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Looking Death in the Eye
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# : |
19747 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
3,114 Words |
| Author
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Kevork B. Bardakjian
Kevork B. Bardakjian holds the Marie Manoogian Chair of
Armenian Language and Literature at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor. |
In their long, turbulent history, the Armenians have often looked death in the eye. Survival has been an age-old challenge for them, and they have developed remarkable powers of resilience. Today the Armenian republic is a land-locked country with limited resources and some unfriendly neighbors, raising the crucial question of whether it could survive as a viable state if it broke away from the USSR. Among Armenians there is an acute realization that fresh values and approaches are needed if the nation is to flourish.
Three critical events are etched in the modern Armenian collective memory: the genocide by the Turks (1915-16), the Battle of Sardarapat (1918), and the rise of the independent Republic of Armenia (1918-20). Each of these experiences has given birth to a vast amount of literature, which is hardly surprising given the fact that Armenia's political destiny has always been a central theme in its literature.
Amid wild speculation, rhetoric, and a wide range of ideas, two principal political trends seem to have emerged in recent Armenian literature and political thought. A small, impassioned minority have called for outright independence; an overwhelming majority support a reasonable and phased approach, rallying around the new, noncommunist leadership of Armenia. Among the voices for close ties with the USSR are novelists Bagrat Ulubabyan and Sero Khanzadyan, both of whom marshall historical evidence to show that alliance with Bolshevik Russia proved beneficial in the past.
The literature of survival is brilliantly evoked by the monumental work of Gurgen Mahari. In recent years many Armenian writers have joined journalists, historians, and other intellectuals in analyzing the monstrosities of the Stalin era, the suppression of national identity and aspirations, the distortions of modern Armenian history, and moral degeneration in the press, while literary output has been somewhat diminished. But Mahari's Barbed Wire in Flower, published openly for the first time in 1988, stands as the foremost example of its type in Armenian literature.
Last stand of a nation
Sardarapat, by writer and historian Bagrat Ulubabyan (b. 1925), is the latest novel dealing with the battle of the same name that gave rise to the independent republic of Armenia in 1918. A second-rate narrative, the book reads more like a history than a novel and, as such, adds very little to our knowledge of the topic. However, the author, a native of Karabakh, does
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