Selected Essays

ASHOT OVANESIAN

The Institute of Peoples of the East is located on the Bersenev Embankment next door to the pyramidal Government House. A little further along, a ferryman used to ply his trade, charging three pennies for a crossing and loading his boat to the gunwales.

The air on the Moscow River Embankment is viscid and mealy.

A bored young Armenian came out to greet me. In addition, one could also see, among the Japhetic books with their spiky script, like a Russian cabbage butterfly in a library of cactuses, a blond young lady.

My amateurish arrival caused no one to rejoice. A request for help to study Old Armenian touched no heart among these people, of whom, moreover, the woman herself lacked this key of knowledge.

As a result of my incorrect subjective orientation,⁵ I have fallen into the habit of regarding every Armenian as a philologist . . . Which is, however, not all wrong. These are people who jangle the keys of their language even when they are unlocking nothing particularly valuable.

My conversation with the young graduate student from Tiflis flagged and ended on a note of diplomatic reserve.

The names were names of highly esteemed Armenian writers, Academician Marr⁶ was mentioned, who had just dashed through Moscow on his way from the Udmurt or Vogul’ District to Leningrad, and the spirit of Japhetic learning was praised, which penetrates to the deep structure of all speech . . .

I was already getting bored and glancing more and more often out the window at a bit of overgrown garden, when into the library strode an old man with despotic manners and a lordly bearing.

His Promethean head radiated a smoky ash-blue light like the most powerful carbide lamp . . . The blue-black locks of his wiry hair, fluffed out with a certain disdain, had something of the reinforced strength of an ensorcelled bird feather.

There was no smile on the broad mouth of this black-magician, who never forgot that speech is work. Comrade Ovanesian’s head had the capacity of distancing itself from his interlocutor, like the top of a mountain that only chanced to resemble a head. But the dark-blue-quartz-frowning of his eyes was worth anyone else’s smile.

“Head” in Armenian is glukh’e—with a short breath after the kh and a soft l . . . It’s the same root as in Russian [glava, or golova] . . . And would you like a Japhetic novella? If you please:

“To see,” “to hear,” and “to understand”—all these meanings coalesced at one time into a single semantic bundle. At the very deepest stages of language, there were no concepts, only directions, fears and longings, needs and apprehensions. The concept “head” was shaped over a dozen millennia out of just such a vague bundle of mists, and its symbol became . . . deafness [glukhota].

You’ll get it all mixed up anyway, dear reader, and it is not for me to teach you.