An Armenian Sketchbook

by Vasily Grossman

  All of these worlds are alive; they are worlds created after a living image and likeness.

  There are, however, gods of a very different kind—gods who are quick and obliging, waiter-gods, “What can I do for you?” gods. In no time at all they create worlds to order, according to the fantasies in some bureaucratic decree or a resolution from some ministry. Their world is inhabited by paper ghosts, by painted figures of cardboard and wax. It is a world of veneers, of tin and papier-mâché. These soap-bubble worlds are always full of harmony and light; they are worlds that have a clear purpose, where everything seems reasonable. But in whose likeness—we must ask—have they been created?

  The worlds that the gods of pen, brush, piano keys, and violin strings create in their own image and likeness—these worlds may be full of imperfections and folly. They may be half-baked, twisted, distorted, confused, dislocated, wretched, and even ridiculous. They may be imbued with the charm of the primitive and naive, with a comic profundity, with the pathos of a child’s toy, with a creator’s vain yet engaging admiration of the subtlety and beauty of his own creations, with the blindness of suffering, with senseless hope. Sometimes we find the tedious monotony of a single color, sometimes an absurd and chaotic motley.

  But there is, surprisingly, more true realism in the craziest picture of the most abstract subjectivist, in the silliest concoction of lines, dots, and spots, than in all the harmonious worlds commissioned by bureaucrats. A strange, silly, crazy picture is, after all, a true expression of at least one living human soul. But whose living soul can we sense in this harmonious, officially sanctioned world so full of apparently naturalistic detail, so dense with ripe ears of wheat and fine forests of oak? Nobody’s—there is no soul in a government office. A government office is not alive.

  Perfect worlds do not exist. There are only the funny, strange, weeping, singing, truncated, and imperfect universes created by the gods of paintbrush and musical instruments, the gods who infuse their creations with their own blood, their own soul. When he looks at these worlds, the true Lord of Hosts, the creator of the universe, probably cannot help but smile mockingly.

  Obsessive scribblers, angry when editors reject their work, often say, “I can’t understand why they turned down my manuscript. Only a little while ago the chief editor published a work of his own—and believe me, it’s complete rubbish. No one could say it’s better than my novel.” Confronted by God’s mocking smile, Homer, Bach, Rembrandt, and Dostoyevsky could say exactly the same in defense of their own creations.

  After all, it is not writers, poets, or composers who created the soul of Eichmann or the sixty-below-zero temperatures of Verkhoyansk.[37] Nor did they create tarantulas and cobras, cancer cells, the insane holes and abysses of space, radiation that can reduce everything to ashes, malarial swamps, Siberian permafrost, and, not far from this permafrost, the blazing sands of the Kara-Kum desert. It is not they who are responsible for the general senseless madness of the universe.

  We have the right to ask the divine mocker this question: In whose image and likeness was humanity created? In whose image were Hitler and Himmler created? It was not men and women who gave Eichmann his soul; men and women merely made an Obersturmbannführer’s uniform for him. And there were many other of God’s creations who covered their nakedness with the uniforms of generals and police chiefs, or with the silk shirts of executioners.

  We should call on the Creator to show more modesty. He created the world in a frenzy of excitement. Instead of revising his rough drafts, he had his work printed straightaway. What a lot of contradictions there are in it. What a lot of typing errors, inconsistencies in the plot, passages that are too long and wordy, characters that are entirely superfluous. But it is painful and difficult to cut and trim the living cloth of a book written and published in too much of a hurry.

  And so we leave the village.

  10

  THE FIRST thing I saw in Armenia was stone; and what I took away when I left was a memory of stone. We do not remember every feature of a face, only those that best express the person’s soul: severe lines and wrinkles, meek eyes, or thick slobbery lips. And what best expresses the soul of Armenia is neither the deep blue of Lake Sevan nor the peach orchards and vineyards of the Ararat valley; what expresses the soul of Armenia is stone.

  I have never seen so much stone scattered about the ground—and I have seen the Urals, the cliffs of the Caucasus, and the Tien Shan. What strikes you in Armenia is not the stone of gorges, steep mountainsides, or snow-capped peaks. Far more striking is the stone that lies flat on the ground: the stone meadows and fields, the stone steppe.

  There is no beginning or end to this stone. There it lies—flat and thick on the ground. There is no escape from it. It is as if countless stonecutters have been at work—thousands, tens of thousands, millions of stonecutters, working day and night for years on end, for centuries, for millennia. They must have used wedges and hammers to dismantle huge mountains. They must have smashed them into splinters—splinters they could use to build huts, temples, or the walls of fortresses. From what they left behind in this vast quarry you could make a mountain so high that the snow on its peaks would never melt. There is still enough stone to build any number of towers of Babel, from the one swallowed up by the sands three thousand years ago to the skyscrapers that buzz with activity on the far side of the Atlantic.

  But when you look at these black and green stones, you realize at once who cut them. The stonecutter was time. This stone is ancient; it has turned black and green from age. What shattered the mighty body of the basalt were the blows struck by long millennia. The mountains disintegrated; time turned out to be stronger than basalt massifs. And now all this no longer seems to be a vast quarry; it is the site of a battle fought between a great stone mountain and the vastness of time. Two monsters clashed on these fields; time was the victor. The mountains are dead, fallen in battle. They have been felled by time just as mosquitoes, moths, people, dandelions, oaks, and birches are felled by time. Defeated by time, the dead mountains have been turned to dust. Their black and green bones lie scattered on the field of battle. Time has triumphed; time is invincible.

  Sometimes this seems to be a strange and terrible kingdom where the earth engenders not life but death. Here, instead of grass, instead of dogwood and wild roses, black stones grow out of the earth. April and May give birth not to flowers but only to stone. Stone pushes its way out of the earth’s womb, taking up all the space on the earth’s surface; sullen, indifferent forces remind us that life’s delicate muslin of fertile topsoil barely covers this dead cosmic globe made from heavy ores and fused rocks. Here we can see just how accidental and fleeting is the pale-blue and green earthly paradise. Here we can see the earth’s profound gloom—without artifice or affectation, without any chorus of birds, without any eau de cologne of spring and summer flowers, without any dusting of pollen.

  Here you walk among stones over a stony field. How strange, how very strange! Stone bones lying on a flat stone bed. There is no earth here at all. Your feet step across a polished parquet floor. It is black, green, or a reddish brown. It is smooth and slippery and seems even to have been waxed. Sometimes you think there is a piece of real black earthy earth there in front of you, but no—it isn’t earth at all. It is a black stone floor. And then you see a puddle, a reddish-brown clayey puddle. No—it is slabs of reddish-brown stone parquet. It is smooth and shiny; it has been waxed. I know the local stone-polisher; he doubles as the local stonecutter. His name is time, and he is invincible.

  No Armenian artist, as far as I know, has ever adequately rendered this great deposit of stones scattered over a vast stone floor. How strange that Saryan—a painter best known for depictions of the joyful, festive chaos of flowering meadows and gardens—is considered the country’s national artist. How strange—how sad and ephemeral—seem meadows and orchards against the background of this ancient people’s tragic history, against these dead mountains that have been broken up
and scattered over the earth! This mass of stone made me feel a great sympathy for the Armenians and the labors they have accomplished.

  I began to think of this small nation as a giant nation.

  I looked at Armenia’s silent, implacable stone—and thought about all the fruit I had seen in the collective-farm market on the day I arrived in Yerevan.

  Only a giant has the strength to turn stone into mounds of juicy vegetables and the very sweetest of grapes. Armenia’s peaches and apples are rosy, but her mountain slopes are arid and her stone looks invincible. Only titanic labor can have given birth to peach orchards amid this hot stone; only titanic labor can have extracted grape juice from basalt.

  As a young man I worked for some time in the Donbass. I was sent to Smolyanka II, the deepest and hottest coal mine in the entire USSR, with the most dangerous concentrations of gas. The main shaft was eight hundred and thirty-two meters deep, while some of the eastern galleries were more than a kilometer deep. I saw face workers, timber workers, horse drivers, all hard at work in the hot and humid depths of the Smolyanka. I was struck by the stark power of this vast boiler room, a boiler room that served the entire Soviet Union. Now, under the deep-blue Armenian sky, looking at vineyards and orchards in the midst of stone, I remembered the Donbass.

  There were moments when I imagined that I could see hanging over the vineyards the smoky glow from vast smelters and blast furnaces, and that the stone of Mount Aragats was being broken up by pick hammers and the drills of cutting machines.

  What an enormous, demanding, and highly skilled task! But it is more than that. It is evidence of man’s daring. If soldiers are war’s unskilled laborers, a man armed with a hammer, spade, or plow bears within him the fearlessness of a soldier.

  The small giant advances, takes a swing at these two monsters—time and the mountains—and the stone of Armenia trembles and begins to retreat. The territory captured from the enemy, liberated from stone, and given new life by water continues to grow.

  Water here is endowed with a special, magical power. It really is the “living water” of magic tales, water that can revive the dead.

  And when you look at the water flowing along channels dug through sheer stone, when you see it spread out over the mountain slopes and turn into the miracle of orchards and fields, it seems that the peasants, workers, and engineers of Armenia have somehow abolished Newton’s law of universal gravitation. Instead of running downhill, water seems to be clambering uphill; it is a mountaineer, always striding on, always striving towards the peaks, climbing up onto stone hills, grunting, puffing, and grimacing, obediently going wherever man, in his fearlessness, tells it to go.

  Meanwhile the small giant tirelessly continues his Herculean labors. Streams of mountain water are transformed into streams of light; scatterings of dead stone are turned into houses full of the hubbub of life. A silk net, a gray silk network of roads, spreads out over Armenia’s hills, valleys, and mountains.

  It is man’s nature to advance. The strategy of human culture is to take the offensive. Man attacks marshes and he attacks the oceans; he attacks ice, diseases, forests, permafrost; he even climbs up into the sky.

  Indefatigably and fearlessly the small giant attacks the arid stone of Armenia. The small giant drives water up the mountain slopes, and this water begets wheat and grapes out of the stone. He forces water from the high mountains down into valleys and strikes from it the fire of electricity. The small giant brings dead stone to life, and the stone becomes a living crystal; he turns lumps of ore into ringing bronze. He digs his way through the centuries and collects honey in the cool of the Matenadaran library.

  Bracing himself against the crisp snows of Aragats, the small giant overcomes the murk of space. Drilling a hole through the bottomless barrel of light-years and parsecs,[38] he looks straight into the pupils of the universe. In the cloudless blue of the Armenian sky we can see the smoky glow of sleepless labor.

  But the small giant does not just work; he also likes to drink and to have a bite to eat when he drinks. And then he dances; he laughs, shouts, and sings.

  We came to a Molokan village. Suddenly we were in Russia again—in Penza, Voronezh, or Oryol. There were men with long beards and boys with blond hair. The boys wore their torn cotton shirts outside their trousers and their worn-out felt boots were far too big for them. The windows of the huts looked like half-blind eyes. There was something Russian even in the barking of the dogs and the strut of the cocks.

  And then we were at the top of the Semyonov Pass, on the wonderful road that leads to Dilijan. Maksim Gorky traveled this road in 1928. And my aunt Rakhil Semyonovna traveled this road in 1941, after being evacuated from Odessa. . . . But this is not how one is meant to write literary memoirs. Gorky is a world-famous writer, while my aunt has nothing whatsoever to do with literature—her father, Simon Moiseyevich, was an insurance agent and his family thought him stupid and narrow-minded. And my aunt, I’m told, was anything but a brilliant student at the Lebenzon gymnasium, the secondary school where she studied in Odessa. She seemed to have inherited her father’s obtuseness with regard to both literature and algebra; she seemed to have little in common with her mother, Sofya Abramovna. But Rakhil Semyonovna was greatly loved by all her family—she never complained, she was always friendly and welcoming, and she was extremely kind. She did not have an easy life. Her husband, an economist, was arrested for no reason in 1937 and died in Kolyma. Her son Volodya, who, when still very young, had been accepted to study microbiology at the university, was arrested and then killed in prison by his interrogator; he had refused to confess to the charge that he had been poisoning wells. Her daughter Nina, a remarkably sweet and beautiful young woman, committed suicide on the day that she graduated with distinction from the Chemistry Institute. Her youngest son, Yasha, who was in the cavalry, was killed at the front. And all her friends and relatives who stayed in Odessa died terribly; the Germans took ninety thousand Odessa Jews to the village of Domanevka and shot them there.[39]

  This meek woman’s journey to Dilijan is out of place in a literary memoir. Did she weep, looking back over her life as she gazed at the wonderful beauty of the mountain road, or did she smile wistfully and feel a moment of hope? Did all this beauty give her comfort and hope?

  Does it matter?

  I asked my companions to tell me about the great men who had traveled this wonderful road. It didn’t occur to me to say to them, “You know, my aunt went along this same road in the winter of 1941.” The old woman wasn’t important enough; she was just one of many, an anchovy or sardine in a great shoal of anchovies or sardines. And, as you know, the biographical details of anchovies and sardines do not enter the pages of history.[40]

  We had crossed the Semyonov Pass. But the road continues through high mountains, making sixteen long turns before descending into a valley. Driving fast is out of the question—the road is narrow and the drop is sheer. Even Armenian drivers hold back—cars move slowly, decorously, like rational beings that fear for their lives.

  Slowly and smoothly, wonderful vistas open up. They appear, float past our eyes, disappear, then reappear after a bend in the road. They begin to grow, to take on a more definite form, but now slightly changed, in a slightly different position. New, unseen miracles appear too.

  Pine trees cover the mountain slopes. The trees are very large; the sun has not stinted its strength on them. The summits are covered by snow. Their outlines are smooth and rounded; they look like sugarloaves. That is, they look like sugarloaves to anyone over the age of fifty—it is already several decades since factories last produced those conical sugarloaves wrapped almost up to their peaks in thick blue paper.

  What simple and frugal means nature uses to create a picture of extraordinary power. A calm and clear winter’s day, snow on the mountains, pine trees. Some white, some green, some deep blue. . . . I do not know if it is the vastness of the sky and the infinite forest, or the stern peace, or the extreme purity of the colors (no white
can be whiter than the white of this fresh mountain snow, no blue can be clearer, purer, and deeper than the blue of the sky above this mountain snow), or whether it is the breaths of smoke drifting about the valley, or all these things together—but the view has an astonishing charm, a simplicity, an inner wisdom.

  A man looks at this clear silent world, a world of crystal peace and purity, and decides that he doesn’t need the valley of everyday life, that its vain bustle is destroying his soul. Tempted by the great purity of the snowy summits, he imagines feats of asceticism. He sees a little shack in the woods; he hears the sound of a mountain stream; he gazes at the stars glimmering among the pine needles.

  Involuntarily I began to think such thoughts. Life in the valley, after all, really is very bitter and turbid indeed. And I had inflicted a great deal of grief on people, probably more than they on me. It would be better for me to live on my own.

  But while I was thinking about life on top of a snowy mountain, our glassy coach had made its way down into the valley. The road was now flat, and we were picking up speed.

  Here the side of the road was covered not with snow but with liquid mud. These muddy puddles reflected the sun, and no one would have suspected it of being only a December sun—it was far too bright and warm.

  We came to another village, and that was the end of my dream of becoming a hermit. The little houses stood among pines; the terraces and balconies around them were full of the lives of women, children, and old men. I tried to imagine the village at different times of day and as it changes over the seasons. And I found myself imagining this life very clearly: here in these little houses and in the shelter beside the village spring; during an April dawn; during a summer evening, when the men are singing, the cows mooing, and someone is playing the zurna;[41] during a sultry noon, when old men doze in the shade, click their worry beads, and glance at the young women going by on their way to the spring, carrying their pitchers and buckets.