Աղէտի պահապանը
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Date
2014
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Abstract
Hagop Oshagan, anxious about the symptoms of disintegration of Armenian society, promoted the plan of restoring lost Armenian unity by means of literature as early as 1914 in Mehyan. In Oshagan’s view future Armenian literature had to replace weakened religious institutions and undertake the renovation of tradition, as had Dante’s poetry in the case of Italy.
The Armenian Genocide of 1915 essentially transformed the problem. The Disaster became the focus of Oshagan’s literature, making the collapse of Western Armenia its sole theme.
Oshagan looked for the roots of the Disaster beyond social relations, in the national subconscious conditioned by soil and blood, a place where “Turkishness” and “Armenianness” were crystallized. He believed that the interpenetration of these two irreconcilable substances had led to the earthquake of Medz Yeghern.
While comparing the Armenian catastrophe with devastation of the sinking mainland, Oshagan granted it cosmic universality, as well as the features of a distinct natural phenomenon. Thus the Disaster was turned into an absolute event, inexplicable to social critique.
Accordingly, the mission of the future Dante of Armenian literature was not the explanation of the Disaster, but its preservation and guarding by writing. Ironically, it is the Disaster that led the dispersed collective genius of Armenians to full disintegration, while it was supposed to fill the vacuum caused by the exhaustion of conventional beliefs and to shape a ground for new moral and social consolidation.
Another expression of the same conservative trend has been the idea of “monastery,” which Oshagan considered an authentic symbol of Armenianness. However, what Oshagan meant by “monastery” is nothing else but the idealization of the traditional Armenian village community in the context of religious and cultural factors which are unique to a medieval cloister.
On the other hand, the cloister is a place of isolation from the outside world. This “closed space” is the only place where tradition can be transmitted from generation to generation and the fading village community (traditional embodiment of a “pure Armenianness”) can be preserved from outside destructive influences.
However, the transfer of tradition in a closed circuit lacks the momentum of real development. Duration as the eternal repetition of the same is the vicious infinity (Hegel), which deters the nation from reengaging its own historicity.