09 05 2008 - Sir: I read Fisk's latest on Saturday 4th in The Independent entitled Bravery, tears and broken dreams.

Sir: I read Fisk's latest on Saturday 4th in The Independent entitled Bravery, tears and broken dreams. I found it silly, arrogant and obnoxious. Most surprising is the lip service it pays to certain vehement anti-Marxist Armenian intellectuals and to the latter-day apologist for Globalisation. It is sad to find Fisk luxuriating in his misled and misleading ruminations. And I felt sorry for him, despite my anger at the facile and inaccurate juxtapositions of this most recent piece, because I respect his decades of valiant journalism and have long admired his courageous stance on the tragedies of the contemporary world.
Fisk's chronological errors and outlandish sketches are simply unbecoming of any decent journalist let alone one as distinguished as he. Alexander Tamanian, the visionary architect who designed modern Yerevan died at the age of 58, on February 20th, 1936. A year later his design of Armenia's first Opera & Ballet Theatre was awarded the Gold Medal at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937. Fisk wonders whether Tamanian's death was a murder or suicide, having decided that it was Tamanian who 'denounced' Yeghishe Charents, ‘one of the nation’s favourite poets’ and hence, he writes, Charents ‘was disappeared by the NKD in 1937’. But the poet was arrested in July 26th 1937, more than a year after Tamanian’s death. The poet was then tortured and murdered in his prison cell on November 27th, 1937, the year Fisk asserts that Tamanian was ‘hard at work building Yerevan’s new Stalinist opera house.’ We have then Armenia’s celebrated architect toiling beyond the grave and presumably happily receiving the laurels of his posthumous glory in Paris in the same year that Armenia’s beloved poet is murdered by the NKD. A perfect phantasmagoria.
Fisk presents Charents as praising Uncle Joe in his 'schoolboy prank.' In fact Charents wrote Message in praise of ‘new light/sun’ in 1933, when he was 36 years old. Moreover Charents had written hundreds of poems, before and after Stalin's rise, in praise of the Sun, Fire, Agni, Soma and so forth, each time as a poetic metaphor for a certain political or aesthetic idea of freedom. The poet genuinely believed that the struggle for a decent life and human warmth that genuine socialism might bring was worthwhile, despite the numerous obstacles it might encounter along the way. He envisaged just such a cataclysmic struggle when only 21, in his epic poem of 1918 that begins 'Out of their minds, the mobs in rage / Are advancing towards the rising sun...’ and embellished these themes in his 1919 collection Holocausted Flame. Charents indeed visualised the flame itself being ‘holocausted’: he himself was born in Kars, in Western/Turkish Armenia in 1897, and after witnessing the Genocide of the Armenians in 1915 he volunteered to fight the Ottoman armies during the First World War to liberate his people and his homeland.
Fisk goes on to praise ‘the individualism of the descendants of Tigran the Great whose empire stretched from the Caspian to Beirut’ because they ‘resisted even Stalin’s oppression’. Tigran the Great ruled in 95-55 BC. To link the ‘individualism’ of the people of present-day Armenia to its bygone Emperor is itself little more than a colonialist 'schoolboy prank.' Charents would now be turning, yet again, in his anonymous grave.
In essence, Charents was a Turner of a poet. The Sun was God for Turner and Charents. As for the Armenian poet being ‘a famous philanderer’: well, Charents loved women and one must assume that many of his beautiful love poems were inspired by some of those he knew. Imagine presenting Shakespeare, Marlowe, Shelley, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas or Oscar Wilde as mere philanderers, homosexuals, drunkards and the like just to make a silly misguided observation. Funny what a cognac on the balcony of a luxury hotel can do to such a rightly esteemed speaker of truths. What a shame...
Khatchatur I. Pilikian -- 24 Bulstrode Avenue Hounslow, Middx. London, TW3 3AB
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Khatchatur I. Pilikian