The Dark Valley
Short Stories
by
Aksel Bakunts
translated from Armenian by
Nairi Hakhverdi
with a preface by
Victoria Rowe
Taderon Press, London
© 2008 Nairi Hakhverdi. All Rights Reserved.
Printed in association with the Gomidas Institute.
ISBN 978-1-903656-90-7
Table Of Contents
Preface
Vands’ Badi
In Akar
On Mount Ayu’s Slope
The Apricot Field
Pheasant
St. John the Baptist Monastery
For Gyulbahar
Aunt Mina
“Dancing Pain”
Orangia
Mrots
The “Demon” of the Dark Valley
The Modest Girl
Tall Margar
Sabu
Alpine Violet
Dedication:
To my father, for reading me bedtime stories
From the Translator…
Like all translations, this translation, too, is not intended to replace the original text. It is merely meant to serve as a means to introduce works in one language to readers of another.
My translation of The Dark Valley was quite straightforward: wherever I could, I maintained a literal translation, and wherever I felt that the translation would be misunderstood or the flow of the text compromised, I chose to rephrase and, on some rare occasions, even to paraphrase.
More importantly, I worked on capturing the mood, if not every linguistic subtlety, of Bakunts's writings. I hope I have achieved this goal and done justice to Bakunts in my attempt to make his stories accessible to an English-reading audience.
Acknowledgments
At the very top, I would like to thank my father for his support and patience, without which I would have never been able to embark on this project and complete it. He allowed for one of my passions and ambitions to come true.
Secondly, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Hayastan Forum, and especially members SAS and Kars, who eagerly helped me understand all the little foreignisms that Bakunts weaves into his writings, from Russian, Turkish, Georgian, Persian, Arabic, and even English, as well as the peculiar idiosyncrasies of Armenian dialectal language.
Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Theo van Lint, Armenologist at Oxford University, for encouraging me to take on this project and run with it.
Preface
Mtnadzor, The Dark Valley, was Aksel Bakunts’ first published collection of short stories, although he had started writing individual pieces for the press while still a student at the Gevorkian Seminary in Echmiadzin. In 1915 his first published piece, satirizing the mayor of Goris, earned him a month’s stint in jail. When The Dark Valley appeared in 1927, Alexander Tevosian, who adopted the pen name Aksel Bakunts, had already lived an interesting and varied life. Born in 1899 in Goris, Armenia, Bakunts was such a promising pupil that the Catholicos was petitioned to enable him to attend the Gevorkian Seminary, where he studied from 1910 to 1917. He taught in village schools in the years between 1915 and 1916 in the Zangezur region of Armenia. He also served as an Armenian volunteer against the invading Turkish army in the battles of Erzurum, Kars and Sardarabad. In 1918-1919 he was a proof-reader and reporter in Yerevan and taught at a school for orphans. He was accepted to the Kharkov Institute in the Ukraine to study agriculture from 1920 to 1923. After a few years working as an agronomist, Bakunts permanently settled in Yerevan in 1926. Following the success of The Dark Valley, his second collection of short stories was published in 1928. He enjoyed a deserved reputation as a master short story writer. The period between 1932 and 1936 was one of intense productivity for Bakunts. He continued to write individual pieces for the press and worked for the official Armenian film studio, Hyefilm, writing screenplays for three films: Sev tevi take (Under the Black Wing) (1930), Tragedia Aragatzi Vra (Tragedy on Mt. Arakadz) (1931) and Zangezur (1936). He translated Nicolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba from Russian and in 1935 published Aghvesagirk (Book of the Fox), a collection of medieval fables rendered from classical to modern Armenian. He attempted several novels, including a fictional biography of Khachatur Abovian, the author of the influential Verk Hayastani (The Wounds of Armenia), who had mysteriously disappeared in 1848. Fragments of Bakunts’ novel about Abovian were published in 1932 but this and other manuscripts he was working on were destroyed following his imprisonment in 1937. In the violently repressive atmosphere of the Stalinist state, Bakunts, along with his friend Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937), was subjected to attacks for the views he expressed in his writing. Bakunts, like so many of his contemporary fellow writers, including Charents, Zabel Yesayian (1878-1942), Vahan Totovents (1894-1938), Gurgen Mahari (1903-1969), and others, was accused of nationalism, alienation from socialist society, as well as an array of other charges, and imprisoned. He was executed in 1937 after a twenty-five minute trial. Bakunts was “rehabilitated” in 1954, which allowed his works to be printed in Soviet Armenia. A museum dedicated to Bakunts, furnished in the style of his youth, was opened in 1970 in Goris and contains some of the shrubs and trees the author had planted.
The Alpine Violet, Bakunts’ most famous short story, dedicated to Arpenik Charents, Yeghishe Charents’ first wife, and included in this volume, has been his most widely translated work appearing in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish and Arabic. The present volume, skilfully translated by Nairi Hakhverdi, is the first time the eighteen short stories comprising Bakunts’ The Dark Valley have been translated into English in their entirety and is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of translations of Armenian literature into English.
***
The stories in The Dark Valley lovingly depict the beauty of the flora and fauna of Armenia, particularly the area around Goris, the author’s birthplace, and the greater Zangezur region where Bakunts worked between 1923 and 1926. These stories never descend into maudlin sentimentality. Alongside images of beautiful mountains, flowers and rivers, are stark, but also sympathetic, portraits of the Armenian peasantry trying to eke out a living under the arduous conditions of a harsh environment, corruption at all levels, and unequal social hierarchies. Despite Bakunts’ evident sympathy for the underdog within the village hierarchies—the landless peasant, the brutalized wife, the orphan—these stories are never propaganda pieces, something the Soviet regime recognized only too well, and indeed the publication of The Dark Valley only served to increase the regime’s distrust of Bakunts. One of the reasons for this is evident upon reading this volume: viewed through the eyes of the villagers, political events and governmental changes, including the Bolshevik revolution, do not seem to fundamentally change social inequalities or raise the standard of living for the majority of the inhabitants of the villages. In fact, in the story The Apricot Field the inhabitants of two towns, who have been quarrelling for decades over ownership of a field, reach an agreement far more sensible than that devised by the new Soviet government.
Where Bakunts portrays change occurring is largely in social interaction, when denizens of the urban world, representatives of the Soviet state or modern professions, met those of the rural environment. Clashes occur between urban and rural values and customs, often centring on women. Such is the case in the stories The ‘Demon’ of the Dark Valley and The Alpine Violet. In The ‘Demon’ of the Dark Valley, a young city woman named Asya arrives alone to hold a women’s meeting for the village women. The story, written through the eyes of a village man, Sakan, focuses on his fascination with the difference between this woman, Asya, and his own wife. Although his attraction is partially erotic, the attraction is based on what are clearl
y evidences of Asya’s urbanized ways—her laundered clothing, her dainty eating, a glimpse of her fair shoulder, and the smell of her perfume-scented body—which are contrasted by him to his wife’s hardy appetite and pungent body scents. In The Alpine Violet one of the themes which runs through this multi-layered short story is the contrast, less direct than in The ‘Demon’ of the Dark Valley, but present, nevertheless, between urban and rural social and cultural norms. In this story, two men, representatives of the urban professions of archaeologist and artist, visit a remote village in order to study the fortress, Kakavaberd, and are watched enviously by a labourer working in the fields. When the two men finish their work they enter what is by chance the labourer’s house, where his wife, along with her young son, but not the husband who is still working, offers them a meal in accordance with village traditions of hospitality. Seeing the beautiful wife, the artist is reminded of another woman, a city woman, whom he once loved, and during their visit, unnoticed by any but the child, he sketches a quick portrait of the wife while she serves them the meal. Later, after they have gone, the young son innocently mentions to his father, who already has been irritated by envy, that the artist sketched a drawing of his wife. Upon hearing this, in a jealous rage, the father grabs a cudgel and smashes it over his wife’s back.
In addition to exploring the chasm between rural and urban cultures, The Alpine Violet raises another theme which runs throughout this collection: the relationship between the visible traces of Armenia’s history—the churches, the stones ornamented with pomegranates and bunches of grapes, the khachkars, the fortresses set high in the Armenian mountains—and the present-day inhabitants of the region. This theme is most clear in the short story St. John the Baptist Monastery in which a villager decides to plant a vegetable garden on the grounds of a ruined seventh-century monastery. He digs up ancient tiles and medieval jugs, carelessly tossing them aside, and dreams of planting onions and garlic on the royal graves and of the royal bones nourishing apricot trees. The other villagers disapprove of his use of sacred ground for such a purpose, but also reflect on the lack of a vegetable garden in the village. Bakunts imagines why the monastery was built—was it a dream of the Prince or of an Abbot in love with the prince’s mistress?—and the author frequently connects the present inhabitants of the village with their Urartian and medieval ancestors. Yet, at the same time, the villager’s enjoyment of the delicious peppers, the fruits of his labours grown on the monastery grounds, reflects Bakunts’ interest in what the relationship between ancestors and the present-day inhabitants is or what it should be. Two years before The Dark Valley appeared, Yeghishe Charents’ Yerkir Nairi, The Land of Nairi, was published in which Charents stated that distinct from the fabled Nairi there is an ancient place called Armenia which was and is full of ordinary people. Bakunts was greatly influenced by The Land of Nairi, and Bakunts’ own unfinished novel, Kyores, a play on the name of his native Goris, is generally understood to be similar in tone and intent to The Land of Nairi. The historical themes in The Dark Valley appear, it seems to me, to be attempts by Bakunts to write the history of the ordinary people of the ancient land called Armenia.
Victoria Rowe, Ph.D.
Gomidas Institute London,
England June 2009
The Dark Valley
Short Stories
The Dark Valley
The only path leading to the Dark Valley closes off with the first snowfall—until spring not a single man sets foot in its forests. However, there are also dense forests in the Dark Valley where no foot has ever been set. Trees fall and decay. In their fallen place new ones grow. Bears dance whistling like shepherds, wolves howl pointing their snouts to the moon, boars dig the black earth with their tusks assembling last year’s rotten acorns.
The Dark Valley is a peculiar place: almost virginal and wild. It resembles one of those forgotten places from an era when mankind did not exist and the fossilized dinosaur felt as free as the bear does in our days. Perhaps the world was like that in those days, when immense layers of coal began to shift, and on those layers, since long ago, the imprints of obliterated vegetation and reptiles remained.
And now, in the Dark Valley, there are lizards with dark green skins that have never seen a human face, but are not afraid of mankind. They lie on rocks, basking in the sun; for hours on end you can watch how the skin of their belly beats, and like a weak vein, you can catch them. The lizards of the Dark Valley do not flee from human beings.
The mountains of the Dark Valley are high, and it is because of them that the sun also provides a few hours of light to the forests of the Dark Valley during the long summer months. And when the sun begins to turn toward the West on the distant horizon, the shadows of the Dark Valley rise and inscrutable darkness sets in under the foliage. The bears come out to hunt, the boars descend to drink water, the eager wolf howls from its lair with its thousand-mouthed yowl echoing through the Dark Valley.
When night falls, the natives of the Dark Valley wake to hunt. The bears eat pears, paw each other, roll about on the dry leaves, and wait in ambush when they hear the wild boars approach. The bear knows the strength of the wild boar’s tusks, so it will not attack at once. If a weak boar straggles from the rest, the bear will slice its gentle throat with one stroke of the paw, eat a few bites, cover the carcass with wood and dry leaves, place a rock on the pile, and turn away grunting, until the carcass begins to decompose.
If by chance the boars hear the squeals of the strayed boar… their tusks will shine like sharp arrows, and all the bear can do is crudely clamber up the oak tree. Like raging horses, the boars will grunt, plow beneath the oak tree with their tusks, and bash the tree trunk. The graybeard forester of the Dark Valley saw the skeleton of a boar one spring, its tusk driven to its root into the trunk of the tree, and in the hollow of a branch, a bear’s dead cub.
The forester, Panin, resembled a wild boar. He was a giant with the garb of a forest chief and a cockscomb hat on his head. He would appear in the forest without warning, stand near the lumberjack, and watch how fast he axes the tree. Suddenly he would come out of his hiding place and roar so loudly that even the bears would wake from their sleep and grumble in their dens. All the terrified lumberjack could do was either to flee or to contort like a snake under the blows of Panin’s whip.
Panin was a hunter. He had six dogs—the one more aggressive than the other. He would go hunting with them in the depths of the Dark Valley. During the moonlit winter nights, when no one would come near the Dark Valley out of fear, Panin’s dogs would wrestle with the bears in the forest clearing or chase startled wild goats. Panin would run after the dogs, shrieking with delight. The nighttime hunt was a familiar element for him.
When day broke, drops of blood would cover the snow; here and there jumbled traces, the carcass of a strangled wolf, skin in shreds. Panin would sit by the hollow of a tree until the dogs had finished eating their quarry.
Panin would not touch a single killed or living animal, and after the dogs had finished feeding themselves, he would return home. If on his way home he caught someone carrying stolen firewood, he would order his dogs to attack him and make him run until the sweaty, bloody man found cover.
That is how Panin was. His terror had spread far and wide, and stories were told about him by word of mouth. No one knew neither his nationality, nor his religion, nor his ancestry. They said that he had been a military officer, that he had killed people, done time, and then gone to the forests. In one of the northern forests, he had supposedly killed his wife on a night out hunting, or more precisely: he had ordered his dogs to maul his wife.
Such were the stories that were told about the forester Panin.
* * *
Avi had a good reputation as a hunter in the village. He would get part of his household nutrition from the depths of the Dark Valley’s soul. He hunted pheasant in the forest clearings, partridge and quail by the fields; he set up traps for foxes, and sometimes he went into the depths of the Da
rk Valley and sat on the butt of a rock for hours until the boars approached the water.
Avi would aim accurately, and the bullet of his rifle would gash the boar’s fat flank. The boar would tumble, dig its tusks into the ground in pain, tear roots, and fall to the ground grunting.
And when he was not afraid of Panin, or when he knew that Panin was not in the Dark Valley, he would lift a bundle of firewood on his back, hide it somewhere, to bring home in the evening.
On this particular day also, Avi had gone out to hunt. There were fresh prints in the snow. Avi followed one of the prints, and just as he ascended the top of a hillock, he saw two foxes. By the time he was ready to shoot, however, they fled. That was a bad sign for Avi: it meant that the hunt was not going to be successful. He walked a little more, saw the prints of a wild goat, looked around, but could not find it. And because on that day Panin was not meant to come to the forest (Avi had heard that the forester was ill), he judged it a good time to take home a bundle of firewood.
Evening was closing in when Avi laid the firewood on a rock and sat on a stump to catch his breath.
A hunting dog appeared, sniffed Avi, and moved on. Avi’s breath cut short. A second dog appeared, then a third, and behind the dogs, Panin, as if he had grown out of the ground.
The snout of one of the dogs was as coarse as canvas. The snout of another was as red as a beet. Panin sputtered like one of the bears in the Dark Valley, and when he raised his whip, Avi hunched over and covered his head with his hands. It seemed to Avi as if Panin’s hand had turned to stone and the whip had frozen in the winter evening’s cold air. Panin pulled back his whip, and when Avi raised his head, it seemed to him as if the devil was cackling in the Dark Valley.
Avi was astounded by the dilemma. He was either to pay a twenty-ruble fine for stealing wood from the forest or kill one of the bears of the Dark Valley. After Panin repeated his proposal one more time, he pulled back his lips and hurled a deafening laugh. Avi started. He left behind the bundle of firewood and retraced the road by which he had come to the Dark Valley. Not a single bear, whether from the forest or outside of it, was worth the price of Panin’s fine.
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