Black Angel: The Life of Arshile Gorky

PART I

ARMENIAN

CHILDHOOD

1902–20

Armenia’s Khorkhom Dream, 1939. Ink, (Diocese of the Armenian Church of America)

Prologue

The small boy climbed a poplar tree, his bare legs and arms wrapped around the white trunk. One hand over the other, he inched up, without looking down. Twenty feet up, crows circled the top of the tree, dived, and flapped black wings – ‘Kra-a-k! Kro-o-k!’ The scarecrow boy had a mess of twigs on his head.

The row of poplars in bright sunlight were laden with nests. He perched on a forked branch, which dipped under his weight. One wrong move and he would fall. The nests looked like scribbles in the sky; they were full of eggs. He wanted to paint on the eggs and give them to his mother. He stretched to steal a few and slip them into his sweater. Crows dived for his face, but the crown of thorns protected him.

He swung in the treetop, exhilarated by the motion. Storks’ nests were even higher up but he wouldn’t touch those. His house was down there among the patchwork of flat mud roofs of Khorkom. Mountains reared up their snowy peaks, Mount Sipan higher than the rest. The turquoise lake shone in the sun, and further out, the rocky island of Aghtamar hunched like a turtle, on the edge of Lake Van. The tip of the church dome pointed at the sky. He was alone on top of the world.

1

The Angel of Birth

1902

In the early years of the twentieth century, Khorkom was a small village by Lake Van, in the province of Vaspurakan, Western Armenia. Armenians had lived continuously on the rugged highland plateau since pre-Christian times. The plateau was edged with lava fields, cut through with rivers. One third of it was taken up by Lake Van, 5,500 feet above sea level. In the Lower Valley of the Armenians, Vari Hayotz Dzor, the lake had risen, flooding fields and squeezing out the people. The Turks, under whose authority the Armenians had lived in the Ottoman Empire, also oppressed them.

The village still stands, under another name, although the original inhabitants have been wiped out. Arshile Gorky was born Manoug Adoian. His large, patriarchal family was one of the wealthiest in the poor village, which lived off the land and the lake. A high bluff, with a church standing on it, overlooked the lake, protecting the village, which nestled in a hollow behind. In fact, khor means ‘deep’, and koum, ‘stable’, in Armenian.

The people of Khorkom were Christians but their rituals and way of life originated from ancient cults of nature. They believed that at the birth of a baby, angels and demons waged war over him. As the boy grew up to become a man, he would feel that demons and angels were never far away.

His mother, Shushanig, went into labour in a mud-brick house smelling of farm animals and manure. She was twenty-four and this was her fourth labour. Her long face had filled out in pregnancy. Her large almond eyes were bright. She lay by a fire in the central room on bedding laid out on the floor. Her husband and all other men had left the house.

Historic map of Armenia and Vaspurakan showing Gorky’s birthplace, Khorkom.

Babies were delivered by a midwife who had to perform ceremonies to protect the mother and child. First, she picked up a long metal skewer and blackened its point in the fire. On each wall of the room, she drew the sign of the cross to keep the devil away. Then she gave the skewer to the mother with a prayer. Childbirth was dangerous. Many women died, and fewer than half the infants survived until the age of two. The elder sisters-in-law were on hand to guide her:

‘When labour starts, the angel comes down and takes all your sins and puts them in a bag and hangs them over your head. When the baby is born, the angel will return and sprinkle all your sins back on to you.’

This was the signal for elderly aunts and young women to come forward. ‘Please, now you are pure, bless us. Please, bless us!’

After three daughters, Shushan prayed for a son. A woman on either side of her, at her elbows and knees, supported her back.

‘A boy! God bless him. A boy!’

Long limbs and a mass of damp black hair. The baby’s eyes were black.¹

The umbilical cord had to be cut while a healthy woman was nearby, the blood smeared across the baby’s wax-covered face so that he would have red cheeks, then the afterbirth and umbilical cord were taken in a white cloth for burial in the churchyard so he would be a fine singer in church.

The midwife beat some salt and a couple of eggs into warm water, and gave the infant his first frothy bath. She put salt on his dark head, under his arms, feet and hands, and swaddled him. He would remain swaddled for the next forty days. The children rushed out with sweets, to pass on the news to the village.

Prayers and ritual verses were said. The midwife asked the mother as she brought her the swaddled baby, ‘Girl, am I light, or are you?’

‘May it pass lightly,’ Shushan had to reply.

Three times they repeated the response, then the baby was laid into the crook of her right arm. He was thin, with long fingers. She saw the faces of her dead father and her brother.

‘Eyes open, Atchke patz. He’s smart.’ Her relatives praised him and congratulated her, spitting ‘tout, tout’ in between words to fool the evil eye. His mother-of-pearl eyelids were fringed with dark lashes. She whispered, ‘My little black one.’

Her husband, Setrag Adoian, rugged, over six feet tall, had to stoop to get through the low doorway. He was handed his son with ceremony and blessings. His previous marriage had ended sadly with the death of his first wife, Lucy Amirkhanian, leaving him with a son and a daughter. He was forty, and he and Shushan had one daughter together, Satenig, but this was their first boy.

Shushan was supposed to stay indoors for forty days to protect herself. The boy was christened after Setrag’s father, Manoug Adoian, but his mother nicknamed him Vosdanig after her home town. From birth the boy had two names, one from each side of his family. He answered to both, as though he were two separate people, until he later adopted a third name.

His date of birth was subsequently lost; in the turmoil of events, all family and official records were destroyed. Gorky would later give his birth date as 1902, then as 1903 and 1904. His elder sisters and cousins maintained that he was born in 1902 or 1903, in October. Vartoosh, his younger sister, insisted it was 22 April 1904. The year 1902 is the most probable one, and corroborated by other boys of his age.

His mother was the daughter of a priest in the Apostolic Orthodox Church belonging to the early Eastern tradition. Sarkis Der Marderossian was head of Saint Nishan Monastery on the slope by Vosdan overlooking the lake. Her name meant ‘lily’ and she was named after a martyred saint. She married into a farming family but her own background was very different. As an eighteen-year-old widow, after her husband’s murder, Shushan had been forced to give up one daughter, Sima. Widows who remarried usually left their children with their own parents, but she had not been able to do this. She kept the younger girl from that earlier marriage, Akabi, now seven. The eldest, she had entrusted to an orphanage in the nearby city of Van in the tradition noted by H. F. B. Lynch, the scholar and traveller who wrote one of the finest accounts of the area at the turn of the century: ‘A widow, about to marry again, will bring her young child to the feet of the missionaries, beseeching them to bring it up and educate it in her place, as their monument – for so she puts it – before God.’²

Setrag’s son by his first wife lived with them. Young Hagop saw the baby put to sleep in a cradle on rockers or in a kelim strung up between ropes for a hammock. While Shushan breast-fed him, she sang and talked to him. Hagop was jealous of the intruder, and grew up into a rough, angry character, quick to push his young stepbrother around. Shushan had entered the marriage of convenience not only to support herself and her children, but also for physical protection. In the archetypal Armenian home, the mother-in-law ruled supreme and the bride was ‘an uncomplaining servant under the grandmother’, waiting for permission to speak to her elders. Sometimes this did not come until the bride was in her sixties.³

Setrag’s elder sister, the widow Yeghus, called Dadig, Grandma, because of her age, was also above Shushan in the pecking order. She controlled the household stores and assigned Shushan work and chores. The unhappiness of a young woman in a loveless union went unremarked by elders who arranged them for convenience. Shushan conformed, ‘always wore a scarf on her head, was very quiet and never sang out loud. She was modest and hardly spoke,’ her nephew Ado remembered. But in a crisis she could show her mettle.

His grandfather Manoug Adoian had three sons, named after Shadrak (Setrag), Mishag and Abednago, whom Nebuchadnezzar had cast into the fiery furnace, but had then seen ‘walking in the midst of the fire’ in the Old Testament. A resourceful man, Grandfather Manoug had gone to labour in Greece to earn money for a team of ploughing oxen and some fields. Farming his fields, cutting poplar trees for lumber and growing most of the fruit and vegetables, he struggled to make a living out of land that was constantly being claimed by the rising waters of the lake. Setrag, his eldest, was born in 1863.

All families lived cheek by jowl in the small houses. Manoug’s young cousin recalled the home:

The Adoians had one house. When you came in, to your right was Setrag with his family and to your left was Krikor [the family’s name for Abednago]. In the centre was a large room with two windows where they received guests. In this room was the tonir, a very big oven where they made bread and cooked. Behind the house was a storeroom where all kinds of fruit and vegetables were kept.⁴

Manoug grew up in a house by the lake with a dirt floor, unpainted walls, hardly any furniture. He wrote later, ‘The walls of the house were made of clay blocks, deprived of all detail, with a roof of rude timber.’⁵ The heart of the house was the hot red fire in the ground. Flames flickered out of the tonir, a clay pot sunk into the earth. Everything pivoted around the central fire and out of it the women pulled bread and food. Smoke went through a hole in the centre of the roof, and the ceiling was always black. Women sat around this fireplace cooking, or when it was empty and cold, covered it with a lid.

His father was busy with the huge, lumbering animals. Gorky’s earliest memories were of oxen and bullocks, horses and sheep. They were stabled right next to the house and as important to him as the human members of his family. All around the house, shoulder-high mud walls enclosed the animals. They were not so much built as moulded from packed mud and straw, with smoothly rounded tops and a rough, dusty surface. The whole village was earth-coloured. The only bright shades were fresh green trees and grass, abundant wild flowers, and the mysterious lake changing from blue to fuchsia and dark purple.

Shushan woke first each day, and while the family slept, she sat by her favourite rose bush, where nightingales perched. Her son used to hear her sing softly as she brushed her hair. Quickly she tied it in a scarf, before the men saw her, and left for the fields and orchards. While she worked, the older women and girls cared for her children. Shushan kept seven horses and was happiest riding. The family had many animals to tend: three hundred sheep of the large-tailed variety used for buttermilk and cheese, twenty goats, two horses for transport. There were four water buffaloes for labour, four oxen for ploughing, three cows for cow milk and dairy products which the people of Van considered inferior to products of sheep milk. Setrag had a khan (warehouse) in Constantinople for import and export. The family owned forests in Van and cut lumber which they transported with their own large sailboat to Adeldjevas in exchange for wheat.⁶

As the toddler grew up, he was drawn to the animals, the sound of baaing sheep and lowing oxen, their dusty odours, the smell of drying dung, as his father herded them around the yard. His mother fed and watered the sheep, and also milked them. Chickens pecked the ground. His father shouted ‘Ho-yez!’ at the oxen; his mother repeated their names for her boy. But though he reacted to her voice, he did not echo her words, and Shushan grew anxious.

Young Manoug was often woken by bellowing oxen. Then he heard waves beating on the lake shore, and hoarse, shouting men. His father Setrag and his uncle Krikor yelled and fought daily, and the small house shook with their rage.

Setrag’s two younger brothers had gone to America in 1896. They had laboured for long hours in dangerous conditions, living cooped up with other men in unsanitary boarding houses, but they did not get rich, and the youngest brother, Mishag, had died of tuberculosis. The thousand dollars in insurance money was the main cause of strife between the two remaining brothers.

Krikor bragged on his return, ‘America is a miracle come true. A dream! They have tall buildings like towers with clocks that chime every hour.’ The open-mouthed villagers noticed that he was still wearing the same worn-out suit.

In 1904 a severe famine struck Van. Grain was scarce owing to bad crops. What little remained was stockpiled by the corrupt Ottoman administrators. Prices were pushed up, while thousands died of starvation. The Armenians were on the whole careful farmers who cultivated their land, growing cereals, tobacco, vegetables and fruit, in contrast with their nomadic neighbours, the Kurds, whose wandering herds stripped the land. There were a number of settled Kurdish villages, but the Armenians were extremely poor and their farming methods were still primitive, relying on wooden ploughs and threshers. The people were described as undernourished, even in normal times, by the excellent anthropologist, Yervant Lalayan from Tiflis:

They harvest the wheat fields by hand, crawling on their hands and knees. Men and women are slow to walk and weak, a sign of bad nourishment. Their heads are bowed, they lack enthusiasm and are slow to talk. After centuries of living in the sight of greedy eyes, they appear like beggars in rags and without shoes. Famine is frequent. It is typical of Vanetzi men to emigrate for years all over the world and work, while their families stay in Van.⁷

Manoug grew up within a community of subject people. For three centuries, Armenians had endured the tyranny and corruption of the Ottoman Empire. Armenia had been divided, with the West falling under the Ottoman, and the East under the Persian Empire, until 1828 when Russia annexed Caucasian Armenia. With the final decay of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century the Christian Armenians became scapegoats for the Turkish pashas, always on the lookout to impose ever more crippling taxes in addition to customary exactions taken by Kurdish overlords. Manoug’s cousin, Azad, remembered the hardships:

The Turkish government had tax gatherers who came to the village, very evil people who took away one tenth of the best crops. Their demands were hard on the villagers, who wept on those days.⁸

Shushan escaped the noisy arguments in the cramped house by taking Manoug out to the fields. In the orchards of pears and apricots, she worked while his sisters played with him. She made toys for him out of bits of wood and cloth. He watched her take a cork and a few feathers, work them with her long fingers and suddenly, a bird was flying above his head on a string. Manoug loved to twirl the bird, thrilled with his mother. He told a friend years later in New York that her handiwork was as fine as the sculptures Picasso assembled out of found junk, and that it was his mother who first encouraged his love of art. He buried his face in her apron as she sang and told him tales: a shepherd played a trick and was imprisoned in a rock, spirits inhabited trees, giants fought and wrestled, then turned into mountains – ‘See Mount Sipan over there?’

Even in his second year, Manoug still made no effort to speak. The children started calling him lalo, Van dialect for mute. Shushan made pilgrimages to churches; she took him to the sacred rocks, springs and trees where people flocked for healing. She was a strong believer and he later evoked a strong memory of going with her to a mysterious part of their own garden. Thirty-five metres from their house, the only needle tree in the village, just two metres tall, twisted and turned dry branches for thirty metres along the ground. They called it Khatchdzar, the Tree of the Cross. Ado, his cousin, recalled, ‘If a snake or spider bit someone, they would tear off a bit of clothing and fasten it to the branch. The Khatchdzar had hundreds of strips of cloth on it. There were ten or so apple and pear trees in that garden and in autumn, when their leaves covered the earth, snakes would come and make their homes.’⁹

Every Wednesday and Friday people came to light candles on the huge rocks out of which the tree sprouted and wrap a strip of cloth around a branch with a prayer. Shushan lit candles and prayed fervently for her son to speak. His older sister Satenig remembered that men had once dug around the tree, and found ‘a huge Bible, ancient script on parchment, not Armenian, an older script. The writings were decorated with birds and flowers. The cover was gold and the edges of the pages were gilded.’ Her uncle Krikor stopped the digging in case the Turkish officials found out and caused trouble.¹⁰

For children the place was a magnet. Later, as an artist, Gorky was exercised by the potency of tree, rock and water. He appeared to be under the sway of the forms and spaces; he drew from nature as though it exerted a force over him. For him, landscape had the function to transform life. He came to write about the Tree of the Cross only after releasing locked-up memories in his late series of paintings entitled Garden in Sochi. Sacred trees still exist in Armenia and the Middle Eastern countries, by a church, shrine or spring. Rags of different colours flutter in the wind, fading into white, and the tatters of people’s wishes cling like dead flowers on bare branches. Those forms would surface in Gorky’s late drawings when he had plenty of reason to make wishes, but had lost the courage to form them.

As soon as Manoug could hold a pencil, he had started to draw. Akabi, his elder half-sister, remembered that he drew all the time. Shushan cajoled and bullied Manoug, but he refused to speak. In every other respect he seemed bright and lively and the women tried remedies: they pressed to his mouth the little finger of a child who spoke; they rubbed the key of St Nishan Church on his lips three times with prayers.¹¹ Then Shushan resorted to shock tactics. One day she walked with him to the top of a crag and showed him that unless he spoke to her, she would throw herself off the edge. As she hurtled to the cliff’s edge as if intending to jump off, the boy cried out:

‘Mayrig! Mother!’

It became his template for dealing with crisis in adult life.

All his relatives remembered her efforts. She did not give up, but asked the help of her nephew Kevork Kondakian, her sister-in-law, Dadig’s son. Kevork was a fourteen-year-old boarder at Aghtamar seminary who came home at weekends. He played with Manoug and tried to encourage him to speak a few words, without results. One day in the middle of a game, Manoug picked up a long stick and threatened his cousin. Kevork grappled to take the stick away, but the little boy was fast, and nimbly darted up a ladder to the roof of the house. Over-excited, he whacked Kevork, who yelled out in pain and pretended to be badly hurt. This stopped Manoug instantly. Kevork howled, as he realised the effect he was having. The little boy peered at Kevork and made incoherent sounds.

Kevork cried, ‘You hurt me, Manoug! I’m crying now. Al gou lam. Manoug. Al gou lam.’

Manoug’s face went scarlet, his eyes dilated and he repeated the words. ‘Al gou lam? Al gou lam?’, crying and running downstairs.

The women rushed to him. Kevork had a healthy fear of Shushan: ‘a very, very good woman, but when she got angry nobody would stand in her way. I was frightened she would be angry with me and I ran away.’

Gorky would use an echo of his first words as a title, Argula, in later years, just when he found his own voice as a mature artist.

Akabi, the eldest sister, however, maintained that he stayed mute even longer. According to her, he did not speak until one day he had gone to swim in the lake and no one could find him. There was great commotion and his mother and aunts feared that he had drowned. They were crying when he returned home. He ran to his mother and said, ‘Yes, hos em. Here I am. ’¹²

All the stories associated his first break into speech with anguish, words ripped out of him. Manoug suppressed his reaction to the violent and brutal outbursts at home, between his uncle and father, by a total shutdown. He could keep his equanimity until a moment of crisis, when the outburst could throw him into violent rage and loss of control. It was to remain a characteristic of Gorky. He held the attention of others with his silence, keeping them on tenterhooks. In his artistic life too, people became impatient, he tantalised them with his skill, testing himself, and delayed his flowering until they lost patience.

Satenig, Manoug’s sister, born in 1901, was his constant companion. She was finely wrought, with full dark eyes, but at the age of two or three she had caught smallpox and her family feared that she would die. They treated the toddler by burying her in hot mud up to her waist, believing that the heat would enter her bones and chase out the smallpox. She escaped from the sand bath, so they tied a heavy weight between her legs to keep her in place. The child survived, but pockmarked and bow-legged. She remained frail and melancholy, often taking to her bed later in her life. Only a year or two older than Manoug, she was closest to him during his infancy. She found it very difficult later to talk about her childhood, and sometimes broke down in conversation, but her recollections were vivid:

To fetch water we put the jugs on our heads and went to the spring. We went to the fields and we had a lot of gardens. The Turks used to come there to sit. It was a lovely place. Full of pear trees. It was on a high slope and looked down onto the lake of Van. We could see Vosdan from our door.¹³

Shushan’s birthplace was within their view. All the children later talked with longing of their beautiful village in its magnificent setting. Small children roamed freely from house to house in the village. Satenig’s recollections of her brother were mostly set outdoors.

We had an orchard which was just near the lake and I was only eight years old. Gorky and I used to go to the slope and slide down it to swim in the lake. He found a fish. A dead one. It often happened because we had a lot of fish. The lake had thrown it up and brought it onto the sand. He put it on the sand and started to draw the shape of the fish. Then he drew it again and then again and again. The same fish on the sand. He said, ‘I can also draw our pear tree.’ It was a pear tree, right there on the slope. It had three branches. He drew it exactly and the fish under it. He was about five years old.

In this anecdote his elder sister captured what Gorky achieved in his late and freest works when he dared to reach back to his childhood. He could draw a fish and a pear tree together without contradiction. As an artist he would work to perfect his draughtsmanship. Even aged five, he was not satisfied with the first fish he drew. He went on looking and drawing, again and again. The lake shore was their favourite playground where small children could also feel frightened. She recalled:

Gorky and I were little and we had gone down from our orchard right near Van Lake to swim. We took off our clothes and put them there on the sand. Out of the water a red snake came and hid in Gorky’s clothes. I remember this from my fright. We got out of the water. Gorky pulled his clothes and the snake jumped out and slipped into the water. We got home and told our mother.

‘Oh, did you see the snake’s head? Was there something shiny on its head?’

We said, yes. ‘That snake doesn’t bite people. You should have caught it. That was a diamond jewel on its head.’

Local lore was full of poetic images which Shushan passed on to her children. Nothing should be taken at face value, because it could be a disguise for the supernatural. She taught her children to identify nature and find magical meanings even in potential dangers.

In one of the key myths Manoug was taught, a great hero, Vahakn, is born out of an apricot-coloured sea surrounded by reeds, a full-grown boy with golden beard and two suns for his eyes.¹⁴ He is a protector of the people, a slayer of dragons and snakes, a mythical sun god and Dionysian divinity. A fragment of a poem from the ninth century bc locates the myth by Lake Van; and Manoug’s name was also associated with the myth. It means child, and was sometimes prefaced with Alek (‘good’) or eghek (‘reed’).¹⁵ He learned that his name and the lake had a place in the central creation myth. At sunset the lake flared up in a sheet of fire; apricot and blue strands of cloud criss-crossed the sky; the reeds stood out by the water’s edge, black and rigid.

2

Hayrig, Father

Manoug became his father’s silent shadow. The mute, observant child with hungry eyes followed the tall farmer, sat on his shoulders as he strode about, watched him as he dug, planted, harvested and harrowed. He loved to watch as Setrag fed and yoked oxen and buffalo to the heavy wooden plough. His father guided the animals, yelled out whinnying, yodelling calls, and often belted out a ploughing song as they churned through the rich soil. The little boy begged to stand on the flat part of the plough. His father picked him up with callused hands, covered in soil and dirt. Those were the times that Manoug felt closest to his hayrig, father, part of a world of labouring men. They bumped through clods and soil, eyes level with the huge hindquarters of the beasts. The boy smelled the earth as it turned over and the steaming odour of the animals.

Later in life, Gorky imitated his father. He moved into the country, dirtied his hands, grew vegetables, surrounded himself with cows, bulls and dogs, all of which he drew. He escaped the claustrophobia of the city to find the big sky and wide open spaces of his childhood. Khorkom’s lakeside fields, with mountains enclosing the horizon, would give Gorky’s paintings their distinctive layout. He drew enlarged close-ups of plants, insects and animals, haunches and udders, from the viewpoint of a small boy. The distant curving screen of folding mountain ranges shaped Gorky’s honeycombed space in late canvases. One painting that springs directly from this experience he called The Plough and the Song.

His father also took him on board the large sailing boats which transported goods. The Armenian sailors sat him on the poplar logs or sacks of wheat; they hoisted the vast lateen sails to coast along the shore, sailing to Van and Adeldjevas. On misty mornings the clouds appeared to fall on the lake, while the boats and mountains floated through them. Later, in America, Gorky’s favourite topics of conversation with his aged father were the farm, fields, animals and boats, as though, his sister Satenig recalled, they would return and find them unchanged. Gorky’s transparent washes, mists of fresh blue, pink, lilac, seem to rise from the lake of Van, the iridescent light on the mountains when the sun is low. A distant sail boat emerging through billowing mists can be seen in Charred Beloved. The mother-of-pearl sheen of the lakeside and skies informed the gossamer texture and light of his mature paintings.

Manoug’s late breakthrough into speech reassured his worried parents. But there is a discrepancy between the idyll of primitive rural life he is supposed to have enjoyed and the mutism which points to disturbance and deep emotional trauma. The outside world was also threatening. A new catastrophe would cause a severe setback for the child and his family.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Britain, which from the late 1820s had been the ally of Ottoman Turkey, was intent on propping up ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ as it was called. Disraeli prepared to pounce on India and dreaded the rival Russian Empire. The European powers had in 1878 committed themselves to guaranteeing the protection of the Armenians, by the Treaty of Berlin, but Britain rebuffed Russia, the Armenians’ neighbour and the only state interested in helping them, and denied them that right. Instead, the Armenian territories came under the special protection of Great Britain, which was in secret league with Turkey. The defenceless Armenians became the Sick Man’s whipping boys: robbery, pillage and rape of the Armenians had always been justified since they were infidel, giaour. British editor W. Llewellyn Williams reported:

First of all Armenians were despised if not actively hated as Christians; then they were treated as beings of an inferior order – maltreated, denied justice, robbed by lawless Kurds and equally dishonest tax-gatherers. They were ground between the upper millstone of religious bigotry and the nether millstone of official injustice and oppression. The State would not defend them. They were forbidden to defend themselves. To carry or even possess arms was punishable by death. To suffer injuries was the Armenian’s duty – in person, honour, goods; to resent them was to deserve and receive punishment. Life was cheap, and long-continued unchecked exercise of power made the Kurd or Turk insensible to the cruelty inflicted upon, and the suffering borne by, his helpless, unresisting victim.

Even at the beginning of the 19th Century, at Constantinople, a Mussulman could very well stop a Christian in the street, and calmly behead him, in order to test that his sword was in good condition. The rayahs (Christian minority) were obliged to carry a special handkerchief to wipe the shoes of a Mussulman in the streets at the least sign that he wished it done.¹

Armenians looked to European countries for protection, but in vain. Russia’s success in carving up the collapsed Ottoman Empire made the Turkish sultan even more vicious after he lost the Balkan states. Armenians formed revolutionary secret societies to defend their people’s security, demand basic justice and civil rights. The sultan later armed Kurdish tribesmen, the Hamidiye, in imitation of the Russian Cossacks, to terrorise the Armenians together with his secret police. Armenians looked to European countries for protection, but in vain. Even Russia ceased to be interested when the St Petersburg autocracy grew ultra-reactionary in 1896.

In Van, orphanages had to be founded to care for four hundred children left destitute by Sultan Hamid’s massacres in 1895 and 1896 to which European governments turned a blind eye. American, German and British church missions had been set up to bring relief. But in less than a decade another massacre was being unleashed on the Armenians by Sultan Hamid.

In 1908 a terrible massacre of the Armenians took place in the city of Van, just a short ride away from the Adoians’ village. Terror spread through villages. A close friend of the family, Dickran Der Garabedian (nicknamed Kertzo Dickran after his village, Kertz), was a young teacher at the Aghtamar Seminary and a member of a resistance group. He brought news of the grim events:

There was a critical situation in Van … the government had seized our secret arms depots, confiscating our rifles, bombs, ammunition, and books and papers. There were searches made in the villages, especially in the Hayotz Dzor district … searching for weapons and jailing the revolutionists and other suspects became common. The torturing, ransacking and destruction became unbearable. People tried hard to bear even rapings.²

In 1908 Manoug’s home was a safe house, sometimes used by the freedom fighters. The children were startled in the middle of the night by desperate-looking men talking in hoarse whispers. ‘They had faces like wolves,’ his elder sister said. ‘My mother used to give them food, and talked to them, then they slipped out as silently into the dark as they had come.’³

The Armenians in Van were in peril. According to the American missionary physician Clarence D. Ussher, the Turkish governor of Van, Ali Bey, ‘used every means in his power to incite the Armenians to revolt in order to have a pretext for massacring them’.⁴ Shushan worried for her daughter Sima – the unlucky older child of her first husband, now a tall, lovely fourteen-year-old, whom she had left in the American orphanage. Sima had witnessed the killing of her own father during the last massacre and had to relive the horrific events of Van among strangers and destitute children. An Anglican minister, the Reverend Noel Buxton, and his brother, Harold Buxton, a Member of Parliament, were travelling in the area and gave eyewitness reports of the horror that struck the city in April 1908:

The terrors began early in the morning. Some women fled panic-stricken down the street; shots were heard – this was the first warning. Then a crowd of fugitives gathered into the little courtyard, hoping for protection from the British Consulate near by. Our friends already made up their minds to go. They slipped out at the back, crossed a narrow passage and gained access to one of those gardens, surrounded by high mud walls which are attached to almost every house in this quarter of the town. So from one garden to another they hastened, expecting to be overtaken at any moment – while the awful butchery proceeded. They saw many cut down. A group of little boys fled down a lane in the same direction; in a few moments they might have reached safety, when round a corner Turkish soldiers appeared. The little boys were caught in a trap. In a minute or two, Turkish swords had done their work, and, bloodstained, were seeking further prey. Meanwhile the fugitives were providentially spared, and reached the American Mission. Here were gathered some scores of fugitives. The compound and building were a very harbour of refuge. Yet even under American protection life was not secure.⁵

He described Sima’s school in graphic detail:

During the night, the crowded schoolrooms and outhouses were raided, and some of the best-favoured both of boys and girls, never to be seen again by their relatives. The horrors of those days have never been told before. House after house in the Armenian quarter was ransacked, and every valuable removed and the building committed to flames. For those who were not butchered in the streets worse tortures were reserved. In some cases horseshoes were riveted on to men’s feet; wild cats were attached to the bare bodies of men and of women so that they might tear the flesh with their claws; many were soaked in oil and burnt alive in the streets.

With such memories in the minds of all, can we wonder that the position of the Armenians should be described as intolerable?

Panic spread to the surrounding villages. Then word reached Shushan in Khorkom that Sima had died. Manoug’s sister Satenig simply said that she died of a broken heart. Grief and guilt overwhelmed Shushan. ‘My mother never talked about her. She couldn’t bring herself to mention her.’ Satenig understood that she blamed herself and her husband’s family for the death of her child.

The ferocity of the attack left most Armenians in no doubt that a wholesale massacre was planned. But among the Adoian brothers there was constant disagreement. Krikor was more ambitious, and kept pressing Setrag to leave for America, where they could work together to send money back home. He argued that if they stayed they would surely be recruited into the Ottoman army. Setrag refused to leave the family behind with their elderly father, and only Shushan to look after the farm and business.

Once when Setrag and Krikor were shouting at each other as usual, little Manoug suddenly jumped up and yelled, ‘Para! Para! Inch para! Money! Money! What money?’

He grabbed his father’s hand and pulled him out of the house to a willow tree, where he asked him to cut off a branch and whittle it into a pipe – the only way he knew to distract his father. His cousin Kevork told the story to show how the outbursts upset the small boy.

Setrag continued to worry about the explosive political situation, but his fears were allayed later in 1908, with the new constitution (written by an Armenian) forced on Sultan Hamid by the ‘Young Turks’.⁶ It introduced civil and religious liberties for all Ottoman subjects and parliamentary representation for the different nationalities within the empire, freedom of speech and press, amnesty for thousands of political prisoners. New Armenian representatives sat in the Chamber of Deputies in Istanbul and, for the first time, Armenians were permitted to arm themselves for self-defence – a trap into which they fell easily, anxious to believe in the new dawn of the ‘Daybreak in Turkey’ movement.⁷

From Khorkom, the children watched fireworks and rejoicing on the nearby island of Aghtamar across the lake on 11 July 1908.⁸ The Young Turks had lowered the high cost of passports and removed other prohibitive taxes and restrictions to rid Turkey of Armenians. Optimistic for the future at last, Setrag planned to travel to America with Krikor, joining a stream of three thousand Armenians.⁹ Setrag was forty-four. Shushan had lived with him for eight years, and given him another daughter, Vartoosh, in 1906. She now lost her second husband as well, and was left to look after the children and the farm, unprotected.

Manoug never forgot the day his father left. Setrag took his own three children, Satenig, Manoug and Vartoosh, sat them on his horse and led them to his huge wheat field by the lake. ‘Just twenty feet away,’ Satenig recalled, ‘the lake beat against the field, and icy water gushed out from a spring.’ Shushan had packed a breakfast of boiled eggs and poghint, a local dish of whole wheat roasted with butter and mixed with honey. They sat on the grass by the spring, ate the food and drank the cold spring water.

Setrag kissed them one by one and said, ‘Can I be sure of seeing the three of you again?’

That picture of their father remained a fixed point of Gorky’s life, the only story he told about his father. All three repeated it like a refrain with variations. Satenig did not even notice that she repeated her story with a different ending:

‘Then we left and came home. When we came home our father was not there, so it must have been about the time he left.’

Manoug clung to a parting gift from his father, a pair of pointed red shoes, made in Van, sabok, Russian for ‘sabots’ made of wood, and sometimes called drekh. A soft leather sock, ankle-high, was worn inside the wooden clog. This footwear is common in photographs of both children and adults of the region. Gorky mentioned the shoes in conversation and later would bring their distinctive form into his Garden in Sochi paintings.

Akabi, his eldest sister, and Vartoosh, both said that Manoug was not speaking at the time. Apparently he relapsed into mutism after the shock of the 1908 massacre, followed quickly by parting from his father. He would never forgive Setrag for abandoning them. Throughout his adult life Gorky would not allow his immediate family to reveal that his father was still alive. Perhaps after the difficulties of his childhood he detached himself from this father who had proved a disappointing and unreliable figure. In Gorky’s drawings, a shadowy male figure is persistently depicted from the back, disappearing through doorways, walking out of drawings, even hanging by the neck, like the father who disappeared from his horizon.

For the rest of his childhood, Manoug came under his mother’s influence, the only boy among three sisters. Shushan became the head of the little family, showing her strength and some dominant qualities as well. The boy became particularly attached to his father’s horse, a chestnut with a white star on its forehead called Asdgh, ‘star’, and a long-haired dog he named Zango.

Manoug found solace and total absorption when his hands were busy. His prodigious talent showed itself early to his friends. He drew with such a passion that Akabi, his half-sister, retained an odd memory: ‘He used to draw in his sleep. You could see his hand moving.’

Even when the children went swimming in the lake, Manoug’s hands were never still. The clay deposit on the sand, used by villagers to make pots, became his play dough. Manoug patiently made little soldiers out of the clay, six or seven with sticks in their hands, lined up in the sun to dry. He called them the ‘Persians’. The half-dozen he made with a headdress he called the Armenians. Then he set them out in battle formation. Every child knew of the battles between the Armenians and Persians. Especially in this region, St Vartan, the commander, was a hero who had defended the Christian faith against the heathen in AD 451. His exploits were chronicled by Yegishe, also a local hero, who had written the history in Manoug’s family monastery, St Nishan.

Ado, his cousin, also recalled that ‘he sculpted incredibly delicate dogs and Van cats. We were amazed since none of us could make them.’ Manoug carved and whittled as soon as he was allowed to hold a knife. His friend Yenovk (Enoch) Der Hagopian recalled:

In Van we didn’t even have a knife to carve with. We were afraid of the Turks and Kurds, all Armenians were, especially the kids. They were fighting us. Our parents were fighting. Sometimes if we carried a knife with us they said, ‘Don’t carry the knife because if they take you, they think that you’ll make trouble.’ I don’t know who got hold of a knife. In spring we used to cut those willows, we used to cut branches and take the skin off, make a whistle. A flute. I don’t remember whether it was mine or his, but we only had one knife.¹⁰

Manoug soon became so skilful that he whittled flutes for the other children and he carved a special one for himself with a face on one side and an animal on the other.

Another boy, Paregham Hovnanyan, saw a darker side to Manoug: ‘a very deep boy and very good. When he did naughty things, he did them secretly. He didn’t show them to anyone. He beat the boys, he beat us.’

Shushan recognised herself in her son’s tempestuous character. He threw himself into play with unreserved passion. She watched this boy who kept nothing back and constantly got himself into scrapes, and feared that he would never be able to temper the extremes of his nature. She called him her Black One, but that was also the name by which the villagers called the Devil. Manoug, the ‘good boy’ with unpredictable moods, became the prototype for the man. Broody, handsome, intelligent, he retained the same ruggedness, the love of manual work and, as far as he could reproduce it, his father’s masculine image.

3

The Village School

1907

‘Lord, admit the boy

Let his flesh be yours

And his bones be left to us.’

The five-year-old Manoug had heard these words from his mother as she handed him over to the headmaster of the village school. Hand in hand, the small boy walked with his tall, slender mother, she dressed in headscarf and long skirt, down the dirt track, along the lake, to the neighbouring village of Koshk. He was lucky to be able to attend school, she told him, few families could afford the fees. ‘Look at the poorer children who labour in the fields and house.’ He must obey his teachers, work hard to read and write, so he could become a teacher. The primary school stood next to the church. The headmaster had absolute authority over his education, discipline and moral upbringing. Shushan believed, like other Armenians, that the only salvation from misgovernment by Ottoman rulers was education. Once Setrag had left for America, the children’s upbringing became her responsibility.

Manoug carried a little slate on which he copied letters and numbers with a nub of white limestone. Paper was precious and the slate was a prized possession. He discovered that he could draw on it. Often, in class, he became so engrossed that he hardly heard the teacher, but his talent made the teachers reluctant to punish him. One day the master, Mr Mihran, noticed Manoug hunched over his slate at the back of the class.

‘Bring your slate here,’ he ordered.

On the slate, with just a few lines, he had drawn two savage dogs snarling and biting while six children stared aghast. Manoug waited.

‘What miracle is this, my boy? Surely you will become a painter!’ exclaimed the teacher.

‘I … don’t know … what I’ll become …’ Manoug stammered, ‘but I love to draw.’¹

Writing and drawing on slate created a lifelong habit. As an artist, Gorky liked to draw on the same piece of paper or canvas, treating the surfaces more like a slate to be drawn on and rubbed out. He left lines only barely erased, the layers showing through. He used surfaces for depth, as though he might just scrub the top layer and start all over again. In particular, his black and white drawings in the series Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia, reproduced the glossy shine of slate.

The Adoians’ house was on the eastern side of the village nearer Koshk. Manoug walked the half-mile to school with his cousin Ado, past their orchard and the springs for drinking water. The clear air at these high altitudes was crisp and invigorating. They ran along a low, swampy area of bamboo and reeds bordering on the river Koshab below and the lake. Ahead, they saw the mountains, Ardos towering above the others, capped in ice. In winter, the ground was covered in snow, sometimes so deep it reached as high as the flat rooftops. The cold never bothered the children on the way to school in the snow, his cousin Azad maintained. ‘It was a good winter. The snow was firm and set and we walked around without shoes on it. It was good, very healthy.’²

The Khorkom school had been destroyed but villagers were collecting to build a new one. The rural primary school even boasted teachers with knowledge of English from the Van teacher-training colleges. Manoug showed little interest in the school subjects and itched to be set free. He sat on rush mats on the floor with the other children – no seats or desks – writing and drawing on his slate or with a pencil on any scrap of paper.

Ado often saw his exercise book, filled with pictures of horses, buffaloes, and his favourite, a stork standing on one leg in its nest. Manoug quizzed Ado, ‘Whose buffalo is this?’

‘Kosali Hagop’s.’

‘How do you know?’

‘By his straight and sharp horns.’³

The children did not have toys, and spent time contriving playthings for themselves, while the girls learned to weave, sew and embroider. A favourite pastime for Manoug was making butterflies and tortoises by cutting walnut leaves with scissors. He carefully preserved beautiful butterflies in the pages of his school primer. His cousin Ado commented that even as a little boy, ‘the great desire for drawing seemed to make him restless’ and that Manoug got into trouble with the teacher for drawing angels’ wings into the parchment Bible in Church.⁴

In an adult drawing of a very personal nature, usually dated 1928–32, Gorky has sketched a butterfly with wings outspread. On each wing is an oval with the profile of a man and a woman, his parents united. Next to it, upright on its short stalk, is one huge eye in the centre of a large leaf. The ink drawing combines the butterfly and leaf, those two natural objects which Ado mentioned. In other drawings and paintings, the eye of a butterfly wing, a dark spot spiralling inside an ellipse of bright colour, is a point of punctuation, whirling with energy.

The church and the school gave the community a strong sense of identity. The Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were defined not by their nationality or ethnicity but by their language, culture and especially by their Apostolic religion. They even used their churches to mark their spatial boundaries and terrain as though the spiritual defined the temporal. Almost seventy years after having left the village, Azad, his younger cousin, drew a map, using churches as landmarks, explaining:

Khorkom is in southeastern Vaspurakan on the shore of Lake Van. A small village of about a hundred houses. That village has neighbouring villages of Koshk and St Vartan. Towards Van people went to St Vartan Church, and on the other side was Koshk, where land and water were mixed together. Wild ducks roamed freely, people never shot or killed them but left them free. Khorkom village is found between the village of Koshk and the lake. From the shore at a distance of half a kilometre, there is a monastery called Vart Badrik on the shore of the lake. It is a historical place about which I don’t know a lot but it looks out at Aghtamar church. Aghtamar is in the middle of the lake. On the feast days, especially the Holy Cross, everyone went on sailboats to the island. There they had a feast and returned to the village.⁵

Each day, Manoug was woken up at dawn in the dark to accompany his aunt Dadig to the morning service in church. The boys dressed in cassocks and held candles for the priest. They learned the antiphonal chants and the ancient music, parts of the Divine Liturgy dating from the fourth century. The Armenians had converted to Christianity as the state religion in AD 301, becoming the first Christian nation. Manoug had to memorise the Book of Daniel, texts of dreams and visions which would impregnate his fantasy. The Khorkom church was crude, some of the walls built with mud bricks; Koshk and Ishkhanikom had finer architecture. The village church had a steeple, but bells were forbidden by the Ottoman government. From the roof of the priest’s house, he heard the gochnag, a slab of walnut struck with two mallets by the sexton, at dawn and sunset each day.

Khorkom, Gorky’s village. Map drawn from memory by Azad Adoian.

Manoug sang religious music and prayers every day. It was the finest music he heard as a child, along with folk music of the region. The deacon held a long-handled staff mounted with a silver disc surrounded by clusters of little silver bells, shshoog, shaking it to frighten away the devil. The boy saw the altar, separated from the body of the church and raised like a stage with a curtain before it. He would map out that space in his mind and draw on it later in abstract works. In grander churches, the vestments and crown of the priests were changed as he passed behind the altar for mysteries and secret prayers, a dramatic moment for a child watching him disappear from view.

The village priest possessed an orchard of apples, so fragrant that they tempted the children. They pinched the apples and ran off to the ruins of Vart Badurik to eat them. They used to stand around the stone altar and intone like the priest. Manoug made darts out of bamboo which he pushed into the uneaten apples, then threw them out into the lake to feed the fish, ‘to make the catch better in the morning’.⁶

Later, in America, Gorky’s friends heard him chant in a magnificent voice, as though conducting a service. Sometimes he gave a comic version, imitating their uneducated village priest, gobbling words in his hurry to be off.

In Khorkom, political discussion thrived at a clandestine library set up in 1908. Only half an hour’s ride from Van with its schools, churches and printing press, and a short boat ride away from Aghtamar, the chief theological centre, Khorkom was downwind of powerful changes which had swept Van in the nineteenth century. The village had a progressive and liberal atmosphere, compared to other villages in eastern Anatolia. Armenian was freely spoken and taught in school, whereas in other provinces it was forbidden.⁷

Manoug grew up in a society in which Armenians were second-class citizens. They were discriminated against, paid extra taxes, were part of a non-Muslim minority. Manoug nevertheless received conflicting messages from the adults about his ethnic identity. Armenians were weak, defenceless, subservient, victims of Kurdish robbery and murder; on the other hand young men were to put their patriotism first, be armed, and fight for their equality and freedom.

Manoug and his friends became aware of the reading and discussion in their library with books and papers from Van, Tiflis (later Tblisi), Baku and America. One friend, Hovnanyan, remembered:

During the winter days in our house or in Malka’s house, the teacher used to read aloud in his free time. People listened to the writings of Toumanian, Aghayan, Raffi, Issahakian and other writers, books and stories. During those gatherings the village shepherd Nohrabed Alexander told wonderful stories from the forty Klhkani Teveri and at the end, he sang and chanted with his beautiful voice those marvellous songs.⁸

Later in New York, Gorky was known as a magical storyteller. He liked sitting together with friends, talked and sang, striking an odd note in the New World. As a child in Khorkom, when deep snow covered the ground, he sat in the evening with several families around the tonir filled with hot embers, and a frame spread with a cloth over it. The children tucked in their feet, while on the cloth dried fruits, thin sheets of apricot and sun-dried apple paste, long strings of dried grape paste, nuts and oghi (aqua vitae) were passed around. Akabi, Manoug’s sister, was often asked for a song; modestly she refused a few times until her mother nodded, then she would sing in a bright voice, her cheeks getting redder. Minstrels, like his friend Yenovk’s father, who had travelled all over Armenia learning songs, played the saz (a string instrument) and sang ballads.

Storytellers, their own shepherd of Khorkom in particular, had memorised vast epics in verse, and Manoug enjoyed the exciting stories of monsters and princesses, kings and djinn, in the local dialect with its guttural earthquake rumbles. This was the background for his instinctive attraction to Surrealism in New York, and his natural affinity for drawing and painting his fantasy.

4

Pilgrim

Manoug’s days were shaped by the changes of season in the farming community, marked by religious feasts. In September he sensed his mother’s excitement as she prepared the annual pilgrimage to her father’s monastery of Chagar Sourp Nishan. She packed his best clothes and plenty of food, and picked a sheep for the sacrifice. Most of the harvest was complete. The wheat and grapes had been stored, the pears and apples stacked in layers of clean dry sand in bins for the winter, the walnuts sold in the market of Van. A few red and bronze pomegranates still hung on the trees.

The Adoians joined a long procession of people who rode or climbed the flanks of Mount Ardos towards Vosdan, driving sheep and calves. His mother still liked to call him ‘Vosdanig’, after her birthplace, but little was left of it, except a glorious history.¹ After the 1895 massacres, when two thousand Armenians had been killed or dispersed and the monastery pillaged, all that remained of the town was ‘the group of buildings which feature the hillside, the remains of the ancient town … the relics of an old castle, the ruins of a church’ and the Der Marderossians’ home: ‘A small church still remains, a memorial of better times, which is said to have existed for many centuries. We could see its plain four walls and small conical dome to the east … still attended by a priest.’²

Two miles from Vosdan the tree line ended and the solid stone walls of a small monastery had rooted on earlier, chunkier masonry. The small conical dome of stone and the top of the square church could be glimpsed. To one side spread the mountainside and behind fanned out orchards and walnut trees. Inside the courtyard were two dozen rooms where Shushan’s family would sleep. Satenig recalled:

We used to stay for three or four nights. They gave us a room in the tower. My mother had been born there. Our family had descended from 37 priests. There were more than eight very beautiful khatchkars, finely carved. These were very happy times. They did sacrifice, danced and feasted.

Shushan’s family, the Der Marderossians, are listed in the annals of the religious centre of Etchmiadzin as priests, keepers of the monastery, going back thirty-six generations.³ The claim that the family descended from royal blood was made, and Shushan was styled Lady, although such a title does not exist in Armenian.⁴