An Armenian Sketchbook, Page 3

  The same can be said of Russian faces and—still more—of Jewish faces. There is certainly nothing uniform about Russian faces. There are Russians with gray or light-blue eyes, with snub noses and flaxen hair; there are Russians with hooked noses, so-called “Gypsies,” with southern, black eyes and pitch-black curls; and there are Russians with high cheekbones, flattened noses, and narrow Mongol eyes. And as for the Jews! Black-haired, hook-nosed, snub-nosed, swarthy, blue-eyed, fair-haired. . . . Faces that look Asian, African, Spanish, German, Slav. . . .

  The longer a nation’s history, the more wars, invasions, wanderings, and periods of captivity it has seen—the greater the diversity of its faces. Throughout centuries and millennia victors have spent the night in the homes of those they have defeated. This diversity is the story of the crazed hearts of women who passed away long ago, of the wild passions of soldiers intoxicated by victory, of the miraculous tenderness of some foreign Romeo towards some Armenian Juliet.

  4

  IN YEREVAN, and in towns and villages in the mountains and on the plains, I met people of all kinds. I met scientists, doctors, engineers, builders, artists, journalists, party activists, and old revolutionaries. I saw the foundation, the taproot of a nation that is thousands of years old. I saw plowmen, vintners, and shepherds; I saw masons; I saw murderers, fashionable young “mods,” sportsmen, earnest leftists, and cunning opportunists; I saw helpless fools, army colonels, and Lake Sevan fishermen.

  And all of these different people were individuals—overbearing, direct, sly, shy, angry, gentle, practical. . . . I saw old villagers clicking their amber worry beads between brown fingers—nearly a century of hard labor amid basalt stone had not hardened or coarsened these men; there was a gentle smile on their faces, and their eyes shone with intelligence.

  I saw warriors, knights, thinkers, swindlers, hucksters, poets, builders, astronomers, and preachers. I saw collective-farm chairmen, physicists, and engineers who built bridges.

  But what about our usual caricature of the Armenians? The silly, smutty clichés and jokes that have become so ubiquitous? Yes, of course—Armenians are primitive! They are pederasts and swindlers, funny little people. The jokes are endless: “Karapet, my poor fellow, how come you’re so yellow?” Yes, where would we be without all those “Radio Armenia” jokes? “Tell me, Karapet. . .” Again and again, with a mocking chuckle: “Our professor, he’s an Armenian, you know.” Or: “Just think, she’s gone and married some little Armenian!”

  It is upsetting to think that the world’s greatest literature has played its part in reinforcing this stereotype: of the Armenian as huckster, voluptuary, and bribe-taker.

  Why has Russian literature been so eager to appeal to the barrack room? Why has it inculcated such mindless, chauvinistic hatred?

  Now, after Hitler, it has become more important than ever to look at the question of nationalism—of nationalistic contempt and nationalistic arrogance.

  What a distance there is between the caricature Armenians of these jokes and the thousands and thousands of real Armenian peasants, soldiers, scientists, doctors, and engineers—each with their own complexities and idiosyncrasies.

  What is it that gathers the diversity of individuals into the unity of a national character?

  For individuals, no matter how diverse they may be, all partake of a particular national character. In all these different people there exists some hint of a national character, some coloring with which it has endowed them.

  I have spoken to hundreds of people, all with their own interests, passions, sorrows, and hopes, their own destiny, their own friends and enemies. What is there in common between the life and fate, the sorrows and hopes of an elderly shepherd living on the slopes of Mount Aragats, and the life and fate of a young graduate student, yearning for her boyfriend in Moscow, writing a thesis about eighteenth-century French literature and desperately wanting to buy a coat of artificial fur? But just as thousands of streams running through forests, mountain rocks, and desert sands, just as thousands of silent, thoughtful, roaring, foaming, transparent, and turbid streams can spring from the same underground source and contain the same minerals—so all these human characters and fates are united by thousands of years of Armenian history, by the tragedy that befell the Armenians in Turkey, by the longing every Armenian feels for the lands of Kars and Van.[9]

  What constitutes the character of a nation is the character of many individual human beings; every national character is, in essence, simply human nature. All the world’s nations, therefore, have a great deal in common with one another.

  The foundation of any national character is human nature. A national character is simply a particular coloring taken on by human nature, a particular crystallization of it.

  Communication between people of different nationalities enriches human society and makes it more colorful. But this process of enrichment cannot take place without freedom.

  When people are free, communication between different nations is fruitful and beneficial.

  Imagine our Russian intellectuals, the kind, merry, perceptive old women in our villages, our elderly workers, our young lads, our little girls being free to enter the melting pot of ordinary human intercourse with the people of North and South America, of China, France, India, Britain, and the Congo.

  What a rich variety of customs, fashion, cuisine, and labor would then be revealed! What a wonderful human community would then come into being, emerging out of the many peculiarities of national characters and ways of life.

  And the beggarliness, blindness, and inhumanity of narrow nationalism and hostility between states would be clearly demonstrated.

  It is time we recognized that all men are brothers.

  Reactionaries seek to excise and destroy the deepest and most essentially human aspects of a nation’s character; they promulgate its most inhuman and superficial aspects. They prefer the husk to the kernel.

  When they promulgate nationalism, reactionaries try to destroy what people share at a deep level; they recognize only what people share at the most superficial level. Reactionaries worship what they see as the national type—and this worship of everything merely national fused with a contempt for more essential qualities is as absurd and ugly as the caricatures of Armenians that you hear in a Russian barrack room; it is the same phenomenon, with a plus sign instead of a minus sign.

  Any struggle for national dignity and national freedom is first of all a struggle for human dignity and human freedom. Those who fight for true national freedom are fighting against mandatory typecasting, against a blind obsession with national character—whether characterized as positive or negative. The true champions of a nation’s freedom are those who reject the limitations of stereotypes and affirm the rich diversity of human nature to be found within this nation.

  It is important to understand what is primary and what is secondary. Of course, there is such a thing as national character. Nevertheless, far from being the foundation of human nature, it is simply one of the many colors, the many timbres, that human nature takes on.

  During the twentieth century the importance of national character has been hugely exaggerated. This has happened in both great and small nations.

  But when a large and strong nation, with huge armies and powerful weapons, proclaims its superiority, it threatens other nations with war and enslavement. The nationalistic excesses of small oppressed nations, on the other hand, spring from the need to defend their dignity and freedom. And yet, for all their differences, the nationalism of the aggressors and the nationalism of the oppressed have much in common.

  The nationalism of a small nation can, with treacherous ease, become detached from its roots in what is noble and human. It then becomes pitiful, making the nation appear smaller rather than greater. It is the same with nations as with individuals; while trying to draw attention to the inadequacies of others, people all too often reveal their own.

  Talking with some Armenian intellectuals, I was aware of t
heir national pride; they were proud of their history, their generals, their ancient architecture, their poetry, and their science. Well and good! I understood their feelings.

  But I met others who insisted on the absolute superiority of Armenians in every realm of human creativity, be it architecture, science, or poetry. The temple at Garni, they believed, was superior to the Acropolis, which was both saccharine and crude. One otherwise intelligent woman tried to convince me that Tumanyan was a greater poet than Pushkin. Whether or not Tumanyan really is finer than Pushkin, or Garni finer than the Acropolis, is of course beside the point. What is sadly apparent from these claims is that poetry, architecture, science, and history no longer mean anything to these people. They matter only insofar as they testify to the superiority of the Armenian nation. Poetry itself does not matter; all that matters is to prove that Armenia’s national poet is greater than, say, the French or the Russian national poet.

  Without realizing it, these people are impoverishing their hearts and souls by ceasing to take any real enjoyment in poetry, architecture, and science, seeing in them only a way of establishing their national supremacy. This compulsion was so fanatical that at times it seemed insane.

  But I understood that this excessive sense of self-importance could, for the main part, be blamed on those who throughout long centuries had trampled on Armenian dignity. It could be blamed on the Turkish murderers who had shed innocent Armenian blood; on those who had occupied and conquered Armenia; on those who told silly jokes at the Armenians’ expense.

  But this long dispute between the negative and positive Armenian stereotypes is not what really matters. What matters is the need to move from the rigidity of national stereotypes towards something more truly human; what matters is to discover the riches of human hearts and souls; what matters is the human content of poetry and science, the universal charm and beauty of architecture; what matters is human courage and nobility; what matters is the magnanimity of a nation’s leaders and historical figures. Only by exalting what is truly human, only by fusing the national with what is universally human, can true dignity—and true freedom—be achieved.

  It is the struggle for human spiritual and material wealth, the struggle for freedom of thought and expression, the struggle for a peasant’s freedom to sow what he wants to sow, for everyone’s freedom to enjoy the fruits of their own work—this is the true struggle for national dignity.

  The only real triumph of national freedom is one that brings about the triumph of true human freedom.

  For small nations and large nations alike, this is the only way forward.

  And it goes without saying that Russians too—as well as Armenians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Kalmyks, and Uzbeks—must understand that it is precisely through renouncing the idea of their own national superiority that they can most truly affirm the grandeur and dignity of their own people, of their own literature and science.

  5

  THE TRAIN arrived in Yerevan on the morning of November 3. No one was there to meet me, though I had sent a telegram in advance to Martirosyan, the writer whose book I had come to translate. I had been certain he would be there; I had even imagined that other Armenian writers would also be coming to meet me. And so there I was on the platform, under a warm, pale-blue sky, wearing a thick woolen scarf, a cloth cap, and a new autumn coat I had just bought in order to look respectable in Armenia. Muscovite experts in sartorial matters had looked me up and down and said, “Well, it’s hardly chic, but it’ll do for a translator.” In one hand I had a case, quite a heavy one—I was, after all, going to be in Armenia for two months. In the other I had a bag with a heavy manuscript—a word-for-word translation of an epic novel by a prominent Armenian writer about the construction of a copper-smelting plant.

  The exclamations of joy had died down and dark eyes were no longer gleaming all around me; my fellow passengers and the hundreds of people who had come to meet them had all hurried away to line up for taxis. The Moscow–Yerevan train had crawled off to the yards; the murky, rain-stained windows and the dusty green flanks of coaches that, after nearly three thousand kilometers, looked tired and sweaty—everything had now disappeared. Everything around me was unfamiliar, and my heart sank—the last little piece of Moscow had slipped away from me.

  I saw a large square in front of the station, and a huge half-naked young man on a bronze horse. His sword was drawn, and I realized this must be David of Sasun.[10] I was struck by the power of this statue: David himself, his steed, his sword—everything was huge, full of movement and strength.

  I stood in the spacious square and wondered why no one had come to meet me. Arrogance? Forgetfulness? Eastern indolence? Some muddle with the telegram? I looked around the square, glancing up at the magnificent monument. . . . The power of David and his steed, the movement captured in the bronze—suddenly all this seemed too much. It was not a legend realized in bronze but a bronze advertisement for a legend.

  I was upset. Should I go straight to the hotel? Without a document, I wouldn’t be let in. Should I trail around the Armenian capital, under the hot sun, wearing a warm coat, a cap, and a thick scarf? A stranger wandering through an alien city always seems sad and absurd. The young and fashionable love nothing more than to laugh at some old countrywoman passing through Moscow in her rustic felt boots, or at some old Yakut walking through Theater Square in a fur jacket on a sultry August afternoon.

  Thank heavens none of my fellow passengers had seen me. Yesterday I had haughtily rejected their attempts to tell me how to go by bus to the hotel. They had understood that I was being met by someone with a car.

  A few minutes later I was in line for the left-luggage office, standing in the cool half dark. There was no sign of any artificial fur coats here, only a sad young woman with a docile child; a young lad in a trade-school forage cap; a young lieutenant, evidently from a village, who had the eyes of a child and who seemed unused to his country’s vast spaces; and an old man with a suitcase made of wood.

  Now I am walking through the square. No one so much as glances at me: I’m just a man in a jacket. I’m just someone going for a walk; I’ve gone out to buy some flatbread or half a liter of beer; I’m on my way to the clinic for some kind of treatment. No one imagines that I’ve only just arrived, that I’m feeling lost, and that I can only half remember the address of the one person I know in Yerevan, the writer Martirosyan.

  I board a bus. For some reason I feel awkward about admitting I don’t know the price of a ticket. I give the conductor a ruble. He gestures at me: Haven’t I got any change? I shake my head, even though I have several small coins in my pocket. The price turns out to be the same as in Moscow.

  Your first minutes on the streets of an unfamiliar city are always special; what happens in later months or years can never supplant them. These minutes are filled with the visual equivalent of nuclear energy, a kind of nuclear power of attention. With penetrating insight and an all-pervading excitement, you absorb a huge universe—houses, trees, faces of passersby, signs, squares, smells, dust, cats and dogs, the color of the sky. During these minutes, like an omnipotent God, you bring a new world into being; you create, you build inside yourself a whole city with all its streets and squares, with its courtyards and patios, with its sparrows, with its thousands of years of history, with its food shops and its shops for manufactured goods, with its opera house and its canteens. This city that suddenly arises from nonbeing is a special city; it differs from the city that exists in reality—it is the city of a particular person. Its autumn leaves have their own unique way of rustling; there is something special about the smell of its dust, about the way its young boys fire their slingshots.

  And it takes only a few minutes, not even hours, to accomplish this miracle of creation. And when a man dies, there dies with him a unique, unrepeatable world that he himself has created—a whole universe with its own oceans and mountains, with its own sky. These oceans and this sky are strikingly similar to the billions of oceans and skies in the m
inds of others; this universe is strikingly similar to the one and only universe that exists in its own right, regardless of humanity. But these mountains, these waves, this particular grass, and this particular pea soup have something unique about them, something that has come into being only recently; they have their own tints, their own quiet splashing and rustling—they are part of a particular universe that lives in the soul of the man who has created it.

  And so there I was, sitting in a bus, walking across a square, looking at the titanic bronze Stalin and at houses, built from pink and yellow-gray tufa, that reproduce the contours of ancient Armenian churches with a grace that seems entirely natural; there I was, creating my own special Yerevan—a Yerevan remarkably similar to the Yerevan in the external world, a Yerevan remarkably similar to the city present in the minds of the thousands of other people walking about on the streets, and at the same time distinct from all these other Yerevans. It was my own Yerevan, my own unrepeatable Yerevan. The autumn leaves of its plane trees rustled in their own peculiar way; its sparrows were shouting in their own peculiar way.

  I was in the main square. On each side was a large building built from pink tufa: the Intourist hotel Armenia, for Armenians from the diaspora coming to visit their motherland; the Soviet of the National Economy, responsible for everything to do with Armenian marble, basalt, tufa, copper, aluminum, cognac, and electricity; the architecturally perfect Soviet of Ministers; and the post office, where my heart would later race anxiously when I went to pick up letters sent general delivery. I came to the main boulevard, where the sparrows were shouting wildly, in Armenian, among the brown leaves of the plane trees. I passed the wonderful Yerevan market, with its heaps of fruit and vegetables in every color—yellow, red, orange, white, and blue-black—with the velvet of its peaches, the Baltic amber of its grapes, its juicy red-orange persimmons, its pomegranates and chestnuts, its mighty eighteen-inch-long radishes that seemed to belong to some phallic cult, its garlands of churchkhela,[11] its hills of cabbages and dunes of walnuts, its fiery peppers, its fragrant and spicy green leaves.