THE ROAD to Dilijan is very beautiful.
We drove along the shore of Lake Sevan. We passed the Minutka restaurant, but I did not even give it a glance. Our coach began to climb uphill.
How mighty, how terrible, and how kind is the power of habit! People can get used to anything—the sea, the southern stars, love, a bunk in a prison, the barbed wire of the camps.
What an abyss lies between the first night of passion and a long, grinding argument about how best to bring up the children! How little there is in common between a first wonderful encounter with the sea and trudging along the shore in the stifling midday heat to buy something from the souvenir kiosk! How terrible the despair of a man who has just lost his freedom! And then there he is, lying on his bunk and yawning as he wonders what will be in today’s prison gruel: pearl barley or pickled cabbage? What creates this abyss is the power of habit. Dull as it seems, it is as powerful as dynamite; it can destroy anything. Passion, hatred, grief, pain—habit can destroy them all.
Nothing can withstand it. I am, now, accustomed to Sevan trout; I am even bored with it.
We drive through a village. There are boys standing in the middle of the road. They are showing us some trout, holding them up in the air.
“Let’s buy a trout. We can make trout shashlyks!” says Martirosyan. Trout shashlyks would, of course, be a novelty. The steamroller of habit has not yet rolled over them.
“All right—why not? Volodya, stop!”
The young vendors thrust bundles of fish at us. The bodies of the dead princesses are still beautiful, but their eyes are blind and their mouths half open, twisted by the grimace of death.
“How much?” I ask.
“Twenty-five old rubles a kilo,” say the ladies, translating the boys’ reply.
My question is hypothetical. I am a guest and I do not have the right to pay the bill in a restaurant, to pay for a glass of fizzy water, to pay for apples in the market or even for a bus ticket, a newspaper, or a postage stamp. At first this embarrassed me; it upset and irritated me. But the power of habit is infinite, and I have already grown used to being unable to spend even a few kopeks, let alone an entire ruble. Now and again, however, my serenity abandons me. Have I been too quick to adopt this strange new habit? Have I even begun to enjoy it?
Surely, this isn’t how I was taught to behave!
About thirty collective-farm workers are sitting by a stone wall. It is a weekday and still only morning, but there is no sign that they are constructing communism—most of them are clicking their worry beads.
Since the war, Armenian villages have begun to look different; the dark, cramped, smoke-blackened ancient hovels, part dug into the ground, part faced with large stones, are disappearing. Every year there are fewer of these thousand-year-old dwellings—and in many Armenian villages there are none left at all. After staying unchanged for millennia, these dwellings have gone.
First we inspect the new, bright collective-farm houses, and then the old smoky, stony burrows with bread ovens dug out of the earth; there is no doubt that the new, bright houses are better. We start to make our way back to the car.
The men gather around Martirosyan; they are talking animatedly. Then Martirosyan speaks. Armenian peasants are astonishingly good listeners. They look as deep in thought as if they were listening to one of the apostles.
Martirosyan approaches the car; he too now looks animated. He tells us that nearly everyone there had read his novel; they had become so deeply involved, grown so close to the main characters that they wanted the author to change their fates. They wanted him to return one leg to someone who had lost both legs in an accident. They also wanted him to bring several dead people back to life. They addressed him as if he were a god, the almighty master of the world where the people he has created live out their lives. He is the master of their lives and fates. What a sense of exaltation! It must be a great joy to see your own creations become a part of the lives of the people you love. And people are kind: Martirosyan never gets asked to tear away a man’s only remaining leg. No one ever asks Martirosyan to remove a general’s Order of Suvorov and replace it by a Distinction in Combat medal or a badge saying “An Excellent Cook.” Nor does anyone insist that a front-line soldier should fly into a furious rage on receiving an unctuous and hypocritical letter from his old mother. No one asks God to take it out on a responsible worker, who during icy blizzards and the dusty heat of summer, under the light of the moon and the light of the sun, never opens his mouth except to utter wise truths.
Yes, people are generous. What they ask for from God is indulgence and compassion.
Earthly gods—members of the Writers’ Union, the Artists’ Union, the Composers’ Union—create a world in their own image and likeness.
Here we have Hemingway’s world. And here—Gleb Uspensky’s.[34] It goes without saying that these worlds are different. Hemingway describes people who adore bullfights and hunting for big game; he writes about Spanish dynamiters in the Civil War and fishermen off the coast of Cuba. Uspensky, on the other hand, describes drunken craftsmen in Tula, junior policemen, provincial bourgeoisie, and peasant women.
But these two very different worlds are not created in the image of a Russian peasant woman or a handsome and dangerous toreador. These worlds are created in the image and likeness of Uspensky and Hemingway. And even if Hemingway were to populate his world with Russian policemen and drunken Tula locksmiths, it would still be the same world, Hemingway’s world. And everything there—the damp aspen trees, the muddy country roads, the dust, the puddles, the little houses, the gray sky of a Russian autumn—everything in this world would still be Hemingway’s. And in Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky’s painfully dismal world everything would remain painfully dismal—even the blue Spanish sky and the wonderfully handsome bullfighter eating young eels in garlic sauce and sipping Spanish wine.
How feeble and imperfect are the earthly gods who have created worlds in their own image and likeness—even such gods as Homer, Beethoven, and Raphael. . . . Here in front of us is a deep-blue world, the world of Roerich’s soul transposed into paint;[35] everything in it—mountains, people, snow, trees, and sparrows—is a uniform blue. And here is a world of angles and rectangles; everything here—even the flowers and the young women—is angular or rectangular. Next to it lies Picasso’s eccentric world, everything crooked and askew. Further on we come to a strange world of spirals, commas, and squiggles. And then we come to the misty, muttering, barely audible philosophical world of Boris Pasternak’s poems.
There are worlds composed of nonsensical trifles that have great meaning, and worlds composed of apparently very serious matters that have no meaning at all. There are the worlds of the obsessed: the love-obsessed, the wine-obsessed, the war-obsessed, those who are obsessed with the importance of the square-cluster method of planting maize.[36] And there are those who constantly, involuntarily, think.
And then there are the worlds created by brilliant schoolboys; they want to re-create, to give wider circulation to a world only one copy of which has ever been printed. They too are finding words for the miracle of a world; they are realists.
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.