LITERATURE OF THE NEW TIMES

Armenian literature of the past century’s 30-s as well as literatures of other soviet countries underwent unprecedented ideological and artistic limitations. The cost of breaking them was not the literary criticism but the writer’s life. And many writers paid with their lives, including the greatest Armenian poet of all times Eghishe Charents.

This situation gave birth to a number of self-seeking, opportunist writers, but there still remained writers who stayed faithful to their mission. The next decades passed for them in a battle for telling the truth and doing it freely, with the means of expression chosen by the writer. Hrant Matevosyan, Aghasi Ayvazyan, other talented writers turned to “closed” topics, wrote works far from the requirements of “Social realism”.

And when the Movement of 1988 began, we may say it became the revolution of the writers. Silva Kaputikyan and Zori Balayan were on the stage during the meetings, they led disputes with Michael Gorbachev in the Kremlin. Writers Vano Siradeghyan and Vazgen Sargsyan took their place. In their person the country acquired crucial figures, while the literature lost the two of the most promising writers.

It was already safe to be involved in literature, while Vazgen Sargsyan died tragically from criminals’ bullets in 1999 in the hall of National Assembly, when he was the Prime-Minister of Armenia, and Vano Siradeghyan took up literature again when he was forced to leave the country facing the danger of being arrested.

Today the society started demanding from culture and especially from literature to lead the nation, although in the new social system this role should be taken and was taken political bodies and figures. The society demanded heroic works, especially ones about the war, while the same society with the help of liberal mass media was involved in all more or less significant figures’ dethroning and defaming. These reasons, together with the material situation of the nation longing for daily bread for a whole decade lead the literature to a gap, where literary editions appear and disappear, old and new writers ask orders or declare their independence from them for more than a decade. Despite this the contemporary literature has certain achievements: its language is becoming more and more natural, reflecting the colloquial layers, its topics are real, free of patterns and taboos, the main characters are people who rejected the masks of false godliness and not heroes, familiar from literature.

Some of the writers represented on the site were known since the Soviet years ( Armen Shekoyan and Vahram Martirosyan – as a poet), others succeeded during the Independence years or are so young ( Arpi Voskanyan, Hambardzum Hambardzumyan), that because of their age they were able to publish only recently. One of the authors, Deni Donikyan represents Armenian Diaspora. Vardan Jaloyan’s work depicts the paradoxes of our reality in the genre of essay.

Vahram Martirosyan