A Monument for the Just

In addition to symbolizing the bridge between the two calamities, Mahari utilized a new brand of literary language deriving from the rich heritage of his Western Armenian roots and building on them with the colorful idiom of the Eastern Armenian dialect.

The writer was also a trailblazer and literary polemist, always in search of new paths in literature. His creative career was encouraged by his mentor, Yeghishe Charnets. Maybe that was one of the reasons that he was accused of being a “terrorist,” “nationalist,” and a “plotter to kill Lavrenti Beria,” Stalin’s security chief, and eventually exiled to Siberia twice.

Literary competitors also had their role in the his destiny and in the loss of Charents, Bakunts, Yessayan and Vahan Totovents, all of the latter were accused of being “nationalists,” an unpardonable crime in the Stalin era. Woody Allen has a very appropriate statement regarding the cowardly net of fellow writers. He says, “Intellectuals are like the Mafia; they only kill their own.”

All of the exiled and convicted writers and intellectuals were exonerated during the later Khrushchov era in the USSR, but for many of them, it was too late. Thus, the death of a large crop of intellectuals under Stalin’s tyranny came to compound our earlier losses at the hands of Talaat Pasha.

Of course, the entire nation laments that monumental loss. But little action has been taken by the authorities in Armenia to discover the burial sites of Charents or Bakunts.

Gasparyan, who had written earlier a monumental volume on Charents, a literary detective work, has undertaken excavation campaigns on the outskirts of Yerevan, where the bodies of two writers are rumored to be buried, defying the police ban, but to no avail.

Some people tend to justify this inaction, arguing that all the nationalities of the Soviet empire were subjected to Stalin’s terror. Even Ukraine’s “potato famine” in the 1930s is ranked as a genocide.

In addition to being Stalin’s victims, Armenians suffered some 300,000 casualties during the Great Patriotic War (World War II) against Hitler.

But what is dissimilar to all other nationalities is that Armenians had already experienced a Holocaust — too big a loss to follow it up with a further loss of such magnitude.

When Poland joined the European Union, its president officially asked for additional seats in the European Parliament to represent the 25 million martyred Poles, killed by Stalin and Hitler.

Although there was no such provision in the charter of the European Union, no one dared to criticize the request.

On November 22, upon presenting the award to Mr. Gasparyan, I seized the opportunity to come up with a proposal, as two government ministers were attending the ceremony. Using the formulation of the late poet Paruyr Sevak, I said, “I implore you like demanding” that the time has come to erect a monument in Armenia commemorating the collective loss of the Armenian creative mind during the Stalin era.

The eve of the Genocide centennial makes the issue that much more compelling. A memorial simply named, “A Monument for the Just.”