YEREVAN, JUNE 7, NOYAN TAPAN. A memorial evening dedicated to great Armenian writer Hrant Matevosian's 70th anniversary was held at Moscow Central House of Writers within the framework of Year of Armenia in Russia. As Noyan Tapan correspondent was informed by David Matevosian, Director of the Hrant Matevosian Foundation, the jubilee event was initiated by the Armenian Embassy in Russia, Russian Federal Agency of Culture Development, International Association of Russian Writers' Unions, as well as RF and RA Culture Ministries. Russian and Armenian intellectuals were also present at the event. Mikhail Sinelnikov, Felix Kuznetsov, Sergei Shevelyov, Rustam Ibrahimbekov, Felix Meloyan and Roman Balayan were among them. They emphasized that H.Matevosian's creation "unanimously obliges to treat it as a high world peak and not to think that this literature is comparable with the samples of the world culture." According to them, the generation of the 60-s has left a huge trace in the world cultural heritage. This is the "generation of war" born in 1920-40 - Hrant Matevosian, Sergei Parajanov, Vasili Shukshin, Andrei Tarkovski and others. "20-year-old young people do not know who is Hrant Matevosian, but the public and lack of the state policy is more to blame for this," the intellectuals said considering important translation and publication of Armenian and Russian writers' works. "A Russian child should know Hrant Matevosian, Hamo Sahian and an Armenian child Andrei Bitov, Vasili Shukshin," the intellectuals consider. According to them, we should bring up our generations with this culture for the sake of the future of our homeland. "... Maybe today's youngest generation, may God give them a long life, will see the day when Hrant will be properly appreciated. What he has done for the Armenian language can be compared only with what Pushkin has done for the Russian language...," Russian writer Andrei Bitov had once said in one of his speeches. According to the Hrant Matevosian Foundation Director, it is necessary that Hrant Matevosian's unpublished works be translated, published and the works abridged in the years of the Soviet censorship be republished. It is also time to include the writer's works in the school textbooks: according to David Matevosian, we cannot bring up the generation only with H.Matevosian's story "Green Field" included in the textbooks of middle classes.

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