tumanyan’s Peter? He himself is both his own Peter and his own Tumanyan; what tragic strength was needed to be so! The herald of the Armenian reawakening was born in 1808–09–10–12, definitely in Kanaker; he perished in 1849–1859, perhaps in the gardens of the Getar, perhaps in the taiga of the Lena. And another fact: the horse Kholstomer, the prototype of Lev Tolstoy’s novella of that name, was born in 1803—let us not forget we are talking about a horse—at Count Orlov’s Khrenovoye stud, of a Dutch sire, Muzhik I, and a piebald, ambling mare from Bukhara, Baba. In eighteen twelve he was gelded, removed from the stallions and sent out from the stud to work; his height was... and so on; he lived twenty-five years... and so on.
This too is culture, and great culture. Above all, it testifies that the writer had a national mission, was created through the nation’s effort and, like the horse Kholstomer in the story of that name, would be put entirely, down to his hide and last bone, to the service of the nation’s interests. This is a phenomenon greater than culture, or culture moves and comes alive through such small, unimportant, seemingly peripheral details. Such details bring separate cultural phenomena closer and join them together, set them in living space, make them a continuously flowing history: that is, a people’s memory, that is, the ability to see oneself between the road travelled and the road ahead. Without such details an individual cultural phenomenon becomes an approximation, an unsubstantiated fairy tale.
Our culture has no details, or few. Was the architect Trdat really Trdat? Did he really construct the dome of Hagia Sophia; did he really exist? What horse did the commander Vardan ride—a stallion or a mare? Horses were not without names: what was the commander’s horse called? The absence of an answer calls into question the reality of Vardan himself and of the uprising itself. But how, from a distance of six centuries and more of oblivion, we are to discern the colour of the commander’s horse is not the concern of the tribunal named World Culture, just as it is not its concern whether Don Quixote was written in prison or at Yasnaya Polyana.
This foreign woman, this beauty of the world, takes her seat in your house as its sole lawful mistress, and you cannot turn her out, as the child of the poor local people in Bakunts’s splendid Kyores tells the rich children, “Get out of our water!” For what, in the name of what, of whom? Your culture, frightened before that magnificent, well-tended, protected, powerful woman, endowed not only with her high, divine, universal human mission, but with the mission of her own nation, state, statehood and social order? Simply because the culture is yours? It has never been so and never will be. What is mine is what is healthy, beautiful and intelligent. With Tolstoy present, Faulkner causes neither awe nor confusion in this house; Kafka is not frightening, since Dostoevsky is here; the Hemingway of despair and heroism is simply dear to us, since we have not seen such blood and madness in And Quiet Flows the Don. All the world’s poetry, with all its giants, will never create confusion in this house of ours, because there are masters here: Tumanyan, Charents, Narekatsi, Isahakyan, Metsarents, Teryan... They come far less to measure others by themselves than to be measured against the giants of this culture.
I was saying all this, and the names of Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, García Márquez and Mikhail Sholokhov were constantly in my mind, in particular Dalí’s terrifyingly powerful canvas called Civil War. The century has marked itself with their names, as with the phenomena of revolution and Lenin, fascism and Hitler, the Shah and Khomeini, plunder and fraud, hypocrisy, genocide and humanitarianism, the power to govern others and the powerlessness to govern oneself, experiment and calamity.
The story of a billionaire’s daughter being kidnapped unfolded and unfolded throughout the world’s press, while the insane Cambodian tragedy huddled in three lines of small print at the bottom of a column. Three lines reported that Pol Pot’s political and economic transformations had annihilated three million of a people numbering seven million. The description of the neutron bomb says: you do not hear the explosion, you do not feel its immediate effect; only after half an hour or forty minutes do you feel slightly dizzy—you—as if you were a little tipsy; then you feel sick—you—but that unpleasantness does not last long: at the fiftieth or fifty-fifth minute you are dead. You, not I. He himself will watch from the top of a nearby hill as I die.
These are realities that push the book away from you, demand that culture free itself of its old, kindly vocation and enter into a cynical, coarse dialogue with reality. And Tolstoy’s words become the brand of a curse upon the new culture: “With my time my culture also ends—the rest is decadence, you and your art are decadence too.”
Is Tolstoy right, or wrong? The Guernicas, the genocides, the thunderous fame of the Dalís testify that he is right.
But there is another cultural camp too; its space may be narrow, but it exists. Today a writer of less than the first rank in fame and force will publish a book of ten stories, and a reviewer will exclaim: here, it has been a long time since we had such a Chekhovian, human book! Chekhovian, human—is that not out of date? Is Zoryan out of date? Shall we mark his next anniversaries, will our children remember him, do his writings fill the span of the international yardstick or stretch and tear? Was his oath as a soldier in Tumanyan’s army belated: neither to see decadence nor to be a decadent? And finally, was it not madness to sit between two Turkish incursions in his native Karakilisa of 1919, tormented, plundered, starving, burning with typhus—in the ancient township of Vank—and laugh at the Ghachaghan people’s revolution, write the immortal pages of The Apple Orchard, when not only the importance of native literature and your pages within it, but the importance of your people themselves in the life of the world, was in doubt? Did Zoryan ask himself these questions?
Is it not strange that fantastic, phantasmagorical reality fermented, took flesh and blood, and unfolded here among us? I mean our national liberation struggle disfigured by genocide, the revolution, civil war and the building of collective farms, the great war and the difficult years of the personality cult. Yet the literature of that reality would take on only a sectarian character among us and gain citizenship in distant Latin America, while the literature of our revolutionary country would be not revolutionary at all but, compared with parallel Western currents, conservative.
The point is that new masters of the country had arrived whose watchword was not the unleashing and reflection of chaos, but its ordering. One of the revolution’s leaders defined the position of their literature and ours precisely that clearly: a revolution in art need not coincide with a revolution in social life.
Perhaps that is not so, or not entirely so, but Zoryan’s art, the very fabric of his work, agrees with that formulation. It neither objects nor discusses, nor enters into conversation with its one-sidedness. Zoryan is simply a labourer of the age that ends with Tumanyan and Tolstoy, and of that age’s culture; there is no struggle against his destiny within him. A worker burdened by awareness of his task within the whole, he does his work: if this people has any historical mission, then I too shall have one alongside it; what remains is to be conscientious in my work. The style has a faint scent of antiquity, especially apparent when set beside the work of his younger contemporaries, Bakunts and Charents, but Zoryan suffers no anguish of self-renewal, and that is not bad. We too naively believe that out of all this century’s cacophony Khachaturian’s wonderful Toccata, Chopinesque and in some shades Zoryanian too, will emerge to rise and fall and grieve in the coming century. Perhaps we are mistaken; perhaps it will not be so, and they will live in a cacophony already grown superdense. But that is their affair: let them live by what they create. It is not our fault that we were born and created almost in the Middle Ages.
They wounded the heart of a little Hamlet from Kaghnut named Hanes: they told him his mother had a lover. They asked him to lend them his pipe to play; afraid they would not return it, he refused. They said, then take it to your mother’s lover, let him play while your mother dances. He does not know what a lover is (we know); he feels it is something very bad (we know it is not so bad). By the river he pouts and sulks, about to burst into tears, with no words to answer. His answering words are orphaned, childish, poor and pure like himself: “You sons of dogs, it’s your mother who has a lover.” Sunset; on the other bank sit the geese, the calves, the lambs; on this bank, the peasant Hamlet. Then the calves and lambs got up—it was time to go to their mothers—and went home. Hanes went too, but he no longer has a mother. Coveting the father’s position, the forester had killed him long ago; now he was taking the mother from the child. And the mother is like us: she knows there is nothing wrong with having a lover, and lowering her eyes, she secretly smiles and blushes. Then the little, distorted, powerless revolt of the little Hamlet in rawhide shoes: he strikes the forester’s horse on the head with a switch, beats the tethered horse. And as a kitten is flung away by taking it by the neck with two fingers, Hanes is taken by the nape and transferred to town as a shoemaker’s apprentice. Although reality and literature have told us much about the torn-apart society of children, so much that one can barely restrain the formulation of a vague suspicion—that humanity cannot love those it has brought into the world—although we know much, have heard and seen much of how children have been exploitatively formed into armies (the Children’s Crusade), sent on explorations, even made into armour for adults (one of the cold-blooded organisers of the slaughter of Armenians, fearing assassination attempts, seated pretty children beside him in his motorcar), and a thousand other such cases, it is Zoryan’s child who hurts us, to whom, after all, nothing has happened: they took him to town to make a man of him; the shoemaker will not eat him, after all. You want to laugh at Hanes’s little trouble, but find your heart troubled; you too want to cry with Hanes. It hurts because Zoryan the artist fills us with his great compassion: compassion for the weak and defenceless, children and the old.
But no. Zoryan has no such predetermined and unconditional loves and compassion. The boys from the upper quarter who sullied Hanes’s pure innocence are children too. Old, blind and even likeable at first is Giko Aper, for whom the world is still in order as long as in his mind he sits on the village headman’s divan, the people come to his gracious feet and he magnanimously attends to their needs just enough to keep them alive, healthy and gratefully bound to his feet. But let one of those who only yesterday awaited bread from his hand become an independent owner of a house and cow today, and even buy a cow from Giko Aper’s somewhat impoverished sons, and the world ends for him. How heavily gracious lordliness sat within that insignificant official of the empire! Old men, old women, women and men are also—if, despite the author’s not particularly firm denial, we nevertheless regard The Story of a Life as autobiographical—his grandfather, grandmother, father and uncle, mother and uncle’s wife, all disfigured by cares and unlovable. Everyone—children, the old, women, men, rich and poor, kings and officials, intellectuals, peasants, even ancient chroniclers, even animals—everyone without exception must pass through Zoryan’s moral purgatory. And Zoryan is restrained, if not, of course, merciless: the imperceptible smile of his compassionate or proud love will tremble before the rare few emerging to meet him from that purgatory—a Tumanyan, a Romanos Melikyan, a Martin Aper, a Davit Machkalov.
There is no veil over reality before his eyes. They are not the eyes of someone in love with his native land, nor the eyes of a stranger or someone becoming estranged: they are the householder’s eyes. They see the reality of the native land as it is. Thanks to that, both the festive, magnificent, firework-like perceptions and recreations of the homeland’s newly found sons, and the mental exercises of strangers and the estranged against an allegedly lifelike background of that same reality, remain alien to his style and spirit.
Zoryan has only one unconditional devotion: realistic literature with a high moral charge. The biased love and biased disdain of an outsider would undermine the very foundations of such literature, or rather give birth to a literature with one leg and one wing, which might impress contemporaries like any extraordinary birth, but would not reach out a hand to us across the decades.
What a direct, penetrating, upright gaze Zoryan has in Ghachaghan and The Fence, in The War, Tsovan, The Apple Orchard: the gaze of the eldest brother in a large household, just by birth and educated besides... He looks, and you avert your guilty eyes. Although you yourself are neither from Ghachaghan nor an owner of a fence, have neither killed a headman in anger nor cut down apple trees, you are nevertheless a person of Ghachaghan, a murderer, a plunderer, a cow wanting to take herself off and vanish from this world of mine-and-yours.
An ordinary peasant woman (The Engineer’s Mother). From these dry, bare slopes where only potatoes and beans grow, her son went to the oil country, rose by the grace of the Mantashevs and became an engineer. Along with him, this ordinary peasant woman rose here, higher than her son and Mantashev himself. She considers her own local equals, especially workers home on leave from the oil country, her labourers. She is now an engineer’s mother; ordinary mortals must fuss around her, water her beans, tend her potatoes and be grateful that she exists. The human being, the oppressed woman, the poor woman, the mother have passed away; before us now is a slave mistress, crueller and haughtier than one born to that status. She bends her equal before her feet and does not see that the person licking her foot is her own self of yesterday, only yesterday. And she takes offence at the world because the disobedient are not punished; takes offence, withdraws into herself and grows old in two days. “How is it that when we were not yet an engineer’s mother, we endured and carried others’ cares?” We carried them because we said the world takes turns: today you will be on my back, tomorrow I on yours. As masters of servants, we were servants in our minds; as servants, masters. Yet there is not even talk of equality, brotherhood, standing perfectly upright beside one’s fellow, equal with equal. The greatest slave is the slave owner, the greatest slave owner the slave, and most unbearable is this mutual tolerance.
...the old man, a beast of burden,
Wearing a rotting, muddy shirt,
His soul forever mute, scorched dry by fire...
And beyond the muddy shirt, in the folds of his mute soul, beneath seven millstones, he cherishes a tiny, silent, secret little man: the image of a master in his own likeness. When circumstances permit, he will emerge; for now, silence. Only occasionally does the tongue throw out words about him: “The world is a fat tail, the lad a knife”; “The meek lamb suckles from two mothers”; “The hand you cannot cut off, kiss and place upon your head.”
A Turkish writer, probably not a bad writer or Foreign Literature would not have welcomed him into its pages—Selim Kocagöz, an Istanbul man, a landowner, that is, an estate owner, that is, a feudal lord, whose fields and orchards are around Smyrna, present-day Izmir, from which Turkish liberators cast Greek and Armenian imperialists and non-imperialists into the sea and freed the orchards and fields for Kocagöz—comes and complains to a literary journalist in Foreign Literature that his position is cramped, that he is between two stones. On one side, people of his class reproach him for loving peasants, as though the peasant did not deserve such love—the peasant who reaps Kocagöz’s fields, gathers the fruit and waters the land. On the other, he is stoned especially by the monopolists of love for peasants, writers from poor families, whose words are: we do not want your sugary love; if your throat fills up and your heart stops with love, give the peasants your land. There. But, he explains, the landowner from Yasnaya Polyana preceded me; why should his love be acceptable and ours not?
The love of the “advocate of a hundred million peasants” would indeed be acceptable, because although the old man’s eyes would fill when he remembered “oh, those bast shoes, those bent necks, oh, those rope belts,” he would also tuck that same peasant beneath a thick beard, put an axe in his hand and bring him out of the forest into Anna’s path as a threat of punishment. He knew much about that peasant, and there was much he did not know; his attitude towards them is not nauseatingly sweetened into affection. That sugary affection would mean sanctifying the existing order, the master’s flattery of his draught beast, something contrary to his philosopher’s conscience. On the other hand, he did not consider himself sufficiently one of them, the peasants, to give himself the right to pinch them, laugh at them, although they had so many ridiculous, bad, vicious, dark recesses.
If you consider yourself one of them, why do you praise everything about them like a guest? Why do you not dare to laugh at this great Ghachaghan? That is not love; it is soft satisfaction with the hierarchical arrangement of you as master and them as workers. It is the quivering of surplus fat within you, generally not too pleased with the order God has established and not too displeased with the order people have established.
How many such lovers of the people and peasants the revolution brought to grief! How many genuine writers and artists, in whose works their characters might have fallen into such a situation, found themselves in the position of their own types and characters! For they were writers, artists, lovers of peasants and, truly, of the people, but the master sat firmly within them. The people had to remain the people to be loved by them, and they had to remain masters to love the people from their height. Their personal attitude towards the revolution, in a rebound, shatters and lays open the substance of their truly magnificent philosophical and artistic structures.
Zoryan never belonged to any revolutionary or counter-revolutionary party; literature was his holy of holies. Yet the revolution did not take Zoryan by surprise. For him it was not an incident, a chance occurrence, a shock, an event; the question of choosing a position did not confront him. In 1957, ten years before his death, the sixty-seven-year-old Zoryan wrote in his autobiography: “Before Armenia became Soviet, I had written the story At the Well, about soldiers fraternising at the front, and the story The War; in ’23 I wrote The Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee, in ’24 The Girl from the Library.”
So calmly, so like himself, so like Zoryan. Incidentally, he was a splendid, classical memoirist, and one of the finest parts of his work is the Book of Memories, with its unsurpassed portraits of Aghayan, Tumanyan, Toramanyan, Romanos Melikyan and others. In the Book of Memories, here is Teryan, dejected, ill, full of plans and great hopes for the coming day. He intends to establish an Armenian-language library of Russian literature and divides the translation of Tolstoy between Nar-Dos and the very young Zoryan, itself a great honour for a young author. Then in ’20 Teryan left the scene, then Nar-Dos passed away, and Teryan’s still pre-revolutionary plans fell to Zoryan alone. It is very symbolic that pre-revolutionary plans are realised years after the revolution. To his two stories before Armenia became Soviet, in which he sees revolution, one can add many more, including The Girl from the Library and The Chairman, written afterwards; and one can regard works written before Sovietisation as works written afterwards. The revolution as such placed no divide before him that he must cross or not cross; revolution was the social and moral charge of his entire work. A son of the people, he knew his people’s life as his own, and for him revolution was the life of the people.
His Girl from the Library tells of the revolution with precisely that light breath; the work’s narrative manner arises from the people’s perception of the revolution. In other words, revolution is not about something extraordinary, unusual, preternatural, supernatural, tragic, comic, incomprehensible or unfathomable, as it appeared to those bewildered before the fact of revolution. The distortions revolution produces in general, the remnants it retains, are well known; so is the fact that many freedom fighters who fought on its barricades become greater tyrants than their predecessors. Like life, revolution yields manifestations that are ridiculous, tragic, senseless, subject to no play of reason. Rebels often cannot govern themselves or you, and look again to your hand, accustomed to power, and so on... But that is not the question of questions: do you, especially if you are a writer, accept the brotherhood of the barefoot, their right to share your throne as equals? That is it. For Zoryan, morality has no other dimensions.
King Pap is dear to him for his desire and ability to see a human being in the tormented, poor child of humanity, to establish national statehood that preserves a person’s humanity as far as possible. This, praise be to history and its facts, is confirmed by Pap’s reforms. And Arshakavan, called a den of robbers by the historian of the time, is renamed the Armenian Fortress by Zoryan, for a people took refuge there. They are not a mob, a mass, building material for you to cut up and fit to your defective model for reconstructing the world, but people, persons, individuals, people like us: ourselves, only yesterday, only sixteen hundred years ago. This is again confirmed by the magnificent cultural heritage they left, thanks to which we are what we are today.
Zoryan also makes the historian of the time, who was obliged to be an impartial chronicler, a wicked, envious, shortsighted type and calls him a slanderer. His vivid literary imagination dazzles the eye, but when the facts themselves are compared with his interpretations, the glitter of fevered delirium is also evident. A type who would like kings to govern in this way and the people to be governed in that way; but the king and people did not govern and were not governed as he wished. They followed their own laws, the laws of life, which were neither Byzantine in inclination nor Persian, neither Christian in composition nor pagan, but of this place, Armenian, peasant. Thus they did not fit the chronicler’s model and greatly angered him, and he called them an unruly mob—them, that is, us in yesterday’s day.
The criticism of the time reproached him for such democratisation, such bringing of kings and the court down to the common people: Pap, they said, is almost a social democrat. And Zoryan accepted the criticism, revised the work... More precisely, he pretended to heed the criticism, pretended to transform the novel. In reality he was incapable of it; he could not. The moral, ethical and also aesthetic configuration of his whole work does not afford that possibility. Every writer’s work, besides reflecting the real world, is also an image of the world the writer dreams of. The world Zoryan dreams of will not tolerate that tyranny and those tyrants. His Pap would indeed be as peasant and Armenian as a village headman. As dark, dense tones are banished from Saryan’s canvases, evil from William Saroyan’s work, despondency from Chaplin’s work, gloom from Mozart’s divine chimes, so the tyrant and tyranny are banished from all of Zoryan’s work. The fabric of Zoryan’s writing simply does not wish to include those strata of human life.
Others have said it of others, but I shall repeat it: I wish that I had written his The War, Ghachaghan, Hanes, The Apple Orchard, Grandfather and Grandson, The Story of a Life, Book of Memories, the march to Tarsus and escape from Tarsus in King Pap...
Zoryan’s profound humanity, penetrating every layer of his conduct and work, the humanity that rises and falls through all his shortcomings and ascents, carries his work from generation to generation.