An evening in memory of David Sargsyan was held in MUAR. Two years have passed since the day of death.
There was no exhibition. There was a book "David", which contains memories of him. We stood in the vestibule of the main entrance-exit (there are two levels and in terms of space it worked out well). It turned out that they were in the interval between "in" and "outside", on the threshold where everything that was in Moscow and the present Moscow itself is kept. For himself, David combined these two environments - museum and urban - into one space, where his fantastic activity took place in the form of transitions from one part to another, and where he took all those interested. The book contains various plots of these joint movements.
Those who knew him closely wrote excellently. It was impossible to write about him without wonderful. It is quite obvious that this was an unusual person, like any great talent. After his death, in an article for a Yerevan newspaper, I wrote about his Diaghilev talent as an organizer and Parajanov's talent as an artist. After reading the texts, I was even more convinced of the validity of these comparisons.
David's sister tells the story of their family, about where David is from. She breaks off her thoughts at the time when David left Yerevan for Moscow to study. I want to tell you about Yerevan, about the city in which he grew up.
(No, I did not know him in my youth, although we grew up in the same urban space. He was older than me, left for Moscow after school, I - much later, after graduation; there could be no intersections. We met in a museum).
Yerevan in the 1960s is a completely unique place. A city of avant-garde architecture. Before that, it was a provincial town with beautiful stone facades, among which are two great masterpieces by Tamanyan. Not rated constructivism. But in general - the predominance of tradition. And in this traditional environment, modernist architecture began to arise literally in a flurry. Spaces were opened, concrete volumes were molded, where there were no not only traditional elements, there were no orthogonal projections.
Yerevan in those years was not like other cities. It was conceived as the capital of all the Armenians scattered around the world, and during these years this utopia was realized for a moment. When the Iron Curtain opened, Armenians and non-Armenians from all over the world began to come to Yerevan. William Saroyan. An architect from Rome who started working in Yerevan. Parajanov filmed The Color of Pomegranate.
In the numerous cafes that have opened in Yerevan, Kochar talked about Paris. Still working Saryan bequeathed Armenian painting to Minas, who returned from Leningrad. Poets, architects.
The largest institute of cybernetics was established in Yerevan with the young genius Mergelyan. Academician Ambartsumyan calculated the age of the universe at the Byurakan Observatory. In the town of physicists above the picturesque gorge of the Hrazdan River, Alikhanov built a nuclear accelerator. Yevtushenko, Voznesensky were regular guests here.
During these years, first-class world orchestras and soloists literally alternated on the stages of two Yerevan halls. (I not only remember all this well, but I watched this process from the inside: my father in the mid-60s was briefly appointed to lead the Philharmonic). Saryan's stained glass triptych appeared in the Small Philharmonic Hall. In the summer of 1965, the Benjamin Britten Festival took place in Yerevan. He lived for a month in the house of composers a hundred kilometers from Yerevan, wrote music to the poems of Pushkin, and he and Peter Pierce, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya performed this for the first time at the Yerevan Philharmonic. And of course, the brilliant Zara Dolukhanova (you know, she was David's muse, for several years he was invariably present at all her concerts).
All of them - these great people, and we all - ordinary Yerevanians, walked the streets that looked like museum halls, filled with first-class ceramics, forging, bronze, with super-graphics made of stone on the facades of houses. The buildings looked like sculptures. Beauty, style, taste were in everything.
After his meetings with Yerevan Mayor Hasratyan, who was building this new city, Bitov will write about one Yerevan masterpiece in his Lessons of Armenia (remember, at the last Moscow Biennale, together with the union, we showed an open cinema in order to draw attention to its wonderful architecture and prevent break?): “It was a truly outstanding cinema, completed in such an original way that in the evening lighting I could not catch how it looked as a whole: it seemed to be hanging above the ground, like a flying saucer landing. There was a lot of time before the start of the session, we were sitting in an ethereal cafe, consisting of holes, shadows and some kind of fluttering curtains. The open-air hall resembled a forum. The southern stars burned above us, like in a planetarium. It seemed to me that we took off, and if you risk approaching the edge and look down from there, then somewhere deep below you you will see our dear, not yet so luxuriously built land and, feeling deeply, you will read down long poems about the love remaining on the Earth …”.
Now this time of the 60s-70s is called the “Yerevan civilization”. David Sargsyan emerged from this “Yerevan civilization”.
… On the cover of the book "David" he is depicted in a photograph with indistinct facial features. The appearance of a person after a year is erased in memory, it becomes unclear. This metaphor is clear. But the content of the book refutes it - in the memory of all the beautiful face of David was preserved absolutely clearly …
Karen Balian, architect
Moscow. 2012-30-01
