The Dark Valley
Authors: Aksel Bakunts
The Dark Valley
Short Stories
by
Aksel Bakunts
translated from Armenian by
Nairi Hakhverdi
with a preface by
Victoria Rowe
Taderon Press, London
© 2008
Nairi Hakhverdi. All Rights Reserved.
Printed in association with the Gomidas Institute.
ISBN 978-1-903656-90-7
Table Of Contents
St. John the Baptist Monastery
The “Demon” of the Dark Valley
Dedication:
To my father, for reading me bedtime stories
From the Translator…
Like all translations, this translation, too, is not intended to replace the original text. It is merely meant to serve as a means to introduce works in one language to readers of another.
My translation of
The Dark Valley
was quite straightforward: wherever I could, I maintained a literal translation, and wherever I felt that the translation would be misunderstood or the flow of the text compromised, I chose to rephrase and, on some rare occasions, even to paraphrase.
More importantly, I worked on capturing the mood, if not every linguistic subtlety, of Bakunts's writings. I hope I have achieved this goal and done justice to Bakunts in my attempt to make his stories accessible to an English-reading audience.
Acknowledgments
At the very top, I would like to thank my father for his support and patience, without which I would have never been able to embark on this project and complete it. He allowed for one of my passions and ambitions to come true.
Secondly, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Hayastan Forum, and especially members SAS and Kars, who eagerly helped me understand all the little foreignisms that Bakunts weaves into his writings, from Russian, Turkish, Georgian, Persian, Arabic, and even English, as well as the peculiar idiosyncrasies of Armenian dialectal language.
Finally, I would like to thank Dr.
Theo
van Lint, Armenologist at Oxford University, for encouraging me to take on this project and run with it.
Mtnadzor,
The Dark Valley
, was Aksel Bakunts’ first published collection of short stories, although he had started writing individual pieces for the press while still a student at the Gevorkian Seminary in Echmiadzin. In 1915 his first published piece, satirizing the mayor of Goris, earned him a month’s stint in jail. When
The Dark Valley
appeared in 1927, Alexander Tevosian, who adopted the pen name Aksel Bakunts, had already lived an interesting and varied life. Born in 1899 in Goris, Armenia, Bakunts was such a promising pupil that the Catholicos was petitioned to enable him to attend the Gevorkian Seminary, where he studied from 1910 to 1917. He taught in village schools in the years between 1915 and 1916 in the Zangezur region of Armenia. He also served as an Armenian volunteer against the invading Turkish army in the battles of Erzurum, Kars and Sardarabad. In 1918-1919 he was a proof-reader and reporter in Yerevan and taught at a school for orphans. He was accepted to the Kharkov Institute in the Ukraine to study agriculture from 1920 to 1923. After a few years working as an agronomist, Bakunts permanently settled in Yerevan in 1926. Following the success of
The Dark Valley
, his second collection of short stories was published in 1928. He enjoyed a deserved reputation as a master short story writer. The period between 1932 and 1936 was one of intense productivity for Bakunts. He continued to write individual pieces for the press and worked for the official Armenian film studio, Hyefilm, writing screenplays for three films:
Sev tevi take
(Under the Black Wing) (1930),
Tragedia Aragatzi Vra
(Tragedy on Mt. Arakadz) (1931) and
Zangezur
(1936). He translated Nicolai Gogol’s
Taras Bulba
from Russian and in 1935 published
Aghvesagirk
(Book of the Fox), a collection of medieval fables rendered from classical to modern Armenian. He attempted several novels, including a fictional biography of Khachatur Abovian, the author of the influential
Verk Hayastani
(The Wounds of Armenia), who had mysteriously disappeared in 1848. Fragments of Bakunts’ novel about Abovian were published in 1932 but this and other manuscripts he was working on were destroyed following his imprisonment in 1937. In the violently repressive atmosphere of the Stalinist state, Bakunts, along with his friend Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937), was subjected to attacks for the views he expressed in his writing. Bakunts, like so many of his contemporary fellow writers, including Charents, Zabel Yesayian (1878-1942), Vahan Totovents (1894-1938), Gurgen Mahari (1903-1969), and others, was accused of nationalism, alienation from socialist society, as well as an array of other charges, and imprisoned. He was executed in 1937 after a twenty-five minute trial. Bakunts was “rehabilitated” in 1954, which allowed his works to be printed in Soviet Armenia. A museum dedicated to Bakunts, furnished in the style of his youth, was opened in 1970 in Goris and contains some of the shrubs and trees the author had planted.
The Alpine Violet
, Bakunts’ most famous short story, dedicated to Arpenik Charents, Yeghishe Charents’ first wife, and included in this volume, has been his most widely translated work appearing in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish and Arabic. The present volume, skilfully translated by Nairi Hakhverdi, is the first time the eighteen short stories comprising Bakunts’
The Dark Valley
have been translated into English in their entirety and is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of translations of Armenian literature into English.
***
The stories in
The Dark Valley
lovingly depict the beauty of the flora and fauna of Armenia, particularly the area around Goris, the author’s birthplace, and the greater Zangezur region where Bakunts worked between 1923 and 1926. These stories never descend into maudlin sentimentality. Alongside images of beautiful mountains, flowers and rivers, are stark, but also sympathetic, portraits of the Armenian peasantry trying to eke out a living under the arduous conditions of a harsh environment, corruption at all levels, and unequal social hierarchies. Despite Bakunts’ evident sympathy for the underdog within the village hierarchies—the landless peasant, the brutalized wife, the orphan—these stories are never propaganda pieces, something the Soviet regime recognized only too well, and indeed the publication of
The Dark Valley
only served to increase the regime’s distrust of Bakunts. One of the reasons for this is evident upon reading this volume: viewed through the eyes of the villagers, political events and governmental changes, including the Bolshevik revolution, do not seem to fundamentally change social inequalities or raise the standard of living for the majority of the inhabitants of the villages. In fact, in the story
The Apricot Field
the inhabitants of two towns, who have been quarrelling for decades over ownership of a field, reach an agreement far more sensible than that devised by the new Soviet government.
Where Bakunts portrays change occurring is largely in social interaction, when denizens of the urban world, representatives of the Soviet state or modern professions, met those of the rural environment. Clashes occur between urban and rural values and customs, often centring on women. Such is the case in the stories
The ‘Demon’ of the Dark Valley
and
The Alpine Violet
.
In
The ‘Demon’ of the Dark Valley,
a young city woman named Asya arrives alone to hold a women’s meeting for the village women. The story, written through the eyes of a village man, Sakan, focuses on his fascination with the difference between this woman, Asya, and his own wife. Although his attraction is partially erotic, the attraction is based on what are clearly evidences of Asya’s urbanized ways—her laundered clothing, her dainty eating, a glimpse of her fair shoulder, and the smell of her perfume-scented body—which are contrasted by him to his wife’s hardy appetite and pungent body scents. In
The Alpine Violet
one
of the themes which runs through this multi-layered short story is the contrast, less direct than in
The ‘Demon’ of the Dark Valley,
but present, nevertheless, between urban and rural social and cultural norms. In this story, two men, representatives of the urban professions of archaeologist and artist, visit a remote village in order to study the fortress, Kakavaberd, and are watched enviously by a labourer working in the fields. When the two men finish their work they enter what is by chance the labourer’s house, where his wife, along with her young son, but not the husband who is still working, offers them a meal in accordance with village traditions of hospitality. Seeing the beautiful wife, the artist is reminded of another woman, a city woman, whom he once loved, and during their visit, unnoticed by any but the child, he sketches a quick portrait of the wife while she serves them the meal. Later, after they have gone, the young son innocently mentions to his father, who already has been irritated by envy, that the artist sketched a drawing of his wife. Upon hearing this, in a jealous rage, the father grabs a cudgel and smashes it over his wife’s back.
In addition to exploring the chasm between rural and urban cultures,
The Alpine Violet
raises another theme which runs throughout this collection: the relationship between the visible traces of Armenia’s history—the churches, the stones ornamented with pomegranates and bunches of grapes, the khachkars, the fortresses set high in the Armenian mountains—and the present-day inhabitants of the region. This theme is most clear in the short story
St. John the Baptist Monastery
in which a villager decides to plant a vegetable garden on the grounds of a ruined seventh-century monastery. He digs up ancient tiles and medieval jugs, carelessly tossing them aside, and dreams of planting onions and garlic on the royal graves and of the royal bones nourishing apricot trees. The other villagers disapprove of his use of sacred ground for such a purpose, but also reflect on the lack of a vegetable garden in the village. Bakunts imagines why the monastery was built—was it a dream of the Prince or of an Abbot in love with the prince’s mistress?—and the author frequently connects the present inhabitants of the village with their Urartian and medieval ancestors. Yet, at the same time, the villager’s enjoyment of the delicious peppers, the fruits of his labours grown on the monastery grounds, reflects Bakunts’ interest in what the relationship between ancestors and the present-day inhabitants is or what it should be. Two years before
The Dark Valley
appeared, Yeghishe Charents’ Yerkir Nairi,
The Land of Nairi,
was published in which Charents stated that distinct from the fabled Nairi there is an ancient place called Armenia which
was
and
is
full of ordinary people. Bakunts was greatly influenced by
The Land of Nairi,
and Bakunts’ own unfinished novel,
Kyores,
a play on the name of his native Goris, is generally understood to be similar in tone and intent to
The Land of Nairi.
The historical themes in
The Dark Valley
appear, it seems to me, to be attempts by Bakunts to write the history of the ordinary people of the ancient land called Armenia.