THERE are many old churches, chapels, and monasteries in Armenia. One of the most famous is the Geghard monastery, which is gouged out of a mountainside. This miracle born within stone is the fruit of thirty years of labor; it is the work of a man endowed with colossal talent and also with colossal faith. The man who hewed out this graceful and harmonious church also chiseled out, in classical Armenian, the words “Remember Me in Your Prayers.”
A road planted with flowers has been laid from Yerevan to Echmiadzin, the small town that contains the official residence of Vazgen I, the Catholicos of All Armenians,[47] and also a fine cathedral, a monastery, and a seminary.
Mankind has been laboring on earth for millennia, creating many objects of spiritual value. These creations often amaze later generations with their elegance, their grandeur, their opulence, their complexity, their boldness, their brilliance, their grace, their intelligence, or their poetry.
But only a few of these creations are perfect—and these perfect creations are not remarkable for their opulence or their grandeur, or even for their extreme elegance. Sometimes perfection appears in the work of a great poet, but not in every line that he wrote. Every line may bear the hallmark of genius, but there are only two or three lines where nothing can be changed or added to, lines about which one can say, “This is truly perfect.” A work of music, or part of a work of music, can also be perfect. A mathematical proof can be perfect—and so can a theory in physics, or an experiment, or an aircraft propeller, a machine part turned on a lathe, the work of a glass blower, or a jar made by a potter.
I think that ancient Armenian churches and chapels also embody perfection. Perfection is always simple, and it is always natural. Perfection is the deepest understanding and fullest expression of what is essential. Perfection is the shortest path to a goal, the simplest proof, the clearest expression. Perfection is always democratic; it is always generally accessible.
I think that a perfect theory will be understood by a schoolchild; that perfect music will mean something not only to people but also to wolves, dolphins, grass snakes, and frogs; that perfect verse can find a place in the heart of a quarrelsome old woman or a supervisor in a strict-regime labor camp.
Through its outward simplicity an ancient Armenian church shows that within its walls lives the God of shepherds, of beautiful young women, scholars, old crones, warriors, stonecutters—the God of all people.
You realize this the moment you see such a church from a distance. High on a mountain peak in the transparent air, it seems as simple as the thought of Newton, as young as if it had first appeared only yesterday and not fifteen hundred years ago, both humanly divine and divinely human. The church looks so simple and natural that you think a child could have put it together out of toy basalt blocks. I, an unbeliever, look at this church and think, “But perhaps God does exist. Surely his house can’t have been standing uninhabited for fifteen hundred years?”
Only a pure, childish faith could have helped people to build these churches, chapels, and monasteries.
These churches are perfect, but I came to feel that the Armenians who built these perfect churches were not Christians but pagans.
That was my impression. Nowhere—neither in town nor village—did I see any believers; what I saw were people carrying out rites. You don’t hear or see a believer; you sense them. In Armenia I did not once sense a believer. I saw many old men and women in the villages—and I never sensed the presence of faith in them.
There are many ruined pagan temples in Armenia, but there is not one pagan temple that has been preserved. Not one pagan temple has withstood the pressure of two millennia. But the spirit of paganism has withstood the millennia; it has survived. This spirit—like the spirit of Christianity elsewhere—is not to be sensed in words, prayers, or sermons. I sensed it in the way Armenians drink wine, eat meat, bake bread, and perform rites; I sensed it in the way they walk, sing, and laugh. I did not sense the spirit of Christianity, even though Armenian churches still look splendid while their pagan temples are all in ruins.
Some years ago an ancient pagan temple was discovered beneath the altar of the main cathedral in Echmiadzin.[48] Excavations uncovered a huge sacrificial altar carved out of a single basalt slab. It was a flat dish, with crude gutters to drain away the blood, and it was massive; it looked as if the most powerful of modern tanks or tractors would be unable to move it. In the stony dark of this underground chamber you still sense a spirit of ancient cruelty. What victims were brought here, to this dark stone? Whose blood flowed down these gutters? The intelligent and enlightened young monk who had secretly let us into this temple smiled knowingly. What remarkable symbolism: a Christian church growing up over a pagan temple. When we returned to the cathedral, a stout priest with very black eyes was standing before the altar, baptizing a baby. He was holding the Gospels in his left hand, and his aspergillum in his right hand, plunging it into a massive silver font and sprinkling the newborn with holy water. In a singsong voice, quickly and indistinctly, the priest was reading from the holy book. His feet were directly above the black sacrificial altar; the scowling vault of the pagan temple had become the pedestal of the Christian altar. It is at this altar, decorated with a great deal of gold and the image of the crucified God,[49] that Vazgen I, the supreme pastor of all Armenians, conducts the most solemn of services. Generations of Armenian catholicoi, their bodies now buried in marble tombs beside the main door, have officiated at services and glorified Christ, little knowing that a pagan sacrificial stone lay sullenly beneath their feet.
But the spirit of paganism neither died nor went underground. It lives on in Armenian villages, in drunken songs and stories from the past, in the skeptical wisdom of old men, in flare-ups of jealousy, in the folly of lovers, in the simple-hearted but piquant judgments of old women, in the worship of vine and peach, in a carnivorous loyalty to the knife that cuts the lamb, in a glass of good cheer and in the arms of a woman, in the folk wisdom that has gathered thousands of years of experience not from a sacred book but from the hardships of everyday life.
The spirit of paganism lives on in ordinary village houses—where you never see an icon, where there is no humility, where the old men drink a strong homemade grape vodka and a cognac that is chestnut-gold—and it reaches to the doors of God’s house. On feast days people bring sheep, cocks, and hens and slaughter the poor creatures by the church gate, to the glory of the Christian God. The yards of almost every church—both working churches and those that are now museums—are stained with the blood of sacrificial animals; they are strewn with down, feathers, and the heads of chickens. And then, not far from the church, the sacrificed animals are grilled or fried over coals; passersby are treated to sacrificial meat.
Paganism lives on even inside the churches, apparent in the crude materialism of the gifts offered to God by Armenian millionaires from America and elsewhere: massive pieces of gold, huge precious stones, silver baptismal fonts that weigh forty pounds or more.
The spirit of paganism lives on in books written on parchment a thousand years ago—books whose authors not only discuss the delights of love but also suggest that the earth may be a sphere and that the universe may be heliocentric. These books are written in the language of a people that has existed for thousands of years, that adopted Christianity six centuries before the Russians but preserved the memory of the wisdom, nobility, and goodness of pagan nations from long before the birth of Christ. This memory has freed Armenians from religious intolerance, from cruelty and fanaticism.
True goodness is alien to form and all that is merely formal. It does not seek reinforcement through dogma, nor is it concerned about images and rituals; true goodness exists where there is the heart of a good man. A kind act carried out by a pagan, an act of mercy performed by an atheist, a lack of rancor shown by someone who holds to another faith—all these, I believe, are triumphs for the Christian God of kindness. Therein lies his strength.
All this is true. But I repeat: There are many ways through which one can recognize that someone believes in God. It is not just a matter of words but also of tones of voice, of the construction of sentences, of the look in a person’s eyes, in their gait, in their manner of eating and drinking. Believers can be sensed—and I did not sense any in Armenia.
What I did see were people carrying out rites. I saw pagans in whose good and kind hearts lived a god of kindness.
We looked at the cathedral and at the offerings brought by millionaires from abroad. I was particularly struck by the improbably huge emeralds and rubies adorning the silver and gold vestments, by the weight of the precious bindings around the Gospels, by the crosses sprinkled with large diamonds.
The injustice of these splendid bindings was glaringly obvious—even to a child.
As we left the cathedral we saw the secretary to the catholicos; he was accompanying one of their frequent American guests. The secretary, a nondescript young man in a plain jacket, ushered his guest into a car—an Intourist Volga—and then came over to us.[50]
As always, I did not understand a word of the ensuing conversation in Armenian. For some reason it seemed entirely normal, rather than absurd, that a translator from Armenian should wait for the author he is translating to explain to him in Russian what has just been said in Armenian; I was, after all, a literary, not a literal, translator. Eventually Martirosyan explained that he had been asking the secretary to tell the catholicos about me and find out if he might be able to receive us.
We stood in the middle of the cathedral yard, waiting for an answer. I felt excited. Never in my life had I met a senior cleric, a patriarch. . . . And every first meeting is a source of excitement, whether with a new city, a new sea, or a person who is special in some new way. For me, of course, the catholicos was a new and special kind of person. But since people tend to be shy, and even ashamed of their natural excitement—as well as of many other simple and entirely natural feelings—I joked and laughed as we waited for the secretary to return, trying to impress on Martirosyan that I took meetings with church leaders entirely in my stride. As for Martirosyan, he was frowning; he too was agitated. Should Vazgen I refuse to see us, Martirosyan would be in an awkward position; it would look as if he had been boasting on the two occasions he told me how well he got on with the catholicos.
But then we saw the secretary coming out through the red arch between the cathedral yard and the patriarchal residence. In a monotonous murmur, he said that the catholicos was expecting us.
Martirosyan stopped frowning and started to smile; I stopped smiling and started to frown.
We walked through the arch and saw a large and pleasant garden. Amid the tall autumn flowers was a gazebo. I imagined the clergy gathering here in the evening, chatting away over their coffee. But I didn’t have time to imagine what they chatted about; we were already in the anteroom of the catholicos. I’d lost my sense of smell after my bout of flu, and so, unfortunately, it was only with my eyes that I was able to take in this room with its low ceiling, its walls hung with engravings, and its antique furniture that today’s young people, were they to inherit any of it, would at once want to replace with something more sleek and compact. And the room, no doubt, had a wonderful smell of cypress wood, incense, hot wax, and dried cornflowers. I was as certain of this as the boy in the Chekhov story had been certain that the suitcases of his uncle the general were brimful of gunpowder and bullets.[51] But I didn’t have time to ask whether the anteroom smelled of cypress wood; we were called in to speak to Vazgen I, the Catholicos of All Armenians.
His bright spacious study was full of beautiful and precious things—paintings and sumptuously published books. A stout man of about fifty, wearing a black silk robe, was sitting behind a huge desk piled high with manuscripts and books. His face was smiling; his kind dark eyes were smiling; his moist full lips were smiling from behind a salt-and-pepper beard. The simplicity of his robe was evidently a testimony not to his asceticism but to his sophistication.
We introduced ourselves, laughing and smiling. Martirosyan and I sat in chairs behind a small table placed at right angles to the large writing desk.
I probably laughed rather too loudly and smiled too exuberantly. There was no reason for me to seem so overjoyed.
A pale servant, dressed in a mouse-colored jacket and trousers, brought us small cups of coffee, delicate little token glasses of cognac, and a box of chocolates.
We watched in silence as the servant placed all this on the table. It may have seemed that it was because of the cognac and chocolates that I went on smiling so radiantly.
Standing not far from the catholicos was a monk in a black robe; his black pointed cowl covered most of his forehead. I had heard that many of the Echmiadzin monks are extraordinarily beautiful, but only now did I realize what male beauty can be. This monk was stunningly beautiful.
His beauty was not a false chocolate-box beauty; it was a demonic beauty. His shining amber eyes, his nose, lips, pale cheeks, and forehead formed an extraordinarily beautiful picture, but he looked haughty and proud. There was a sharp contradiction between his malevolent beauty and his pose of humility beside the catholicos’s armchair.
The catholicos raised his glass affably, said a few words, and took a small sip. I conscientiously downed my own. Martirosyan, the author I was translating into Russian, translated the patriarch’s words for me: He was glad to meet me and he drank to my good health.
We began to talk. I understood at once that I need not have become so agitated: The catholicos was in no way a new and remarkable kind of man for me. It would have been a new experience for me to be meeting a man of fanatical faith, a prophet, a religious leader whose inner life determined his every word, movement, and look. I had been alarmed at the thought of meeting someone who, after a single glance at an unbeliever like me, would divine how petty, vain, and worldly I am.
But I sensed nothing fanatical about the man I was talking to. He was intelligent, educated, and worldly. An enlightened worldliness was, in fact, his most striking quality.
We talked about literature. The catholicos told me that he not only read Dostoyevsky but that he had seriously studied him, that without knowing Dostoyevsky it is impossible to gain a serious and profound knowledge of the human soul. He said he had published a work on Dostoyevsky, but that he couldn’t, unfortunately, suggest I read it: It had been published in Romanian some years ago, when he was bishop of Bucharest.
The catholicos told me that the writer he loved most was Leo Tolstoy. I did not feel surprised. The Church had once pronounced an anathema against Tolstoy—but everything changes.
Then he began to speak about writers who have discussed Armenians and Armenian history. I realized that he had not read any of my books.
He asked me about my own impressions of Armenia. I said something about the beauty of the country’s ancient churches. I said I wanted books to be like these churches, simply made yet expressive, and that I would like God to be living in each book, as in a church.
But I do not think my words meant much to anyone except me. The catholicos listened with a gentle, indifferent smile. I looked at the monk standing beside his chair; he did not seem to be listening at all. Beneath his black robe I saw patterned nylon socks and fashionable brown suede slippers.
Then the catholicos and Martirosyan conversed in Armenian; I did not understand a word. But I think I understood something else. I understood that this was a conversation between intelligent, educated, and decent people who knew the ways of the world; it was a conversation between men who enjoyed a joke and who sincerely respected and admired each other. There was a rapport between these two men: this Party member in a fine suit, an art collector and wine connoisseur, with a pretty dacha and a deep knowledge of Armenian history—and this patriarch, a worldly and sophisticated figure with a European education and several telephones on his desk.
What these two men had in common was—paradoxically—how little either had in common with his predecessors. Martirosyan had nothing in common with the hungry, tubercular, ardent revolutionaries of earlier decades; and Vazgen, for his part, was certainly not the kind of man to go to the stake preaching the word of God in a state of joyful illumination.
These two men were representatives of two of humanity’s greatest ideas: the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
I have often heard or read about people feeling anxious before meeting some great man. And then, the moment they come into the presence of Tolstoy, Lenin, or Einstein, they calm down, realizing that the great man is kind, straightforward, and considerate—and that he is not unlike other such people they know.
But this is not what I felt with regard to the catholicos. Discovering that Einstein is kind and straightforward has never made anyone doubt his genius.
Vazgen I, on the other hand, was clearly not a great man. I calmed down not because he was kind and considerate but because I realized that he was unremarkable. I had already met many people like him.
I sat there, full of petty worldly vanity, trying to memorize details of our conversation and thinking about my Moscow friends: Soon I would be telling them how I drank coffee with Vazgen I, the Catholicos of All Armenians, and talked about Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy with him. I might have been preparing to review a show.
We said goodbye; our meeting had lasted twenty minutes. The handsome monk in the black pointed hat escorted us to the car. He walked beside Martirosyan, talking and laughing. He was no longer on stage. And I thought about how I would like to be photographed with this monk against the background of the cathedral, that it was a pity no one had photographed us with Vazgen—and how eloquently I had spoken about literature and churches.
We passed a blind beggar. His face was full of misery; it was the face of Job. We passed a peasant walking towards the cathedral with a sheep on a length of rope; there was something terrible about the sheep’s submissive anticipation of death. I looked at the handsome monk beside us; the god of kindness and compassion had not even touched his wonderful countenance. As we walked past the muttering old man and the doomed animal, the monk was still laughing.
Six weeks after this meeting I went to visit Ivan, the boiler man. I wanted to meet his father, Aleksey Mikhailovich, a Molokan elder.
It was a winter evening and we were walking along the steep, snow-covered streets of Tsakhkadzor. Snow in the high mountains is different from other snow; it is lighter and fluffier.
Ivan was silent, and so was I. I was feeling depressed. Walking on fresh snow is hard work; I was starting to wheeze. We were walking down a long and very steep street, and I did not relish the thought of having to walk all the way back up again through deep snow.
Finally, stepping over a dilapidated fence, we entered a yard and walked past a small dog that barked at us without conviction. Then we went past some sheds thrown together out of rusty tin and old boards. I sensed the warmth of sheep manure and the smell of a henhouse. This smell remained equally strong even after we went into the dimly lit entrance room.[52]
Then and there, we seemed to leave Armenia. There was no longer any sense of the mountains, of the Araks River, of our nearness to the Turkish border. Everything was entirely Russian, as if from a Russian village: the floor beneath our feet, the half dark of the entrance room, the water barrel, the tin cup standing on a bucket covered by a piece of plywood.
We entered the main room. Dear God, there we were, back in village Russia. We were somewhere near Kursk, somewhere near Oryol. There was a large Russian stove and a perfectly made bed with perfectly smoothed pillows; in one corner there was a plain unpainted bench. Village Russia, southern Russia, where the Lgov region borders the Glukhov region, where Oryol borders Sumy, where Voronezh borders the Svatov steppe. Yes, at first I thought that there was something of the Ukraine in the walls bleached with lime, in the dirt floor, in the patterned hemp cloth on the wall above the bed, in the look of the entrance room. After a while, though, I realized that this was less a hint of the Ukraine than a hint of Armenia.
The Russian log hut. How much thought have scientists and thinkers given to it? Has anyone studied the paradox of its great diversity and its great uniformity, its constant evolution and its limitless conservatism? Has anyone written books about the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of kinds of Russian stoves? Here are the Volga stoves—from Kamyshin, from Saratov, all similar, as if in accord with some rigid mathematical law. Who remembers the master craftsman who created them all? Nowhere did he write, “Remember my name in your prayers.” Yet what quantities of bread, what a great deal of cabbage soup, how much living warmth his stoves have given birth to! And then the realm of Volga stoves comes to an end, and the realm of Voronezh stoves begins. Everything is the same, and everything is somehow different: the stonework, the chimney, the sleeping bench above the stove. Here a different master has created his own laws and expressed his own character, but he too never dared to write, “Remember my name in your prayers.” And now come the Kursk and Oryol stoves; they too suddenly take over, reign, bake their bread—and then, as if exhausted, no less suddenly abdicate. An invisible chieftain unites whole districts and provinces under the banner of his own particular kind of Russian stove, and then comes a boundary—and we find a new stove chieftain creating stoves in his own image and likeness. And so we come to the huts of the Far North—of Vyatka, Arkhangelsk, and Vologda.
And somewhere in eastern Siberia, in the very easternmost Far East, someone exclaims in astonishment, “But these are our very own Poltava stoves, our very own Volynia stoves, our very own hearths, our very own sleeping benches!” It is remarkable: After traveling thousands of miles in slow creaking carts, Russian settlers carefully re-create their own particular kind of stove. For hundreds of years they defend their stoves from the constant onslaught of other influences, from new-fangled modernist stoves, from decadent stoves, from pagan stoves.
And it may well be that the same laws hold sway in Canada or in Ukrainian settlements in Brazil—the same laws for the construction of stoves, the frames of log huts, their roofs and entrance rooms.
Someone from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told me that an old woman, a toothless half-Indian old woman in the Amazon jungle, anxious about her grandchildren, was once heard to tell her daughter-in-law to close the window in an improbable hotchpotch of English and Russian: “Zachini vindovy, or childrenyata zasickuyut.” The stability of people’s inner worlds, the stability of their forms of speech, of their habits, customs, and household utensils can withstand vast expanses of ocean, equatorial heat, and tropical jungle, the power of a vivid, noisy alien life that continues its attacks for decades and centuries.
Here in Armenia, I witnessed the extraordinary steadfastness of the Russian stove, the Russian hut, the Russian porch, the Russian entrance room.
Then I said to myself, “No, it’s not a matter of stoves and cooking pots but of people’s inner being. What matters is not the hut—what matters is that Ivan lives in this hut.”
And yet Ivan spoke Armenian so well that the Armenians themselves envied him his huge vocabulary, his pronunciation, his knowledge of the nuances of village dialects, the wealth of Armenian catchphrases, sayings, and little rhymes he was able to draw on.
Martirosyan told me that Ivan’s knowledge of Armenian was perfect. Ivan’s friends were all Armenians; he drank with Armenians; he went hunting with Armenians; he ate Armenian soups.
But then we entered the hut, and I met Nyura, Ivan’s friendly and beautiful wife. And sitting on the stove were Ivan’s four fair-haired children—two boys and two small girls. The children were quiet and well behaved; their bright little faces all turned towards me. We talked about fairy tales. The children were able to keep up a serious conversation about Ivan Tsarevich, Ivan the Fool, the Firebird, Brother Ivanushka and Sister Alyonushka. And in the mountains of Armenia there was something especially touching about these children sitting on a Russian stove, about their quick eyes and flaxen hair, about our sweet and serious discussion of Russian fairy tales. They were splendid children—quiet but not timid. Ivan, standing beside the stove, was looking at them with a tenderness and love I had never before sensed in him. In my mind this hut, and Ivan, and his children, and the fairy tales of old Russia all became one; it was here that I first truly sensed the Russianness of a man whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all lived out their lives in the mountains of Armenia.
Then Ivan’s parents came into the room—old Aleksey Mikhailovich and his wife, Maria Semyonovna. They were real old villagers. Aleksey Mikhailovich had gray hair, a dark weather-beaten face, and broad shoulders. He was wearing an old cotton jacket, a shirt with white buttons, and cotton trousers darned on the knees and tucked into canvas boots. And Maria Semyonovna had a wrinkled face, bowed shoulders, and large brown hands—a testimony to a long life of heavy and uninterrupted labor.
We all introduced ourselves and sat down at the table. Aleksey, sensing my curiosity about him, frowned and for a moment seemed rather shy.
But soon we were talking about matters that interested him more than anything in the world—love for other people, right and wrong, good and evil, faith and lack of faith.
And from his very first words, as I looked into his eyes and listened to his awkward, ungrammatical peasant speech, I felt what I had not once felt in the presence of the catholicos: I sensed that this was a man of faith, a man held by faith. I sensed this not from anything he said but from a sure intuition.
He was not trying to convince me of anything. He spoke with sorrow about people’s reluctance to follow life’s most important law—that you should wish for others what you wish for yourself; that you should wish good to others without exception, regardless of their nationality, of their wealth or poverty, of their faith or lack of faith, regardless of whether or not they are Party members. If you don’t wish yourself harm, if you don’t do harm to yourself, then you shouldn’t wish or do harm to others.
Aleksey Mikhailovich said all this with emotion, stammering, blushing, searching for words. There were drops of sweat on his face; he wiped his brow more than once with his handkerchief, but the sweat did not stop.
There was great power in his words; they were, after all, not the words of a priest in his church but the words of an old man who lived in a cramped and airless hut, an old peasant wearing a torn jacket and on whose shoulders lay the burden of daily labor. Neither this burden of labor nor any other of life’s hardships had diminished his inner strength.
His old woman and his daughter-in-law listened to him attentively, and from time to time they joined in the conversation; like Aleksey, they cared deeply about people’s goodness and the truth of their lives. And their faith did not exist somewhere outside their everyday life; it had itself become their everyday life. It was one with the borshch they cooked, with the clothes they washed, with the bundles of wood they fetched from the forest—with everything in their long hard lives.
And there was no trace in Aleksey’s words—which the women concurred with and which Ivan and the silent children on the stove were so alertly absorbing—of any kind of religious obsessiveness or spiritual grandiosity. They were just simple words about the need to feel pity for others and to wish for them what you would wish for yourself. They were words from life, not words from a sermon—words from the life these people lived here in this hut and the work they did day after day.
Nor was there anything conceited or hectoring about these words. There was only sadness, a sadness that no matter how simple everything may really be, people are unable to live well, according to the law of goodness and truth, but constantly fall away from this ideal.
I remember clearly how Aleksey, when he referred to lies, gossip, and all kinds of human wickedness, never condemned anyone but just said very quietly, with a frown, “It’s not necessary. No, there’s really no need for it.”
Then Ivan and I had some vodka together. With it we had some pickled cucumber, some khash, and some boiled chicken. But all Nyura gave Aleksey Mikhailovich was tea and bread. He drank and ate this almost guiltily, as if rather than being proud of his godliness, he was ashamed to be revealing it to others.
I asked him what he thought about the killing of animals, and he replied, “What can I say? It seems people can’t manage without it, but to go hunting for fun—no, it’s not necessary. There’s really no need for it.”
He looked at his son, sighed, and said, “My Ivan’s a cruel man.”
And Ivan said nothing. He too let out a sigh.
The longer we talked, the more moved I felt. I was not being inquisitive. I was not making mental notes of trivial details. I was gripped by a feeling I had not expected.
Meetings with famous people can—as we have seen—be disappointing. Someone very gifted, even a true genius, can turn out to be a very ordinary person indeed. His talent is separate from his soul. And you immediately cease to care that this ordinary, mediocre man is endowed with some particular talent that he displays elsewhere—in a laboratory, in an operating theater, on a grand stage, or in something he writes.
It is worse still when someone knows he is expected to display certain unusual qualities and knows that he does not possess these qualities; he begins to pretend, to play games, to act the prophet. This, of course, happens not with geniuses but with second-rate talents.
And then there are meetings like mine with the catholicos: Someone turns out to be intelligent, enlightened, and pleasant, but not of the caliber one had expected.
My experience today could not have been more different.
First there had been the steep streets deep in snow. This had been hard going, all the more so because of my shortness of breath, and I had felt cross with myself for agreeing to go and see Ivan and his father. It had all begun to seem pointless and tedious: I’d have done better to stay in the Writers’ Union house, play a game of billiards, and glance at the journal In Foreign Parts.
Next the Russian stove; the fair-haired children; my thoughts about the Russian character and how perfectly a log hut expressed the steadfastness of a Russian peasant who spoke Armenian as eloquently as the most golden-tongued of Armenians.
Then I had sat at table with an old, semiliterate man in a dirty jacket and canvas boots and felt in my heart an excitement I had seldom known.
By then Armenia and Russia no longer seemed to matter. I was no longer thinking about the nature of greatness or the characteristics of a particular nation. There was only the human soul, the soul that did not lose faith as it suffered anguish and torment among the scree and vineyards of Palestine, the soul that remains equally human and good in a little village near Penza, under the sky of India, and in a northern yurt—because there is good in people everywhere, simply because they are human beings.
This soul, this faith was alive in a semiliterate old man, and it was as simple as his life and his daily bread, without a single high-flown word or moment of lofty preaching. Reaching out to his faith, touching it and sensing its power, was enough to bring tears to my eyes, because I suddenly realized that it was less about God than about people. I understood that Aleksey could not live without this faith, just as he could not live without bread and water, and that, for the sake of his faith, he would not hesitate to subject himself to the torment of the Cross, or to the most terrible and unending penal servitude.
The gift possessed by a great poet or scientist is not the highest of gifts. Among even the most brilliant virtuosos of the mathematical formula, of the musical phrase and poetic line, of the paintbrush and chisel are all too many people who are weak, petty-minded, greedy, servile, venal, and envious—people like slugs or mollusks, moral nobodies in whom, thanks to the irritating pangs of conscience, a pearl is sometimes born. But the supreme human gift is beauty of soul; it is nobility, magnanimity, and personal courage in the name of what is good. It is a gift possessed by certain shy, anonymous warriors, by certain ordinary soldiers but for whose exploits we would cease to be human.