Memoirs of an Armenian Revolutionary, Volume 1 — Foreword

What one has heard directly from the actors themselves, or seen with one's own eyes, cannot be unreal or false; but neither can it be counted the whole truth. The voice of the zurna¹ gives the wedding guest pleasure, and delicate ears a fright.

To read the authors in order to grasp reality is to invite confusion: there the writer himself is the axis and the world his satellite; the hero parched on the front line is deliberately forgotten, and his water-carrier presented as the hero. So much is dictated by the interests of his own person, or his party, or his class.

Read the laws, then, to verify? Those too were built to make lawless deeds lawful.

Read the authentic documents? But those were built to veil what actually took place.

Read the daily dispatches in the press? But they are written to a purpose of their own — first to earn the fee, then to satisfy the instincts of the paymaster and of the mob.

It is for these failings that history and the social studies are still far from being a science; some say such a science exists, others say it does not.

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From 1905 onward I made it my habit, within the field of my work, to set down descriptions of the notable events I saw or heard, to make notes on antiquities, traditions, or songs, and to keep the important letters and memoranda. Those scraps of paper and those notebooks could have become genuine and unerring documents, giving the picture of all that came and went. Unhappily, no trace now remains of the essential ones among those records.

Let me show what sort of fate they met. On the lake-facing side of Mount Varag, in a monastery near the village of Shushants (its exact name I have forgotten), there are cuneiform inscriptions. No one had ever noticed the wedge-writing on the foundation stones of the monastery's left wall. I took a copy, and since I myself could make nothing of those inscriptions left over from Urartu, I sent it by way of Persia to Moscow, to put the question to Grigor Khalatian and Msrlian, who had been masters of mine. Whether those copies ever reached their hands I have had no word; but I am confident that in the spot I have pointed out the originals must still remain. I sent them off in 1905.

In the years 1905–06,² in the village of Khndzorut in the Caucasus, the snow forced me into confinement, cut off from the world. I noticed that I was surrounded by men who were priceless wells of Armenian and Kurdish songs, epics, traditions, folk tales — of unwritten literature altogether. Such men were Khudo of Berkri, Samo of Sparkert, Khacho of Voghm, Lato, and others. I had no means to take down their melodies, nor to learn and describe the dances; but I could write out their songs in the dialect of the province, their traditions and their tales, whose age came down from times unknown — from Urartu, perhaps, and the origins of the Armenians. Though Kurdish was strange to me, I took down what they sang in that tongue as well, in Armenian letters, grasping their sense only roughly.

Among them were the epic of King Iskender, Mek tsar mi ker mej tsovun; Khana Dum-Dum,³ the golden-armed khan's revolt against the Persians; and Voy Amare khetabi, in which the Armenian king Trdat takes the name Amar, embraces Kurdom and Islam, and opens war on Karapet and Hovhannes.⁹

Those writings came to twenty-one notebooks, a hundred pages to the notebook. I was conscious that by gathering those immortal songs, I too was mingling with the immortals.

In Van the notebooks were seized by the authorities, but in 1908 they were released thanks to Commissar Mehmed; I carried them with me to Erzerum, and there I left them.

In 1912, when I returned to Erzerum, I learned that Dr. Zavriev had sent eight of the notebooks, a year or two before, to Petersburg (or was it Moscow?). They must have reached their destination; into whose hands they fell, I do not know. I suppose into those of N. Marr, of Msrian,¹⁰ of the teachers of the Lazarian Academy, and of the scholars of Zavriev's circle. Two volumes I left with Professor Asdvadzadur Khachatrian, for him to study as a Kurdologist and historian; the remaining volumes I took with me to Mush, meaning to copy them out and send them abroad, to Venice or Vienna. Events fell out so that I could not carry my purpose through. In 1914, sensing the dangers that threatened, I added to them my notes on events and persons, and other records besides; I wrapped it all in waxed canvas, laid it in a kerosene tin, and hid it in the place where I was living (where Dr. Zavriev's clinic had also been) — under the house of Jojo's Gaspar, on the river bank, beside the bridge that joins the St. Marineh quarter to the Koghu quarter.

In 1914 and 1915, when we had taken to the mountains like wild beasts, the satchel of my bodyguard Ghukas kept filling with documents. We had no paper for rolling tobacco or khavrdzil leaf.⁴ And to a man living out his death-agony, a smoke is the supreme comfort. So I dealt those documents out to the smokers, so that they could roll up those testaments of entreaty and of command and send them up to heaven. And I know for certain that those records are no more: they have turned into prayer.

By 1916 I stood stripped of every document and of all I had collected. I grieved over the loss; yet, unchastened, I found materials gathering again of their own accord out of the new life in the Caucasus. To these were added my notes on the events, the figures, the documents, the raw stuff I had lost in Turkey; and to these again the papers that had accumulated with Aram, which he had handed over to me to decide what should be done with them.

To a young man of Khnus named Andranik I entrusted the sorting and copying of those important historical records. It was Aram's death that set me thinking of the papers' safety. One parcel of them I dispatched abroad; in it were the memoirs of Matteos and of Aram, which were printed in the Hairenik monthly. I am sorry that I did not send my own notes, which I had set down while memory was fresher, nor that five-verst map⁵ on which the battles are marked in conventional signs...

Those stayed behind in my lodging in Erevan when I left for Zangezur. One must suppose they were either destroyed, or seized by the Bolsheviks.(*)

In giving these explanations I pursue two aims.

The first is that, by the trail here shown, those manuscripts may be sought and found. In them are uncut and priceless diamonds, torn from the country and from the people. There are records there of the latest period, which will complete — or refute — what has been set down at a later date. The real thing is those records, and one day or another they will be found. What I will tell is only their echo, propped on memories, dim and half-complete.

My second aim is to show this: that today, when there are cameras, the cinema, the phonograph record, and instruments of every kind — if only the means of communication exist; if we come to know the worth of the pictures and figures scratched into the rocks, of the strange stones jutting up among the hills, of the remnants of ruins where the mind, the speech and the life of our forefathers stand stamped; if the things their grandchildren tell and sing, and act out in gesture — expressions reckoned uncouth — are not despised — then all of this can become the documents of our age-old history, of a taste, a creative power, a purpose now passed away, which those instruments can record without falsification.

Every people is curious to know its origin and its past. When the historical data will not serve to satisfy that curiosity, it creates out of its imagination, out of its national memory, a legendary explanation, which often mingles with the history of the gods, who are without beginning and without end.

Without history there is no nation. A nation's history is set down either in oral sayings, in tales told in prose and in verse, in customs and legend-like folk stories; or else it is carved on stones and written on parchment.

The people's unwritten history, shaped and told across the centuries — however unconfirmed by documents, however shot through with legend, however wrong in the chronology it offers and the places it points to — is at bottom not false; it is real. In those histories and traditions one must look for the events and the lived experience of the past, for the present's searchings, and for the instincts of its hopes for the future, condensed beneath the veil of epic and tale. A people's true character, its past, is to be found in its unwritten folk poetry, which, having condensed everything into its heroes, is not history but the raw stuff of history.

The individual's history is the memory of his own past, which may be written down or not; it stays alive so long as he himself is not dead. Those around him may know that history in part, or not know it at all; to them it matters little. But for the individual the memory of his history is an inescapable, inseparable part of his being, and he is powerless to break free of the memories of his past, as though they were a vital part of his present and his future. That memory often makes its presence felt when a man is unconscious, asleep — through his dreams.

A nation is the individuality of the generations belonging to one stock; the only difference is that a person's individuality is bounded by a short span of time, while a nation's knows no bound of time. It is eternal, so long as it has not lost its memory; it is mortal when it takes no pride in its past or does not know it — even without having been wiped out as a people. When a nation, in its memory, dates its beginning from the creation of the world, and starts its history in mythology — like the Jews, the Greeks, the Armenians, and others — it becomes immortal, whatever its numbers, its quality, or the disfavor of its condition.

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This is where the foreword my father meant to write as a testament breaks off, unfinished. It falls to me only to add some brief supplementary information about the manuscripts of the Memoirs and the publication of these volumes.

In Tabriz, where my father was living in 1921 with A. Avtandilian, he recounted to him his recollections, then still fresh, and Avtandilian wrote them down. In this way some 1,200 pages of raw material were gathered, with passages here and there in my father's own hand.

It was on Ruben Darbinian's urging that my father undertook, in Paris, the first reworking of these notes. The Memoirs of an Armenian Revolutionary began to appear in the Hairenik monthly⁶ from its first number. There followed in succession the story of Daron (which forms the matter of Volumes III and IV of the present edition), the life of Constantinople (the last part of Volume VI), and the Kars period (the beginning of Volume I).

In May 1950, Harry Karian and Alex Pilibos made my father's acquaintance and — let them say themselves what moved them to it — proposed to print the Memoirs in separate volumes, taking on the whole material burden themselves. Expressly for this undertaking they founded a press in Los Angeles, above all by Harry Karian's unresting efforts.

The materials already published could not simply be reprinted as they stood. They had to be reworked afresh, enlarged here and cut there, so as to become more of one piece. That is why the reader will notice an appreciable difference between this text and the Hairenik versions.

For reasons of convenience, publication began with Volumes III and IV (The World of Daron, 1906–1908). Next came Volume V (Akhlat, Van, Tiflis, 1908), whose contents had not been published before; then Volume VI (Kars–Constantinople, 1908–1909), in part from unpublished matter.

Death overtook my father as he was at work on Volume I. Its first ten chapters were already finished; the matter that follows them, drawn from the Tabriz notes mentioned above, carries the story, following the journal, down to his entry into the Land (1904).⁷ For Volume II (Van–Lernabar, 1904–1906) the notes were likewise used, together with certain reworked passages, each one signalled where it occurs.

My father had planned to bring his Memoirs down to our own days, gathering them into ten volumes. It is with sorrow that I must report that not even the skeleton of this work's conclusion will be given. The notes on the first war are broken and few. I do have by me, however, a document of interest concerning the Republic of Armenia; I hope that one day it will be published as a separate work.

My father wrote all in one breath, paying no attention whatever to composition or to the rules of grammar, and someone had to come after him to put his writing and his language in order. The correction of the texts published in Hairenik was patiently carried out by R. Darbinian and A. Gesar; A. Gesar also corrected Volumes III, IV, V and VI of the present edition.

To see Volumes I and II through the press required minute and wearying labor on the notes, whose exceedingly careless language, even while being corrected, had to keep its style, its thought, and its savor. The man who did this work had to know not only the events, but my father's cast of mind and his ways of expression. That man was my father's old comrade A. Khondkarian, with whose help, our forces joined, we brought out the volumes named.

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Part of the contents of the present volume appeared in the following numbers of Hairenik: —

*V. D. M.*

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(\*) All the papers and documents mentioned remained intact, down to the February Uprising,⁸ in the cellar of Rouben's lodging. I had occasion to see and verify them myself. At the time of the February Uprising I told S. Vratsian about those papers, so that he might arrange to have them moved to some safer place. What arrangement was made, I do not know. — Note by A. Kh.