Zorian

The words of Musaler people say: "He was on a horse, he forgot God, they brought him down from the horse, he forgot the horse." So let's try not to forget the horse before the image of God and the image of God on the horse. let's try to see our Zoryan against the moving background of both simple and chaotic world literature and reality. a difficult situation for an appreciator of our literature, one of the founders of our literature, one of the founders of this republic, whose citizens we are, one of the founding members... But I don't create this difficulty, I just don't want to see my Zoryan isolated from great literature.
An exciting and funny picture worthy of the pen of young Zoryan is still flickering in front of my eyes. A resident of an insignificant village on the coast, a former marine who participated in the war, went to ask the border guard marines for a couple of fireworks bullets. He stood on the beach rock with the watch in his hand. exactly nine o'clock, when the artillery volleys rumbled in the capitals and hero-cities of the Union in honor of the mariner's day, he was going to shoot his bullets in his insignificant village. Now I don't want to make small fireworks of local significance, even though I am both a lover of Armenian literature and particularly a fan of Zoryan. A difficult situation for me, which I face with less unpleasantness, because I still have a door of exit. As soon as I got bored, I will say that at least one hundred pages of great literature belong to Zoryan. the literature that is called a golden fund - "War" and "Apple Orchard", "Winter Night" and "Ghachagan", and the name of Stepan Zoryan is engraved once and for all on the front of the Armenian story, just like the name of Anton Chekhov on the front of the Russian story.
Gone are the days of the one-wheeled power of national culture within national borders, state borders do not ensure the monopoly of a national figure of culture, creators of all languages and all national styles create in front of all peoples of all languages and other spirits and styles, the powerful beauty named World Culture enters your farming estate, inherited from grandfathers and great-grandfathers, with her inexorable right of the powerful and beautiful and... it is very inexorable, Motherland Culture said. He doesn't feel sorry for your landlady, he doesn't say that this nation has not had the right and the ability to not ignite its hearth of culture for six hundred years - six hundred - six hundred - a full period for every nation and nationality to emerge - become strong and - establish - pass - a full life of a nation - for six hundred years, not to ignite its hearth of culture, but at least to keep what is out of place, for six hundred years it has not laid a stone on a stone, it has not once patched a monastery for itself, a number of six hundred years and He does not remember the year, he is neither alive nor dead, he lived in spacelessness and timelessness, and his culture did not see any shelter and caress over his head, and on the contrary, he lived under the enemy's hostile, at best, suspicious, always green with hostility gaze, and if we have to talk about the state's attitude, that enemy's hostile relation to the culture of this country has been prophetically raised to the level of state policy, because the cradle of hope for identity is first rocked by the song, then by the parties and popular masses. by song we mean the whole thing: song and poem, construction and architecture, picture, book and history, in a word, culture, and the prophetic hatred of the rulers first of all towards culture is more than understandable.
A person's heart freezes from envy and despair, admiration and respect, when he separates even a couple of facts from the many facts of the Armenian and Russian cultures.
We proudly repeat the proud speech of the Russians that Pushkin is the answer to the call of Petrosvadhyan after a hundred years, for a hundred years they refer to each other's calls and understand each other, and immediately another question arises: and Tumanyan is the answer to whose call, who is Tumanyan's Petros? he is both his Petros and Tumanyan, and what tragic power was needed to be like that. the trumpeter of the Armenian revival was born in 1808-09-10-12, specifically in Kanaker, died in 1849-1859, perhaps in the Getar bogs, perhaps in the Lena taigas. and the other. The Kholstomer stallion, the prototype of Leo Tolstoy's novel of the same name, was born in 1803, let's not forget that it is about a horse. in the Khrenovian horse stud of Count Orlov, from the Dutch Muzhik 1st sire and from the Bukharee Baba Gaitun chal dam. At eight hundred and twelve he was castrated, removed from the stallion and expelled from the stud farm. height was... etc., lived twenty-five years... etc.
This is also a culture and a great culture. this is above all the evidence that the writer had a national mission, was created by the effort of the nation, and, like the Kholstomer horse in the story of the same name, will be completely used for the benefit of the nation. this is a phenomenon bigger than culture, or culture moves and comes to life with such small, unimportant, intimate details. such details bring individual cultural phenomena closer and connect each other, put them in a living space, make them a coherent history, i.e. the memory of the people, i.e. the ability to see oneself between the past and the future. Without such details, a separate cultural phenomenon becomes an approximation, becomes an unsubstantiated fairy tale.
Our culture has no or few details. Was Trdat the architect really Trdat, s. Did he really build the dome of Sofia, did he really exist? What kind of horse did Captain Vardan ride - was it a stallion or a horse? Horses were never without a name. What was the name of Sparapet's horse? The lack of an answer disputes the reality of Vardan and the rebellion itself - but how can we notice the color of Sparapet's horse from the distance of six or more hundred years of oblivion? It is not the concern of justice in the name of World Culture, just as it is not the concern whether "Don Quixote" was written in prison or in Yasnaya Polyana.
This foreigner, this worldly beauty, swarms in your house like the only legitimate mistress, and you cannot, like the child of the poor natives in the wonderful "Kyores" of Bakuntsi, says to the children of the rich, "Get out of our waters", invite out of your house - for what, for what, who - that magnificent, well-groomed, sponsored, apart from its high, divine-universal mission and so on. Is your culture afraid of a powerful woman endowed with the mission of nation-state-statehood-public order, just for the sake of the fact that she is yours? This was neither the case nor will be. Mine is what is healthy, beautiful and smart. With the existence of Tolstoy, Faulkner does not cause fear and confusion in this house, Kafka is not scary because there is Dostoevsky here, Hemingway of despair and heroism is only beloved because we have not seen such blood and madness in "Peaceful Don", the poetry of the whole world with all its giants will never cause confusion in our house, because there are hosts here - Tumanyan, Charents, Narekatsi, Isahakyan, Metsarents, Teryan... They come not only to measure themselves, but also to measure themselves with the giants of this culture.
I was saying all this and the names of Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, García Márquez and Mikhail Sholokhov were constantly in my mind, in particular, Dali's hideously strong canvas called "Civil War". The age has marked itself with their names, as well as with the phenomenon of revolution and Lenin, as well as with the phenomena of fascism and Hitler, Shah and Khomeini, robbery and falsehood, hypocrisy, tyranny and philanthropy, the power to rule others and the impotence of self-governance, experimentation and trouble.
The story of the kidnapping of a billionaire's daughter unfolded and unfolded in the press of the whole world, and the crazy Kampuchean tragedy was written in small print under a column in three lines - in three lines it appeared that Pol Pot's political-economic transformations destroyed three million of seven million people. The description of the neutron bomb states: you don't hear the explosion, you don't feel the immediate effect, after half an hour to forty minutes you only have a slight dizziness - you - as if you are a little drunk, then your heart starts to stir - your - but that discomfort does not last long, in the fifty to fifty-fifth minute you are dead. You, not me. He will watch me die from the top of a nearby hill.
These are realities that push the book back in front of you, that require culture to get rid of its old, good title and enter into a cynical and rude dialogue with reality, and Tolstoy's words on the new culture become a stigma of curse: "My time ends and my culture - the rest is decadence, you and your art are decadent."
Is Tolstoy right or wrong? Guernicas, Ekherns, thunderous glories of the Dalis testify that it is true.
But there is also the other cultural camp, the place may be narrow, but it is there. a writer of not the first fame and charge will publish a book of ten short stories today, and the reviewer will exclaim: there has not been such a Chekhovian, humanitarian book for a long time. Chekhovian, a humanist - isn't it outdated? Isn't Zoryan timeless? Are we going to celebrate his next anniversaries? Will our children remember him? Do his writings fill the international arena or stretch and tear? robbed, hungry, fried in typhus in your native Gharakilis, in the ancient rural town of Vank, and to laugh at the revolution of the Ghachagants, to compose the immortal pages of Khndzor Park, when not only the question of native literature and the significance of your pages in that literature, but also the significance of your people in the life of the world was in doubt. Did Zorian ask himself these questions?
Isn't it strange that the fantastic and phantasmagorical reality was fermented, took on flesh and blood and unfolded here among us - I mean our national-liberation struggle, which was marred by the uprising, and the revolution, the civil war and the construction of the kolkhoz, and the great war and the difficult years of the cult of the individual - but the literature of that reality was only sectarian in nature and would get civil rights in distant Latin America, and the literature of our revolutionary country would not be revolutionary at all, but, compared to the parallel currents of the West, conservative.
The point is that new owners of the country had arrived, whose motto was not the unleashing and reflection of chaos, but regulation. One of the leaders of the revolution clearly described their position and that of our literature. the revolution of art does not necessarily coincide with the revolution of social life.
It may not be so or not so, but Zoryan's art, the very fabric of his work is in harmony with such a setting of the question - he does not object, does not discuss, does not enter into a conversation with the one-sidedness of such questioning. Zoryan is simply a cultivator of the time ending with Tumanyan-Tolstoy and the culture of that time, there is no fight against his destiny in him. A laborer burdened with the consciousness of what he has to do in general, he does his work. if this nation has any historical mission, then I will have it too, all that remains is for me to be conscientious in my work. The style is slightly archaic, it becomes obvious especially in relation to the work of his young parallels, Bakuntsi and Charents, but Zoryan does not have self-repairing tendencies, and that is not bad, and we also naively believe that Khachatryan's Chopinian, with certain shades of Zoryanian, will separate from all this cacophony of this century and rise and fall in the coming century. wonderful "Tokata". maybe we are wrong, maybe it won't happen like that, but they will live with super dense cacophony, but that is already their job, let them live with what they created, and it is not our fault that we were born and created almost in the Middle Ages.
The heart of a little Hamlet from Kalnut named Hanes was pierced, they said he had a lover. They told us to give the shud, he was afraid that they wouldn't return it, so he didn't give it, they said go ahead, let your mother's lover give it to us too. He doesn't know what a lover is ¥we know¤, he feels that something is very bad ¥we know it's not that bad¤, he made a puff on the river bank, he will cry now, he has no words to answer, and the answer is an orphan, a child, poor and pure like him. "Puppy, yours has a lover." it is sunset, on the other bank of the river the geese are sitting, the calves, the lambs, on this bank, the rustic Hamlet. then the calves and lambs got up - it's time to go to their mothers - they went to their homes, Hanes also went, but he no longer has a mother, the forester had his eye on his father's position, he killed the father a long time ago, and now he was taking the mother away from the child, and the mother is like us, she knows that having a lover is not a bad thing, she lowers her eyes, secretly smiles and blushes. Then, the small, distorted, powerless rebellion of the small, miserable Hamlet - he hits the forester's horse on the head with a club, beats the tied horse - and just as a kitten is thrown by the neck with two fingers, he grabs Hanes by the neck and takes him to the city, a shoemaker's apprentice. And even though reality and literature have told us a lot about the divided society of children, so much that we can hardly contain the vague guess that humanity is not capable of loving its own, although we know a lot, we have heard and seen a lot of how children were speculatively formed armies ¥children's crusade¤, sent for research, until they even turned children into armor for themselves ¥the cold heart of the Armenian slaughter one of the organizers, being wary of assassination attempts, made cute children sit next to him in the coach, and a thousand and one similar cases, but it hurts Zoryan's child, who in the end nothing happened to him - he was taken to the city to be turned into a human, the shoemaker will not eat him in the end. you want to laugh at Hanes' little care, but you see that your heart is troubled with Hanes and you cry; it hurts, because Zoryan, the aesthete, overwhelms us with his great sympathy - sympathy for the weak and defenseless, children and the elderly.
But no. Zoryan does not have such biased and unconditional love and sympathy. the boys from Veritagh are also children, who polluted the pure innocence of Hanes; old, blind, at first even the ape Giko is sympathetic, for whom the world is still in order as long as he is on the throne of the householders in his mind and the people come to his merciful feet and he nobly takes care of the people's cares as much as he would keep the people healthy and gratefully tied to his feet, but it is enough that one of those who looked at the bread in his hand yesterday is on his own today to become a landlord and a cow owner and still buy a cow from Giko Apor a little impoverished boys - the world ends for him. there are also old, old women, women and men, if we do not look at the author's less drastic denial and consider "The Story of a Lifetime" as an autobiographical poem, his grandfather, grandmother, father and uncle, mother and uncle's wife, all of them distorted and unloved by the hand of care. everyone: children, old people, women, men, rich and poor, kings and officials, intellectuals, peasants, even ancient historians, even animals, all of them will pass through the Zoryan purgatory of morality. and Zorian is reserved, if not of course, his imperceptible smile of merciless, compassionate or proud love will vibrate in front of the rare ones emerging from purgatory - a Tumanyan, a Romanos Melikyan, a Martin Apor, a Machkalov Davt.
There is no veil over the reality in front of his eyes, they are not the eyes of a lover of the native land, nor the eyes of a stranger or an alienated person - they are the eyes of the host, they see the reality of the native land as it is, and thanks to this, both the festive-luxurious-fireworks perceptions and reproductions of the newest children of the motherland, and the meditations of the foreigners-estranged as if they were the same reality, remain alien to his style and spirit. on the background of plausibility.
Zoryan has only one unconditional dedication: realistic literature with a high moral charge, and the biased attitude of loving the biased and constraining the biased would have destroyed the foundations of such literature, or rather, would have given birth to a monotonous literature, which might have left an impression on contemporaries as an extraordinary birth, but which would not reach us for decades.
What a straight, penetrating, upright, elder brother of a great house, who was born righteous and still educated, is the look of Zoryan in "Ghachagan" and "Tsankapat", "War", "Sea", "Khandzor Park"... he looks and you run away from your guilty eyes, even though you yourself are not a Ghachagan, nor a moderate, nor did you kill in anger, nor to cut down apple trees, but I am both a ghachagan, a murderer, and a robber, and a cow, who wants to get rid of this imuko world.
She is an ordinary peasant woman ¥"the engineer's mother"¤. From these dry and barren slopes, where only potatoes and beans grow, the son went to the oil world, with the mercy of the Mantashovs, he became an engineer, and this ordinary peasant woman also climbed here with him, she rose more than the son and Mantashov himself. she considers local people like her and especially the workers who came on vacation from the oil field as her cultivators, she is the mother of an engineer, ordinary mortals are obliged to come with her head, water her beans, cultivate her potatoes and be grateful to her that she exists. The man, the oppressed, the poor, the mother have passed away, before us is no longer a slave owner, more cruel and arrogant than a tribal slave owner, he bows down to his fellow man and does not see that yesterday's foot is being licked by yesterday's self, and he is angry with the world that the disobedient are not punished - he is angry with the world, he enters into himself and grows old in two days. "Well, how is it that we were not the mother of an engineer yet, we patiently took care of others?" We were pulling because we said the world is taking turns, today you will be my shalak, tomorrow I will be yours. In the state of servant-owners, we were servants in mind, in the state of servants, we were servant-owners, and there is no question of equality, brotherhood, standing side-by-side with one's equal. The biggest slave is the slave owner and the biggest slave owner is the slave, and the most intolerable is that tolerance.
... fat apin,
He was wearing a muddy shirt.
The soul is always mute, silent...
and in the folds of the mute soul, under the seven stones of the muddy shirt, under the seven stones of the millstone, a beautiful, silent, secret person cherishes the image of the agha, when the circumstances bring it, it will come out. your head."
A Turkish writer, perhaps not a bad writer, otherwise "Inostrannaya Literatura" would not have hosted him in its pages, Selim Ghojagöz, from Istanbul, avatater, that is, a landowner, that is, a feudal lord, and the fields and gardens are around Smyrna, today's Izmir, from where the Greek and Armenian imperialists and non-imperialists were thrown into the sea by the Turkish liberators and free up the gardens and fields for Ghojagyoz - the literary journalist complains in the pages of "Inostranaya Literatura" that his place is narrow, he is between two stones, on the one hand he is scolded by the people of his class for his love for the peasantry, as if the peasant does not deserve such love, the peasant who harvests the fields of Ghojagyoz, collects the fruit, irrigates the fields and on the other hand, especially the monopolists of peasant love, the writers from poor families, who say that what we want is not your sweet-sweet love, that fills your stomach and makes your heart stop with love, give your land to the peasants. Here. But, he explains, I was preceded by the landowner from Yasnapoli, so why was his love acceptable and ours not?
The love of the "lawyer of the hundred million peasantry" would, yes, be acceptable, because the old man's eyes would, of course, fill up when he remembered "oh those trekhs, those crooked necks, oh those rope belts", but he would trample the same old man under his thick beard, take an ax in his hand and take Anna's path out of the forest as a threat and punishment. He knew a lot about that muzhik, and he didn't know a lot, and his attitude towards them is disgustingly unlovable. That, that endearment, would mean sanctification of the existing order, the master's flattery in front of his yoke, which would be against his conscience as a philosopher, and on the other hand, he did not consider himself so much one of them, the muzhiks, to give himself the right to poke at them, laugh at them, even though they were so ridiculous, bad, ugly, and dark.
If you consider yourselves theirs, then why do you praise them like a guest, why don't you dare to laugh at this great Ghachagan? it's not love, it's a soft thanks to the hierarchical arrangement of your master and the cultivator, it's a vibration of extra fat inside you, generally not so satisfied with the orders set by God and not so dissatisfied with the orders set by people.
How many problems did the revolution bring to such people-loving and peasant-loving people! How many real writers and artists, whose heroes in their works would probably fall into such a situation, found themselves in the situation of their types and characters - because they were writers, artists, peasants and, it is true, people-lovers, but they were firmly seated in their hearts, the people had to remain people in order to be loved by them, and they themselves would remain agha in order to be able to love the people from their height. Their personal attitude towards the revolution reveals the very content of their truly magnificent structures of philosophers and aesthetes.
Zoryan never belonged to any revolutionary or anti-revolutionary party, his holy shrine was literature, and yet the revolution did not take Zoryan by surprise, for him the revolution was not an incident, a shock, an event, the question of orientation did not stand before him. In 1957, ten years before his death, sixty-seven-year-old Zoryan wrote an autobiography. "Before the sovietization of Armenia, I wrote the short story "At the Well" about the fraternization of the frontline fighters and the short story "War", on the 23rd I wrote "The President of the Independent Committee", on the 24th - "The Girl in the Library".
So calmly, so like him, powerfully. By the way, he was an excellent, classic memoirist and one of the best parts of his work is the book of Memories, with unsurpassed characters of Aghayan, Tumanyan, Toramanian, Romanos Melikyan and others. In the book of memories, here is Teryan, depressed, sick, full of plans and great hopes for the coming day. intends to establish an Armenian library of Russian literature and divides Tolstoy's translation between Nar-Dos and the very young Zoryan, which in itself was a great honor for a young author; then on the 20th, Teryan left the arena, then Nar-Dos passed, and still the pre-revolutionary Teryan programs fell only on Zoryan. It is very symbolic that the pre-revolutionary plans are implemented years after the revolution. It is possible to add many more stories to his two stories before Sovietization, in which he sees a revolution, including "The Library Girl" and "The President" written after Sovietization, and one can consider the works written before Sovietization as works written after Sovietization - the revolution as such did not set a gap for him to pass or not, the revolution was the socio-moral aspect of his entire work. it was the charge. A child of the people, he knew the life of his people as his own, and the revolution was the life of the people for him.
His "Library Girl" tells about the revolution in such a light breath, the novelistic style of the work derives from the popular perception of the revolution itself, that is, the revolution is not about something extraordinary, extraordinary, supernatural, supernatural, tragic, comic, incomprehensible-incomprehensible, as it appeared to those who were confused by the fact of the revolution. It is well-known what perversions the revolution brings, what side effects the revolution has in general, it is also known that many freedom fighters who fought on the barricades of the revolution become more tyrants than the previous tyrants. just like life, the revolution also gives manifestations that are both ridiculous and tragic and senseless, not subject to any game of reason; Rebels are often unable to rule over themselves and over you, and look again at your hand, accustomed to power, etc. But that's not the point of the questions. you, especially if you are a writer, do you accept the brotherhood of chluts, the throne of those who are equal to you? For Zoryan, morality has no other dimensions.
The Pope is dear to him with his aspirations and ability to see the tormented and poor pearl of pearl, to establish a national state that keeps people as human as possible, which, thanks to history and its facts, is confirmed by the transformations carried out by the Pope, and Arshakavan, which was turned into bandits by the historian of the time, is renamed the Armenian fortress from Zoryan, because a people took refuge there, which is not a crowd, a mass, a building material, so that cut and fit it to your own flawed model of world reconstruction, they are other people, personalities, individuals, people like us, we were only yesterday, only one thousand six hundred years ago, which is again confirmed by the wonderful cultural heritage they left behind, and thanks to whom we are what we are today.
Zoryan makes an evil, envious, short-sighted type and calls the historian of the time, who was obliged to be an impartial chronicler, whose bright literary imagination dazzles the eyes, but also obvious, comparing the actual facts with his comments, the glow of inflamed delirium. a type that would like the kings to rule like this and the people to be ruled like this, but the king and the people did not rule and be ruled like he wanted, they were guided by their own laws of life, which were neither Byzantine, nor Persian, nor Christian, nor pagan, but local, Armenian, rustic, and therefore they did not fit into his model of the chronicler and were strict with him. angry, and he called them a disobedient crowd, them, that is, us in yesterday's day.
Criticism of the time criticized the kings and the court for such democratization-socialization, the Pope, they said, is almost a social democrat, and Zoryan also accepted that criticism, re-edited the work... more precisely, he pretended to ignore the criticism, he pretended to transform the novel. In fact, he was not able, he could not. The moral-ethical, and aesthetic aspect of his entire work does not reveal such possibilities. Every writer's work, apart from being a reflection of the real world, is also an image of the writer's dream world. Zoryan's dream world does not tolerate that tyranny and tyrants, his Pope, yes, he was going to be as rustic and Armenian as a village chief. Just as dark tones from Saryan's paintings, evil from William Saroyan's work, depression from Chaplin's work, gloom from Mozart's divine sounds - tyrant and tyranny are banished from all of Zorian's work, the texture of Zorian's work simply does not want to include those layers of human life.
It has been said about others, but I will repeat it. I would like to have written his War, Ghachagan, Hanes, Apple Orchard, Grandfather and Grandson, One Life Story, Book of Memories, the march to Tarsus and the escape from Tarsus in "Pap the King".
The deep humanity of Zoryan, penetrating all layers of his behavior and work, the humanity emerging in all his shortcomings and omissions, brings his work from generation to generation.