To Go On Living: Stories (Plough Publishing, 2025) is the portrait of a community fighting for survival. More than the story of the individual characters we meet in its thirty-one episodes, the book tells the story of a war that the inhabitants of Berd, a small Armenian mountain village along the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, had the misfortune of experiencing. Abgaryan’s strategy of opening and ending an episode with the same words gives the stories closure, even as they exist as part of a larger narrative. It is through the characters’ flashbacks that we learn of hostilities that broke out “so suddenly and so stealthily” in the early 1990’s and “escalated seemingly overnight.” As “any dweller of borderlands knows, once [war] starts, it tends to never end,” writes Abgaryan. The villagers lose their loved ones to explosions. They are shot by snipers and mutilated and maimed by projectiles. Yet, even as they mourn their children and bury the dead, they continue to care for those who survive because, as great-grandmother Tata always said, “Life always conquers death.”
Abgaryan has the amazing ability of evoking the devastation by depicting the disruption war causes to the characters’ peaceful daily lives of going about their household chores of kneading the dough, baking the bread, tending their orchards, harvesting crops, preparing winter preserves, making medicinal brews, and so much more. Once a war broke out in Nugzar’s village, however, people were forced to quit their little town leaving the barns and the rabbit cages open so the animals would not starve to death. Vineyards remained untended for decades. Abgaryan’s “When the next explosion came . . . human fear—bulky, billowing—breathlessly spread from yard to yard, filling the cracks between the rows of firewood, the slanting chimneys, the attics, and the crawl spaces. Hopelessness and misery reigned supreme; it was as if anything that could inspire hope had been snuffed out at once,” highlights the horrors of war more vividly and effectively than the graphic details of violence she occasionally indulges in.
Indeed, rather than enhance, the description of Poghosants Vasak’s daughter Anishka witnessing “through the attic window how her father was axed to death and how her mother, who had long been wheel chair-bound, rose up and, calling to her husband, stumbled down the stairs, how they reached her, hit her over the head with the back of the axe and dragged her towards the fence by her hair,” distracts and detracts from the forcefulness of “Back then, all was silent. Not even the wind sang, because back then the war ruled over that mountain pass,” or the almost poetic beauty of, “in Pashoiants Sona’s drawings of the fogs of her childhood . . . the fogs smell of loneliness and longing.”
It is impossible to read To Go On Living without recalling Abgaryan’s earlier novel Three Apples Fell from The Sky that brings to life the simple, almost idyllic world of Maran, a village perched on a cliff in the Armenian Highlands. The Maranians gather together over strong tea with thyme, they laugh together, and are just content with the way things “are supposed to be, so that’s how they’ll stay.” The “That is how it was meant to be” of the villagers of Berd does not convey the same good-natured acceptance of the misfortunes of life.
The ongoing and the new wars between 2015, when Three Apples Fell from The Sky was published in its original Russian and 2018, when To Go on Living was published, must have taken their toll on the enchanting world of Maran. The uncharacteristic sadness and sense of loneliness of the characters in the stories in To Go On Living evidence the loss of the villagers’ joyful spirit. In fact, the stories, the later stories in particular, convey a sense of hopelessness, even of bitterness and resentment at times. Old Maro will never make baklava again because she never managed to overcome the bitterness of losing her son and her daughter-in-law to the war. It must indeed be difficult to maintain the same serenity when “Every ceasefire is nothing but an excuse to break it,” and when the only possible choice for the villagers is, as the village tailor’s apprentice Masis well knows, “to leave, taking with you everyone you love.”
Notwithstanding, a brief lull in the war restores the villagers’ faith in the goodness of life, no matter what it throws their way. The final episode in To Go On Living, “In Lieu of An Epilogue,” reaffirms the truth of Tata’s words. To the immense joy of the family, Pashoiants Sona finally has a baby boy. The episode concludes with: “Life is fairer than death, and that’s what encapsulates its unbreakable truth. It is necessary to believe this in order to go on living.” In Abgaryan’s world it is always time to go on living.
