Armenian News Network / Groong
Stepan Zorian: An Outstanding Soviet Era Novelist’s Posthumous
Works
Armenian News Network / Groong
November 28, 2021
By Eddie Arnavoudian
LONDON, UK
Unflinching
critical engagement in Soviet Armenia
Short story writer and novelist Stepan Zorian
(1889-1967) described himself as a ‘chronicler of his times’. His three volumes
of posthumously published notes, letters, articles, fragments from unfinished
short stories and novels and especially his diaries make for riveting reading
about life in Soviet Armenia. They are full of frank and revealing insight as
they expertly chronicle the Stalin era, the hardships of everyday life in
Armenia, the traumas of Armenian history, the fragility of the Soviet Armenian
state, the reality of Great Russian and other national chauvinisms, the Cold
War, the threat of global nuclear catastrophe, opinions on writers and poets as
well as on his own literary career and much more.
Like the first and second volumes, this third one (336pp,
2013, Yerevan) has the quality of primary source material and the quality of
fine art too as the author with vivid sketches of individual experience, emotion and sensibility, his own included, captures a sense
of those invisible but overarching social relations and forces that shape
lives.
Illuminating comments on painting, sculpture, architecture and literature show him unafraid to challenge
Soviet orthodoxy or the more bombastic Armenian patriotic traditions. The
almost deified Soviet writer Maxim Gorky is dismissed. ‘I was never attracted
by any of his works’. His ‘characters are artificial’ and his most famous novel
‘Mother’ ‘is boring, verbose, artless and unconvincing.’ Zorian’s
judgment of poet Siamanto, victim of the genocide, is
no less withering: ‘wooden language and words plucked from dictionaries’;
instead of ‘honest emotion’ ‘bombastic sentences’, ‘accumulations of
words…bombastic words.’
Despite the great honour he
enjoyed in the Soviet era Zorian had no time for the
bureaucratic USSR party apparatus whose officials tiresomely and repeatedly
heralded a degenerate Soviet Union as a triumph of socialism. Despondent, in a
December 1966 diary entry he warmly recalls the pre-Stalinist ‘1920s… (as)
different days. Then there was enthusiasm, faith and a
positive outlook. These have now all been forgotten. Petty egoism prevails 
everywhere… What is going to be the
end of this…’ Zorian died in 1967, just over two
decades before ‘the
end’ in the form of the USSR’s collapse.
Ruminations on tiny landlocked Armenia grasp its existential
vulnerability even during the Soviet age. ‘The phenomenon of mass emigration’
that had blighted the larger homelands during the 19th century
‘continue to this day’. Like yesterday, in Soviet Armenia too ‘rivers have
flowed beyond its borders to irrigate the fields of other nations, its human
resources migrated to build other nations’ cities, its intellectuals built
other nations’ science.’ With Armenia weakened and now ‘bereft of its
(historical) lands’ ‘the outlook for its continued survival is bleak.’ Our
nation ‘is like an irreparably broken plate, its fragments strewn far and
wide’.
Passing entries capture wider truths. The times are menaced
by unresolved national animosities. The ‘brotherhood (of peoples) is an
illusion.’ National antagonisms during the Soviet age have been suppressed but
not eliminated. ‘Rather than the sermon of brotherhood it is the law that
restrains.’ Meanwhile Great Russian chauvinism corrupts the Armenian language.
‘We have to have permission’ ‘to use our own native words’. ‘The defense of
(Armenian) terminology is damned as nationalism!’ ‘What usurpation!’
Zorian’s register of his own personal drama
is as profound as it is moving. 70th birthday greetings ‘leave a bad
taste’. They remind him ‘of the years during which my bright dreams and so many
creative ambitions died.’ He remembers the Stalinist purges when ‘countless
men…innocent comrades and friends…were exterminated.’ Five years on as the
December ‘snow settles on roofs and trees…I feel childhood returning and
despite being 75 I want to run and play!’ But still there is no escaping
memory. Recollection of ‘comrades lost and banished’ cause deep pain. Revealing
enduring wisdom, Zorian 
continues:
‘Albeit 75 I do not feel old. I
remain captivated by the beauties of nature and of life, exactly as I was when
young. Moreover, my mind is as active as ever, as is my desire to work. Perhaps
this itself is a sign of age…we want to leave a legacy behind. On the other
hand, the desire to work is perhaps an instinct that seeks to dim the thought
of death. Yet I now think of death more frequently …It does not matter how much
one grasps it as an inexorable law of nature, death remains the greatest
tragedy of a human life.’
The available portions of Zorian’s
diaries are invaluable. Alas, only tiny segments survive. For personal and
family safety at the height of Stalin’s purges, he and his family burnt the
bulk of diaries Zorian had started keeping in 1910. A
huge masterpiece of art has been lost beyond any recovery. But that which
remains together with all Zorian’s posthumous
writings are absolutely indispensable to any historian of Soviet Armenia and of
Soviet Armenian art, culture and literature.
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Eddie Arnavoudian
holds degrees in history and politics from Manchester, England, and is ANN/Groong's commentator-in-residence on Armenian literature.
His works on literary and political issues have also appeared in Harach in Paris, Nairi in Beirut and Open Letter in Los Angeles. |
