14 Literaturnaya Armeniya 6 and 7 (1965). In 1967 it was republished both in Yerevan and in Moscow. In Yerevan it was included, along with Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia, in Glazami druzei, a collection of works about Armenia by Russian writers. In Moscow, it was included, with still more cuts, in a collection of Grossman’s work titled Dobro vam.
15 The writer’s real name was Gabrielyan, though he published under the pseudonym Hrachya Kochar. The translator’s real name was Hasmik Taronyan; “Hasmik” is the Armenian for Jasmine. The real identities of these two figures would have been obvious to many people in Yerevan and it is unlike Grossman to be so disparaging towards people whose hospitality he had enjoyed. It is entirely possible that he cut these passages himself.
16 These remarks about the editing, and censorship, of Grossman’s manuscript are largely drawn from the thoughtful discussion of these questions in Shimon Markish’s preface to the French translation of Dobro vam, published as La paix soit avec vous (L’Age d’Homme, 2007); in this edition, every passage omitted from the 1965 publication of Dobro vam is italicized.
17 See “Armenia! Armenia!” Grossman himself tells the story of the old man addressing him in Armenian in Glazami druzei, 362.
AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK
1 Sergey Merkurov (1881–1952) was one of the most prominent Soviet sculptors and the creator of the three largest of the many Soviet monuments to Stalin. Of Greek-Armenian descent, he was a cousin of the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff.
2 Held October 17 to 31, 1961. Among the matters discussed were the removal of Stalin’s remains from the mausoleum on Red Square and the renaming of several towns and cities previously named after Stalin.
3 “Soso,” a diminutive of Joseph, was what Stalin’s mother called him.
4 In the beginning of 1962—soon after Grossman’s visit—the statue of Stalin on the hill over Yerevan was finally taken down; it had been one of the last important Stalin monuments still standing. The roof of the World War II Victory Museum that had served as its podium then remained empty for five years. In 1967, another titanic statue, of Mother Armenia bearing a huge sword, took the place left empty by the Father of Peoples.
5 In 1915, the Ottoman government systematically exterminated the Armenian population of Asia Minor. Between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed.
6 Andranik Toros Ozanyan (1865–1927) was an Armenian general, political activist, and freedom fighter. He was so popular among his men that, even when he was promoted to the rank of general in the Imperial Russian Army, they continued to refer to him by his first name: “Andranik Pasha.” During World War I, he helped organize Armenian battle units to fight alongside the Russians and against the Turks. In 1919, he emigrated to the United States, where Armenian émigrés referred to him as “the George Washington of the Armenians.”
7 Throughout much of the Caucasus and Central Asia the suffix “aga” is used as an honorific; it is attached to the first name of any elder male judged worthy of respect.
8 Sic!
9 These largely Armenian provinces were once part of the Ottoman Empire, though Kars was subsumed by the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century. In 1920 the short-lived Armenian Republic fought a disastrous war against Turkey and was forced to cede the territory Armenians still think of as “Western Armenia.”
10 The legendary hero of The Daredevils of Sasun, a medieval epic about the expulsion of Arab invaders.
11 Traditional candies popular throughout the Caucasus; nuts, and sometimes also raisins, are threaded onto a string, dipped in thickened fruit juice, dried, and wrapped in skin like a sausage.
12 The neoclassical architect Aleksandr Tamanyan (1878–1936) is remembered above all for his work in Yerevan.
13 Khachatur Abovyan (1809–1848), best known for his novel Wounds of Armenia, is seen as the father of modern Armenian literature. Stepan Georgievich Shaumyan (1878–1918) was an Armenian Bolshevik journalist, literary critic, and politician. Yeghishe Charents (1897–1937) was an Armenian poet and revolutionary who died in prison during Stalin’s Great Terror. Anastas Mikoyan (1895–1978) held high office throughout most of the Soviet era under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev.
14 Ivan Paskevich (1782–1856) was an important general in the tsarist army. His successes as second in command, and then as commander in chief, of the Russian forces during the war with Persia (1826–1828) included the liberation of most of Armenia from Persian rule.
15 Grossman’s interlocutor has confused him with the literary historian Leonid Grossman, who, in 1930, had published a fictional memoir in the voice of Olivier d’Archiac, Pushkin’s second in his fatal duel.
16 Grossman is referring to Life and Fate.
17 Grossman studied chemistry at Moscow State University and always retained a deep interest in science. Here, uncharacteristically, he appears to have confused Thomas Edison, best known for his invention of the electric light bulb, with Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.
18 In December 1825 a group of liberal aristocrats staged an unsuccessful rebellion against Tsar Nicholas I.
19 The first great Russian comedy, by Aleksandr Griboyedov (1795–1829). It was rejected by the censors in Petersburg, and the performance in Yerevan was the only performance Griboyedov saw in his lifetime.
20 Mikael Nalbandian (1829–1866) was a utopian-socialist writer and philosopher. Arrested in 1862, he was imprisoned for several years in Petersburg and then exiled to Kamyshin, where he died of tuberculosis.
21 Hovhannes Tumanyan (1869–1923), a writer interested in folklore, is often seen as the Armenian national poet; in 1908 he was briefly imprisoned. Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) was a Ukrainian-Russian short-story writer and journalist. A fierce critic of the tsarist regime, he served two terms of exile, the second of them in Yakutia, in northeastern Siberia.
22 Prince Davit Guramishvili (1705–1792) was a Georgian poet forced to live much of his life outside Georgia. Grigory Savvich Skovoroda (1722–1794) was an important Ukrainian philosopher, poet, teacher, and composer. The Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) was exiled to the Kazakh coast of the Caspian Sea from 1847 to 1857. Most Soviet readers of Grossman’s day would have known this.
23 The poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841).
24 Aleksandr Griboyedov: see note 19.
25 Vladimir Bogoraz-Tan (1865–1936) spent ten years in exile in Yakutia (1889–1899). There he studied the language, beliefs, and way of life of the Chukchi people. After publishing his materials some years later, he achieved worldwide renown. In 1917, he became a professor of ethnology at Petrograd University. Remaining in Leningrad during the 1920s and 1930s, he founded the Institute of the Peoples of the North and helped to create and teach written languages for indigenous Siberian peoples.
26 Prince Kropotkin (1842–1921) was a writer, scientist, and anarchist philosopher.
27 Nikolay Dobrolyubov (1836–1861) and Alexander Herzen (1812–1870) were radical thinkers and journalists; Nikolay Nekrasov (1821–1878) was a radical poet and the editor of an important literary journal.
28 Molokans are sectarian Christians who split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century. Their name, which means “milk drinkers,” reflects the fact that, unlike the Orthodox, they drink milk on most of the two hundred or so fast days. In the late nineteenth century, there were about half a million Molokans within the Russian Empire, many of them exiled to Armenia and Azerbaijan.
29 Several hundred miles southeast of Kiev.
30 In 1833, a supposed outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon some Transcaucasian Molokans led to a schism between the Constants (the original Molokans) and a new, more zealous sect who referred to themselves as the New Israelites but were generally known as Jumpers and Leapers.
31 The original title of this novel is Men Livet lever, which could be translated as “But Life Lives.” The title of the existing English translation is The Road Leads On.
32 The Komsomol is the Union of Communist Youth.
33 Martiros Saryan (1880–1972) is generally seen as Armenia’s national artist. His early work was influenced by Gauguin and Matisse, and from 1926 to 1928 he lived and worked in Paris. A member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences from 1956, he was awarded the Order of Lenin three times.
34 Born in the city of Tula, Uspensky (1843–1902) was a prominent Russian writer and a member of the populist movement.
35 Nikolay Roerich (1874–1947) was a Russian painter and mystical philosopher, strongly influenced by theosophy.
36 A method promoted in one of the many “campaigns” instigated by Khrushchev.
37 Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962), the Nazi officer who was one of the main organizers of the Shoah, was tried in Jerusalem for war crimes in 1961. The trial lasted from April until December; Grossman would have been in Armenia as it was ending. Verkhoyansk, a town in eastern Siberia, is the coldest inhabited place on earth. Between 1860 and 1917 political exiles were often sent there.
38 One parsec is 3.26 light-years. Grossman’s imagery here is strained, but he is evidently referring to the Byurakan Observatory on the slopes of Mount Aragats. Founded in 1946, this was one of the most important astronomical centers in the Soviet Union. Grossman’s visit to Armenia was in 1961, the year when Yuri Gagarin’s space flight focused Soviet attention on outer space as never before.
39 More Jews were shot at Domanevka than anywhere else in the Ukraine apart from Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev. The shooting was, in fact, carried out by Romanians, with little direct German involvement.
40 In most respects Grossman seems to have stayed close, in this memoir as in much of his fiction, to the factual truth. However, his daughter, Yekaterina Korotkova, has informed me (in an e-mail of August 8, 2012) that the true story of Grossman’s aunt differs greatly from the version presented here. In reality, she was highly educated and the wife of a famous Kiev professor of medicine. Her first name was not Rakhil but Maria. The accounts of the deaths of her three children are also fictional. Grossman seems to have wished to emphasize not only her Jewishness but also the ordinariness, during these years, of what one might imagine to be an improbable intensity of tragedy. He also, no doubt, wanted to establish as strong as possible a contrast between the world-famous Gorky and this unknown “anchovy or sardine.”
41 A woodwind instrument similar to an oboe and often played outdoors.
42 Sasha Chorny (1880–1932; real name: Alexander Mikhailovich Glickberg) was a popular poet, satirist, and children’s writer.
43 From a famous poem written in 1837: “When the yellowing cornfield sways in the breeze.”
44 In July 1841, Lermontov was killed in a duel at the foot of Mount Mashuk, in the Caucasus.
45 Grossman is quoting from Jeremiah 31:15; Rakhil is, of course, the same name as Rachel.
46 Aleksandr Vertinsky (1889–1957) emigrated after the Revolution but returned to the Soviet Union in 1943. He was always popular and even won a Stalin Prize as a film actor in 1951, but his first legal vinyl record was released in the Soviet Union only in 1969, twelve years after his death. Pyotr Leshchenko (1898–1954) was considered “the King of Russian Tango.” He too emigrated, settling first in Paris and then in Romania. After 1945, he wanted to return to the Soviet Union; the Soviet authorities appear to have granted their permission, but he was then arrested and imprisoned in Romania.
47 The head of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
48 The remnants of the fire temple were discovered in the 1950s, not long before Grossman’s visit. It now seems probable that these remnants, rather than predating the first Christian cathedral, are from the second half of the fourth century, when much of Armenia was under Persian occupation and the cathedral was converted into a Zoroastrian temple.
49 Grossman seems to have forgotten that there is no image of Christ on the altar in Echmiadzin. The image on every Armenian altar—even when a church is dedicated to a particular saint—is invariably that of the Virgin and Child.
50 Intourist, founded in 1929, managed nearly all travel by foreign tourists within the Soviet Union. Volga cars, introduced in 1956, were a symbol of high status.
51 Grossman is alluding to Chekhov’s story “The Privy Councillor.”
52 Between the outer door of a Russian hut and the room or rooms where people ate, worked, and slept there was always an unheated entrance room. This provided insulation from the cold and could be used for storing tools and firewood or for housing animals.
53 Viktor Ambartsumyan (1908–1996) founded the Byurakan Observatory.
54 In 1961 the Soviet government redenominated all existing paper money. Old rubles were revalued at one-tenth of their face value; many people thus lost nine-tenths of their savings. Between 1961 and 1991 the official rate of exchange was one ruble to one pound sterling, though the black market rate was usually at least ten rubles to the pound. The series of new notes introduced in 1961 included three-ruble green notes and five-ruble blue notes.
55 See note 10.
56 Clothes produced by this factory were notoriously ugly.
57 One of several Russian ultranationalist and anti-Semitic organizations from the early twentieth century.
Further Reading
Andrey Bitov, Captive of the Caucasus, trans. Susan Brownsberger (HarperCollins, 1993). This includes the memoir Lessons of Armenia.
Thomas de Waal, The Caucasus: An Introduction (OUP USA, 2010).
John and Carol Garrard, The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (Pen and Sword, 2012).
Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows, trans. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Anna Aslanyan (NYRB Classics, 2009).
_______, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (NYRB Classics, 2006).
_______, The Road, ed. Robert Chandler, trans. Elizabeth Chandler, Robert Chandler, and Olga Mukovnikova (NYRB Classics, 2010).
_______, A Writer at War, eds. and trans. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (Pimlico, 2006).
Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, trans. Sidney Monas (Notting Hill Edition, 2011).
Philip Marsden, The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians (Flamingo, 1994).
Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook
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