THE RURAL WORLD OF H. TUMANYAN
Authors: Ghazaryan Ani 
Published: December 2024

Tumanyan's creative heritage is one of the unique and invaluable treasures of Armenian literature, which includes the past and present artistic traditions of the motherland. By the irony of fate, the life of the great lyricist coincided with public and political scandals with an extremely loud sound in his homeland, which left their mark on the course of his life, leaving many of the poet's dreams and aspirations unfinished, but the tactful writer did not give up, spoke and talked with his native people, becoming the exclusive translation of sorrows, dreams and hopes.

He believed that a national poet should fully know and understand life in order to be able to fully bring out the vibrations of the people's heart, present the waves and ups and downs of their stormy soul, simultaneously revealing the psychology of people. These are the three main problems he set before himself, which he carefully addressed in all his large-scale works, convinced that literature should not be just a mirror depicting life, along with reflecting time and events and faces, it should "create in life the noble and sublime, the pure and immaculate image given to him by God, composed of the purest elements of nature (H. Tumanyan, ELZH, no. 7, 1995). This is Tumanyan's understanding of the relationship between life and literature.
What H. Tumanyan depicted was the village rich with traditions, that by itself opposed to the civilization, but that was also dissatisfied with the centuries-old customs and habits that had become a unique and invisible confinement for people. One does absolutely understand the gentle irony of the poet who perfectly knows that memories of the past bear the contrast between the ancient and the new, which one can notice with the naked eye in almost all of his works devoted to the rural world, where he rather than idealizing his heroes, represents them in pastoral shades.
He sets himself a task to talk about the inevitable conflict between a traditional system and the civilization that were more important and vital than the criticism of the old and the retardation.
Focusing on moral values, the poet raised his voice against the devastating efforts of the civilization penetrating into the rural world, because the accelerating course of the destructive time machine eliminated not only what had outlived its time but also imposed a threat to the traditions that would become a cause for the collision of traditional systems and the civilization.
Tumanyan is able to imperceptibly move the reader's imagination to his native edge by presenting the colors of his native landscape in parallel with the skillfully created characters.
He created his world imperceptibly, in parallel with his literary activity, his way of self-expression, and at the same time he opened his own way of discovering the reality, discovered his world within himself, and put the key to the closed doors of his creative world on the reader's table, remaining the exceptionally great poet of the lyrics of his native landscape.
The reason for the tragic fate of Tumanyan's heroes is the ignorance caused by the social situation, which the poet pushes into the background with the power of art, because he consciously brings to the fore the conditions that cause the destruction of people. The writer, who knows himself and people excellently, highly appreciated the humane, remaining a speaker to the reader's heart and soul, which is imperceptibly transmitted from him to the reader. Undoubtedly, this is a testimony of the exceptional power of Tumanian art.
Literary critic Zh. Kalantaryan wrote, "Tumanyan deeply studied new literature, discovered certain patterns, which allowed him to have a scientific approach to literary phenomena, as well as to evaluate phenomena in the context of time and history." (Zh. Kalantaryan, 2021, p. 32).