“Three Apples Fell from the Sky” by Narine Abgaryan: An Armenian village where the dead never entirely leave7 min read
“One Friday, Anatolia Sevoyants put her affairs in order and lay down to breathe her last.”
Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell from the Sky, 2020 (С неба упали три яблока, 2015) is a novel about a village that appears to be dying, and about the stubborn human capacity to begin again when beginning again seems absurd. It leads readers into a remote Armenian community shaped by family memory, superstition and neighbourly obligation, yet refuses to reduce its inhabitants to their suffering. Eccentric and quietly profound, the book suggests that survival is not merely the continuation of life, but the preservation of stories, recipes, and names.
A village between disappearance and renewal
Three Apples Fell from the Sky takes place in Maran, a fictional Armenian mountain village whose surviving inhabitants are growing old together. The outside world can barely reach it. Its road is a disaster, its telegraph wire ancient, and many of its houses have been abandoned. War, famine, natural disaster, disease and migration have gradually emptied the village, leaving behind a small community of people who know one another’s histories almost as intimately as their own.
The novel begins with fifty-eight-year-old Anatolia Sevoyants preparing to die. Convinced that a sudden haemorrhage signals the end of her life, she cleans her home, puts her affairs in order and lies down to await death with a mixture of composure and irritation. Death, however, does not arrive as expected. Instead, Anatolia’s apparent ending becomes the beginning of an unexpected transformation.
Around her, Abgaryan assembles a large cast of villagers: widows, farmers, teachers, craftsmen, survivors and quarrelling neighbours. Each person carries a private archive of loss. Families have been broken by violence or deprivation. Children have died, disappeared or left. Entire households have been reduced to one remaining inhabitant. Yet Maran is not presented as a cemetery. Its residents continue to harvest fruit, preserve food, repair roofs, tend animals, exchange gossip.
The book does not proceed through a tightly linear plot. Instead, it moves backwards and forwards through the histories of its characters, gradually revealing how the village became what it is. A present-day gesture may open onto a memory from decades earlier; a household object can contain the history of a marriage; a recipe can summon the presence of someone long dead. In Maran, the past is not behind the characters. It remains active within their homes, habits and relationships.
The title comes from a traditional Armenian ending to fairy tales, in which three apples fall from the sky: one for the storyteller, one for the listener and one for the person who believes in the tale. In Abgaryan’s novel, the phrase also suggests that storytelling is a form of preservation. The inhabitants of Maran cannot escape death or loss, but by recounting their lives, the novel ensures that they are not forgotten.
A Russian-language novel with an Armenian soul
The novel won the Yasnaya Polyana literary award and became a major success in Russian before reaching a wider international readership through Lisa C. Hayden’s English translation. The Armenian reception of Three Apples Fell from the Sky is inseparable from a productive contradiction: Abgaryan writes in Russian, but the emotional and cultural world of the novel is unmistakably Armenian.
Born in Berd, in Armenia’s Tavush region, Abgaryan draws on landscapes, customs, family structures and forms of speech that Armenian readers can readily recognise. The novel appeared in Armenian translation in 2017, translated by Naira Khachatryan, and has attracted scholarly attention for the way it combines Armenian cultural memory, folklore and national identity within a Russian-language literary form.
Abgaryan belongs to a long and complicated tradition of Armenian cultural production taking place across languages and borders. Armenian literature has never been confined to the territory of the Republic of Armenia or to a single linguistic space. Writers shaped by displacement, imperial histories and diaspora have written in Western Armenian, Eastern Armenian, Russian, French, English and other languages. Abgaryan’s work raises familiar questions about what makes a book Armenian: the author’s birthplace, the language of composition, the setting, the cultural memory it carries, or the community that recognises itself within it.
The Armenianness of the novel lies less in declarations of identity than in the texture of ordinary life. It is found in the attention paid to food, hospitality, burial, kinship and reputation.
The book’s Armenia is not the Armenia of monumental architecture, geopolitical debate or idealised national imagery. Nor is it the sophisticated urban Armenia of contemporary Yerevan. It is peripheral, ageing and geographically vulnerable. That perspective can feel particularly intimate to Armenian readers familiar with villages that have lost much of their population through economic migration, war and the concentration of opportunity in the capital or abroad.
Understanding rural Armenia
Foreign readers should not approach Maran as a sociological model of every Armenian village. It is fictional, heightened by folklore and shaped by Abgaryan’s distinctive imagination. Nevertheless, the novel communicates truths about rural Armenian life that conventional travel writing or political analysis often misses.
The first is the centrality of interdependence. Privacy in Maran is limited. Neighbours know who is ill, who has food stored for winter, whose roof is damaged and whose family once committed an unforgivable offence. This closeness can be oppressive, but it is also a survival system. In a place where state institutions and modern infrastructure feel distant, the community itself becomes the principal provider of welfare, information and emergency assistance.
Help is rarely presented as an abstract virtue. It is practical. Someone brings food, finds medicine, tends an animal, prepares a body for burial or walks through dangerous weather to check on a neighbour. Care may arrive accompanied by criticism, interrogation or complaint, but it arrives.
Foreign readers also encounter a perception of time markedly different from the accelerated rhythm of modern cities. In Maran, time is seasonal, agricultural and ancestral. People organise life around weather, harvests, illness, religious observance and memory. The dead remain present because their belongings, sayings and consequences remain present. A conflict begun in one generation can shape relationships in the next.
This helps explain the novel’s mixture of Christianity, folklore, dreams, omens and magical realism. The supernatural is not introduced as a dramatic rupture with reality. It belongs to the villagers’ moral and imaginative universe. Signs matter. Dreams may carry warnings. Animals perceive what humans do not. The boundary between the living and the dead is porous.
The novel also illuminates a particular Armenian relationship with catastrophe. Its characters have experienced enough misfortune to expect further disaster, but their fatalism does not amount to passivity. They prepare for the worst and continue working. Grief is absorbed into routine because routine is what makes grief bearable.
What readers may recognise as the Armenian “soul” in the novel is therefore not one stable national characteristic. It is a set of tensions: pride and vulnerability, melancholy and humour, harsh judgement and limitless generosity, attachment to the homeland and knowledge that departure may be necessary. Abgaryan’s Armenians complain about their circumstances while remaining profoundly attached to the place that produced them.
Abgaryan also captures the moral importance of remembrance. To forget someone is almost a second death. The novel’s long family histories may initially challenge readers, but their accumulation is deliberate. The author asks us to recognise that every apparently ordinary elderly villager contains an epic history invisible to strangers.
Why this novel stays with you
Three Apples Fell from the Sky deserves to be read far beyond audiences already interested in Armenia. It speaks to a universal contemporary fear: that small communities and local traditions are being lost faster than they can be remembered.
The book begins with a woman expecting death and ends by restoring the possibility of a future. That movement gives the novel its quiet power. Abgaryan does not promise that suffering will be compensated or that every village can be saved. She offers something more modest and perhaps more believable: while people continue to feed one another, remember one another and tell one another’s stories, disappearance is never quite complete.
The three apples ultimately belong not only to the storyteller and the listener, but to anyone still willing to believe that goodness can be handed down.
