It happened so that I had gathered some newspapers, magazines and journals, as well as several books subscribed and preserved by Armenian political prisoners in Mordovia after 1965.

I undertook an activity strictly indecent of the colony: creation of the Armenian library. In this job I was helped by Andranik Margaryan. Throughout a few months, including Sundays, we plunged into the literature at hand, selected the most valuable ones. We may say, we handled a serious bibliographic job. Our “camp library”, classified according to fields, was established, with one of the materials of which I had some “personal intimacy” and which, may be not objectively, was considered to be the most valuable library element. It was the last “Grakan Tert” edited by Hamo Sahyan, in which on the 70^th anniversary of Charents, on January 13 1967, a fragment was published from an atypical poem “in memory of N.S.”  from the Charents relics, saved by painter Regina Ghazaryan.

However, the “prison library” like prisoners had to undergo all kinds of collisions and enforcements. We were again unexpectedly taken to another place. Leaving Ural for Mordovia we took with us a part of our library. And when 5 months later I was again taken to Perm from Mordovia, I could bring back only a few things I had taken with me.  My library together with me was swaying and getting worn out.

Two years later, after the stormy events I was taken to hospital, later to Yerevan prison, then again to Ural-  Perm. While departing, I didn't manage to take my things with me, and my library was left in Mordovia.

At the time from a Mordovian camp Paruyr Hayrikyan had been transferred to mine, and everything I had left there was handed to him. But some time later Paruyr had been as well transferred from there, this time to Perm. It was then I got this letter from him: “I took some part of your archives with me, but I had to leave the rest. If there was something valuable there, forgive me. I looked through all of them, but it was beyond my strength to take them all, so I took only the ones which seemed specially valuable to me, I even had to leave some part of my books”.

I received my specially valuable things in my place of exile. Paruyr had no idea about my “Charents struggles”, but I was glad to see that among the ones he had chosen was “N.S.”-  the “N.S.” that had saved me from falling down, that had wandered with me from a place of confinement to another one, from a place of exile to another one.

After serving my prison term, I- “a specially dangerous state criminal” together with Charents or let him forgive me, together with my “N.S.”, returned to Armenia. At my earliest convenience I had the poem printed in “Ankakhutyun” paper. And in 2008 in Charents House-Museum during an event devoted to Eiffel Tower of our literature I told this story and in front of astounded, deeply touched and admired Anahit Charents, presented the paper to the house-museum.

My “N.S.”, having roamed about with me and like me in foreign lands, found its eventual shelter.

I should mention happily that this poem of Charents, wholly- under the title “As gray yellow leaves” was printed in the book of his works “Norahayt Ejer ” due to diligence of a literary critic Davit Gasparyan.

Razmik Markosyan