Աշտարակի կրակոցները և սահմանադրական կարգը

1992թ. սեպտեմբերին Աշատարակ-Ագարակ ճանապարհին գնդակահարեցին Աշտարակի գործկոմի նախագահ, դաշնակցական Հովհաննես Սուքիասյանին և նրա վարորդ Վարուժան Աբրահամյանին:

Այդ կրակոցները հիմք դրեցին այն սահմանադրական կարգի, որ մինչև հիմա գործում է, և այն սահմանադրության, որ պիտի պարտադրվեր երկրին երեք տարի անց` 1995 թվին:

Ինչպե՞ս:

“Взять Цхинвали – не проблема”. Проблема – грузинский национализм

“Смотри, видишь – Цхинвали. Видишь, как вроде бы легко взять его?”, — политолог Паата Закареишвили показывает из грузинского села Эргнети на 4-этажные цхинвальские здания.

Кажется, действительно, что очень легко: два полка — и Цхинвали твой. Грузины так и сделали 7 августа прошлого года. Но успех продлился всего день – расчет оказался ошибочным.

Сегодня солдат не видно, но стоять здесь все равно опасно: снайперы видят тебя из своих укрытий.

Internal Bleeding: Crisis has turned “Armenians” against “Karabakhis”

Where are you from?

“For the first time in my life I did not say I am Karabakhtsi [Karabakh Armenian]. They asked me where I am from, I told from Abovyan,” ArmeniaNow photographer Anahit Hayrapetyan tells about how every photographer and journalist in the neighborhood of the Myaskinyan monument on March 1 was asked about their descent in a fierce search for Karabakhtsis.

Third Party Voice: Reactions to being called “scum”

“I don’t think any person with dignity can be found in Armenia to go against the people and not stand by our side. It’s painful there is a lot of scum, but, be confident, the more powerful our movement becomes, the less becomes the scum..”

This is from Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s February 23rd speech. I read these lines and my heart pounded.

Review: A fan of Grishkovetz discovers the artist’s stage side

«I want to be comprehendible… I want to tell a universal story…»

I would have never thought I would see Yevgeni Grishkovetz (www.odnovremenno.ru) in Yerevan one day, that my interest in him, that the place he and I live might ever coincide. I knew about him from internet – he is a renowned writer, playwright and actor, who stages and plays his own pieces.

I used to download his work from the internet and compared him with Armen Shekoyan, who also tells his life with various parallels in first person in the “Armenian Time” novel. They resemble each other as both tell what has previously remained undiscussed – about the Soviet Army, for example (see)

During HighFest International Theater Festival (www.highfest.am) on Yerevan stages from October 4th to 14th, Grishkovetz performed for two days — “A Fellow Who Has Eaten a Dog” that brought him fame nine years ago and “Simultaneously”; and I understood: no, those are not short stories, or they are short stories only in the second place, and in the first place they are performances, where the lines written black on white I read get life with Grishkovetz on stage, they become humorous and comic or stir a feeling of sadness.

In “A Fellow Who Has Eaten a Dog” he, telling about himself, tells us also about our childhood, how our parents used to wake us in the morning, the sweetest time to sleep, switching on the light and having us get out of the warm bed, and sending us in cold winters to the least loved place – to school. “I did not need to go to school; it was my parents who needed it.” The mathematics classroom is poisonously illuminated in a dark Siberian morning and he is afraid of going to school because he is convinced that the teacher hates him.

The Soviet school is replaced by the Soviet Army, where there are hateful officers to replace the hateful teacher. He is relegated to three years of difficult service in the navy on the Russian Island in the Far East. He has done some bad things in childhood: he sometimes used to keep the change from the shop instead of giving it back to the parents, he once stole a role, but are those things punished by service on a Russian island?

The performance differs from the original text, many of the episodes are new and other are missing. The play changes within the course of time: he replaced his mother in the text with his wife and children meeting him when he comes home drunk, and changes the Mathematics teacher with the one of Russian.

At the press conference the next day after the performance Grishkovetz explained he fits the performance to the environment, trying to play in a way to be comprehendible to all: “I am interested in telling a universal story,” the artist says, explaining why he adapts. “If I tell the Swiss how I used to go to school in Kemerovo, Siberia in winter when the temperature was minus 40 degrees (Celsius), with workers standing in the bus stop, and say that there was the smell of diesel fuel in the bus, for him that would be the same as to watch the Discovery channel. How to tell in a universal manner? ‘I was walking, it was cold’ (for a Swiss plus 4 is also cold), ‘the bus doors opened hissing, there was a specific smell in the bus (there is no smell of diesel fuel [in Switzerland]), I took a ticket and looked at its number- is it a lucky one or not? I rolled it up and began to turn it from side to side in my mouth, and did not want to go to school at all. The story I told is absolutely mine, but is not different from the life of a Swiss at all. I want to be comprehendible.”

Grishkovetz played “A Fellow Who Has Eaten a Dog” about 500 times between 1999 and 2004. He has been the only one to stage it in Russia. The play has been staged in Portuguese, German, in Ukrainian, played by a woman in Kiev, in French, by a black man in France.

The press conference was, like the performance, spiced up by humor: Grishkovetz, 40, has graduated from the School of Philology at the university in his native Kemerovo: “Thank God, it was impossible to get the profession of actor and director, and the only place to read books was the school of philology that had any connection with arts.” Grishkovetz used to have a small theater but he did not play himself, because he does not like his appearance, he has a lisp and was confident he was useless for the stage, but he left for Kaliningrad and was forced to play: “I had no actor, and I was the only actor, whom I could not pay. So I went on stage and became an actor.”

He is an author of five books, and his novel called “Asphalt” will be published next spring.

After the performance I thought Shekoyan’s novel is also a long-lasting play. Many of the chapters of the novel are more tasty and impressive when he tells them in cafes. Karen Mkhitaryan, the author of ‘Illness of Depression’ who was a teller before he became a writer, later used to tell the majority of the stories he wrote in cafes, frequently in different versions. He was given a program on AR TV for some period where he used to tell the stories, but then the program was closed. He now tells the stories before he writes them down, and there are so many stories he tells that he does not manage to turn all of them into written short stories, and other writers steal his unwritten stories and write them. Grishkovetz’s difference from Mkhitaryan and Shekoyan is that first of all he has managed to come to an idea of telling the story from the stage and making it a genre. Secondly, Russia gives person larger opportunity to express himself.

Bridges: Remembering Axel Bakunts

Zangezur and Ohio. Opposite sides of the globe. Different worlds. Different people.

I felt the connection, though, of two elderly men in writers’ texts, which almost identically repeat each other.

Uncle Dilan and Francesca, at the decline of their lives, one in the 20s of last century, in the village of Zeyva of the Kapan region (a literary critic supposes), the other 80 years later, in 1987, on a farm near Winterset, revisit the only moment of their life that they lived, the love instant that imparted sense to life and catch the eyes of the two writers among millions.

Impromptu Prose: Novelist and newspaper make for successful formula of fiction

The novelist’s material is influenced by weekly reader response

Each Saturday, for the past 18 months, “Aravot” newspaper publishes a chapter of “Haykakan Zhamanak” (Armenian Time), a novel by Armen Shekoyan.

How is it that for all that time, a novel next to news appears somehow harmoniously, especially tells about the Soviet past interlaced with the present?

Author Milan Kundera writes that unlike history that is foisted on a person as an alien force, the history told in a novel is born from human freedom, his deep personal creativity and his choice, and is a sort of revenge against history.

If so, then Armenia missed a huge period as a novel history.

Of course, novels were published in the Soviet years, but they, as described by Kundera, were copies of imposed history of an outside allien force where characters were made to fit the sterile characters of censorship. Only literature on the subject of the village was given certain freedom, as Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was pursuing a policy of rebuilding the village left in ruins as consequence of the Stalin regime. Prose and real life about a Soviet city were parallel lines that could never cross.

Eighty Years of Sevak: A tribute to a poet

The poet

Last February when thousands demonstrated against presidential election violations, passionate speeches from politicians were followed by actor Vladimir Abajyan’s, who recited a poem: «People are different»

What he likes most of all,
Best of all in his life,
Is his… chair.
He loves it,
He woos it,
He creeps to proceed,
At all costs he crawls to it,…
And thus he climbs up to sit
on the shoulders of the world.

The words belong to Paruir Sevak, and perhaps no others could be so in tune with speeches about seizure of power, fraud and injustices. And even if another such poem does exist it probably is one of Sevak’s.

January 26 marked the 80th anniversary of Paruir Sevak’s birth.

Conservatory teacher of Armenian language Biurakn Andreasyan says that for 20 years students have been naming Paruir Sevak and Vahan Teryan as their favorite poets and, without waiting for their tutor to give them homework, with great pleasure have recited Sevak by heart.

The poet died 33 years ago, but Sevakamania is still alive.

«Sevak makes you think. You cannot read his works just mechanically. After you read them you start thinking of people’s states of mind, hypocrisy, different expressions of love, faith and history of Armenia,» says 18 year old Gayane Melkomyan. «His comparisons are very unique, his works are both simple and complicated.»

Unlike the flowery, pastoral images and landscape metaphors of his contemporaries, Sevak’s Armenia is the modern city and urban spirit — calculators, trams, theatre and concert bills attached to walls, airplanes and so forth.

His poetry explains in a simple manner the unexplainable:

«First love is like first loaf, it always burns and you can’t help it.»

«I hate your name as you probably hate my hands that used to stroke you… if I have a girl she will bear your name . . .»

«You — three letters, you — an ordinary pronoun but with these three letters I become an owner of this entire world.»

But coupled with this simplicity is a clever layering that reveals hidden possibilities from the Armenian language. Many poets wrote their first lines, influenced by Sevak’s catchy rhythms and precise words.

Later, though, some of those protégés criticized Sevak’s work as being too commercial, written with exaggerated civic pathos and overdone. (He is among the most wordy poets, as was evidenced by the publication of a two-volume glossary of words used by Sevak.)

Sevak’s obstinate spirit boils the blood of youth, captured in such phrases as:

«Without going mad nobody would win… and words would never turn into songs if they didn’t go crazy… I wish I were always crazy.»

And:

«I would like to erase the word ‘cautious’ at the expense of life.»

«I would like to turn irregularity into a rule.»

If the Western youth movements of 1960s were reflected in Armenian poems, the epoch of that era would be Sevak’s poetry books «The Man in the Palm of Your Hand» and «Let There be Light», which are the wreath of his creative work. It is a poetry against bureaucracy, philistinism, moral dogmas and hypocrisy.

There was little or no dissident literature in Soviet Armenia. Through compromise during those years Armenian writers managed to publish their books and become «legitimate» creators. Sevak was one of four famous contemporary poets, who didn’t become a member of the Communist Party. People used to tell stories about his disobedience towards the authorities. For instance, once he was ordered to visit the Central Committee of the Communist Party and was told that he had said that members of the Central Committee are Turks. Sevak answered that «Turks» is normal as there are good people among them but you are worse than Turks as you are not people.

Sevak was not a «legitimate person» among all «legitimate persons», he was the rebel among the temperate. He was the one who could talk to the upper class of the Communist Party but he always was a clown, who tells the king all the truth:

«Clown»
You see, it is a child’s play for me
To provide a plank with brain folds,
To prepare chicken-feed from brain,
And then a public meal of that chicken-feed.

However, one day his disobedience ran afoul and the Central Committee prohibited publication of his «Let There be Light» and protests against his previously published poetry flooded the Kremlin.

Subtexts and symbols of poems from «Let There be Light» which secretaries of the Central Committee dug out and found between the lines, criticize Soviet methods. As it is written in «Source of Light»:

Our rear is a dark one indeed:
It’s from books that we learn of our past;
Yet our front is darker still:
The books declare our future.
Darkness in front of, darkness behind us,
We are caught in between.

«Let There be Light» was published in Beirut after Sevak’s death. It brought the times of nonconformist literature closer, but it was not until several years later that it was published in Yerevan. And even then, it had some abridgements.

A society looking for the personification of their protests against cruel methods and injustices, discovered Sevak. And in 1971, when he died (at age 47) in a car accident, hypotheses of Sevak’s death were spread. His death is still a mystery and still discussed: Accident or murder?

«Those days I was deader than Sevak,» says the poet’s first wife Maya Avagyan. «I couldn’t come to my senses and I didn’t ask whether he was killed or not. Later I was asking one of his friends, who was holding a high post in the Party, of only one thing: to find that truck, which was the cause of the accident, however, they never found it.»

She remembers Sevak sitting cross-legged on a sofa for many hours and writing in his notebook. She says he had only one weakness: women.

Sevak’s funeral turned into national sorrow. His body was taken from Yerevan to Sovetashen village, where he was born. For 100 kilometers those who loved him escorted his body, while fans came out of villages to stand at the roadside with lines from his poems written on posters.

Of his own art (in «The Birth of a Poet») Sevak says:

The poet’s «work is a bottle thrown into the sea by a drowning sailor asking for help. Will the Sea of Time ever bring the bottle ashore?»

A year ago waves of demonstrations brought ashore, next to the Matenadaran, the bottle he had thrown once.

To see the shores of verity,
To witness to the falsehood of the liar;
So that you will not be afraid
To unmask the face of injustice.

One has shouldered the world,
While the other is sitting on its shoulders.

(Poems translated by Marine Petrosyan)

Anti-Poetry: Street rhythms deafen the eternal in contemporary artist’s work

People’s poet: Shekoyan challenges convention with his street style .

As freedom of artistic expression toddles its way toward maturity in Armenia, philosophical clashes arise between traditionalists and those inclined to break barriers.

The clash between the familiar (and therefore the accepted) and the uneasy unexpected finds expression in art and in literature: Some bookstores stopped selling a new Armenian novel because it was deemed too racy.

In the world of poetry, Armen Shekoyan is also challenging tradition.

Shekoyan is the only poet whose work is being published in newspapers (originally in «Aravot» and now «Haikakan Zhamanak»).

His second book of verses «Hotel Yerevan» came out in July, after first being printed in the daily newspapers.

And while he may be gaining an unexpected audience through the newspapers, he is getting expected criticism from literary circles, where his style is largely disregarded as something less than literature.