The Armenian Communities Department collaborated with the publishing house Dom Quixote, to publish, Bem hajam! Apontamentos de Viagem à Arménia, a Portuguese edition of Vasily Grossman’s book: An Armenian Sketchbook.

After the Soviet government confiscated, or, as Grossman likes to put it, “arrested” Life and Fate, he took on the task of revising a literal Russian translation of a long Armenian novel. The novel was of little interest to him, but he needed money and was evidently glad to have an excuse to travel to Armenia. An Armenian Sketchbook is his account of the two months he spent there.  Written in 1962, two years before his death, this book is very different from all the others he wrote. It is by far, the most personal and intimate, endowed with an air of absolute spontaneity, as though he is simply chatting to the reader about his impressions of Armenia—its mountains, its ancient churches, its people—while also examining his own thoughts and moods.

«Vasily Grossman’s book is a very perceptive description of Soviet Armenia during a crucial period of cultural and political transformation. The dynamics Grossman witnessed and recorded in this small «sketchbook» were, in many ways, the opening acts of the popular nationalist movement of the late 1980s in Armenia. This, in line with parallel movements in other USSR republics – from the Baltics to the South Caucasus – quickly became separatist movements leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991…. What makes this book particularly interesting is Grossman’s first-hand account of one national element of a broader process that was slowly but systematically undermining the Soviet Union. He was describing something that Soviet experts in the West could only begin to understand decades later. » From Razmik Panossian’s preface to the Portuguese edition.