Ever since the mid-90s, a group of writers in Armenian kept writing "drawer" literature that they knew could never be published. What was "drawer" about it?

The concept of "drawer" literature first emerged during perestroika, referring to works that authors hid in drawers, knowing full well that they could never pass the Soviet censorship and find a publisher. In Armenia, like elsewhere in the Soviet Union, these were mostly works that spoke of Stalin's repressions, those dealing with narrowly national themes, as well as the Armenian Diasporan literature that defied the Soviet ideological and aesthetic dictums.

Ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the "drawers" retained their status as the hidden places of free expression. A long time has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of state-mandated censorship. Nevertheless, the censorship survived in the people's spirit and in those who continued to govern the literary world: the institutions that remain from Soviet times (the Academia, the Literature Departments, the publishers and the Stalin-styled creative unions, epitomized by the Armenian Writers' Union). While these replaced the Soviet ideology with a national agenda, and loosened the restrictions to some degree, they continued to monopolize literature by default. Added to this was the fact that the only audience for any literary publication consisted solely of the authors and their colleagues, and literature never had a chance to escape from the narrow literary circles. A poem of mine, published in the Grakan tert (Literary periodical), the publication of the Writers' Union, created such an uproar among a number of writers and literary critics that they appealed to our country's president demanding censure. The state proved to be more tolerant, and I realized that the primary obstacle facing Armenian literature was not the state government so much as the country's literary and intellectual elite. This incident made it irrevocably clear to me that, in order to create a free literary environment, it was essential to establish a literary journal outside that very environment, thus safeguarding it against both supervision and bias.

The "drawers" burst open. In 2001, a fellow writer and I created the literary venue Bnagir (Original/Manuscript); five years later, in 2006, when Bnagir ceased to exist, another venue, part of my literary publication, Inknagir (Autograph), came to take its place. Both generated quite a few scandals: two of only five literary bookstores in Yerevan refused to carry the 4th issue of Bnagir, and the 2nd issue of Inknagir was rejected everywhere, excepting two café-adjacent newsstands. We opened up many old drawers, and it turned out that the forbidden texts of Armenian literature were more than stories of Stalin's repressions, as exemplified in the previously unpublished pornographic poems of the Armenian classical and widely anthologized poet Yeghishe Charents, executed in 1937, that appeared in our journal. The world-wide web allowed both journals to spread around the world, bringing uproar and acclaim. Unfortunately, it also brought about threats against the publications as well as towards individual authors, like the poet, who, under the pseudonym of G. Grigor had composed and published explicit homoerotic poetry.

The official literary circles, realizing that, despite their efforts, they were losing their stronghold on literature, orchestrated an organized offensive from their lecterns. A representative example was a comment about Bnagir made at the conference of the Armenian Writers' Union by Zhenia Kalantaryan, a literature professor at Yerevan State University: "The high priests of free art did not ascend the Parnassus but instead descended into the street, demolishing all the moral, ideological, and spiritual standards in their wake. Preaching their message of verbal freedom, they dragged into literature the stratum of language that has no place in the dictionaries and cannot be uttered aloud, one that, like the 3rd issue of Bnagir, literally exudes the stench of decay (Grakan tert, 11/22/02). The "stench of decay" emanated from Vahan Ishkhanyan's short story "Brotherhood."

However, our goal was not the mere introduction of the so-called non-normative, inappropriate vocabulary and the sometimes sexually explicit materials into our texts; in fact, examples of these are few. By allowing people to publish under invented names, Inknagir provides publishing opportunities for those living in the outer regions of Armenia, who would have never dared to seek free self-expression, hampered by the difficulty of finding their own personal and authorial voice in the national arena. Inknagir also encourages experimentation. In order to add fresh voices to the literary environment, we have made it our goal to publish those works of Diasporan Armenian writers who did not satisfy the institutional censors. In doing this, we have exposed our readers to the plurality of Armenian thought in a country tightly governed by post-Soviet nationalist tenets. Merging works of Armenians representing different cultural entities into a single literary space has forged a unique contemporary context that has new grounds for collaboration for different groups of Armenians. It is a creative atmosphere in which the mere fact of being Armenian does not serve as the sole unifying factor.

This anthology presents a picture of the last eight years of our work. All of the authors represented here have collaborated with Inknagir and Bnagir; Lusine Vayachyan has published her first works at Inknagir.

I know that there were other texts that deserved to be among the chosen. But many of these were no longer than fourteen pages, whereas we focused on anthologizing longer works in order to give our readers a deeper understanding not only of Inknagir but also of the individual authors represented in the collection.

Most of the works included in the anthology have appeared in Inknagir (Lusine Vayachyan's, Krikor Beledian's, and Gagik Kilikyan's texts, two of Vahan Ishkhanyan's short stories -"Hairless" and "Black Hair," my two poems - "Harem Rose" and "Unfinished Ode: Upon the Clitoros"; Marc Nichanian's essay is appearing here for the first time and will also be included in one of Inknagir's upcoming issues. Some of the texts come from Bnagir (Vahan Ishkhanyan's other stories; the expanded excerpt from Arman Grigoryan's novel, a shorter part of which first appeared in Bnagir; Garun Aghadjanyan's short story "Environmental Strokes;" Karen Gharslyan's poems "The Poet's Cardiogram," "Fragments," and "Love at Every Sight;" a number of Marine Petrosyan's poems; and my "African Kiss"). As for the rest of the selected materials, we have, in some cases, turned to individual books and unpublished manuscripts in order to create a fuller picture of an author's work.