Conversations with Hrant Matevossian

I consider myself one of those exceptionally fortunate people who had the good luck not only to be Hrant Matevossian’s contemporary, but to enjoy the great prose writer’s and great man’s closeness and trust. Beneath an appearance that at first seemed simple and approachable lay an inner world as vast as the universe, into which a false or immoral person could never enter. Many may claim to have known Hrant Matevossian the man, but I am sure they knew only as much as the eye can see or the ear hear. Like all great people, he was as defenceless as a child before life’s intrigues. He was straightforward, filled to the brim with love. Entirely love. Entirely kindness. How he loved life, humanity, the world, and particularly his little corner of it, Lori! How he loved the word, the harmonious interplay of words! He worshipped the word. Even in writing an ordinary note he chose each word, its place and emphasis, attentively, reverently, painfully. Every word had to sound in its own voice. He feared dead words. In recent years my work as a journalist revealed something to me. Some people speak smoothly and pleasantly, but when you put their speech into writing, nothing remains beneath it, because they have nothing to say, no reverence for the word. It is all unnecessary repetition of worn-out thoughts and redundant words. Hrant Matevossian’s speech was different: write it down and you discovered that not one unnecessary word had been uttered. You could neither subtract nor add.
He was generous. He gave everything generously: the warmth of his soul, energy, precious time from his life, money from his pocket. In the cold, difficult years, no one who approached him left empty-handed. He gave even to those who, after receiving, did not hesitate to malign him. One day when I came to see him, I sensed he was in good spirits. It struck me immediately, because he was often dispirited. “I put on a new suit,” he smiled, “and saw there were ten dollars in the pocket. I will give them to someone.”
He was astonishingly modest and humble, as great people are, just as the untalented are arrogant. Now that he is gone, we will truly feel our need for him, see the place he has left vacant. His words, what he had to say, were direct, about his village, his neighbour, his people, without unnecessary convulsions or contortions, without reverence for the foreign. He was content with and proud of the inheritance his ancestors had given him. With what he had been given, he entered the world arena and raised what he had inherited from grandfathers and great-grandfathers a step higher. To his last cell he was Armenian, a man of Lori, and at the same time a fully fledged citizen of the world. To join humanity’s procession he never changed his garb; he entered as he was, Armenian, from Lori, the son of Ignat of Ahnidzor. The world recognised and accepted him precisely that way.
From my first day of contact with the literary world, I dreamed of meeting him, talking with him, knowing him closely: I adore his literature. Though late, my dream came true after he became chairman of the Writers’ Union. We became close from the very first meeting. We spoke often and at length. How open and defenceless he was before life, like Jesus walking in the desert! It seemed he should have been the happiest person in the world, yet great suffering inhabited that great soul. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, an immense world had become ruins. He was like a traveller who had lost his way.
I realised late that his thoughts needed to be recorded and passed to future generations. It is a pity I switched on the recorder so late. Nevertheless, I do not doubt that what I present is enough to know the great son of Armenia at least a little better, to touch his soul a little.

6 August 1999.
— Who were your literary teachers?
— My greatest impression... I was almost a child, had broken my arm and was in hospital. There I met two titans together: I read Taras Bulba in Bakunts’s translation. It was magnificent. But I must say Aksel was not the first. The first was Chekhov, through his influence on Stepan Zoryan. Zoryan brings Lori’s landscape, its dialect, the shade of that dialect into literature. He also recalls Tumanyan, touches the Tumanyan world at one edge, and that is my homeland, my dialect. To that extent, perhaps, Stepan Zoryan.
I leaned more towards prose; perhaps that was the reason. Prose seemed a greater poetry to me than poetry itself. Its calm narration, the characters’ movement through the landscape: there was an enticing mystery in all of it, dark slopes, not sunny ones... It all came out of Zoryan in a strange unity. His stories suggested and recalled things. Beneath his words flowed the green slopes remembered from my childhood, familiar names and inflections. But to avoid exaggeration I must say he was not altogether a fully fledged teacher... One could compile two volumes in which Chekhov’s influence is continually present. In a few works, though, he almost managed to break out, smash the frame. They are masterpieces of Armenian literature: The Apricot Tree, Tsovan, The Apple Orchard, The War.
If I were building a personal library, I would include at least three volumes of his: the recollections of Tumanyan and a substantial part of his prose. I could adopt his attitude towards history as that of a parent, a father, someone close. He was a great man: intelligent, conscientious, fine. He would never lose his conscience. An elevated, cultured individual.
We did not meet very often. I was not shameless enough to burst into his life, nor was he so ambitious as to imagine every arrival his son, the stone he sat on a part of himself. He was not that powerful a man. An intelligent, fine person. I think I too spoke the first true words about him, on the occasion of his death.
It was years ago. There was something like an interval. We were sitting here, perhaps right where we are now. I had discovered Mndzuri and wanted to promote him in every way so people would know. It was a dead situation then, particularly in Constantinople. Not only we, but even Dashnak Beirut paid little attention to accommodating Constantinople and its literature. Whether Shahnur or Mndzuri, in short, anything concerning Constantinopolitan literature. For that reason Mndzuri entered our literature very late. I had happened upon two stories, and my heart was bursting because that man was absent here. I proposed him to the magazine Sovetakan Grakanutyun. There seemed to be some reference to his work: Stepan Kurtikyan published information about diaspora literature in the magazine in the form of reviews. I was then on the staff of Grakan Tert and had some standing with Kurtikyan: I had worked beside him for years as a typesetter, proofreader, and for a time a staff member. I went up to his office: there is an author named Mndzuri. Zoryan was sitting beside Kurtikyan. I said: there is an author named Mndzuri. I have picked out three stories from different places. We should publish them here, become acquainted, get to know him. On that man’s face I saw, I will not say stony indifference, but that the subject simply did not exist for him. A shade of anger entered my speech. Stepan Zoryan sat in his armchair looking silently. I said: he is a writer. Kurtikyan took Mndzuri’s letters out of his desk drawer. He had written on little narrow strips and had an incomparable handwriting. I saw that the manuscript was there, yet that man had absolutely no idea what Hakob Mndzuri meant. Helplessly I looked to my right, at Stepan Zoryan. He sensed that I was asking for help and spoke his weighty word: “Mndzuri is our finest village writer.” I saw that he knew. He was a wonderful man, would offend no one, was actively involved in the literary world. Without naming names, he said: better than such-and-such famous figures. Bakunts was not among those names, because he had reservations about him, and let us hope he was mistaken.
Aksel was a master, he existed. But above all there was Gurgen Mahari, lively, fine, conservative, filling my childhood. There was also the literature that won Stalin Prizes, as repulsive as wartime narratives posing as memoirs, yet actually outright false literature, which with its poor translation consumes childhood and leaves nothing in the body. That literature existed, and beside it Armenian literature, which I rejected. If Russians can draw you in by skilfully constructing plots, our people do not even have that.
Against that general background, Mahari’s appearance was very beautiful, as were Childhood and Youth. A selection was published on his return from Siberia. I think Vahagn Davtyan and Hrant Tamrazyan were its publishers and editors. It was a wonderful collection. That was my book when my brother Hrachik and I rented a place on Aygestan Street. Our first purchase was a table with two drawers, our table for both bread and books. We spent our tiny wages on books. I think my first book was Suren Aghababyan’s monograph on Stepan Zoryan. I thought we would build a library; it did not happen. Then Gurgen Mahari’s book, the prose writer’s and poet’s, became a book we leafed through, wore out and gave away. Since then I have not read Mahari’s poems.
— Did Gurgen Mahari as a prose writer influence the beginnings of Hrant Matevossian the prose writer?
— At the beginning he certainly must have; he could not have failed to. There was something infectious in his work: a childlike immediacy, a lively style and so on. He could not have failed to. But as the awareness of what prose means developed, Mahari had to be left outside, and was. The prose I cherish is the prose of tranquil narration: Russian prose, and in Armenian Shirvanzade, a little, partly Tumanyan’s prose, his calm narrative. Tumanyan is unique in knowing what prose, epic, poetry and lyric are. A unique connoisseur. Zoryan had that awareness too. He knew what prose meant...
Bakunts stopped writing Karmrakar because he was writing a novel in the style of a short story. Not an epic tale, a novel. He had to interrupt it. There are wonderful passages. Still, it is not the genre of the novel. Not a novel. Not And Quiet Flows the Don. The epoch is the same. In its epoch it is similar; it aspires to encompass that whole period, but the declaration of an epic outlook has not yet been developed within it. The handwriting betrays...
Perhaps these three were my first teachers: Mahari, Bakunts and Zoryan. Afterwards you grow older: you have had a poor education, poor literary upbringing; not knowing languages, you have remained alone within your homeland’s borders. Greater figures existed in the world, who ought to have entered my life but did not, because you have aged, hardened, your receptiveness is no longer the same... The rest comes by instinct.
My favourite great work is Hadji Murad, the summit of world prose. Tolstoy’s The Cossacks too. But much more Hadji Murad, which seems carved in stone, precise, encompassing the entire time. The Chechnya of a hundred and fifty years ago is today’s Chechnya. The Kreutzer Sonata is also a great work. Pushkin’s prose too. His history of Pugachev is great prose. I am simply in love with the ability to submit oneself to discipline, turn from poet into prose writer and obey the demands of a genre: of poetry, lyric, epic, fairy tale, historiography and prose, which as independent entities and presences have their own dictates, and you need an ear to enter them. That is why I once said that perhaps our language is not a language of prose. I had the right to throw out that remark, because if the highest achievements, the summits of your national language, Armenian, are Wounds of Armenia, Land of Nairi, Derenik Demirchyan and so on, and others, where epic narration is absent, I am forced to think that perhaps our language is not a language of prose. Perhaps our man cannot sit by a river and, waiting for the fire to catch, tell the person beside him a beautiful story. Our people speak to one another in fragments, short, vivid, aphoristic expressions. A Turk will sit and tell his neighbour a long story, a tale; an Arab will tell a tale; a Russian will tell his companion beside him a long story. Our language seems not to possess that quality. That is why I have said that epic, peaceful narration may not be a quality of our language. That is my aspiration, my dream of tranquil narrative, and I do not think any step forward has been made in that direction. My constant struggle is to create prose of calm narration, quiet works without epithets or with few epithets, purely through verbs and nouns, moving calmly. Perhaps I have a few successful pages.

9 August 1999.
— Does the friendship formed in Soviet times continue, or did it end with the empire’s fall? That must be the loss of something great.
— I will not say that from the outset I understood the Soviet Union as a great homeland, with a kinship flowing directly from that concept and its bearers, Russians, Uzbeks, Georgians and others. There was a combined, mixed feeling of friendship and enmity. There was also a vigilance against losing national identity. I never forgot my national belonging, nor could I. It was after the empire’s collapse that I was to acquire the truly heavy awareness of losing a great, kind homeland. The empire was an enemy to the extent that every state is an enemy to its citizen’s problem, to the extent that every individual, in whatever state, is in both enmity and friendship with it.
Our circle of friends formed in Moscow. That is not a reinterpretation through hindsight. It was a very lovely circle: we drank together, cared about each other, grew disappointed, read each other’s writing and defended one another.
— That is a great thing.
— It was quite a great thing, in the company of the Georgian Rezo Gabriadze and Andrei Bitov. Simply at fate’s bidding we gathered under one roof. Even if we admired the shots fired by Americans and Europeans, thought our country the kingdom of evil, even if we mocked and rejoiced, something beautiful nevertheless united us. We rejoiced without understanding that we ourselves bore that empire. The empire was in each of us: that great person, the citizen of a great country. I remember a chance remark a Moldavian made to me: “History decreed that at one time we were also citizens of another empire.” He meant the Ottoman Empire. “There, in the empire, we were together, and now we are together too.” That awareness existed. Of course I regarded the achievements as mine: a shared life, a unity of faith. Finally, one can find a correct answer to this question: we are all Easterners. All of us, Armenians and Russians, Ukrainians and Azerbaijanis, Moldavians and Georgians, display a shared quality. Though we are all children of this world, this earth, with Australia, America and the whole world, we are nevertheless a somewhat different people. Our cultural idols are here. First, God forgive me, let us renounce Shakespeare, I do not know whom else, and only then the others... My feeling of kinship is first towards our own. Yet I would say that in high flight everyone’s national garb falls away. Then perhaps someone more Armenian will appear in American dress than in native dress in Armenia. In great flights one must say that Don Quixote is more Armenian than the actual Don Quixotes here, that the English Hamlet is more Armenian than our Hamlets here...
Although the Turkish and Azerbaijani enemies, the Georgians, have always betrayed us, you do not always understand how. They had to betray: they think of their own bread first. Although they have taken much blood, assimilated many people, ruled and subordinated, I nevertheless cannot renounce this thing called brotherhood. You do not know what it is: the brotherhood of fellow citizens of an empire, of bearers of brotherhood, of Easterners... There is something beautiful. Still, as a conglomerate we had created a fraternal family at our little meetings. I think we helped one another emerge. Andrei Bitov emerged before our eyes; I think we helped a little too. Rezo Gabriadze emerged, I emerged, Grinkov in Stalingrad... It was a family. Happy those who lived under conditions of peace, even dictatorial peace. Happy those who lived not during Genghis Khan’s rise but under his rule. Unhappy those who lived during an empire’s fall, even Genghis Khan’s empire. Here we are living through the collapse of that empire, even if we called it the kingdom of evil. Unhappy us.
— So the atmosphere in that mingling of different nations helped each nation take flight.
— Those things have been said, but apparently they were worth recalling. It was an empire, an ideology publishing literature in seventy languages. The idea of cultural-national autonomy had been embodied, had acquired an administrative form. Nothing like that had existed in the world.
A fellow my age named Vladimir Sangi, then thirty-year-old Vladimir Sangi, to whom Chingiz Aitmatov’s novella Spotted Dog is dedicated, represented one of Sakhalin’s small peoples. I think there were thirty thousand of them. We played billiards together in the Moscow dormitory...
— Who was he? A writer?
— Sangi, yes... He had come there to study. He was their Mesrop Mashtots: he had devised an alphabet for that tribe of thirty thousand and was translating a novel. Human history has seen nothing like it.
But now, in these constricted times, it is impossible to live, and that circumstance makes us smaller, petty, provincial, cuts us off from the world. Cut off, confined within ourselves. This is genocide, the killing of a nation. Without a new community, union, federation or confederation, or simply good-neighbourly relations, we cannot live. Much tolerance, intelligence, thought and effort are needed for a channel to emerge in which you can feel the citizen of a great state, with democracy, popular rule, great ideas, awakening great ideas and revealing individual capacities, the suppression of which caused the empire’s destruction. The whole country had become a cemetery of oppressed souls and restrained abilities... A cemetery, until it exploded.
God grant that I begin to regard a Turkish intellectual with the same brotherly feeling I had with Vasil Bykau and Nodar Dumbadze. Even now, when I read them, my eyes fill... Let there be journeys, going and coming, let us sit together like fellows, there in their country, mocking their clowns. It was a beautiful feeling... One day... Perhaps there were just three of us, Andrei Bitov, Rezo Gabriadze and I, watching football. Football made us remember other football. Rezo said there was a player in the Trabzon team... The Trabzon team are Georgians. We asked: why Georgians? Why should there be Georgians in the Trabzon team? He said: because they can lose beautifully, like Georgians. Lose, he said, because they are conceited, foolish, they leap beautifully and prettily, like Georgians. What matters here is that there was a brotherly feeling towards other nations and peoples. If we could overcome the national complex and look at others that way...
— For that we must grow stronger, more powerful. While we are weak, we cannot.
— Of course Rezo’s foundation, like mine, was the empire. On that foundation one could permit oneself such generous remarks and judgements. We simply do not yet know what we have lost.

14 September 1999.
— How I long for my land’s voices, rhythms and scents, which were simply life to me! By land I mean Lori, of course. The voices, truly... Like bread... As a hungry person longs for bread, so do I: that hunger, that lack. I fear it is already beyond return...
I know that each time I come into contact with it, things change, life enters me. I say life because my present condition exists alongside living, yet is also at odds with it. Perhaps it belongs to another presence. But I know that is life; I know that its living presence, its hidden whisper and rustle within me, prompted me and let me create a few living lines. Otherwise relationships of another level come, bookish lines come...
How I long for my father’s and mother’s voices... For my father’s voice, scent, hand... The weight on my shoulder of a labourer’s worked hand. He had a large, beautiful hand... And he had earned nothing... Earned nothing in the sense that nothing had come into the house, yet he had worked... Those evenings, evenings of effort and sweat... That was how the day ended, how the day was lived...
Time was different. There was the hope of the day. From child to elder, from little ones to the grey-haired, they were bound to that nature. The child felt he was not the world’s slave, that their help was something beautiful. But distant, existing as a distant power, as God’s distant power. Let there be help, that friendship, but the living God is in our field, that green field...
How I long for that field’s undulation! The wind went over the crops, playing and playing: that was living life... Will we see it again?..
I consider myself fortunate: I saw that period, which contained the whole of peasant life from the beginnings of humanity’s history to our days. I saw it. And how I wish... How I pity my children, grandchildren, these little ones born in the city, who will not know what a field is, a gnat, an ox, the scent of earth, the freedom of space. I pity them for having no place on the ground... For never having seen the running of chamois and the frolicking of deer...
There... Like that... In Vahagnadzor, in the Shahalli gorge... Before the Soviets that gorge had another name. Tumanyan was proud that the enemy would not pass through those places. The Shahalli gorge, that narrow ravine... There... I awoke in the train. It was morning. In the forest opposite, to the right when you travel from there, clouds were slowly rising through the forest, up the gorge, up the slopes, the damp, wooded slopes. I know that was the day I became a poet. That day I was charged, filled...
Once I was very receptive. After reaching Aparan, after descending, my voice would begin to change, my interior, my substance would begin to be charged with something else. It was so beautiful. My relationship with everything was very good: the soil, my mother, the dog, the cow. The cows sitting at the door, heavy, gazing so peacefully in the evening. The dog... We travelled in different cars, so there was no single rattle of a car or engine by which one could say the dog recognised us. Our house was at the upper end of the village. To the bottom was probably about two kilometres. Then suddenly I would see it, from far away: Hrant has come! Hey, wait, where are you going, I am coming!.. Ah, where have you been lost?..
Happy those who still have that small homeland. Happy those who still have a parent over them, even disabled, even bedridden. They still have one, someone praying for them. Happy those who have planted a tree somewhere or left a dog: they must go. Happy those who have at least a hundred metres of soil beneath their feet.
— After all this, it is worth speaking about God, about the universe, its infinity.
— The universe’s boundary is our madness.
— And infinity?
— Infinity is our powerlessness.
— How do you imagine God’s existence?
— God’s existence?.. God’s presence?.. God’s presence is the awareness of our powerlessness, our powerlessness before comprehending the world. Despite the power of our immense perceptions, there is an immense area beyond their scope. We arrive at another existence that extends beyond the limits of our capacities... That is God. And very often also our presence, our existence in the world.
The soil, life, nature itself, water itself breathe with life. They strive towards the earth’s living, towards becoming existence from non-existence, becoming a presence. Stone itself is endowed with the ability to speak. That is why it crumbles, asks for moss upon it, cracks, groans, and suddenly you see it has become a tree. There. It strives towards life. So do we. We too were trees, moss, soil in our surroundings. We are their continuation. Thus the soil is inclined to speak, listen, become music and song, think, negate, towards the wise desire to break apart, to burn... All this is burning. A desire for burning...
Life is a fire in the marshes: there and not there, —
Life is a traveller, a long-awaited guest who must come.
Life is a fire in the marshes: there and not there, —
Life is a traveller, a long-awaited guest who must come.
Life, like earth and sky, is boundless, boundless, —
Life, like lost stars, has a thousand names.
Yeghishe Charents, a sixteen-year-old youth...
— What was your first literary attempt?
— I remember, certainly. There may have been other attempts not worth returning to. But the first one I remember, which I still recall with longing, was also a success; it was published later than the other works, in a magazine version. I do not know why it was left out of some collections.
It was the first work meant for publication on which I concentrated and worked for quite a long time. It contained youthful inexperience and also my youthful love, which nothing can replace. It is an immensely precious work. I seem to have made corrections to the magazine version, worked in its margins, but the magazine has disappeared. I will ask my wife to find it and reprint it. It is short but very important to me. As I remember, very important: the theme of return.
— Was it a short story?
— A short story, probably twenty or twenty-five pages. The impressions came from childhood, and I was the acting subject too. I had found something else. I had an uncle, a younger uncle, whom I remember from the age of four. I was definitely four, because it was the Finnish War and he had already gone. What I remember is that they were slaughtering a cow at their door: it was this uncle. That cow was slaughtered; I was a child and it impressed me. He left his wife and daughter and went to war. He finished the Finnish War successfully, but before being demobilised the Second World War began, and they said Yeranos had been killed. That was the end. On cold winter nights his wife came to our home, and our young mother, who also had small children, received her. She had a little child who died; she came and slept nestled against my mother. She endured and bore it for a long time, waited. In the village many married very young, became widows, their children orphaned. She refused everyone for a long time. When people came to ask for her hand, she came to our home and said through tears: what should I do? The women, the relatives, urged her to go. She said: I go to Dsegh, but I stand on that stone looking to see if he is coming, so I can take his arm and come here, to my home... The house they had built, its four walls, its roof... But the boards had been nailed to one side of the roof; he had not managed the other before going into the army. One day a devil’s wind swirled through the trees from our garden and entered beneath the roof. It entered and lifted all the bricks. The house collapsed like that. The tiles broke upon it... We saw other things too...
In my thoughts I loved him very, very much. I did not kill him: in my mind I did not accept that he had been killed. I saw his return... His return was mine. I had come to Yerevan at fifteen, and each time, in my mind, I went back along that road to my native house. Through his return I saw mine: the yellowed pumpkin, the hen, the rooster there, the ginger cat on the fence, the apple tree... He was attached as I was. The log at the door, the wife’s labour, the labour of her gentle hands upon the log. A woman’s hand had not been strong enough to split and tear it; it had helplessly gnawed at its sides. He must come and split the log... That blanket, that couch, that woman... There were our threshing floors, the Ors threshing floors; women had gathered there to rejoice: he has come!.. It was that return I meant to bring back, and the next day’s good morning, as though nothing had happened, as though the house had survived. There had been sins in the woman’s life, of course. But there was such disgust at barracks, war, filth and disease that this tiny disruption of morality here could not outweigh that pumpkin, that cat, that house, that silence, that peace... Like that. I considered it my first serious work and published it.
— Was the title Return?
— Hovsep Returns from the Army. If I reprint it now, I will call it Return. They published that work because after the sketch Ahnidzor came out, I was expelled from the institute. I worked in two places and was dismissed from one as well, leaving one. There was a small salary. They did not dismiss me there because my child had already been born and I was renting a home. We somehow lived. They no longer published me or broadcast me on the radio; everyone refused. There were many disputes, something like despair, it was simply repulsive. Finally the newspaper Hayastani Fizkulturnik took me on as a proofreader. One day someone unexpectedly said: have you nothing? Bring it and we will publish it. The reason was that Beirut’s Dashnak centre had noticed my banned material and taken it under its protection from far away. Munich radio had attacked them, saying that as in ’37, so today young people... And so on... After several such articles I suddenly saw them here beginning to atone. They particularly offered publication in Sovetakan Hayastan, the magazine published for the diaspora. That is how I was restored. Later that hero defending me came here from Beirut. I had been taken on at Grakan Tert. I was a wonderful typesetter, setting twenty pages a day with perhaps two errors, perhaps none. I also edited the material while setting it. Dr Papazyan appeared here, and it became clear who was responsible for my rights being restored, for that work having been published. Dr Papazyan was a member of the Dashnaktsutyun bureau. They influenced matters from afar, and the second work was published too. Like that...
— What was the first really good work you were pleased with?
— The story August. Very seriously conceived, a traditional plot, with no tribute paid to other things. It accords with my thinking: juxtaposed images that do not hinder each other, serving each other as both pauses and comparisons, completing the setting. And the setting is very beautifully made: a pear fell, the heat, that dry house, that grass... The dialogue is beautiful too. A good work, done, and alongside it the story Alkho continued.
How did the others emerge?.. I remember precisely: I took Zorayr Khalapyan’s typewriter and wrote things. I could do that. I waited for everyone to leave the editorial office, then sat and worked at night.
There was a novella of a hundred and four pages. It was very important, my anxieties about disappearing nature and our connection to it. Those anxieties existed; it was built upon them. My editor had read Aitmatov’s novella and named my work The Horse’s Eye... There were cherished plots like that which I kept. One was Alkho, also The Orange Mare and the others. Of course it was not well structured as a novella, but there were wonderful fragments from which Mesrop, Alkho and others were drawn. One can say that those hundred and four pages became works unchanged; very little was left out. What was left out was the central connection: disaster threatens us because we have lost our ties with the earth. Asphalt has been spread between our soles and the earth’s voices. I was angry with Yerevan and did not think about it. I thought about Ani. At the same time I thought that one day I would write about Ani, about human immorality becoming so heated that the city perished, about us being so immoral that disaster awaits us too. I do not know whether I managed it... Apparently my thought fled towards saved humanity, landscape and rural work; the peasant’s work became important, something that existed as a social and political question. Truly, because we are losing a people. Or perhaps I was wrong? They criticised me; I had to affirm my own position. Had Ahnidzor passed unnoticed, not been savagely crushed, the magazine not collected, burned and banned, perhaps I would have taken another road, sought other things. But I stood by the spot where they had struck me, the place they had bombarded, in defiance of them. In that way Hrant Matevossian emerged as more or less a village writer. Otherwise another, urban work had also been left unfinished. I was a city boy after all: I came at fourteen and was here. Otherwise I would have caught the city’s rhythms. But that bombardment was also state policy, because the peasant, as a small cooperative proprietor, had to be deprived of that too and equated with a worker. He had to be a worker on the land, as one is in the city or factory. That is why collective farms were crushed, because they were a form of collective ownership, and state farms organised. In short... Everything happening in the village was pain; I bore every change painfully, and it had to echo. Then a life lived for one day on one hectare is enough to devote your whole life to it and go on and on forever... Not to mention history, what you have lived through.
— What is Hrant Matevossian’s technology of writing? One person writes, finishes and then begins to work on it; another searches for words and constructs sentences for days.
— One of today’s writers taught me something beautiful: write on one page of a notebook and leave the other blank, make notes on the white page that will later enter the first... I know that very cleanly written pages are a sign of uselessness. If it was written all at once, not worked upon, I shudder and know something bad is there. Often, even unjustifiably, I intervene, though not to complicate it, add more or make pauses... I know nothing... I cannot work on a typewriter. Sitting down to one work twice, I reached the sixteenth page and saw with horror that my style had changed, become something else: the machine had suggested something else. That was where it ended, and that wonderful work was spoiled. I left it, yet remember it with longing; perhaps I can return to it one day. Only with a pen.
Like any undertaking, a literary work should be written in one go, without interruption, and then read and worked upon. That is how I did it, working as I went. Today I corrected yesterday’s work and moved on. Because life was difficult, large works were interrupted, and returning was always very hard. You are already doing another work, know what it is for, and it is a joy and discovery because you have prepared tomorrow’s things, have something to write. The interrupted work is forgotten; your body fades within it, and it is difficult to revive it again as a person of a new quality.
— The Green Field is my favourite work.
— I told The Green Field to my son and shuddered myself while telling it: I saw something very beautiful that absolutely had to be written. But when I began writing, I did not find what had told me, while narrating, that I must turn this into a text. It is another matter that it is beautifully done and the reader does not notice the flaw, that it is well written and you do not notice the absence of radiance at first glance. It is well told, has good language, because I did it for the language too, for children, teaching language and rhythm. It is an expression of love too: I was telling it for my child, telling the best I had. Yet something was lost. It is a pity it was lost.
— It is a very good work. One cannot find an unnecessary word or connection.
— Yes, a couple of children’s works, one might say, succeeded. My Mountains is not bad either. That too was written in one breath. I wrote Punishment with great difficulty.
— It had to be difficult to write. It is quite complex.
— Yes, when he goes to fetch hay, right?
— Yes, a difficult work, but very good.

28 September 1999.
— What is a word to you?
— I do not accept the word... When it appears in a text as a saviour. I have always avoided that. The text should be strong, not one word rescuing it all. All words should have equal power. Gurgen Mahari used the word’s saving power more than anyone. After some loose, empty narration, suddenly a rescuing word appeared and saved the whole page. Thus texts were saved by words and expressions. True, great artists, however, have no word; the word has no significance for them. In Hovhannes Tumanyan’s text the word has no significance: the words are so precisely found that none stands out. It seems a succession of grey words, yet it produces a vivid, great image. The words, themselves grey and insignificant, create a significant text. I do not know what kind of writer I am, but I am a good reader and was a good literary scholar from the outset. I have professed not the culture of the word but the culture of the text, the whole, always dimming brilliant words, removing them from the text.
In Tumanyan’s Gikor that word is absent; the word is the whole of Gikor. On that basis I will give you a true example. Aram Ilyich Khachaturian, who was also a great musicologist, was asked about his ballet Gayane. I mean the Sabre Dance. The ballet master had suggested that something was missing, that they should find a scene. He then wrote that famous Sabre Dance melody and said late in life: I wish I had not written it. It spoiled the ballet... That is precisely the word. A small text stood apart and shifted the ballet’s centre onto itself.
— How would you explain that everyone can combine the same words and write the same sentences? A text will be written, but no story will result. Yet one among many succeeds, produces a story, a work of genius.
— Because the world is as much a subjective presence as an objective one. Because under God’s gaze one earth arises, under the devil’s another thing. Because it turns out that literature’s object is not reality, but the writer himself. Your question is about the subject perceiving the object. Reality stood before Tumanyan and very many of his contemporaries. Before Tumanyan it becomes a marvellous, real literary world; under others’ gazes it dies, does not grow into literature. Those contemplating subjects lack the power to transform it into a literary reality.
— In creating, a painter, sculptor, musician or writer transfers energy to what they create. In other words, the work is constantly within the influence of its creator’s energy field. I mean physically, not imaginatively. I would be interested in your view.
— Perhaps that is what enters the work and creates the literary or musical reality I mentioned. That is how Martiros Saryan’s Armenia arises, how Hakob Hakobyan’s Armenia does. It is the presence of their energy field. On the other hand, they also discover a new reality for us. Afterwards we join their gaze.
— If we think on a cosmic scale, a person, their arrival in the world and their life seem meaningless. Why does a person come, why leave? What must they do to live rightly? Their role?
— To tell the truth, a person is enacted rather than acting. To that extent it seems meaningless to you. Yet a person can also, as some religious currents believe, influence things to some degree. To the extent that one is a creature, creative forces are also present within. To that extent it is not meaningless. I think God is within the human being too. Ultimately, if the relation is set out as God and reality, God and human, creature and creator, the foundation is nevertheless the creature... Those are my views; I have adopted our ancestors’ attitude. In the human being, the power of the entire universe is revealed.
— Do you think a person is soul and body? How do you regard the idea of the soul’s immortality?
— I once reflected on it. At other times I have given good answers. I consider the whole universe inanimate and inclined towards life. The inanimate inclines towards living, and the effort is shared. I connect the soul with soil, with the inanimate, which beneath the sun, by the sun’s power, the light’s, the wind’s... In short, all living things incline towards becoming ensouled, acquiring a soul, towards life. I do not want to think it is truly soil, truly dead, and a soul drips down from above and animates it. Rather, it is a property of the inanimate to come alive, become ensouled and inspired. It is a property of the inanimate to gather moss, have microbes, develop, become a fungus, the fungus something else, define something else on the boundary of animate and inanimate, such as a starfish, and aspire towards the soul. It is a property of God’s world, its essence, its embodiment towards the living. No one and nothing wants to be dead. Everything inclines towards awakening, becoming soul.
— Do you mean that life is a property of the soul?
— No, life is a property of the inanimate. The inanimate tends towards life.
— What do you dislike most in a person?
— The tyrant. Tyrants are the ugliness of the world. They ought to have been answered before they were made into gods. But since a person is also a slave, an executor, they submit, worship, turn another into an object of worship, an idol, and the original response is distorted. That is already a second stage. But the first instant, when someone subjugated their fellow human being—the response at that instant is the truest. I do not lose that response. Violence is the most abhorrent phenomenon.

15 June 2001
— Most prose writers were tempted to write poetry when they were young. Have you ever written poems?
— Poetry, too, must be mature. The prose writer’s, the playwright’s, the poet’s—all their genres must be mature. They are entirely separate fields, yet related, neighbouring domains that interact; they are all the writer’s equal children. Perhaps the firstborn is the poem. A gifted person should be able to succeed in all three fields. Of course, the beauty of art first drew me through poetry. A whole world—in Teryan’s poetry, in Tumanyan’s poetry...
I made a few attempts at writing poems, but that was in my early youth. Then prose seems to have enchanted me with the quality of its spare beauty... I had broken my arm and was in hospital. A nurse brought a book from the hospital library in which something had been crossed out. Later I realised it was Aksel Bakunts’s name. He had translated Gogol. Gogol was fortunate in his encounter with me. I was not yet reading Russian; there was an excellent Armenian translation. Then Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy... I read very little. The reader in me had not yet taken shape. And I had no guide to recommend fine literature. Overcoming everything with a sense of smell bestowed from above—simply an insatiable thirst for reading—I gradually began to attend to aesthetic qualities. I was fortunate in that the time of freedom came. Charents appeared with his immense, great world; Bakunts came, Totovents...
— What is Nar-Dos’s prose like? Especially the language.
— It is true prose, yet nevertheless small-minded. It is not daring; it flies low. The reader never encounters the boundaries between falls and flights...
— And what do you think of the younger generation of prose writers? Will the literature of our time be created?
— Much has been said about that. I am no longer young, yet to this day, in every book, Armenian or foreign, I have always sought a guide—brave, deeply knowledgeable, someone who will open a world before me, even if it is hell. That is what I seek: a guide. To say I have found one would be an exaggeration. But capable people have arrived who claim territory with their prose. Sadly, especially in prose, there are few such names. Once again, to irritate the fools, I shall name Levon Khechoyan and say that some of his works are a step forward. Sadly, he has no complete work sustained throughout with equal strength.
In that respect, Demirchyan’s Vardanank is unique. At my age he made me a youthful reader again. Across endlessly many pages, an endlessly precise narrative. Otherwise you turn the pages of Armenian literature with apprehension in your heart: now you will turn a page and encounter an error, a false sermon, journalism, and so on. Page after page, the episode, the greatness accumulated—the very thing that makes a person who truly pursues literature great. Sadly, our contemporaries did not show the ability the writers of Vernatun possessed: Tumanyan, Isahakyan, Nikol Aghbalyan. The last was a great literary scholar. There are things in his writing so close to me that it is as though I wrote them myself. People with a sense of honour, whose purpose was to keep literature and their homeland steadily before their eyes: having absorbed the whole of world culture, they tried to add something of their own. There are no people with that sense of honour. There are tolerable people who seem able to shoulder the burden. This applies both to the older writers and to the relatively younger ones.
— The characters you create come alive and live lives of their own. Do you always feel their existence, miss them, or do you forget them after writing and live the life of the one newly coming into being?
— They are far more present in what I have not done than in what I have done. Though I wish it were otherwise. Perhaps that attitude comes from my mind still being more on what I have to do than on what I have done. There is so much to do that what I have done is a mere trifle. Before this powerful, vast, uncontainable world we make efforts, some feeble attempts to embrace the uncontainable: great expanses, vast numbers of people, perhaps the entire Armenian people—but they remain unfinished. I do not admit it now, but perhaps something has sometimes forced me to admit that I am weak. Before this life, what we have done, not just my own works, amounts to paltry attempts.
Everything depends on one’s mood. In the end, Saryan’s painting does not encompass the entire Armenian world. Nevertheless, it is painting that embraces much, establishes an image and opens up a world. It is his world—the world Saryan created. In other words, Saryan gives people a way of seeing: you must look with his loving, tender gaze. Through him that world becomes dear to you. If I too can impart my view of the human being, the world, the homeland to my reader, as the great ones—Saryan, Charents—did, if I can gain the reader’s fellow feeling and be the reader’s ally, creative collaboration will arise...
That is always how it happens. Kuchak, Sayat-Nova give their readers a way of seeing, a true response, creating together about this great world. That is how a writer’s longevity and immortality arise.
— You speak very modestly of your work; your impression is mistaken. It is not so. Your literature has its readers—an entire people.
— I could say the opposite.
— Why say the opposite when it is not so...
— Thank you. But let us speak a little in absolute terms. We presented ourselves to the world neither through Vahagn Davtyan’s images, nor Hamo Sahyan’s, nor Paruyr Sevak’s. It seems we might find the key to reading that world through the eyes of the writers who came after thirty-five, but they are not Charents. How good that Charents existed in our time. It was Charents who answered. Nor was I the one who could become a guide in my time. Again it was Charents: in the twenties, in the modern myths, in Commander Shavarsh...
— All that is also connected with the times, with cataclysms within a short span of time. Charents had to answer the great questions. An artist responds to their time. Times have changed. Hamo Sahyan, Hrant Matevossian, all the great figures of the recent period will come to the fore again. Is it not clear that in the present period your prose, Hamo Sahyan’s limpid poetry, are out of place, that precise literature interests no one? What interests people is more combative, powerful, incisive literature, something of another kind. And young writers write in response to the demands of the time.
— God grant they can create something like A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, a clean world into which the reader can move... Among us, Hakob Mndzuri did not set out to take possession of everything, to encompass it all, but he brought a series of images that truly form a panorama of the whole of Western Armenian life before the genocide. He created a world of feudal times, brought a whole sequence of images that impress themselves on you as though they are in motion, as though they are a film. There is no analysis. Only images that demand an active response from you. Only firm and enduring images that become a panorama of Western Armenian life throughout the past century. Of an entire lost world. The philosopher in the author seems weak, but the artist is powerful. The philosophy is required of you, through the images he brings. In other words, you must draw the conclusions.
— When literature preaches virtue, humanity, peace, love, it seems to have no value for our time. People do not think about these things now. Today, for example, literature of obscenity interests them. People accept phallus-worshipping literature; prizes are awarded. Yet that is not pure literature. I acknowledge those writers’ literary talent. But that road does not lead to the temple. All this is connected with a time of transition, with the people’s state of mind. Such phenomena exist, which is why the literature of Hrant Matevossian, of Hamo Sahyan, literature that has created great values, may lose its value at a particular moment. After all, Jesus too was crucified because people were not ready to accept his teaching, but later he came and won over the world. The same is true of genuine, great literature.
— The cause for dissatisfaction is not why they write about such things, but who is so superficial. Both Dostoevsky and Charents, in Along the Crossroads of History, created very similar situations, but love guided them. And so you enter a world unfamiliar, alien and unacceptable to you, where you have a guide. If I am dissatisfied with our new writers, it is for this: for bringing a picture of superficial life, for their superficiality and powerlessness, their poverty. In the end it is poverty. They lack the strength to scrape away that surface and reach the human-god in the deepest layers, because God is not in heaven; God is within the human being. From the deepest layers, the greatest depths, the human being drew God out, removed him and settled him in heaven. There is a human being amid that rubbish and confusion; otherwise we would no longer exist. How many times has humanity stood before cataclysms and managed to pass along the edge, to skirt them! That God within, that Christ within, nevertheless led people along the path of goodness, holiness, patience, love and forgiveness.
— Writers of the new times seem to have no attitude of their own either. They simply describe. Someone looks through other people’s windows, steals the secrets of their intimate lives. That is a base act. But the author does not tell the reader: it is wrong, do not do it. They simply describe with an eyewitness’s meticulous powers of observation. But that does not become literature, does it? Surely the creator has an obligation to humanity, to God.
— They think they are one thing and that person another. They imagine they stand at a distance. But in literature there is only one true answer: the writer is within everyone. True literature has only one addressee: me, only me. If we read and say, this is not about me but about my neighbour, the work’s precision is approximate. If I do not see myself in the images, it is not true literature. These are simply reports. Again, there are names who seem to be engaging with Western literature, like so many of our poor painters: they think they are abstracting into abstractionism, abstracting into surrealism, when it is simply their poverty. It is the absence of a powerful worldview. The powerful writer brings a worldview. Those are great who have God’s gaze and bring a world. If they do not bring or open a worldview, if they have none, merely gathering images can give nothing.
— Do your characters dictate their will, or can you control the course of events to the end?
— That would be a blessed state, granted to very few. They dictate their will. I attribute most of my failures precisely to that. They go their own way. They cross into new territories, and what you thought out beforehand, what you were to do by your own will, imposing that will on the structure as an architect or a construction engineer, does not work. Often the backbone loses the overall form of the structure. God grant strength so that somehow the work can truly be accomplished. Faulkner spoke of this state, explaining failures by it: embracing the uncontainable. Nevertheless, works remain unfinished. You always try to recover your lost rhythm in the next work, or cover up, conceal an error you made, a flaw in your work. And another flawed work may result, because the characters really are not puppets. They must live by their own will, with their full lives, and they place obligations upon you. Let me give an example. According to my wish, the wish of an Armenian Christian, an Armenian writer, the murderer, having killed a person, has killed himself; his physical, bodily death is merely a matter of time. He ought to have been physically ruined, weak, pitiful. Not even a body any longer: no life, no needs. No need even to finish him off. That was the picture: they had gone to take revenge and found someone weak and wretched. Fifty or sixty years after the events I asked the man who had gone there, “Why, is he alive?” That other man had killed a person. It was in our district. My interlocutor fell silent for a minute, then said, “Why, has he croaked?” It turned out he had not: he had killed deliberately, by his own will, as a display of manhood by his own reckoning, and went on living his life. It was my duty to sense that, rather than attribute a Christian’s wish to someone living another life, with other desires. With a good, proper upbringing I ought to have known it and built my plans on that knowledge. It would have led me to different depths from the thought that you must not kill because in killing another you kill yourself. No, he had set himself aside and been a man. Murders too are phenomena of a person’s inner world, and there too one is required to emerge in a manly fashion. I have had very few teachers whom I followed jealously, enviously. Read Hadji Murad and see how he struggles to the very end. Even after he is killed, the unconscious body struggles to live, to be, to establish itself on Earth.
— There is a ferocity of powerful pagan love of life, of combativeness, in the character.
— I very much wish that our children of fifteen to twenty would be formed by reading the great Armenian writers and such great works, that they could encompass depths. That is why I said I had no teachers. They gave us bad literature, superficial literature that teaches nothing; they did not teach us nature, so much within us has been emptied out. Together with our time, purely because of that distortion, that partisanship, that incompleteness, we did not bring a deeply human novel into being. Life squandered that suffering; the literature that never came into being was born dead and passed on to the generations. It is a pity that effort was spent on it, that those works were read, and Hadji Murad and similar works were not. In any case, those books were not teachers.
— Our adoption of Christianity as Armenians seems to have taken the wrong path. The national heritage of our pagan period was almost completely destroyed: shrines, temples, national traditions, even oral tales and legends were deliberately consigned to oblivion. How do you regard that fact?
— One of my friends raised that question much earlier, twenty or thirty years ago: every revolution means destruction. Christianity too. At the same time, one should not look upon it with active hostility. Perhaps it is true, or the only truth, that the culture of the pagan period was completely destroyed and a new culture came. To inherit the destructive force of Christianity’s revolutionary teaching and turn against it would be to do the same thing they did. They destroyed something very precious and great, and established their own. The understanding within society is that the present culture has been offered as the price of that culture: Mashtots, Khorenatsi, Narekatsi, sacred hymns, Sayat-Nova came into being... A great, magnificent culture arose, and one must treat it tenderly, lovingly, without returning to the sources of its origins.
— When you are engaged in the creative process, working during the day, does that process continue in dreams or in some other way while you sleep? Or does it stop, to begin again in the daytime?
— Those are memories of youth. In the turbulent flow, that did happen. But I have not had it for a long time. That obsession, that fever, that compulsion to create, the power to detach and connect: detaching from reality to connect with a greater human world and be with that world, rave, live, marvel, rejoice, laugh... I have not had it for a long time. But it is a blessed state. A writer’s unhappy state, achieved at the expense of youth. Bearing everyday cares, poverty, with joy. And the most dreadful thing is that this effort and suffering are not bestowed on you with pleasure. You simply do it at the expense of your youth. God grant that I can again engage with that delirium and work.
Sometimes I turn with longing to my unfinished work as to a real world: it is an immense world, a state in which characters, people, small and great, strive to emerge from stone and live real lives. I truly love them. I love them as real people are not loved in real life, because that person has truly been created by seven heavens; there is truly a part of God within. There I am not alone; God is with me. When the mother knew neither sleep nor rest, trying to separate them from stone so that they might live with earthly breath, breathe... What I love most is the image of a little girl named Shushan, ten to thirteen years old, who looks after her mother, her father, her brother. A little girl who is mistress of the household. I love her as, quite simply, no woman, girl or little girl—no one—has been loved in Armenian life. I must wrest her out of stone, out of obscurity.
— Who is the Armenian?
— Armenian existence and our entire history answer that question. Who are we, where have we gone throughout our history, what have we given to the world’s culture, civilisation, art? We bring everything together, into a single image, and give the Armenian a moral assessment. There is a description by Mandelstam that at other times has seemed encouraging. The Armenian is a person who shuns everything metaphysical, repels it, believes in the world of things. For him, stone is stone, Aragats is Aragats. He repels and shuns everything metaphysical. The great poet, fleeing the world of revolution and falls, found himself here in the world of things, of reality, and was captivated with reverence before the country, the soil, the human being. Among a people who reject the metaphysical. I consider the assessment true because it recalls all your and my great manifestations: Saryan, Aram Khachaturian, William Saroyan or anyone else. There is something constructive in us that loves and cherishes the world. Our person does not fall all the way—he is afraid. Nor does he rise all the way. He does not become Macbeth, descending to the bottom, nor does he pursue soaring flights; he does not become Magellan either. He neither falls to the very bottom nor rises to the very top. That person is the Armenian. His architecture, his music, his painting, his verbal art prove it. How many times has our creator, the individual, engaged with the world of metaphysics, and how many times has he left that world outside his sphere of interest? Be it Saryan, Tumanyan or Aram Khachaturian...
— In other countries Armenians become artists and military commanders of the highest calibre, yet in their own country, among their own people, they do not fulfil themselves.
— Where did Garegin Nzhdeh emerge?
— There was only one Nzhdeh, an exception. And how many Nzhdehs were there in Byzantium, Russia, France...
— Many times I have encountered people simply laying the blame on the nation, in effect on the blood: the quality is supposedly not good enough... On the gift. A scoundrel’s attitude towards the people that gave him birth. It is the scoundrel who lays the cause of his downfall, the blame, on his parent. Nzhdeh drew attention to this: when the man himself is shameless, he says his mother is shameless.
— Forgive me, but that is not the right way to put the question.
— No, it is not. If we return to our sources, we shall sing our own song; we do not sing our own song when we adopt the Turkish sultan’s attitude towards the Russian people and the Russian tsar’s towards the Turkish people. Adopting the monarchs’ attitudes towards one another, we speak of them in their language: of one in the other’s language. We must find our own language, and our Armenian from Turkey’s attitude towards the Russian emperor must be an Armenian’s, not a Turkish Armenian’s; the attitude of Armenians from Russia towards Turkey and the Turkish sultan must be an Armenian’s, not a Russian Armenian’s. That is what I mean: we have indeed danced to someone else’s pipe. That was when we sang “Istanbul must become a sea of blood”—the song of the Russian tsar, of the Cossacks. That too became a cause of our tragedy. Let us say, well, our interests coincide with his interests—very true words. Then they withdrew, and we were left alone against the powerful Turk.
— We were left exposed to the blow.
— Yes, we were left exposed to the blow. It is another matter that this adoption makes us face reality in a completely different way from how we would if we felt entirely alone. I have always spoken about this and can always insist: deceived we were, but a person of a new quality already stands in the arena, tall, acquainted with the world’s great ideas, not abased. It was as real and material a contribution to the Armenian person’s world as great military, material aid would have been. The word is as material an aid, as tangible an aid, as military assistance, as, say, Colonel Korolkov’s honourable conduct: in effect, he himself saved Sardarapat. With his little Cossack regiment, with the remnants of his regiment, he turned and struck. And everyone rallied around him.

— A family’s gifts, passed genetically from generation to generation, find expression through one of its members. From whom did you inherit your gift as a writer, your mother’s or your father’s side? To whom do you owe your talent?
— My mother’s side. The way she saw ordinary events, the way she told them... I remember a couple of very beautiful scenes. Grandfather Avetik’s large family would gather: the daughters-in-law and their sisters-in-law. We children were there, listening to the whole dramatised life of the village as performed by the daughters-in-law. They mimicked the entire village, presented the entire village. Everyone could be recognised from the gestures. And drama, comedy, were created right there. Right at the carpet loom, weaving, growing tired, swaying, the women created. So when Vahagn Davtyan told Chobanyan something, repeating that craftsmen had created all our medieval song, I imagined the women sitting there at those carpets, singing. And the people created those hayrens. I could see that people: my father’s sisters, my uncles’ wives, who truly created our stories. Of course there were storytellers among the men too, but they were mostly women. Women create language. Let us remember Pushkin: his nanny created his language.

Hovik Vardumyan, Conversations with Hrant Matevossian,
Van Aryan Publishing House, Yerevan, 2003.