An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman

Author:Vasily Grossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-635-1
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2013-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

10

THE FIRST thing I saw in Armenia was stone; and what I took away when I left was a memory of stone. We do not remember every feature of a face, only those that best express the person’s soul: severe lines and wrinkles, meek eyes, or thick slobbery lips. And what best expresses the soul of Armenia is neither the deep blue of Lake Sevan nor the peach orchards and vineyards of the Ararat valley; what expresses the soul of Armenia is stone.

I have never seen so much stone scattered about the ground—and I have seen the Urals, the cliffs of the Caucasus, and the Tien Shan. What strikes you in Armenia is not the stone of gorges, steep mountainsides, or snow-capped peaks. Far more striking is the stone that lies flat on the ground: the stone meadows and fields, the stone steppe.

There is no beginning or end to this stone. There it lies—flat and thick on the ground. There is no escape from it. It is as if countless stonecutters have been at work—thousands, tens of thousands, millions of stonecutters, working day and night for years on end, for centuries, for millennia. They must have used wedges and hammers to dismantle huge mountains. They must have smashed them into splinters—splinters they could use to build huts, temples, or the walls of fortresses. From what they left behind in this vast quarry you could make a mountain so high that the snow on its peaks would never melt. There is still enough stone to build any number of towers of Babel, from the one swallowed up by the sands three thousand years ago to the skyscrapers that buzz with activity on the far side of the Atlantic.

But when you look at these black and green stones, you realize at once who cut them. The stonecutter was time. This stone is ancient; it has turned black and green from age. What shattered the mighty body of the basalt were the blows struck by long millennia. The mountains disintegrated; time turned out to be stronger than basalt massifs. And now all this no longer seems to be a vast quarry; it is the site of a battle fought between a great stone mountain and the vastness of time. Two monsters clashed on these fields; time was the victor. The mountains are dead, fallen in battle. They have been felled by time just as mosquitoes, moths, people, dandelions, oaks, and birches are felled by time. Defeated by time, the dead mountains have been turned to dust. Their black and green bones lie scattered on the field of battle. Time has triumphed; time is invincible.

Sometimes this seems to be a strange and terrible kingdom where the earth engenders not life but death. Here, instead of grass, instead of dogwood and wild roses, black stones grow out of the earth. April and May give birth not to flowers but only to stone. Stone pushes its way out of the earth’s womb, taking up all the

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