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.

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.