Beyond the headlines: Narine Abgaryan’s “To Go On Living” and the human afterlife of war6 min read
Narine Abgaryan’s To Go On Living, 2025 (Дальше жить, 2018) does what years of news alerts, casualty figures and geopolitical analysis often fail to do: it restores individual lives to a conflict that many foreign readers have learned to process only as distant information.
Through thirty-one interconnected stories set in an Armenian border community after the war of the early 1990s, Abgaryan shows that war does not end when the shooting stops, but continues in damaged bodies, emptied houses and the habits of those who survive. This is not a book about military strategy or competing territorial claims, but about the difficult work required to remain human after violence has entered every household.
Thirty-one stories of survival
The thirty-one linked stories in the book unfold in and around Berd, the Armenian town near the Azerbaijani border where Abgaryan was born and grew up. The characters are fictional, but the book draws directly on the author’s experience of coming of age during the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s.
The stories form neither a conventional novel nor a chronological account of war. Characters appear, disappear and return in one another’s memories. A person encountered briefly in one story may become the emotional centre of another. Families overlap, neighbours observe one another, and private tragedies gradually become part of the collective history of the community.
Abgaryan does not reconstruct battles or explain troop movements. War arrives indirectly: through the sound of shelling, an amputated limb, a soldier who does not return, a child who no longer speaks, or a family waiting for news. Much of the book takes place after the most immediate danger has passed, when the survivors must confront the far less visible question contained in its title: what are they supposed to do now?
They cook. They tend gardens and animals. They bury their dead. They argue over inheritances, fall in love, raise children, harbour resentments and attempt to repair houses as well as relationships. Some perform acts of astonishing generosity while others become cruel.
The stories are connected by a recurring attention to ordinary objects and gestures. Bread is kneaded, preserves are prepared, animals are fed and medicinal herbs are gathered. These domestic details establish what existed before the violence, what the violence threatened, and what survivors attempt to reconstruct afterwards.
The war that remains
Like Three Apples Fell from the Sky, To Go On Living was written in Russian but is rooted unmistakably in Armenian experience. Its cultural landscape is formed by Armenian family relationships, food, humour, religious practices, local speech and the close social networks of a small border community. Yet this book is more directly autobiographical in its historical foundations than Abgaryan’s fictional village of Maran.
The collection is closely associated with Berd in Armenia’s Tavush region, where the author experienced the instability and violence of the early 1990s. Abgaryan has described the material as arising from memories and stories connected to her own community. This personal proximity matters because the collection does not feel like a writer selecting war as a dramatic subject. It feels like an attempt to describe what remained within families and communities long after international attention moved elsewhere.
The title is deliberately modest. It does not promise victory, reconciliation or complete recovery. To “go on living” is not necessarily to overcome the past. It may mean waking up, preparing food, working, caring for someone else and making it through another day while still being haunted by memories.
That understanding has particular resonance in Armenia, where the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh has affected several generations. The book centres on the war of the early 1990s rather than the 2020 war or the Azerbaijani military offensive of September 2023 that led to the departure of almost the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh. Yet later events inevitably change how the collection is read. Stories about communities living beside an unsettled border no longer belong only to the past.
Still, the book should not be mistaken for a political history of Nagorno-Karabakh. Nor does it attempt to adjudicate historical or legal claims. Its perspective is specifically Armenian and intensely local. Abgaryan does not turn her characters into national symbols. The dead are shown as real people, not only as martyrs, and the survivors remain ordinary individuals with difficult relationships, regrets and unfinished lives. This makes the human cost of war feel personal rather than abstract or patriotic.
Understanding Nagorno-Karabakh beyond the news cycle
For many foreign readers, Nagorno-Karabakh has appeared mainly as a recurring sequence of headlines: clashes, ceasefires, negotiations, blockades, territorial gains, casualty estimates and displaced populations. The names of towns and regions become markers on a map. Human beings appear briefly as numbers, photographs or quotations before the news cycle moves on. To Go On Living interrupts that repetitive process. Abgaryan does not ask readers to comprehend an entire conflict at once. She asks them to remain for several pages with one person.
A casualty is no longer one of several thousand. He is the individual whose chair remains in a particular kitchen, whose mother continues to prepare food in the quantities she once prepared for him, or whose absence changes the future of a woman who expected to marry him. A displaced family is not simply part of a population movement. It is a family forced to leave animals behind, opening cages and barns so that the creatures will not starve after the humans have fled. These details do not make the war more or less important than other wars. They make it possible to perceive, once again, what the word “war” really contains.
The collection also demonstrates why a ceasefire is not the same as peace. News reporting naturally concentrates on identifiable events: an offensive begins, an agreement is signed, a road is reopened or a territory changes control. For civilians, however, conflict has no equally precise endpoint. A person continues living with a disability. A family continues waiting for the missing. A community becomes accustomed to measuring distance according to the range of weapons.
Abgaryan is particularly effective at showing how conflicts remain alive in collective memory. Every new outbreak of violence activates earlier bereavements. Families do not encounter each war as an isolated event. They experience it through stories inherited from parents and grandparents, through previous displacements, and through names already inscribed on graves.
This is why the later Nagorno-Karabakh wars cannot be understood solely through daily reporting. Headlines record what happened. Abgaryan shows where what happened continues to live and how everything is connected.
Why this book speaks far beyond Armenia
To Go On Living should be read because it restores moral attention. It obliges readers to slow down at precisely the point where contemporary media habits encourage us to accelerate. A notification can be dismissed in seconds but Abgaryan makes her characters difficult to forget by showing us their homes, humour, fears and losses.
The collection also challenges the language of resilience. In international reporting and humanitarian discourse, communities affected by conflict are frequently described as “resilient”. The term can be admiring, but it can also conceal the cost of survival. Abgaryan shows that continuing to live is not just some effortless evidence of strength. It is work that outsiders never see.
News reporting is indispensable: without it, wars can unfold without scrutiny. But reporting alone is not enough. Narine Abgaryan supplies what the headline cannot – the long silence after the explosion, the uneaten food on the table, the neighbour who arrives without being asked, and the survivor who discovers that remaining alive is only the beginning.
