Bulgarian Literature as World Literature 9781501348105, 9781501348136, 9781501348129

Citation preview

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Literatures as World Literature Can the literature of a specific country, author, or genre be used to approach the elusive concept of “world literature”? Literatures as World Literature takes a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations—according to language, nation, form, or theme—of literary texts and authors in their own world-literary dimensions. World literature is obviously so vast that any view of it cannot help but be partial; the question then becomes how to reduce the complex task of understanding and describing world literature. Most treatments of world literature so far either have been theoretical and thus abstract, or else have made broad use of exemplary texts from a variety of languages and epochs. The majority of critical work, the filling in of what has been traced, lies ahead of us. Literatures as World Literature fills in the devilish details by allowing scholars to move outward from their own areas of specialization, fostering scholarly writing that approaches more closely the polyphonic, multiperspectival nature of world literature. Series Editor Thomas O. Beebee Editorial Board Eduardo Coutinho, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Hsinya Huang, National Sun-yat Sen University, Taiwan Meg Samuelson, University of Cape Town, South Africa Ken Seigneurie, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University, Denmark

Volumes in the Series German Literature as World Literature, edited by Thomas O. Beebee Roberto Bolaño as World Literature, edited by Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro Crime Fiction as World Literature, edited by David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, and Louise Nilsson Danish Literature as World Literature, edited by Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature, by Delia Ungureanu American Literature as World Literature, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo Romanian Literature as World Literature, edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian Brazilian Literature as World Literature, edited by Eduardo F. Coutinho Dutch and Flemish Literature as World Literature, edited by Theo D’haen Afropolitan Literature as World Literature, edited by James Hodapp Francophone Literature as World Literature, edited by Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, and Bertrand Westphal Samuel Beckett as World Literature, edited by Thirthankar Chakraborty and Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez Bulgarian Literature as World Literature, edited by Mihaela P. Harper and Dimitar Kambourov

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature Edited by Mihaela P. Harper and Dimitar Kambourov

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020

This paperback edition published 2022 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © Mihaela P. Harper and Dimitar Kambourov Each Chapter © Contributors 2020 Cover design by Simon Levy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harper, Mihaela P., editor. | Kamburov, Dimitar, editor. Title: Bulgarian literature as world literature / edited by Mihaela P. Harper and Dimitar Kambourov. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: Literatures as world literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Explores Bulgarian literature’s advent from the standpoint of its internal relations to the world”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020018999 | ISBN 9781501348105 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501369780 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501348112 (epub) | ISBN 9781501348129 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Bulgarian literature–History and criticism. | Bulgarian literature–Appreciation. Classification: LCC PG1001 .B7956 2020 | DDC 891.8/109–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018999 ISBN:

HB:   PB:   ePDF:   eBook:  

978-1-5013-4810-5 978-1-5013-6978-0 978-1-5013-4812-9 978-1-5013-4811-2

Series: Literatures as World Literature Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

В памет на баща ми, Петър Боянов Казанджиев; на Кая и Анди Mihaela P. Harper In memory of Kostadin Dimitrov Kambourov, for Deyna, Daphina and Traci Dimitar Kambourov

Contents Foreword  Bulgaria and Its Worlding: A Historical Perspective  Maria Todorova ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction  Modern Bulgarian Literature: Being in the World  Mihaela P. Harper and Dimitar Kambourov Part I  Histories: In Search of a National Profile of World Literature   1 Medieval Bulgarian Literature as World Literature  Diana Atanassova   2 Bulgarian Literature in a “Romaic” Context  Raymond Detrez   3 The Bulgarian Literary Space and Its Languages: Monolingual Canon, Plural Writings  Marie Vrinat-Nikolov   4 Post-Liberation Literary Quests: From National Nostalgia to Social Anger and Modernist Dreams  Milena Kirova   5 Does Bulgarian Literature Have a Place within World Literature? Amelia Licheva Part II  Geographies: Bulgarian Literature as Un/common Ground within and without   6 Europeanization or Lunacy: The Idea of World Literature and the Autonomization of the Bulgarian Literary Field  Boyko Penchev   7 Anthology Anxieties: Maturity and Mystification  Bilyana Kourtasheva   8 Anomaly and Distext in Bulgarian Literature: Kiril Krastev Vassil Vidinsky, Maria Kalinova, and Kamelia Spassova   9 Telling History in Many Ways: The Recent Past as Literary Plot Ani Burova 10 Between the Local and the Global: Aporia in Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West  Mihaela P. Harper 11 Bulgarian Literature: Beyond World Literature into Global Literature  Emiliya Dvoryanova

1

15 27 41 55 67

81 89 99 111 123 137

viii

Contents

Part III  Economies: Bulgarian Literature and the Global Market 12 Tame Domesticity and Timid Trespasses: Travels and Exoduses Todor Hristov 13 The End of Self-Colonization: Contemporary Bulgarian Literature and Its Global Condition  Alexander Kiossev 14 Bulgarians Writing Abroad: Import and (Re)export of the Outsourced Production  Dimitar Kambourov 15 In Between and Beyond: Diaspora Writers and Readers  Yana Hashamova 16 Factotum and Fakir: The Translator of Bulgarian Literature into English  Angela Rodel Part IV  Genetics: Bulgarian Literature’s Heredities, Affinities, and Prospects 17 Bulgarian Literature’s Localism and (Im)mobility  Darin Tenev 18 1963, 2016: Two Perspectives on Blaga Dimitrova  Julia Kristeva 19 Bulgarian Women’s Literature: Plots and Stories  Miglena Nikolchina 20 Writing from the Saddest Place in the World  Georgi Gospodinov 21 Bulgarian Liveliness  Jean-Luc Nancy 22 Haide: On a Life that Feels Itself Live (A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Bulgarian Liveliness”)  Cory Stockwell Afterword  Beyond “Minor Literatures”: Reflections on World Literature (and on Bulgarian)  Galin Tihanov Select Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

149 159 171 187 199

213 223 229 239 249 251 259 267 273 277

Foreword Bulgaria and Its Worlding: A Historical Perspective

I am grateful for this invitation to present to the general reader this talented collection by leading literary critics and historians of Bulgarian and comparative literature, living in the country and abroad, but representing an enviable intellectual community. I am one of these general readers, coming from an adjacent humanities discipline that has as its end product also a literary genre. I use the adjective “enviable” for this literary community purposely because, in my discipline, it would be extremely difficult to gather so many historians of Bulgaria (either in the country or abroad) who share the same theoretical background and vocabulary. What I also happen to have in common with the majority of these contributors is a native tongue that was typically taught as one of the Slavic languages but is not nearly as much nowadays since it falls under the euphemistic rubric of “less commonly taught languages.” Two things struck me when I read these contributions. There is a defensiveness permeating practically all of them, and there is an obsession with the notion of world literature. The first did not surprise me: all of us, coming from the so-called “minor cultures,” suffer from it. But the second—the interpretation of a central concept with which they operate—did. “World literature,” just like “world history” has become a ubiquitous presence in university curricula and almost a mandatory framework, especially for beginning graduate students. Given the fact that literary studies (as well as anthropology and sociology) is a theoretical field, while history rarely contributes to theory but mostly consumes it and very often ignores it, hiding behind the necessary and labor-intensive but also consoling empiricism, it was surprising to find the treatment of “world history” less constrained, more complex and nuanced. “World literature,” at least in the understanding of this volume and stripped of all the nice attributes of being pluralistic, dialogical, and embracing, is in the end very functional and economist. Of course, theories of cultural production recognize power asymmetries, hegemonies and the like, but the concept here seemed to me to stand firmly on the (implicit) pillars of circulation beyond the country of origin, reception, and recognition—all with almost market-based bearings. This, of course, hugely narrows the possibility for maneuvering and agency on the part of “minor literatures.” Allow me to juxtapose this very briefly with the treatment of “world history.” Just like world literature with its centuries-long pedigree from Goethe, world history has had a long development but, until the mid-twentieth century, it was directed by a single author based on a certain historiosophy. For all its popularity, the dominant mode continued to be national histories. By the end of the twentieth

x

Foreword

century, scale became one of the most important categories in the debate about the meaning of the historical profession. Recognizing the crisis in the classical paradigms with which we analyze the social, it explored the relative significance of the big versus the small, of the fragment versus the whole, of the local versus the global, of the value of exception versus generalization. By the early 2000s, the drive was mostly toward macrohistory, global, transnational, and world history. This endeavor was inspired by the desire to supersede the nation-state, to shed the swaddling bands in which modern historiography was born in the nineteenth century and which nowadays was perceived as its original sin, to overcome nationalism and Eurocentrism, although with some nostalgic nods in the direction of the assaulted area studies. There has been naturally a healthy skepticism (which I share as a whole) that, most often, global history is a figleaf of present geo-politics and that the focus on macrohistory can easily slip into the marketing of world history teaching and a happily celebrated monolingualism (often bordering on monoglossia). At the same time and constructively, however, this movement brought in the new and deserved interest in environmental studies, and several stimulating big turns: the Atlantic, the oceanic, borderland history, the new cultural economic history and history of science, and so on, even though much of this was prefigured by previous historiographical schools. Despite the appearance that the global is taking over, smaller scale initiatives and interesting work continues to be generated on the micro and intermediate levels. Inconveniently, specificity does not want to disappear. Historiography has gone through several methodological turns in the past decades— from comparative history and transfer studies to an emphasis on histoire croisée, entangled history, or connected histories. These shifts were meant to deal constructively with the recognized inequalities, the existing power asymmetries between metropole and peripheries, the same that exist also in world literature. But there is, in my opinion, a fundamental difference. The definition and practice of world history is not premised on its circulation, public reception, and recognition; it is rather the result of expert-negotiation, albeit hierarchies are, of course, built within this army of experts themselves. Still, this circumstance precludes the excising of the periphery and allows for the recognition of the marginal and its ability to upset, recalibrate, or sometimes completely transform the sweeping and, by necessity, reductive dominant narrative. I want to insist on this transformative quality and not simply on the recovering of subaltern voices, salvaging “peripheral” visions, and showing the irreducible property of locality and its resistance to the flattening processes of globalization. Because of this, among historians I observe less angst “of being left out” than I discern among my literary colleagues. There is less of the pressure to adjust, to “fit” in the dominant themes that govern the global public space, without asking why these particular dominant themes are there in the first place. Where localism is seen as provincialism or, in a more benign view, as solipsism, in history it can be (although it is not always) celebrated and, if properly executed, can intervene by upsetting these dominant themes. Some of this has to do, of course, with language, clichés, and translation. Historians are not exempt from stereotypes either, but we are not confronted so strongly by a combination of these as a writer is. Reading Georgi Gospodinov’s chapter, I could hear the same

Foreword

xi

consternation and frustration that was voiced some years ago by another prominent writer from the Balkans, the Romanian Mircea Cartarescu. He had been approached by a German publisher, who said he was interested in East European writers. Cartarescu had immediately responded that he did not consider himself an East European writer. “Of course, the publisher conceded, as a Romanian, you are from Southeastern Europe.” For Cartarescu this simple geographical positioning had the following direct message: Stay where you are, the publisher was telling me in a friendly manner. Stay in your own ghetto. Describe your tiny chunk of the (South) East European history. Write about your Securitate, about your Ceausescu, about your People’s House. About your dogs, your homeless children, your Gypsies. Be proud of your dissidence during the communist days. Leave it to us to write about love, death, happiness, agony, and ecstasy. Leave it to us to create the avant-garde, to innovate, to breathe cultural normality. Your only chance here is to describe your small exotic world for some small publishing house that might accept you … Just choose: either you conform to our clichés or you disappear.

Cartarescu was furious. He could not accept the triple division of Europe into Western, Central, and Eastern, let alone the southeastern subdivision of the subdivision: “Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe. Civilization, neurosis, chaos. Prosperity, culture, and chaos. Consciousness, subconsciousness, and chaos.”1 Here comes, I think, the indispensable role of the translator, which affects world literature much more seriously than world history. I am a little surprised that more was not made in these chapters of David Damrosch’s “gaining in translation.” Very few Bulgarian writers have had the luck to be delivered successfully into a “major” language, although there is clearly progress in this direction. The Michael Henry Heims of the world are a rarity, and he never touched Bulgarian in his amazing translations from a dozen European languages, among them Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Hungarian, and Romanian. The gifted translators of Dubravka Ugrešić are managing to introduce the local in such a way as to decenter the global and create a cosmopolitan readers’ following. The art of translation deserves a special section and it could be added in a second future volume on Bulgarian literature. Translation studies have carved a respectable place of their own, and I am not taking sides in the sophisticated dispute between adherents of the precise rendering of the original versus adaptation involving also invention. In my youth, while in the English language highschool, I was reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets in English during an evening of poetry. Yet, I was awed by the inexact (or maybe even wrong) translation of Vladimir Svintila who “bettered” (pardon the sacrilege) the sonnets. As Mark Polizzotti would have it: “A good translation offers not a reproduction of the work but an interpretation, a re-presentation, just as the performance of a play or a sonata is a representation of the script or the score, one among many possible representations.”2 Clearly, however, a translator from “less commonly taught languages” is not simply a transmitter. S/he is also a manager, promoter, impresario. I wish someone would fall in love with and interpret the posited as “untranslatable” but also untranslated works of Milen Ruskov.

xii

Foreword

To be sure, the pervading defensiveness is felt equally among historians and, as I pointed out, this was the second thing that struck me but did not surprise me. Defensiveness is inevitable and it will be there as long as we are not on an equal playing field. But the field has little to do with our own understanding and efforts, and everything to do with economic and geopolitical forces beyond our control. Years ago, when invited to present my book3 in Paris, my host, a prominent figure in French academia, asked me after the lecture: “Would you have been able to write this book in Bulgaria?” I knew the expected answer ought to be negative, and I stubbornly tried to speak about the genesis of the book which had to do with my research and thinking in this very Bulgaria, but he pressed me further: “Well, yes, but tell us, what did America give you?” Again, I knew that I should answer properly, making the gesture to Fernand Braudel and how the alienation from one’s own milieu gives one a unique perspective … But again, I stubbornly answered: “What did it give me? An invitation to Paris.” The audience laughed but, in the ensuing dinner, my host patronizingly recommended that I should not be so defensive. Maybe not, but I still think that all of us must tread the fine line between defensiveness and push-back. Most of all, we should not care too much about how we are received and whether we are recognized. Once we have delivered ourselves from the debilitating need to be accepted and recognized, defensiveness is transformed into defense and dignity. Maria Todorova University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Notes 1 2 3

Mircea Cartarescu, “Europa has the form of my brain,” interview in the Bulgarian newspaper Kultura, N. 23 (2325), May 28, 2004, 12. Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, cited in Marina Warner, “The Politics of Translation,” London Review of Books 40, no. 19 (October 11, 2018), 21–4. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford University Press, 1997). The book was later translated into French: Imaginaire des Balkans (Paris: Editions EHESS, 2011).

Acknowledgments We would like to express our gratitude to Jean-Luc Nancy and Julia Kristeva for agreeing to have their work included in this collection, as well as to Maria Todorova and Galin Tihanov for taking the project to heart and sparing time and energy to write the foreword and afterword, respectively. We would also like to thank our contributors, who came together from far and wide to share our vision and commitment, as well as Thomas O. Beebee (editor of the Literatures as World Literature series), the editorial board, and Bloomsbury for welcoming our work. Special thanks to Katherine De Chant for assisting us kindly and patiently along the way. There are so many others who helped this book come to be, many more than we can acknowledge or thank enough here. To each and all of them, heartfelt thanks. Mihaela P. Harper and Dimitar Kambourov

Introduction Modern Bulgarian Literature: Being in the World Mihaela P. Harper and Dimitar Kambourov

I Mihaela P. Harper I first shared the idea for this volume with writer Georgi Gospodinov and literary critic Albena Hranova in 2010.1 A few years later, a chance to contribute to Crime Fiction as World Literature2 brought the idea back to the fore. As I queried into the place of Bulgarian literature within world literature and vice versa, the vision for this collection took a much more definitive form, and I was overjoyed that Dimitar Kambourov was interested and available to co-edit the book with me. He has been remarkable at this—a generous and patient collaborator. Much the same can be said about all of the participants gathered here. Their contributions illuminate, from a wide array of angles, what is, to most of the globe, an obscure literature and culture. Together, we offer to an English-speaking reader this unique edited collection on Bulgarian literature from its genesis to the present. The question of Bulgarian literature’s relations to the world (primarily to Europe) has been of intermittent interest both in Bulgaria and abroad. Particularly over the last decades, many have endeavored to better understand and augment these relations by promoting a minor national literature to global visibility and recognition. An outcome of similar effort, Bulgarian Literature as World Literature brings together some of the prominent literary critics, historians, writers, and translators involved with Bulgarian literature and culture across the globe today. The volume constitutes a long-overdue, collaborative engagement with homologous and antithetical interventions, and aims to provide a world audience with an overview that is both richly nuanced and as comprehensive in its scope as the space permits. Arrayed into four sections—Histories, Geographies, Economies, and Genetics—the chapters take on distinct topics; their occasional overlaps expose debates, articulate different approaches to a central problem, or propose a fresh glimpse into a familiar topic. Thus, while one position may illustrate Bulgarian literature’s localism and

2

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

immobility, another may argue for its capacity to mobilize the global expanse (as Jean-Luc Nancy writes of Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow). In order to offer readers a more substantive grasp of the development of Bulgarian literature and its search for a national profile of world standard, the historical parameters within which it is examined extend far into the country’s past (its independent, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods, going back to the birth of the Cyrillic alphabet in the ninth century CE). Yet, the primary focus of this collection is on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Bulgarian literature—its place in the world, the ways in which it both presents the world to itself and itself to the world, and the impacts of these worldings on its structure, form, and thematic concerns. Inasmuch as they consider Bulgarian literature within its broader Balkan and East-European geographical and political contexts, the chapters are distinctly attentive to its singularity. Among the specific aspects that the volume foregrounds are the link between literature and nationbuilding, modern and postmodern literary trends, women’s authorship, émigré writing, and the manifold impacts of book markets, both national and international, on the very life of literature. Contributors raise a variety of broad theoretical questions, including the definition and function of the terms “minor literature,” “world,” “globalization,” and “wordliness” today; the un/translatability of specific modes of writing and aesthetic, as well as literature written by originally Bulgarian nationals in tongues other than their native; the very im/possibility of world literature in a globalized world; and how to conceptualize a productive relationship between the regional and the global, the provincial and the worldly, the minor and the major. Because of its unprecedented nature, the volume not only fills a significant gap in the traditional East European and Balkan as well as contemporary European literary fields but can also serve as a cornerstone for future collaborative research in these and other related areas.

Bulgarian Literature: Localized, Globalized, Glocalized “How many people live today in a language that is not their own?” asked Deleuze and Guattari in 1975,3 as if anticipating the increasing prominence of the question in a greatly globalized world more than four decades later. Between two and six million Bulgarians do4 (although for those born in multinational or multilingual families the question of an “own” language is more complicated). The Bulgarian diaspora is frequently referenced both in the Bulgarian media and in academic research, often with a view to the mass exodus of nearly one million Bulgarians between 1990 and 2005, the first fifteen years5 after the fall of the socialist regime. This exodus is consequential in a variety of ways not only for the migrants themselves but also for those who remained within the borders of Bulgaria. Yet, throughout the country’s more than 1300-year-long history, and especially over the last two centuries, there have been many migrations, both into and out of it, which makes certain themes such as displacement, identity, ethnicity, patriotism, and loss in the writings of Bulgarian nationals understandably prominent.

Introduction: Modern Bulgarian Literature

3

According to the United Nations, Bulgaria is not only the least well-off European Union member but also one of the two “world’s fastest shrinking nations.” Under seven million at the moment, Bulgaria’s population is expected to be 23 percent less by 2050.6 Our limited space precludes an in-depth investigation of the many factors that contributed and may continue to contribute to this drop from almost nine million in 1986. The experiences and implications of this and other diminutions, produced by and/or grafted onto the national consciousness, however, is something that our contributors do explore. Several of them argue that certain processes, including catching up to “developed countries,” self-colonization, and reaching into the national past for core identity features, are key to understanding Bulgarian culture. Questions such as which elements of these processes, if any, are distinctly Bulgarian, and how they can be distinguished from all East European or even worldly experiences of this kind; how these elements can be identified and articulated (if not “patented”) are at the basis of some of the interventions. In sum, the volume’s multidirectional discourse articulates simultaneously the conscious/subconscious dynamics of the nation and its (projected) external perceptions through the many, varied, and—if I may be indulgent here—scintillating, yet widely unknown, literary creations of Bulgaria. Even though few of us gathered in this volume belong to world literature studies strictly speaking, our contributions endeavor to address what David Damrosch identifies as one of the field’s main challenges, namely “to do a better job of understanding works in their home context, even as they assume a new life abroad in new literary and cultural contexts in which they may have very different meanings and effects.”7 Each of the chapters helps contextualize Bulgaria’s literature and culture, but each also augments the understanding of Eastern Europe as a region and provides a long historical view of the West’s perspectives and attitudes toward this rather infamous region and toward Bulgaria in particular.8 Thus, with regard to the notion of world literature, the volume as a whole inclines to Matthias Freise’s conception of it “as a network of relations, and not as a set of objects [i.e., literary texts],”9 relations that include but are not limited to culture, history, politics, semantics, and intertextuality. Diana Atanassova opens the first section, “Histories,” with an assessment of medieval Bulgarian literature’s relation to the world from three distinct vantage points: the Bulgarian language, its universality, and its “nationalization.” Complicating the notions of national history and literature, Raymond Detrez reaches back into the “Ottoman context” of Bulgarian literature and the convoluted history of the Balkan region. He proposes that it is more appropriate to view pre-modern Bulgarian literature as part of a single “‘Romaic’ literary system, shared by all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire” than as a national literature that bears distinct national themes and sensibilities. Marie Vrinat-Nikolov’s transnational and interdisciplinary perspective extends this discussion to the internal geographies of the Bulgarian literary space—its “grey areas,” discernible through their multilingualism, disavowal, and otherness. In the chapter that follows, Milena Kirova examines the development of Bulgarian literature after the declaration of the country’s independence in 1878. Her essay offers a nuanced overview of a complex of national pursuits and cultural tendencies that resulted in the emergence of a “Bulgarian approach,” a distinct strategy aimed at bringing Bulgarian

4

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

literature closer to contemporaneous world standards. Amelia Licheva’s query into the place of Bulgarian literature within world literature concludes the section by isolating several of the defining trends in Bulgarian novel writing since 1944. Bulgarian Literature as World Literature’s second section, “Geographies,” commences with Boyko Penchev’s analysis of the role that “markers of worldliness” played in the establishment and perpetuation of an autonomous literary field in Bulgaria. In the subsequent chapter, Bilyana Kourtasheva looks to the literary aspirations and rivalries as well as to the literary and non-literary authorities and powers that drove the formation of a Bulgarian literary canon in the first half of the twentieth century. Vassil Vidinsky, Maria Kalinova, and Kamelia Spassova complicate the discussion of the Bulgarian literary canon further by focusing on the case of Kiril Krastev; its anomalousness, they argue, exposes the normative field and its constructs as well as the founding themes of Bulgarian literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Ani Burova brings the conversation to the present by taking a closer look at literary trends in the post-1989 period. She addresses the problem of memory vis-à-vis the communist/socialist past reified in Bulgarian and other East European literatures. In my own contribution to the volume, I focus on Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West (2011) and theorize how the tensions between local and global forces manifest upon a geographical terrain and inscribe themselves upon one’s self-consciousness. Also querying into the dynamic between the local and the global, Emiliya Dvoyanova exposes the imperceptible omnivorous voracity of the global, draws distinctions between “world literature” and “global literature,” and argues for the precious precariousness of a small, unmapped place in the world. “Economies,” the third section of this volume, spans a number of processes and interchanges between Bulgaria and the world, commencing with travel. Todor Hristov’s chapter outlines the impacts of travelling to and from Bulgaria on the national self-consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century, grounding his study in Aleko Konstantinov’s famous travelogue To Chicago and Back (1894). Picking up the discussion with a glance at the Bulgarian literary scene in the twenty-first century, Alexander Kiossev proposes that the traditional complex of “catching up” to the world, with the attendant “Westernization” and “self-colonization,” have come to an end in Bulgarian literature. Bulgarian literary works today, he claims, present a dilemma not between Europe and the Bulgarian motherland but between participation and self-exclusion, “global presence versus local fame.” In his contribution, Dimitar Kambourov demonstrates how a number of books written by Bulgarians living abroad, in languages other than Bulgarian and focusing on Bulgaria’s socialist era, are summoned back “home” through their Bulgarian translations, thus obtaining a world literature potentiality capable of providing a provisional context for the admission to world literature of Georgi Gospodinov’s books. Also with a focus on contemporary diaspora writers—Julia Kristeva, Kapka Kassabova, and Dubravka Ugrešić in particular—Yana Hashamova’s subsequent chapter illuminates the interplay between the West and the native in the identities and “diasporic intimacies” of these authors. Turning the question to the relation between language, literature, and national identity, Angela Rodel describes the

Introduction: Modern Bulgarian Literature

5

process of translating from Bulgarian into English and the obstacles to bringing a minor literature into visibility on the global market. Bulgarian literature’s heredities, affinities, and prospects are foregrounded in the final section of the volume, “Genetics.” In order to articulate the complex relationship of Bulgarian literature to itself, Darin Tenev turns to epigenetics. Through meticulous close reading, he articulates multiple complex relationships between artists and their work, Ivan Vazov and Pencho Slaveykov, localism and universalism, Bulgaria and the world, DNA and the context within which it r/evolves. Julia Kristeva interrogates the genetics of history, i.e. the relations between one historical moment and another within the lifespan of a nation. The pulse of each is reflected in the rhythm and thematic engagements of Blaga Dimitrova’s poetry but also in Kristeva’s own relationship to Dimitrova and Bulgaria, in her personal story and the nation’s history. Miglena Nikolchina’s analysis dovetails Kristeva’s by focusing on the “literary generations” of Bulgarian women writers, with particular emphasis on the case of Elisaveta Bagryana, and outlining their complex, non-chronological interrelations. Georgi Gospodinov also considers the spatiotemporal dimensions of writing and points out that, despite sharing much of its neighbors’ histories, Bulgaria has been identified as “the saddest place in the world.” His chapter queries into identity markers, such as “East-European,” “postcommunist,” and “Balkan,” to address the question of what literature can do today. JeanLuc Nancy touches upon this question, too, in his reading of Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. Nancy suggests that some literature, such as Gospodinov’s novel, has the power to palpate life, to revitalize, and mobilize. In his own chapter, Cory Stockwell elucidates and advances Nancy’s conceptions. His contribution ends with хайде (a Bulgarian word that means come on or let’s go), which I hope that the reader will take as an invitation to venture into Bulgarian literature well beyond this volume.

Notes 1 A chapter of my dissertation engaged with Gospodinov’s Natural Novel (1999) and Hranova’s Георги Господинов: Разроявания (2004). Mihaela P. Harper, “Breaking Up, Down, and Out: Anomie in Georgi Gospodinov’s Natural Novel,” SEER 93, no. 3 (2015): 429–50. 2 Mihaela P. Harper, “‘In the Footsteps of Agatha Christie’: The Case of the Cursed Goblet and Contemporary Bulgarian Crime Fiction,” in Crime Fiction as World Literature, eds. Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 171–86. 3 Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, and Robert Brinkley, “What Is a Minor Literature?” Mississippi Review 11, no. 3 (1983): 13–33, www.jstor.org/stable/20133921. 4 “There are more than 6 million Bulgarians living outside Bulgaria: Petar Haralampiev,” BNR, March 13, 2018, http://bnr.bg/en/post/100944803/there-are-more-than-6million-bulgarians-living-outside-bulgaria-petar-haralampiev. 5 “Bulgaria Population 2019,” World Population Review, http://worldpopulationreview. com/countries/bulgaria-population/.

6

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

6 “World Population Prospects 2019,” United Nations (New York: United Nations, 2019). 7 David Damrosch, “Frames for World Literature,” in Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal, ed. Weigui Fang (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 94. 8 Ibid., 96. In “Frames for World Literature,” Damrosch asserts that, “Throughout the twentieth century, most comparative studies in Europe and North America focused on the literatures of Western Europe and North America, perhaps extending as far east as Russia, but usually skipping over Eastern Europe in the process.” 9 Matthias Freise, “Four Perspectives on World Literature: Reader, Producer, Text and System,” in Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal, ed. Weigui Fang (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 191.

Introduction: Modern Bulgarian Literature

7

II Dimitar Kambourov Mihaela Harper’s invitation to join her in the preparation of this project, Bulgarian Literature as World Literature, for Bloomsbury Academic’s series on world literature, found me in an opportune moment. I had been teaching Bulgarian literature and cinema to MA students at Trinity College Dublin, and Bulgaria, it had turned out, did not exist on the literary and cinematic maps of my otherwise highly informed students coming from all corners of the globe. And there was a minuscule number of texts dedicated to Bulgarian literature, cinema, arts, and culture written in or translated into English. Therefore, without further ado, I accepted the invitation and embraced the project as a mission. When a minor literature (like Bulgarian) is considered world literature, an imaginative, mischievous attitude is inevitable. Any attempt to talk about a minor/ Bulgarian literature as world literature implies wishful thinking: how would Bulgarian literature look if we were to see it through the lens of world literature, as a conjectured presence in it? The endeavor resembles the Bulgarian game of “What kind of a something-or-other would they be?” in which one player thinks of a person, and the others ask what kind of car, party, food, philosophy, etc. this person would be, until they guess his or her identity. I imagined our Bulgarian Literature as World Literature as a voluminous attempt to play this game by asking what kind of world literature Bulgarian literature would be. Despite the implication that it is none of the things imagined, the very worldly revisiting of Bulgarian literature should bring new insights. And vice versa: Bulgarian literature should help redraw the conceptual mapping of world literature. The challenge was considerable since Bulgarian literature has never irrefutably contributed to world literature; it has never been an indispensable presence on the world literary map, nor have its authors tried to write in a manner meant to please the mysterious entity of global readership, until, arguably, the last decade or so. But that made the stakes even higher. As we worked on the project, however, doubts began gnawing at me. Was not “world literature” another emergency measure, designed to salvage what is left of literature departments in American, British, and European universities? Another postcolonial politics of difference (or was it of identity)? Was not world literature intended to overcome occidentalism in the literary canon, while preserving the driver’s seat for European classics and contemporary Western literary production, and still enlivening the western literary stagnation of the post-creative writing epoch? An alleged counterbalance of national literatures’ internal dominance, was not world literature but an exotic display, aptly located between the Tourism and Memoir sections? A timid attempt to preserve an element of class and quality, of artistry and elitism against the sweeping dominance of global bestsellers, was world literature itself not compromising with style, structure, vocabulary, grammar, and message, inevitably remaining under the auspices of good faith, humor, and sentiments? As a theorist trained in deconstruction,

8

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

I could not help but deplore as a betrayal against the profession world literature’s dictum of universal translatability. I read its regressive attitude toward literature as an attempt to galvanize pre-theoretical approaches restricted to what is preserved in translation: themes and “messages,” plots and characters, plausibility and empathy. World literature was enticing to me as an ultimate chance for a small literature’s global emergence, but its selection process seemed to favor only authors ready to play its game and meet its expectations: writing “for their translators,” mythologizing local and regional history and reducing it to instructive allegory, oversimplifying and shying away from ambiguity, securing identification through the intimate universalism of monochromatic feelings, etc., rendering the untranslatable otherness of any authentic literature merely into a mysterious spice of an exotic literary cuisine. Weren’t the gains from world literature bigger though? A survival kit against the plummeting standards of readers (which made landslide global successes out of embarrassingly poor books), weren’t world literature’s translations into English, the new lingua franca, gestures of acknowledgement for the literary honor of the original languages? At the end of the day, was world literature not the surviving child of literature in times of vicious natural selection? It evokes the manner in which world music merges unfamiliar sound, timbres, rhythms, techniques, and “worlds” with state of the art production and distribution technologies. And yet, despite being a chance for small literatures’ world presence and visibility, has world literature not proven questionable in the way it chooses representatives of nations and regions? Hungarians, Germans, Chinese, Austrians, (Belo)Russians, even Americans and Brits … the readerships of too many countries have found themselves in dismay when they learned the names of their compatriot chosen by the Nobel and other committees to represent their countries and regions. A clever yet concessional project, world literature seemed to me all too eager to sacrifice the epistemological ventures of literature: a quasi-Pygmalion, Petruccio style domestication of a notoriously shrewlike mode of writing. I owe a deep gratitude to Mihaela Harper for managing, with immense patience and generosity, to make me stay in the project. She told me that my literary hypostases made her believe that I am the right person: the slow and close reader of the Bulgarian canon and the fast and distant weekly reviewer of books from all corners of the Earth. Was not my schizoid split between these two modes of reading indicative of the literary condition of my country then?

World Literature behind the Curtain Since national literature is at the core of the Bulgarian school curriculum and is a subject on the university entrance exams, analysis and interpretation remain strongly associated with the national canon. But no matter how deeply education and profession affect us, part of us forever remains a free floating, omnivorous reader: we are all to some extent world literature readers in our time off. And even more so during our “socialist” youth: I clearly remember that, for all of us then, the Bulgarian of Bulgarian

Introduction: Modern Bulgarian Literature

9

literature had little to do with Bulgarian as mediator of literatures written in other languages. Its translational mode released us from the obligation to deal with language as an autotelic, self-referential, hyper-organized entity demanding studious unraveling. Back then, we were all obsessed with style. Decades later, when I reread the originals of some old translations, I discovered that the translators were also suffering from style mania: they were capable of violating the native syntax and distorting Bulgarian word order and phrase rhythm in their commitment to conveying the style of the original. The combination of irreproducible styles and unknown worlds formed the magic core of that mode of reading. Translation therefore had an enormously emancipating effect on reading by breaking the shackles of national language, and of language in general. Translations were not made out of words and devices but out of worlds and styles instead. My innocent, unnamed encounter with world literature back then (perceived as a self-indulgent, guilty pleasure) turned books into teleportation devices. (Damrosch’s “window” metaphor would hardly come to the minds of people coerced to call “the wall” home). Writing literary columns for a cultural weekly for years was perhaps my unconscious effort to preserve that world literature mode and scope of reading. Though world literature has never been a strong component of the Bulgarian educational system, it had a strong structural supporter in the face of late socialism’s translation policy.1 There were two large publishing houses specializing in literary translations. Narodna Kultura made its name through series like World Classics, which also included modern and contemporary Western and non-Western works; Hristo G. Danov translated recent literary production, mainly from the West, but also from minor literatures and languages all over the world. Two thick magazines— Съвременник (Contemporary) and Панорама (Panorama)—were also almost entirely dedicated to literary translations. There was a quota for Russian and East European titles, of course, but either the Western quota was much bigger or the socialist reader had developed a palate for “the rotten West,” as the propaganda called it (to which the joke retorted that the West is like a medlar fruit—the more rotten, the sweeter). A crucial benefit of the socialist translation policy was that the Western selection was not dictated by the market, but by two alternative criteria—the author’s critical acclaim at home and abroad and the book’s critical attitude towards capitalism. The second requirement helped protect us from Western kitsch and glamour, while the critical stance of Western authors made the socialist melodrama and propaganda in literature even more unbearable. In effect, the Bulgarian socialist reader got access to a rather representative selection of Western literary production, based on both aesthetic and political criteria. Its temporal span was also quite open: the fact that a book had originally appeared ten, twenty, or thirty years back did not prevent its “belated” publication. Still, the appeal of Western literature had to be hidden; the disproportionately large quota of Soviet and East European books also needed to be camouflaged somehow. In effect, the dominance of West and East was counterbalanced by a wide planetary interest: books from the so-called Third World and from minor literatures and small languages from both Europe and beyond were massively translated. Thus, under the auspices of proletarian internationalism, the socialist translation policy secured the presence of first-class world literature.

10

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

World Literature in Bulgaria Today My hypothesis is that the taste for world literature in Bulgaria as we know it today has been conditioned by the socialist translation policy as well as by the reading approach that it spawned. To the traditional and popular approach of reading for plot, an alternative one was added: reading for the world. Since neither the West nor the rest of the world used to be even theoretically reachable for 99 percent of Bulgarian citizens, the socialist translation policy had the structural effect of replacing the world with world literature. In effect, literature’s redesign into an imaginary transportation device cultivated an alternative mode of reading, turning the translated word into worlds and thus creating a readership that embraced a mode of reading for the world. Although the transition to a market economy reoriented publishing toward bestselling and award-winning books in the western hemisphere, the interest in world literature as a mode of reading for the world has been preserved, not least because of the economic hardships of the Transition. The exodus of millions of Bulgarians to the West and the shifting self-perception of the nation as the Third World within the First World have also had their cultural and literary repercussions. World literature as a mode of wide circulation of literature outside its place of origin emerges as perhaps an indirect yet a more secure route for contemporary Bulgarian literature to find access to the global book market. This collection of essays could be seen as representative of the same tendency. Since our main concern in this book was the manners in which the (self)perception of a national literature is colored and modified when observed through the prism of world literature, some approaches seemed to work better than others. For a small literature written in a language as obscure, difficult, and practically unknown by non-native speakers as Bulgarian, Damrosch’s translatability allowing world circulation is an absolute priority. Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” is a telling counter-concept capable of operating with wide corpuses of texts. These are generally post-theoretical approaches, since they abstain from dealing with the eminently untranslatable aspect of literature and give up the entire legacy of close reading in its formal, structural, or deconstructive hypostases. World literature, it turns out, has always been with us as readers at large. Bulgarian literature, which enjoyed a special status at home for far too long, found itself incapable of keeping up with the already developed audience for world literature. Still, Georgi Markov with Women of Warsaw (1968), Pavel Vezhinov with Night with White Horses (1975) and The Barrier (1976), and most notably, Ivaylo Petrov with Before I Was Born and After My Death (1973) and Wolf Hunt (1986) responded to the newly opened literary context and the new readership (Vezhinov was an editor in chief of Съвременник magazine, an almanac mainly for recent literary events all over the world) by reorienting their writing toward world literature. Poets like Konstantin Pavlov, Nikolay Kanchev, Boris Hristov, Binyo Ivanov, Georgi Rupchev, and Ani Ilkov also produced poetic voices and standards corresponding to the most advanced quests in world poetry during the second half of the twentieth century.

Introduction: Modern Bulgarian Literature

11

Therefore, although I feel fully content with our volume’s comprehensive scope, I feel obliged to at least note some absences. Perhaps the very omissions beg for analysis. For Bulgarians, Botev appears to be what Pushkin is for Russians, Mickiewicz for Poles, Petőfi for Hungarians, Mácha for Czechs, Prešeren for Slovenians, and so on. Through his legacy of just twenty poems, he raised Bulgarian literature to a level from which it was capable of speaking to other literary traditions and actual literary practices in the second half of the nineteenth century. Vazov’s and Pencho Slaveykov’s alternative projects to Europeanize Bulgarian literature have been widely discussed in this volume; the roles of symbolism and futurism in opening up toward the world have also been addressed. Yavorov’s poetic legacy, however, has remained somehow in Slaveykov’s shadow. An encyclopedia of the modern soul, Yavorov’s oeuvre boldly articulated “the super-earthly questions that no century has solved” (“Mask” 1907)2 by staging them not only in a transcendent space but also in named locations abroad such as Nancy, France. Yavorov and Dimitar Bojadzhiev were the first to create poetry presenting non-native geographies not from the viewpoint of cultural tourists (as Vazov and Slaveykov used to do) but of human beings whose identities have been questioned through the disturbing discovery of non-belonging to any community, place, or time. Such a new sense of worldliness was further developed by Atanas Dalchev’s objective poetry, Charvar Mutafov’s The Dilettante (1926), Boris Shivachev’s The Inventor (1931), Letters from South America (1932), and Svetoslav Minkov’s fantastic endeavors. I must also mention Yordan Yovkov, whose short stories about the Bulgarian village are in fact mythical parables, saturated with characters of many ethnicities and with messages tending to be ethically universal. Yet, the most prominent absence in our volume is perhaps that of Nikola Vaptzarov. His poetry found its place in the national canon after 1944, when the communist regime started exporting it widely as a modern, proletarian world literature with exceptional interest in social, scientific, and cultural revolutions worldwide. Vaptzarov’s poetic endeavor incorporates the most advanced planetary sense in modern Bulgarian literature, a puzzlingly unforced non-provincialism, curiosity, unbound sensitivity, and worldliness, released from any transcendental or universal claims. His poems “History” and “Cinema” are among the most insightful defenses of literature as an art capable of compensating for language’s inherent lagging behind by turning its abstract outlines into worlds. Another significant figure omitted is Dimitar Dimov. A novelist from the mid-twentieth century, Dimov systematically trespassed borders and boundaries by specializing in international liaisons between Bulgarian women and German men or between a Spanish Jesuit and a British junky. Finally, three authors from the period of late socialism need to be mentioned: the ultimate postmodern poet Nikolay Kanchev developed a planetary eco-sensitivity articulated through the most untranslatable layer of language—the idiomatic one—and yet he and Kenneth White used to successfully translate each other’s poetic idioms; in Vera Mutafchieva’s masterful novel The Case of Cem (1967), Bulgaria, as a part of the world of Orthodoxy, was presented as a structural victim of the historical compromise between Christian Occident and Islamic Orient—perhaps the only worldly reading of Bulgarian historical mishap defying the myth of “Turkish slavery”; and Ivaylo Petrov,

12

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

whose masterpieces Before I Was Born and After My Death (1973) and Wolf Hunt (1986),3 tackle the modern history of the Bulgarian village through a kaleidoscope of incommensurable local traditional and modern world discourses like folklore, the realist idiom, existentialist philosophy, communist propaganda, and contemporary media, among others. As thought-provoking as absences and omissions might be, they are perhaps less revealing about the world status of Bulgarian literature than the points of shared interest and crossroads, which turn into manifestations of hyper-presence. As editors, we chose to grant maximum freedom to our contributors as far as topics and foci were concerned. The effect unsurprisingly was that some names, movements, and periods turned out to be more appropriate—“more equal”—than others. For example, Pencho Slaveykov, the central figure of the celebrated modernist Мисъл (Thought) circle, whose agenda to Europeanize Bulgarian literature contributed to his Nobel prize nomination, became a focal point for five of the participants. Georgi Gospodinov, the Bulgarian writer most translated, reviewed, and recognized abroad, attracted the interest of at least half of the authors. The handful of Bulgarians who write in languages other than Bulgarian provoked analytic work commensurate with that dedicated to the entire contemporary literary production in Bulgarian. Among the “ex-Bulgarians,” Kapka Kassabova and Miroslav Penkov, who write in English, happened to draw attention more often than, say, Trojanow or Dinew, Lazarova or Lewitscharoff, despite the fact that the accolades for those writing in German are no less impressive. The volume’s ultimate focal points—Bulgarian Modernism and the literary production of the new millennium—are far from surprising. Two worldly fulcrums hardly imply reliable support, yet such was clearly the will of the contributors—to abstain from uncritically rounded depictions of Bulgarian literature as world literature. As the cliché goes, this volume should be perceived as a work in progress. My strong conviction is that it will have fulfilled its task if its results and merits, along with its deficiencies and omissions, inspire debates and criticism, but first and foremost, if they prompt further work. And further reading. Worldwide.

Notes 1 We were unaware back then that socialism was far more open and curious about Western literary production than the West was about us in the East. Had we known, we would have approved: after all, we all loved to laugh at silly jokes like “Is the film good, or is it Soviet?” 2 Peyo Yavorov (Пейо Яворов), Подир сенките на облаците (София: Ал. Паскалев, 1910). 3 Ivaylo Petrov, Wolf Hunt, trans. Angela Rodel (New York: Archipelago Books, 2017).

Part I

Histories: In Search of a National Profile of World Literature

1

Medieval Bulgarian Literature as World Literature Diana Atanassova Translated by Traci Speed

Universality, supranational values, and a common language are all among the attributes of world literature in contemporary literary studies. All of these are traits intrinsic to the literatures of the pre-modern era. Although the concept of world literature is associated with modernity and defining phenomena of contemporary literary reality, it could also be reasonably applied to medieval literatures, since their specific socio-cultural context, universality, and universal values are fundamental, and a common (sacred) language is obligatory. Thus, in this chapter, we will attempt to present medieval Bulgarian literature as world literature through three principal perspectives: first, we will focus on the language in which it was created; next, we will examine individual elements that endow it with a universal character, inherent to it largely because of the Christian ideology to which it is fully subject; and finally, we will note some tendencies related to overcoming “supranationalism” and the aspiration to impart nationally specific traits. Medieval Bulgarian literature emerged in the second half of the ninth century, after the arrival of the disciples of Constantine (in Christ, Cyril, d. 869) and Methodius (d. 885) in Bulgaria in 886. A little more than twenty years1 had passed since the invention of the alphabet2 that permitted the Slavs to write in their native language. In the period from 863 to 885, Cyril and Methodius (the first Old Bulgarian writers) and their students worked within the boundaries of the two principalities inhabited by Slavs—Moravia and Pannonia. At that time, they used the Slavic language mainly for religious educational purposes and created texts in a narrow stylistic and genre register associated with specific parts of the religious ritual. That is, in the words of the Italian Slavicist Riccardo Picchio, at this time the Slavic language served as an “apostolic dialect.”3 This is the stage at which Old Bulgarian was a kind of an auxiliary linguistic instrument “for the dissemination in simpler words of the dogmatic truths whose complexity, according to the position of the Roman church, only Latin was capable of expressing.”4 After the death of Methodius in the spring of 885, however, for a number of political reasons, his followers were expelled from Pannonia, writing in Slavic was discontinued,

16

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

and Latinism was restored. It was then that the disciples of Cyril and Methodius went to Bulgaria. They introduced Old Bulgarian literature and initiated a new stage in the development of the Slavic culture of writing. In Bulgaria, Old Bulgarian became the official language of state administration and of the church. It acquired legitimacy as a result, becoming equal in status to the sacred Greek and Latin—the two main Christian languages of this period. And the works of writers like Clement of Ohrid (d. 916), Constantine of Preslav (d. tenth century), Naum of Ohrid (d. 910), and John the Exarch (d. tenth c.) transformed it into a great literary language. As Picchio notes: In the Bulgaria of Boris and Simeon, the Slavic language was not at all accepted as a language of the people, that is, as the equivalent of a lingua vulgaris, but it acquired an independent literary merit comparable with that of church Latin in the West and Greek in the East. That is, we can speak of a process of devulgarization that characterizes the linguistic and religious politics of the First Bulgarian Kingdom.5

The Old Bulgarian men of letters codified the language through the literary texts they produced. And these texts, for their part, became the foundation upon which the literatures of the other Orthodox-Slavic peoples (Russia and Serbia) gained a foothold and developed. For this reason, Old Bulgarian literature should be designated a “literary paradigm,” having established a corpus of exempla that determined the later development of the entire literary activity in the lands of Orthodox Slavdom.6 In other words, the literature created in the time of the First Bulgarian Kingdom, between the ninth and tenth centuries, marked the beginning of a new literary and cultural civilization, largely of an equal status to the Latin and the Greek—that of Slavia Orthodoxa,7 which had a supranational character and was based on the use of a common language. Old Bulgarian literature is a religious literature and, as such, it is entirely dominated by a Christian ideology and worldview. Most writers and literate people, to the extent that there were such, were members of the clergy. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that their works were created with the purpose of serving religious ritual and instilling Christian values. For this utilitarian, pragmatic literature, aesthetic enjoyment and intellectual challenges, typical for literature in the modern world, were rather an accidental effect. And nevertheless, insofar as we consider the phenomena in view of their contemporaneity, we can say that during the period of the First Bulgarian Kingdom, works emerged in the Preslav Literary School8 that were commensurate with the high literary achievements of Byzantium. It was precisely then that some of the most significant poetic, rhetorical, and prose works in the history of medieval Bulgarian literature were created. Most of these are directly connected with liturgical services, but there are also some with no such connection. In most of the works, meaning is achieved via concrete historical messages as well as symbolic and allegorical inferences typical for this epoch. But there are also texts in which an additional broadening of meaning can be discovered, exceeding the usual parabolic style through which the works from the Middle Ages emulate their Biblical prototypes. It is a matter of a supplementary figurative semantic layer,

Medieval Bulgarian Literature

17

achieved through imagery and stylistic and rhetorical devices, producing a polysemy characteristic of every literary text.9 In one of the earliest works and the first hagiographic text in Old Bulgarian literature—the Long Vita of Cyril10—a number of images along these lines can be found. We will focus, however, on perhaps the most famous one, describing the union between Cyril and Sophia the Wisdom of God. An episode is included in the beginning of the Vita narrating the dream of seven-year-old Cyril in which the city governor tells him to choose as his wife one of the noble girls of the city who have gathered there. Cyril stops before the most beautiful among them who, in his words, had a radiant face and lavish adornments of golden beads and pearls about her; her name was Sophia— that is, Wisdom.11 Found in this episode are the usual references to Biblical texts—in this case, to the Book of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon, in which Wisdom is represented as a beautiful girl; the symbolic dimensions of the number seven, sacred in the Christian culture, express simultaneously perfect unity with God (in three persons) and creation (the four directions of the visible world); through the customary device of hagiography (showing the predetermination of the hero in a dream or vision) and through the allegorical union between Cyril and Sophia, his passion for learning and his pursuit of divine knowledge are established; and not least, a sort of explanation is given of the sobriquet “philosopher,” which Cyril received. Thus, it can be said that the episode ushers in the figurative paradigm of holiness. It is an interesting fact that in more than one Byzantine vita episodes are found describing a bride-show. These are texts mainly from the period of the ninth–tenth centuries. In the opinion of Lennart Rydén, this was a matter of literary fashion, owing to the inarguably functional character of these plots, related to a large degree to fairytale narratives12 and pre-Christian legends and texts.13 In the Long Vita of Cyril, however, there is no question of a real incident, but of an allegory revealing Cyril’s dedication to learning, the word, God, and to divine knowledge. The choice of this particular plot to show the predetermination of the hero attests to an attitude of the Old Bulgarian author that particular models, typical for Byzantine hagiographic prose in this period, be followed. The episode is also an expression of the ideologeme of the time connected with the notions of (theological) knowledge as salvation, given to the Bulgarians as a result of predetermination and election. The Bulgarians as a chosen people, upon whom God’s blessing had been bestowed, was a dominant motif in the Bulgarian literature from the ninth and tenth centuries, the period of the First Bulgarian Kingdom. This was, to a great extent, due to the fact that the concept of the significance and the historic mission of the Bulgarians was an essential element in the political doctrine of Simeon I the Great (893–827).14 This idea was also prominent in an exemplary work of rhetoric—On the Letters by Chernorizets Hrabar.15 Its beginning states: Now formerly the Slavs didn’t have letters, but they counted and prophesied with lines and notches, being pagans. And when they became Christians they had to write the Slavic language with Latin and Greek letters, without any system. But

18

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature how can one write well with Greek letters: God or life […] or youth, or language and other such things? And it was that way for many years. After that, God, who loves man, arranging everything and not leaving the human race without understanding, but bringing everyone to understanding and salvation, took pity on the Slavic people and sent them the holy Constantine the Philosopher, called Cyril, a just and truthful man. And he created for them thirty-eight letters, some on the model of Greek letters, others after Slavic speech.16

On the Letters is a comparatively short rhetorical text exalting Slavic literacy and polemicizing with its opponents—the supporters of trilingualism17—who did not accept the sacred and divinely inspired origins of the Slavic script. Emphasizing the merits of Slavic writing, the author objects to the sacredness of the Greek script because, in his words, it was invented by pagans, while the Slavic letters “are holier and more worthy, because a holy man invented them.”18 Cyril was a teacher sent by God, who had a mission of salvation, to lead the Slavic peoples out of the chaos and confusion of both ignorance and the inability to acquire knowledge, and into the orderly, organized, and harmonious world that was the very blessing of God. Order, according to the concepts of the medieval person, “came from an absolutely transcendental, absolutely universal God, who was found not only beyond the material boundaries of the cosmos, but also beyond its ideal boundaries.”19 It is no coincidence that we already encounter the blessing given to the Slavs through the gift of the word, presented as a kind of transition from chaos to order, in the introduction to the Long Vita of Cyril. There, it states that the merciful and generous God, desiring salvation for the people, which could be achieved through knowledge of the truth, does not cease working benefactions for humankind: “He did so also in our generation, having raised up for us this teacher who enlightened our nation, which did not wish to walk in the light of God’s commandments, and whose understanding was obscured by weakness and even more by the Devil’s wiles.”20 A bit further into the text, in words attributed to the Byzantine emperor himself, we see the same idea. In a reply to the request of the prince (княз) Rostislav (Rastitsa) of Great Moravia to send him a teacher who could explain the Christian faith to the Slavs in their own language, he wrote: God, who will have all men come unto the knowledge of the truth and raise themselves to a greater station, having noted your faith and struggles, arranged now, in our time, to fulfill your request and reveal a script for your language, which did not exist in the beginning but only in later times, so that you may be counted among the great nations that praise God in their own language.21

Also organized around the semantic opposition of darkness/ignorance and light/ knowledge/enlightenment is the Eulogy of Cyril, written by Clement of Ohrid. The light imagery typical of the works of Clement of Ohrid is present here as a basic semantic core, expressed through all stylistic means and possibilities of metaphor. It can be said that this overexposure of the imagery of light is related to its particular

Medieval Bulgarian Literature

19

privileged position, owing to the idea that light is an “absolute metaphor for God.”22 In the words of the apostle John, “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”23 The Eulogy of Cyril24 also states that, through his piety and beauty, he dawned on the earth like a sun, enlightening the whole world with the rays of the tri-hypostatic God. And here, as in other works from the period, the enlightenment of the Slavs, who had been shrouded in unreasoning darkness, is presented as the result of Cyril’s mission of salvation: “Even though he shone later, he surpassed everyone. Just as the morning star, arising later, causes the whole starry surface of the sky to shine, giving light with its rays […] shining more than the sun with his triune rays, he enlightened innumerable people lying in the darkness of ignorance.”25 In a large portion of the works from the period, in which literacy and the word are a basic theme, there is also an explicitly expressed or implicitly alluded to providentialism. The Slavic script and the enlightenment of the people are presented as a result of divine prophecy. In both the Eulogy of Cyril and the Vita of Cyril, we encounter the metaphor, based on a verse in the Book of Isaiah, depicting the Slavic script as a way of overcoming muteness and deafness, that is, the impossibility of articulating and perceiving what is said: “According to the prophecy he [Cyril] exposed the dumb language and with the letters he directed everyone on the road to salvation.”26 Also: “And according to the word of the prophet, the ears of the deaf were unstopped, the Words of the Scriptures were heard, and the tongues of stammerers spoke clearly.”27 The analogy in both texts is with the Book of Isaiah 32.4 (“The fearful heart will know and understand, and the stammering tongue will be fluent and clear”).28 By relating concrete events to the transcendental dimensions of the Holy Scripture, salvation is conceived of as possible only through language and the word. In the Prologue to the Gospels (Проглас към евангелието),29 a poetic text from the ninth century, the script (and its role as the salvation for the Slavs) is also presented as a result of a prophetic prediction: For as it was promised by the prophets … That is what happened in our seventh millennium. As the promise was unto the blind to see And unto the deaf to hear the Word of Gospels For man needs to know God. Verily I say unto you, Slovienes This precious gift of God and his love is yours.30

Тhe work is a sort of a poetic preface to the translation of the Biblical books of the Gospels, which herald the incarnation of the Word of God, the birth of God in the flesh. The established title of the text—Проглас към евангелието (прогласъ естъ ст҃го евангелиꙗ (Prologue to the Gospels)—is actually its first verse. In the copies that have been preserved, the text is titled “Oration of Our Blessed Teacher Constantine the Philosopher” (Бл҃женаего оучителѣ нашего константина философа слово). In Old Bulgarian texts, the word “прогласъ” is unique, a hapax legomenon, and it is

20

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

related semantically to the word евангельѥ (evangelie, from the Greek εὐανγγέλιον “good news”/εὐαγγελίζομαι “announce good news”). Because of this, it should be understood as провъзгласяване, възвестяване (proclamation, announcement), but from here also as пророчестване (prophesying) or предричане (foretelling). Hristo Trendafilov views the Prologue to the Gospels as proclaiming the fulfilled prophecy of the coming of Christ for the Slavs and the meaningful comprehension of its instruction in a native, Slavic language.31 In this sense, the work is connected with one of the most important functions of medieval Christian literature—to give voice to divine truth. It is no surprise that the words Слово (Word) and Бог (God) are the ones most often encountered in the work. The ethnonym словѣнъ (Slavs) appears bound with the word слово “word,” and it seems that it is no coincidence that it appears in the text only twice, where it is a matter of listening to the word:32 “слышите словѣньскъ народъ вьсь·33/слышите слово отъ бога бо приде·/слово еже кръмитъ дш҃ѧ чл҃вчскыѧ·” (Hear you, the whole Slovien nation,34/Hear the Word, sent by the Lord,/The Word that feeds hungry human souls.)35 In the Prologue to the Gospels one of the most impactful metaphors presents illiteracy as nakedness: “наꙃи бо вьси бес кънигъ ѧзыци/брати сѧ не могѫще без орѫжиꙗ/съ противьникомь дш҃ь нашихъ· (Naked are nations36 without books/they cannot fight without a weapon/against the enemy, who destroys our souls37). The implicit analogy here is that, as God was born in the flesh for the salvation of humankind, so too the letters/writing, giving form to language, will give the Slavs that light which is God himself and will lead them out of the darkness of ignorance and the lack of enlightenment. The selected examples from different categories—prose, poetry, rhetoric— show basic themes and ideas in texts during this period. Literacy, the word, and enlightenment, however, are basic Christian categories. This is why the works had a universal ring. And as far as the literature of the First Bulgarian Kingdom, the period of the ninth–tenth centuries, we can say that it is universal and entirely subordinate to the aspiration to enter into the genre, the figurative, and the stylistic paradigm of Byzantine Christian literature. This assertion is also valid to a great extent for the literature of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom (1185–1396), especially for the period from the end of the thirteenth century and throughout the fourteenth century, when there was a second flourishing of literacy. But we should not overlook the fact that this was the period of hesychastic philosophy and ideology, which influenced the development of literary phenomena to a large degree. Bulgaria’s fall under Byzantine rule put an end to a period in which its literature had been developing with exceptional intensity; this period is known as the Golden Age of Letters, reigned over by Simeon (893–927), protector and patron of culture and literature. During the period of Byzantine rule (1018–1185), the eloquence and language experimentation typical for the authors of the preceding period is not evident. The works written in Bulgarian were mainly apocryphal, and their authors remain unknown. Tendencies can be observed in them that, generally speaking, are connected with imparting ethnicity-specific traits to certain Christian ideas and concepts, as well as conferring a “national countenance” to common Christian cults, that is, the “Bulgarization of saints.”

Medieval Bulgarian Literature

21

In this period, so-called historical and apocalyptic works were plentiful.38 These include information about specific events in Bulgarian history in the form of revelations, most often by some of the great prophets like Isaiah and Daniel, in an oracular manner. That is, they speak of these events as if they were forthcoming, although they had already occurred. Usually Bulgarian history was present as a part of the series of kingdoms that would change before the Second Coming. The idea about an alternation of kingdoms, as we know, comes from the Book of Daniel, according to which, before the Second Coming, there would be a succession of four kingdoms—the Median, the Persian, the Chaldean, and the Greek. In his commentary on the Book of Daniel, St. Jerome sees in the last the “fourth” kingdom of the Roman Empire, whose reign would continue until the end of the world. Thus, the Roman Empire became a part of the “divine plan,” which led to the identification of the “Roman world” with the Christian world.39 When the Bulgarian men of letters and compilers of historical and apocalyptic works40 included the Bulgarian kingdom in this series,41 however, this legitimized the importance of the Bulgarian nation, placing it directly among the chosen peoples in the Holy Scriptures. At the same time, it reduced universal Christian history to the specifics of Bulgarian reality, in this way imparting a certain “national” tone. One illustrative example of this is the Tale of Prophet Isaiah: How He Was Taken to the Seven Sky [sic] by an Angel (better known as the Bulgarian Apocryphal Chronicle).42 In this text, the Bulgarian nation is represented through Old Testament imagery, and their election is a principal leitmotif: Here I am, Prophet Isaiah, Our God Jesus Christ’s beloved amongst the prophets, coming according to the will of God to tell you what is going to befall the men over the whole world in the last days. It is not me, who tells this story, brethren, but rather our Heavenly Father with His Holy Spirit relates this story to me and now I am telling it to you. […] then He sent his holy angel unto me and lifted me up from the earth taking me up into the celestial height. […] And then I heard a voice, saying something else unto me: “Isaiah, My beloved Prophet, go west of the uppermost lands of Rome, separate the third part of the Cumans, called Bulgarians and populate the land […] which was abandoned by the Romans and the Hellenes.43

The analogy with the Israelites, led toward the Promised Land by the prophet Moses, is clearly visible. The very land where Isaiah led the Bulgarian people was also represented through the familiar topography from the Book of Exodus.44 The application of attributes such as “New Jerusalem,” “Kingdom of Jerusalem,” and “Seven-Hilled Babylon,” which in one way or another correlate Bulgarian specificities to Biblical ones, is due both to a blending of ideas and to an awareness of belonging to a “complex, shared identity,” in the words of Ivan Bilyarski. But this also shows an aspiration for the specifically Bulgarian to be presented through the prism of Christian history. According to Bilyarski, the work is indicative of the creation and support of a particular religious self-awareness and of the state and political ideology based thereupon.45

22

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Hagiographic texts from this period provide another example. It is customary that the saints insist on their belonging to a supranational community, the Christian community, and they usually indicate Heavenly Jerusalem as their homeland. In the Bulgarian texts of saints’ lives from this period, however, we find testimonies of the saints’ belonging to the Bulgarian ethnicity.46 This applies not only to saints who are  Bulgarian in their origin, such as, for example, John of Rila, about whom George Skylitses (twelfth century)47 wrote that he was “Bulgarian by birth,” but also for the early Christian saints who were in no way of Bulgarian descent. Such is the case in one version of the Life of St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, in which it is said that his father was “a Bulgarian” by birth.48 The compositions insisting on the origins of Cyril and Methodius provoke the greatest interest. Thus, for example, in the Brief Vita of Cyril (the so-called Assumption of Cyril), which is believed to have emerged in the thirteenth century,49 it is announced: “The homeland of this venerable father of ours was the thrice holy city of Thessaloniki, in which he was also born. Bulgarian in origin, he was born of pious and devout parents.”50 We encounter the same information in the Brief Vita of Methodius, a text from the same period: “This holy Methodius was from the city of Thessaloniki, a Bulgarian by birth.”51 A little earlier, however, before the idea of the Bulgarian origins of the holy brothers crystalized, testimonies about their missionary activity among the Bulgarians had emerged. In the Synaxar Vita of Cyril, which probably appeared in the eleventh century, we read: “After this, he went to Moravia and taught many people to believe in Christ […]. After this, he went among the Bulgarians, preaching about Christ.”52 In later monuments, this idea is presented as the conversion of the Bulgarians by the brothers themselves: “After this he went to the Bregalnica, and there he found some people from the Slavic tribe converted. But those whom he found unconverted, these he converted and showed them the way to the Orthodox faith. And he wrote books for them in the Slavic language. And those whom he guided to the Christian faith were 54,000.”53 In the Vita of Clement of Ohrid, written by the Byzantine man of letters and archbishop of Ohrid, Theophylact, in the twelfth century, there is a statement that the Bulgarian king Boris was baptized by Methodius himself: “Besides this, the great Methodius was then continuously bestowing with the benefactions of his word King Boris as well […], whom he had earlier made his spiritual child.” This idea would turn out to be important later, when it was reproduced in Paisius of Hilendar (1722–1773) in order to produce other stories, subject to other ideologemes. The “Bulgarization” of common Christian saints, Cyril and Methodius in particular,54 is a widely discussed issue in medieval Slavic studies. We will not dwell on this here, as this issue, however interesting it may be, would divert us significantly from the focus of the present discussion. The goal here was to note particular tendencies in the texts of this period that speak to a certain surmounting of “supranationality,” a feature of the literature from the previous period, directing attention to the Bulgarian. Medieval Bulgarian literature has the clear self-awareness of “world” literature— with the caveat that the Christian world is to be understood here as “the world.” In the first century of its existence, this literature focused on the entry of the Bulgarian nation into the family of Christian nations and elevating the Bulgarian language to

Medieval Bulgarian Literature

23

the level of the languages in which the Word of God was preached. When the first fervor of entering the Christian world passed, however, and a political and social crisis set in, attempts at “nationalizing” the field of the sacred began, mainly along the path of ascribing an ethnic origin to the Christian saints and the inclusion of the Bulgarians into the prophetic future of the apocryphal apocalyptic literature. With all of the conventionality and precariousness of analogies of this sort, we can discover a similar mechanism as well in the functioning of Bulgarian literature in the new eras.

Notes 1 There are two hypotheses about the exact year of the invention of the Slavic alphabet: 863 and 855. For a more detailed discussion of the postulated theses on the question of the exact year, see: Диана Атанасова and Бойко Пенчев, “Хронология и идеология (За начало на славянската писменост според учебниците по история и кирилометодиевистиката),” Eslavistica Complutense 14 (2014): 97–106, http:// revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ESLC/article/view/44754/42190. 2 The Glagolitic alphabet (глаголица) was the first Slavic script created by ConstantineCyril. It is based on the Thessalonian Slavic dialect, which was a dialect of the Old Bulgarian spoken language. Thus, the written language of the brothers Cyril and Methodius was Old Bulgarian. The term “Old Church Slavonic” used in Western scholarship is not appropriate because, in medieval Bulgaria, the written language was used not only in the ecclesiastical sphere and for the purposes of the religious ritual, but also in the public sphere and administration. 3 Рикардо Пикио (Riccardo Picchio), “Мястото на старата българска литература в културата на средновековна Европа,” in Православното славянство и старобългарската културна традиция (София: Софийски университет “Св. Климент Охридски,” 1993), 150. 4 Ibid., 153. 5 Ibid., 152. 6 Ibid., 140. 7 Riccardo Picchio introduced the term Slavia Orthodoxa (Orthodox Slavdom) in order to signify the cultural community professing Orthodox Christianity, whose existence had already been recognized in the Middle Ages. Рикардо Пикио, “Православно славянство” и „римско славянство“ (Литературно-историографски въпроси),” in Православното славянство и старобългарската културна традиция (София: Софийски университет “Св. Климент Охридски,” 1993), 52. 8 The Preslav Literary School emerged in the second half of the ninth century in the northeastern region of Bulgaria, and together with the Ohrid Literary School, founded at the same time in the southwestern region of the country formed the earliest two main literary centers of medieval Bulgaria. 9 In his History of Byzantine Literature, Alexander Kazhdan makes a distinction between literature (Literatur) and letters (Schrifttum). Alexander Kazhdan, A History of Byzantine Literature (650–850) (Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation Institute for Byzantine Research, 1999), 1–3.

24

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

10 The Vita of St. Cyril was written in the second half of the ninth century (sometime in the period from 869, when Cyril died, to 882, from when the Latin text about St. Clement of Rome [d. 99 AD] Vita cum translatione s. Clemintis dates in which information can be found about Cyril that is believed to have been taken from the Vita of St. Cyril). The author of the Vita of St. Cyril is unknown. In the scholarship there are two hypotheses: (1) that its author is Clement of Ohrid and (2) that it is a collective work and that Clement participated in its writing, as did other disciples of Cyril. For The Long Vita of Cyril in English see Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 1983), 23–97. 11 Quoted in ibid., 27. 12 Rydén believes that because these episodes appear in narratives (in saints’ lives and in some chronicles) primarily in the ninth and tenth centuries, it is a matter of a tendency in anonymous works to include such fictional elements: Lennart Rydén, “The Bride-Shows at the Byzantine Court—History or Fiction?”, Eranos 83 (1985): 190–1. According to other researchers, however, the episodes describing bride-shows are not just literary inventions, but reflect a real court practice for choosing the wives of Byzantine rulers. And in this sense we can look at some of the attested stories as historical evidence: Warren Treadgold, “The Historicity of Imperial Bride-Shows,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 54, (2004): 39–52. 13 A similar plot is present also in the Old Testament Book of Esther and in The Geography by Strabo (64 BC–c. AD 24), in which the story is told of the beautiful hetaera Rhodopis, chosen to be the king’s wife. Rydén, 181. 14 Angel Nikolov (Ангел Николов), Политическата мисъл в ранносредновековна България (София: Парадигма, 2006), 109. 15 For the treatise On the Letters in English see Thomas Butler, Monumenta Bulgarica: a Bilingual Anthology of Bulgarian Texts from the 9-th to the 19-th Centuries (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1996), 147–58. 16 Quoted in ibid., 147. 17 The idea that there were only three holy languages—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin— that were the most elevated in the entire world was formulated by Isidore of Seville (560–636). Although it was not accepted as Christian canon, and in this sense it had no dogmatic character, it served the political interests of this period and the ambitions for influence of the two main religious centers—Rome and Constantinople. 18 On the Letters, Butler Monumenta Bulgarica, 147. 19 Sergey Averintsev (Сергей Аверинцев), “Редът в космоса и редът в историята,” in Ранновизантийската литература. Традиции и поетика (София: Тавор, 2000), 304. 20 Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints, 27. 21 Ibid., 67. 22 Sergey Averintsev (Сергей Аверинцев), “Златото в символиката на ранновизантийската култура,” in Ранновизантийската литература. Традиции и поетика (София: Тавор, 2000), 438. 23 1 Jn 1.5. 24 For the Eulogy of Cyril in English see Butler, Monumenta Bulgarica, 85–97. 25 Quoted in ibid., 93. 26 Ibid., 91. 27 Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints, 69.

Medieval Bulgarian Literature

25

28 Isa 32.4. 29 There are two hypotheses about the authorship of this poetic text: (1) that it is the work of Constantine-Cyril the Philosopher (Emil Georgiev, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Toporov, Krassimir Stantchev, Donka Petkanova) and (2) that it was written by Constantine of Preslav (André Vaillant, Petar Dinekov, Ivan Dobrev). 30 All the citations in English of the Prologue to the Gospels are according to the translation of Michaela Chorváthová, published in Konštantín Filozof Proglas, ed. Magdaléna Gocníková (Bratislava: Perfect, 2004), 9–11. 31 Hristo Trendafilov (Христо Трендафилов), “Проглас към евангелието: жанрпрецедент и функционална множественост,” LiterNet 4, no. 53 (2004), https:// liternet.bg/publish3/htrendafilov/proglas.htm#26. 32 Roman Jakobson (Роман Якобсон), “Проглас към евангелието на свети Константин,” in Езикът на поезията (София: Издателство “Захари Стоянов,” 2000), 118. 33 Old Bulgarian text; Andrey Boyadzhiev (Андрей Бояджиев), Старобългарска читанка. Текстове. Речник. Справочник (София, 2016), 117–21, https://naum.slav. uni-sofia.bg/liliseries/diss/2016/11. 34 The correct translation should be Slavic people since during that period we can’t speak of a nation. 35 Konštantín Filozof Proglas, 17. 36 It should be people, all the more because ѧзъіци means both “languages” and “people.” 37 Ibid., 37–8. 38 Apocrypha with typical apocalyptic stylistics, which follow Biblical models of prophetic visions in terms of their composition: Anisava Miltenova and Vassilka Typkova-Zaimova, Historical and Apocalyptical Literature in Byzantium and Medieval Bulgaria, trans. Maria Paneva and Milena Lilova (Sofia: East-West Publishers, 2011). 39 Milyana Kaymakamova (Миляна Каймакамова), Власт и история в средновековна България (VII-XIV в.) (София: Парадигма, 2011), 130–2. 40 Because it is a matter of pseudepigrapha, of works ascribed to distinguished figures (Vision of the Prophet Daniel, Tale of the Prophet Isaiah, etc.), their authors are anonymous. 41 For example, in Interpretation of Daniel: “For God crowned seven kings […] and their kingdoms […] And when the beginning of the sorrows of the whole world comes, Michael Khagan will arise among Bulgarians.” Miltenova, Historical and Apocalyptical Literature, 181. 42 Ibid., 291–5. 43 Ibid., 291. 44 Ivan Bilyarski (Иван Билярски), “Избраният народ и Обетованата земя (Географски черти на религиозната идентичност),” Старобългарска литература 41–2, (2009): 121–33. 45 Иван Билярски, Сказание на Исайя пророка и формирането на политическата идеология на ранносредновековна България (София: ПАМ Пъблишинг Къмпани, 2011), 207. 46 Ivanka Gergova examines medieval and National Revival period texts in which Bulgarian national affiliation is attributed to the saints. Иванка Гергова “Побългаряване на светци,” Старобългарска литература 48, (2013): 219–29. 47 George Skylitses was a Byzantine writer and imperial secretary who was the governor of Sofia during the time of Emperor Manuel I Comnenos (1143–1180).

26

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

48 The Bulgarian version of the Life of St Demetrius is considered to have been written in the thirteenth century. It is translated into modern Bulgarian by Anna-Maria Totomanova (Анна-Мария Тотоманова). Klimentina Ivanova (Климентина Иванова), ed., Стара българска литература. Том четвърти. Житиеписни творби (София: Български писател, 1986), 412. 49 There are hypotheses that posit the emergence of the text around the beginning of the twelfth century or the end of the eleventh. 50 Иванова, Стара българска литература, 64. 51 Klimentina Ivanova (Климентина Иванова) “Успение Методиево,” Palaeobulgarica 23, no. 4 (1999): 22. 52 Иванова, Стара българска литература, 68. 53 Ibid., 64. 54 Regarding Cyril and Methodius specifically, see Dimo Cheshmedzhiev (Димо Чешмеджиев), Кирил и Методий в българската историческа памет през средните векове (София: Академично издателство “Проф. Марин Дринов,” 2001).

2

Bulgarian Literature in a “Romaic” Context Raymond Detrez

According to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Literary Terms, a national literature consists of the “written creations in a specific national language,” especially with a view to those characteristics that are considered to determine the appearance of the literature in question.1 An answer to the question of what exactly “appearance” (облик) might signify is provided by the entry “National singularity of literature” (“Национално своеобразие на литературата”) in the same dictionary: “the national singularity of a literature is displayed in its subjects matters, in the description of everyday life and nature, in the language and style of the authors, but first of all in the character of the protagonists.”2 In practice, since language is supposed to constitute the base of the nation and to reflect the “people’s soul” or Volksgeist, which allegedly is omnipresent in all material and immaterial cultural achievements of the nation, the entire literary production in a specific national language—from the first written accounts to contemporary literature—is believed to reflect the collective singularity of the national community using that language.3 However, many, if not most literary works have no particular national features except for the language in which they are written. This is the case with literary works produced during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. They are strongly marked by a common perception and experience of the surrounding world, a religious or philosophical outlook on life, a moral and aesthetic value system characteristic of a civilization in a specific phase of its historical development, but do not display a particular ethnic, let alone national specificity. Admittedly, these works may contain references to certain realia. Medieval mystery plays, neo-stoic Renaissance poems, Enlightenment contes philosophiques conveying abstract ideas are inevitably situated in a concrete location and deal with concrete people, but the “national” particularities of that location and these people are of no relevance to their chief message. It might be useful to attribute to the term “national literature” a narrower meaning, comparable in its specificity to terms such as “Renaissance literature,” “Enlightenment literature,” and others. “National literature,” then, relates to such literary works, in which the author had purposefully meant to display national distinctive features: they deal with

28

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

national themes including liberation struggles, foreign oppression, and personalities and events with national historical relevance, situated in recognizably “national” urban or rural environments. The protagonists are attributed typically “national” features (traditional costumes, a collective mental makeup or “national character”); they use an “authentic” language, labeled as “national” as well. Mountains and rivers are seen as personifications of national identity (e.g., Стара планина, Балкана, i.e., the Balkan Range; Дунав, Danube). Such literature, produced mainly by authors of the romantic and realist schools in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, is a “nationalizing literature,” both in the transitive and the intransitive sense: a literature that acquires an explicit national character and at the same time contributes to the creation of the national community, making it “visible” by construing its cultural distinctiveness and strengthening the bonds between its members by providing them with a mythologized self-image. My contribution to this volume deals with Bulgarian literature from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, the era preceding that literature’s development into a national literature in the narrow sense of this term. It is a literature possessing a number of characteristics that render it different not only from the literature of the National Revival (възрожденска литература)—a “national literature” in the narrow sense of the word—but also from medieval literature. Considering this literature as “late medieval” or “early National Revival literature” is denying it its own specific nature, which I will deal with in this chapter.4 At variance with Old Bulgarian, genuinely “medieval” literature, Bulgarian literature in the pre-national period appears to have been part of a particular polylinguistic literary system that developed within the multiethnic Orthodox Christian community that formed within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire and resulted from the Ottoman state institutions, more specifically the way the Ottomans dealt with religious diversity. This system developed from the sixteenth century onward, reaching its full maturity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As opposed to Old Bulgarian literature, this literature is democratized, in the sense of being more accessible to ordinary people and dealing with their everyday life; in addition, it had acquired some frail Enlightenment features. However, conversely to what is customary in National Revival literature, the “people” addressed is not ethnically marked; it is merely the Bulgarian-speaking segment of the huge Orthodox Christian community in the Ottoman Empire. To emphasize its being a literature “in its own right” (and for the sake of brevity), I attemptively launched the term “Romaic literature,” in the sense of “the literary production of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman empire,” of which Bulgarian literature was a part. “Romaic” is derived from Romaios (Greek Ῥωμαῖος, plural Ῥωμαῖοι), and “Romaean,” which was a shared selfdenomination of all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. My use of the term “Romaic” needs clarification, since it touches the very essence of my argument. The Byzantines called themselves Romaioi and in Bulgarian romej (ромей) means vizantiec (византиец), “inhabitant of the Byzantine Empire.” However, since Orthodox Christianity was the essence of Byzantine “national” identity, the term in the Balkans acquired the meaning of Orthodox Christian in general. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Romaios meant Orthodox Christian in or from the Ottoman

Bulgarian Literature in a “Romaic” Context

29

Empire, of whatever ethnic origin. Bulgarians, too, were frequently called Romaioi and called themselves Romaioi. In his Manual pertaining to the bishopric of Plovdiv (Εγχειρίδιον περί επαρχίας Φιλιππουπόλεως), the priest Konstantin mentions that “there are five kinds of inhabitants in this city: Turks; Orthodox Christians, who call themselves Romaeans (romaioi); Armenians; Manicheans, usually called Paulicians; and Jews.”5 At least half of the population of Plovdiv at that time consisted of Bulgarians.6 In the chronicle of Ohrid, which pertains to events that took place between 1801 and 1843, the population of Bulgarians, Greeks, and Vlachs is systematically represented in religious terms as “Romaeans.”7 In the book-keepers’ registers of the mixed BulgarianGreek Orthodox Christian community in Adrianople, kept from 1838 to 1858, each year began with the formula Tis politias Romaion (From the community of the Romaeans).8 The self-identification of all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire as Romaioi was obviously quite widespread.9 Yet, the most frequently used collective self-denomination among Bulgarians was християнин, “(Orthodox) Christian” or, with the same meaning, “Greek” and “Romaios,” while the ethnonym “Bulgarian” appears mainly in folk songs, although the heroes of these songs were most often labeled “Christians” as well.10 These collective self-denominations referring to religious appurtenance indicate the preponderance of religious over ethnic self-identification.11

The Ottoman Context The Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state. However, in the Balkans, the majority of the population was Orthodox Christian, and in Anatolia Orthodox Christians were a considerable minority. Following the Islamic tradition and moved by sheer pragmatism, the Sublime Porte offered to the “people of the Book” (Jews and Christians), confessing a revealed religion, a substantial amount of internal autonomy in return for their acknowledgement of the supremacy of Islam and the acceptance of a number of restrictions and obligations, among which was the payment of a poll tax called cizye or haraç, marking their subordinate position. Relations between Muslims, on the one hand, and Jews and Christians, on the other, are traditionally defined as a contract, “zimma,” “providing protection in return for subjection,” although, undoubtedly, “discrimination without persecution” seems to be a more appropriate assessment.12 Orthodox Christian Bulgarians belonged to the Rum millet-i—the first of the three main non-Muslim religious communities (millets)—together with Orthodox Christian Albanians, Arabs, Gagauzes, Greeks, Karamanlis, Romanians, Serbs, Vlachs, and others.13 Just as the Ottoman authorities dealt with religious and not with ethnic groups, the leaders of the Orthodox Church(es), in an ecumenical spirit, did not take into account the ethnic distinctions within their flock. Until the eighteenth century, the situation of non-Muslims differed considerably from place to place and from period to period, as the implementation of zimma was left to the local Ottoman administrators. However, the responsibilities and competences of the clergy were increasingly extended and institutionalized, involving also a number of

30

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

secular tasks. This process coincided with the steady territorial expansion of the chief ecclesiastical institution within the Rum millet-i, the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Conquering the capital of the Bulgarian Empire in 1393, the Ottomans abolished the Patriarchate of Bulgaria in 1393, whereupon the Bulgarian dioceses were submitted to the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The dioceses in the Bulgarian principalities of Dobrudja and Vidin, which had broken away from the Bulgarian Empire in the 1330s and the 1360s respectively, had already joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople earlier. The Autocephalous Archbishopric of Ohrid in Macedonia, founded by the Byzantine Emperor Basileos II in 1019, maintained good relations with the Ottoman invaders and was left undisturbed. After the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans considered the Patriarch of Constantinople as the leader of all Orthodox Christians, who were ruled in the same way and were exposed to the same cultural influences across the empire; they shared the same fate and were dealt with as one single supraethnic religious community. All Orthodox Christian churches accepted the moral and judicial authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Moreover, the Patriarchate of Serbia and the Autocephalous Archbishopric of Ohrid were formally included into the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1766 and 1767 respectively, an event that multiplied and promoted the contacts between Orthodox Christians in the Balkans.

The Patriarchate’s Cultural Policy The Patriarchate of Constantinople pursued a policy aiming to strengthen the Orthodox Christian flock spiritually and to make it more resilient to the threat of schismatic Christian teachings (such as Catholicism and Armenian miaphysitism) and Islam. Although the danger of the “Latins” had steadily faded away, Catholicism remained the main enemy. A large part of the exegetical literature spread by the Patriarchate—and translated from Greek into Bulgarian—contended with the “schismatic Catholics.”14 Apparently the hostility towards the Catholics was inherited from the late Byzantine period, when the Hesychast monks fiercely opposed the policy of reconciliation the Byzantine emperors (reluctantly) pursued in order to find in the West allies who could help to halt the Ottoman advance. Most likely, the Ottoman sultans supported the Patriarchate’s anti-Catholic stand, given the fact that the Catholic West was among the empire’s chief enemies—to be joined in the late seventeenth century by the Orthodox Russians. Islam was considered a heresy on par with Catholicism. In addition, the “Turkish” or “Muslim” oppression was explained by the Patriarchate as “a punishment from God” for the sins Orthodox Christians had committed, more specifically their conformity to recognize the authority of the pope. In practice, since Islamic proselytism was not very strong, the main threat of Islam consisted in its seductive lure: membership in the Islamic community offered unique “career opportunities.” Bulgarians seem to have understood well the benefits of having a choice between various religions.15 In order to strengthen the solidarity and the feeling of togetherness among the Orthodox Christians, the Patriarchate resorted to the creation of the cult of the so-called “new

Bulgarian Literature in a “Romaic” Context

31

martyrs” (новомъченици)—Christians who were martyred by Muslims for the sake of the True Faith. Most “new martyrs” had embraced Islam in a moment of weakness, most often drunkenness; when they regretted their decision and wanted to re-convert to Christianity, the Muslims accused them of apostasy and threatened them with capital punishment. The cadis (Muslim judges) often preferred to declare the apostate non-accountable in order to avoid the emergence of a local place of pilgrimage that would threaten public order.16 Execution occurred mostly on insistence of the Muslim crowds. (It is worth mentioning that most converts from Christianity to Islam, however, did not change their minds.) In the first half of the sixteenth century, two famous Bulgarian hagiographies, venerating such new martyrs, were written: The Life of the New Georgi of Sofia by Priest Pejo and New Nikola of Sofia by Matej Gramatik.17 Neither of them mentions the Bulgarian nationality of the saint. According to the Russian historian Irina Makarova, the Patriarchate insisted on concealing the ethnic origin of the new martyrs in order to make them apt for veneration by all Orthodox Christians.18 While Donka Petkanova admits this, she also observes that the new martyrs were local saints of limited popularity.19 Whatever the case may be, the hagiographers point out only their protagonists’ Orthodox Christian identity. Similarly, when hundreds of new martyrs are collectively venerated by the Orthodox Church on the third Sunday after Pentecost their ethnic origin is not mentioned. Probably the most efficient means to unite the Orthodox Christian flock was the use of the Greek language. In the eighteenth century in Bulgarian and Macedonian cities, especially those in which a bishop resided, divine services in Church Slavonic were gradually replaced by services in Greek. In the Slav villages, though, Church Slavonic remained in use. In the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, to which belonged a large number of dioceses now located in Bulgaria (including Sofia, Samokov, and the famous monastery of Rila), Church Slavonic never disappeared. When the liturgy was celebrated in Greek, but the flock was overwhelmingly Bulgarian, the reading of the Gospel and the sermon was often performed in Bulgarian or, more exactly, in the local Slav dialect.20 The Greek or Graecized non-Greek bishops also resorted to Bulgarian when corresponding with non-Greek village priests. In sum, the Patriarchate of Constantinople pursued a policy of imposing Greek as a liturgical and administrative language, but mainly for the sake of homogeneity, efficiency, and convenience. When the interests of the church were threatened, it was prepared to tolerate the use of other languages. Nevertheless, since schools principally trained future priests, Greek liturgies implied being educated in Greek.

“Greek Culture” vs. “Romaic Culture in Greek” In the eighteenth century, Greek rapidly spread also among the Balkan urban elites. This was due to the establishment of Greek merchants in Bulgarian cities and to the increasing number of Bulgarians engaged in trade and becoming Graecized. A command of Greek was not only a professional requirement but also a precondition for

32

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

social upward mobility. Greek functioned as a means of intellectual communication not only among priests and monks but also among all educated Bulgarians. From the Middle Ages onward, Bulgarian intellectuals, as a rule, had a fair command of this language. Many of them studied in Constantinople or on Mount Athos, the main centers of Orthodox learning. From the outset, Bulgarian written culture was a calque of Byzantine literature. Greek influence increased in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, due to the spiritual and cultural renewal initiated by the Athonite hesychast monks. Their influence on the written culture was still strongly felt in Bulgaria during the first centuries under Ottoman rule. It is of utmost importance, however, to keep in mind that the use of Greek should not be understood as Graecization or Hellenization in the ethnic sense. First of all, in all of its functions—as a liturgical language, as the lingua franca of trade, as the language marking the “social distinction” of a multi-ethnic urban elite, as the language of interethnic and even intra-ethnic communication among Romaic intellectuals—the Greek language had, to a large extent, lost its ethnic markedness (while remaining, to be sure, also the language of ethnic Greeks). The “Greek culture” was not “Greek culture,” but “a culture in the Greek language.”21 Greek was a religiously and civilizationally marked language, adopted by the intellectual elite of the entire multi-ethnic Romaic community as “their” language. In the same way “Greek literature”—more appropriately “Romaic literature in Greek”—was considered by Bulgarians and other Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire as the common literature of the entire Romaic community, that means, as “their” literature.

“Romaic Diglossia” The language which I have been calling “Greek” for the sake of simplicity so far actually encompassed a large variety of languages, from the many Greek dialects via “demotic” or “vernacular Greek” to the moderately or extremely archaizing “scholarly Greek.” The latter was not understandable to common, undereducated people. This created a situation known as “diglossia,” which occurs when two varieties of one language, a low code and a high code, exist side by side in a given society, each one with a different role in different social situations.22 By the end of the sixteenth century the learned cleric and writer Damascenus Stoudites, alarmed by the fact that most Greeks had no access to religious books written in the scholarly language and were, consequently, threatened by various religious aberrations, decided to compile the Thesaurus (Θησαυρός), a collection of thirty-six sermons, written in a language close to that spoken by the common people.23 Damascenus, who usually wrote in a very pure, archaic scholarly Greek, explicitly mentions at the beginning of each sermon that he writes in the “common language” (κοινή γλώσσα), the “colloquial language” (λόγος πεζῇ φράσει), or “simple language” (λόγος ἰδιωτικῇ φράσει)—to distinguish it from the scholarly language.24 The Thеsaurus was widely translated into Bulgarian. The damaskinars—translators and adaptors of damaskins, “sermons from the Damascenus Stoudites”—initially made use of Church

Bulgarian Literature in a “Romaic” Context

33

Slavonic, but since that language was as incomprehensible to the average Bulgarian as scholarly Greek to the average Greek, they soon resorted to vernacular Bulgarian.25 The damaskinars took over Damascenus’s terminology and called the language they wrote “common language” or “simple language.” The damaskinar Josif Bradati is even more explicit: he claims to translate “into the simple Bulgarian language so that the simple and ignorant Bulgarian people should understand and learn.”26And Sophronius, bishop of Vratsa, translates “from the Church Slavonic and Greek profound language into the Bulgarian and simple language, to be read every Sunday in the churches, so that simple and uneducated people, women and children could understand the Law of God.”27 Obviously, the damaskinars also considered the language variety in which they wrote as “common” and “simple,” meaning “low.” Sophronius’s remark seems to suggest that “simple” Bulgarian corresponds to both Church Slavonic and Greek as “high.” However, at variance with scholarly Greek, Church Slavonic had long lost all other functions but that of a liturgical language at that time. Scholarly Greek was still a widely used, “living” literary language; Church Slavonic was a dead language, the use of which outside the liturgical sphere was rather a curiosum.28 In fact, to low code written Bulgarian vernacular corresponded high code scholarly Greek. The German linguist Karl Gutschmidt pointed out that “[d]uring the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Greek language at least partially executed the function of a literary language: in the Helleno-Bulgarian schools, in scholarship, and in correspondence.”29 That opinion is shared by Bulgarian language historians.30 Still in the first half of the nineteenth century, such prominent Bulgarian intellectuals as Rajno Popovič, Konstantin Fotinov, Neofit of Rila, Ivan Seliminski, Anastas Kipilovski, and many others corresponded with each other in Greek.31 Proceeding from scholarly Greek, the situation may be described as follows. To scholarly Greek as a high code corresponded not only demotic Greek as a low code but also vernacular Bulgarian. Jouko Lindstedt describes a case that eloquently reveals the relationship between scholarly Greek and the Greek and Slavic vernaculars. The Konikovo Gospel (ca. 1800) contains fragments from the Gospel both in demotic Greek and a South Macedonian dialect, written in Greek script.32To vernacular Greek and Bulgarian/Macedonian might be added also karamanlıca (Turkish) or karamanlidika (Greek), the language of the Turcophone Orthodox Christians in Anatolia—Turkish, written in Greek script.33 The Karamanlides themselves called their language “τουρκτζέ” (türkçe), “Turkish.” The authors of books in karamanlıca defined that language as “σάτε” (sade) or “ατζήκ τουρκτζέ” (açık türkçe)—“plain” or “open,” “accessible,” “understandable” Turkish—terms that correspond to “simple” and “common” as used by Damascenus and the damaskinars referring to the vernacular they wrote. The high code corresponding to low code tourktzé was, again, scholarly Greek. More or less the same situation, by the way, existed for Albanian and Vlach. Thus the core Greek diglossia—“scholarly Greek vs. demotic Greek”—was extended not only with vernacular Bulgarian, but also with Turkish, Albanian, and Vlach, constituting a multiple “Romaic diglossia.” There is no doubt that scholarly Greek was considered to be a (more) prestigious and even a sacred language. However, the use of the terms “simple” and “common”

34

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

did not refer to any social distinction or aesthetic judgement. Neither is there any indication that, as some Bulgarian literary historians suggest, the damaskinars used the native tongue of their readers/listeners out of concern for the preservation of their Bulgarian ethnic identity.34 The “simple” and “common” language was used pragmatically to convey more effectively religious messages to the undereducated believers. The damaskinars had the intention neither to reflect whatever Bulgarian ethnic identity in their writings, nor to instill in their readers/listeners an awareness of Bulgarian national belonging. The damaskinars’ only purpose was to keep the flock “on the path of the Lord.”

A “Romaic Literary System” The multiple “Romaic diglossia” generated a “Romaic literary system,” consisting of a “high literature” in scholarly Greek and a “low literature” in various vernaculars, one of which was Bulgarian. High literature in scholarly Greek was written by Orthodox Christian intellectuals of various ethnic appurtenance (though predominantly Greek) and read by Orthodox Christian educated people of equally various ethnic appurtenance, who all together considered that literature as their common intellectual property. To what extent Greek books—or, more precisely, Romaic books in Greek— were read by Bulgarians is revealed by the fact that from 1750 to 1840 in Bulgaria and Macedonia 1,115 titles were in circulation—not copies, but titles—of printed Greek books, compared to only fifty-two Bulgarian ones.35 The thematic overview compiled by Manjo Stojanov indicates that among them were not only religious books (a number of which in low code demotic Greek), but also scholarly books, manuals, belle-lettre, books on philosophy, and so on, briefly, what is understood by “high literature.”36 A “high literature” in Bulgarian, comparable to that produced in Greek, did not exist. These printed books in Greek were read not only by Greeks residing in Bulgaria. They could be found also in the private libraries of educated Bulgarians, in Bulgarian monasteries, in public and school libraries, and so on.37 The library of Neofit of Rila, teacher and writer (of, among many other things, Greek grammar), contained 270 books in Greek, eighty in Russian, fifty-six in Church Slavonic, about forty in Bulgarian, and thirteen in Serbian. Bulgarians not only read but also wrote books in scholarly Greek. In the nineteenth century, about thirty Bulgarians are known to have written in Greek and some of them—like Nikola Piccolo (Nikolaos Pikkolos) and Grigor Parlichev (Grigorios Stavridis)—acquired fame as Greek writers and literates.38 Even more Vlachs contributed to the corpus of high Greek literature: from the seventeenth through the first half of the nineteenth century about forty names of Vlach authors and scholars writing in Greek have come down to us.39 About six Albanian intellectuals are also known to have written in Greek40 as have many Karamanlides.41 In addition to this high literature in scholarly Greek, accessible only to educated “Romaeans,” several low literatures existed in the Balkan vernaculars, intended to serve the undereducated.

Bulgarian Literature in a “Romaic” Context

35

These literatures, comparable, to some extent, to the medieval Volksbücher in Western Europe, rendered Romaic theological thought in vernacular language and in a simple phrasing. In Bulgarian and Karamanlıca, there is large corpora of such texts, mostly handwritten, but some also printed. To be sure, collections of liturgical texts, sermons, hagiographies, exegetical treatises, and so on in Church Slavonic continued to be copied over and over, and to be used during the divine services in those churches and monasteries where the Church Slavonic tradition had been preserved. However, an increasing number of such edifying texts were translated from vernacular Greek. Since only highly educated Bulgarians were interested in high literature and understood scholarly Greek, the texts translated from vernacular Greek were meant to be read or listened to by the undereducated. Trained Bulgarian monks and priests usually knew vernacular Greek and had no problem translating Damascenus Stoudites’s Thesaurus into vernacular Bulgarian. The Thesaurus was rarely translated completely; most often a codex contained only a selection of sermons or a selection of sermons was included into a codex together with translations from sermons, hagiographies, and various edifying stories borrowed from other books, written mainly in Greek and occasionally also in Church Slavonic or in some other language. Not all damaskinars translated themselves; many of them included in their codices damaskins that were translated by others. The damaskinars translated and copied freely, abbreviating the original text or including passages of their own making. They also created totally new sermons and biblical explanations, which were still called damaskins, since they were conceived after the model of Damascenus Stoudites’s sermons. Damaskins of all kinds were included in so-called “compilations of miscellaneous content” (сборници със смесено съдържание) that also contained stories of a more secular, even entertaining, though always edifying nature. Most of these “secular” stories were translations from Greek as well; a few reached Bulgaria via translations from Greek into Russian or into some other languages. The damaskins and the stories in the compilations, dealing with miracles, the exploits of saints, superstition, witchcraft, girls’ and women’s decent behavior, soberness, et cetera, may seem obsolete to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century reader. However, they often give a charming picture of the daily life and the mental makeup of the Balkan Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule. In the seventeenth and mainly the eighteenth century in the Balkans and Russia, the writings of the Cretan monk Agapios Landos gained great popularity. In 1685–1686, about one third of his Αμαρτωλών Σωτηρία (Salvation of sinners, Venice 1641) was translated into Church Slavonic—as Спасение грешным—by the Ruthenian Samuil Bakačič.42 At about the same time, some of the stories in the third part of the book were published by Bakačič separately in the book O чудесах святой Богородицы (The Miracles of the Holy Virgin). Some of the latter stories found their way to Bulgarian “compilations of miscellaneous content.” Tellingly, they were eventually translated again, this time directly from Greek, by Josif Bradati and others.43 It is indicative of the particular relationship between Greek and Bulgarian languages and literatures that, although there existed a translation of Agapios’ work in Church Slavonic, the damaskinars preferred to translate it once again from Greek.

36

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

The Romaic literary system is an eloquent illustration of the linguistic and cultural interconnectedness of the various ethnic groups that constituted the Romaic community. It resulted from that interconnectedness, while at the same time contributing to it. Some Balkan languages did not fit entirely into the “Romaic diglossical system,”44 but they participated in their own way in the “Romaic literary system.” The same kinds of texts—sermons, hagiographies, edifying stories, historical accounts and suchlike— circulated also among Romanians and Serbs and their literatures fully served as channels through which texts were exchanged.

Conclusion The corpus of literary texts, written in Bulgaria in the period that is labelled in Bulgarian literary history Late Middle Ages or Early National Revival era, represents an integral part of Bulgarian literature in the sense of “literature written in Bulgarian.” It is, however, not “Bulgarian literature” in terms of a literature displaying distinctly ethnic, let alone national features. The authors were aware of their Bulgarian ethnic belonging, but ethnic identity was not their major concern. They considered themselves and their readers merely as Bulgarophone Romaeans. To them, the Bulgarian texts they produced were “Romaic” in the first place. Given the circumstance that the Bulgarian high literature was in fact “high Romaic literature in Greek,” shared with the other Orthodox Christian Balkan peoples, and that Bulgarian low literature did not differ from that written in demotic Greek, karamanlıca, and other Balkan vernaculars, it appears that Bulgarian literature in the pre-national period should preferably be studied in the context of a Romaic literary system. What Bulgarians considered their literature was not only literature written in Bulgarian; educated Bulgarians read (handwritten or printed) books in scholarly Greek and many of them also copied and wrote books in scholarly Greek. Since Greek functioned as the ethnically unmarked, shared language for intellectual communication within the Romaic community, there is no reason to assume that these educated Bulgarians perceived literature in scholarly Greek as “foreign” literature. It was the high literature of the religious community they identified with: the multi- or supra-ethnic community of Ottoman Orthodox Christians. When exploring the spiritual habitat of pre-national Bulgarians and their intellectual horizons, we should take into account also the entire corpus of Romaic books in scholarly Greek that was available to them. Limiting Bulgarian literature to the damaskins, accepting only them as an indication of the scope of Bulgarian cultural life and, thus, denying the Bulgarians a high culture of their own, is a distortion of historic reality. This observation is valid, by the way, also for the Karamanlides and even more for the Albanians and the Vlachs who, given the scarcity of literary texts in Albanian and Vlach, would appear to be all but completely “cultureless.” Consequently, rather than studying the damaskins and “compilations of miscellaneous content” as parts of separate national literatures and the product

Bulgarian Literature in a “Romaic” Context

37

of influences transmitted from one national literature to another, it seems more appropriate to think of them as literary works constituting one single Romaic literature, written in several languages. This is the case all the more so because “national literatures,” with clearly distinguishable national features, among the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman empire did not exist at that time. As Vasilka Tăpkova-Zaimova and Pavlina Bojčeva observe, the distinction between “one’s own literature” and “a foreign literature” was no longer valid in the Balkans after the fifteenth century, “when the idea of a common Orthodox unity of all Christians had materialized.”45 Of course, pre-national Bulgarian literature can still be studied diachronically in the context of Bulgarian literature as a whole. However, Bulgarian literature in the pre-national era did not develop within the framework of a nation, but within that of a religious community. The literary historian, insisting too much on alleged ethnic particularities risks overlooking the functionality, the social distribution, the supra-ethnic character, and the religious nature of Romaic literary texts and ignoring the way the authors and readers (or listeners) of these texts themselves dealt with them. Briefly, in the pre-national era Bulgarian literature did not produce any masterpiece that could be reckoned to “world literature” as Goethe understood it. Goethe would probably consider that “It is very well to acquaint yourself and the world with them; to our moral and aesthetic education they are of little use.”46 Considering, then, Bulgarian literature as one of the many budding “national literatures” that all together constitute “world literature” engenders the risk of missing the very essence of this literature—its belonging to the literary legacy of a particular multiethnic and multilingual Romaic “world” in its own right, occupying an admittedly modest, but unique place in world civilization.

Notes 1 Десислава Лилова, Енциклопедичен речник на литературните термини (София: Хейзел-Дуден, 2001), 280–1. 2 Лозан Николов et al., eds., Речник на литературните термини (София: Наука и изкуство, 1980), 487–8. 3 Cf. Herder’s famous statement “Has a people, especially an uncultivated people, anything dearer than the speech of its fathers? In it resides its whole wealth of ideas, its tradition, history, religion, and principles of life, all its heart and soul. To deprive a people of its speech or to disparage [its speech] it is to deprive it of its sole eternal possession, transmitted by parents to children.” Johann Gottfried von Herder, Sämmtliche Werke: Zur Philosophie und Geschichte, vol. 30 (Stuttgart & Tübingen: In der J.G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1829), 68 (translation mine). (Nationalists, quoting Herder, usually omit the parenthesis zumal ein unkultiviertes Volk, “especially an uncultivated people.”) 4 See Petar Dinekov (Петър Динеков) et al., eds., История на българската литература, vol. 1. Старобългарската литература (София: БАН, 1963) and, more recently, Анисава Милтенова, ed., История на българската средновековна литература (София: Изток-Запад, 2008). To Boyan Penev, eighteenth-century

38

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Bulgarian literature is a part of “new Bulgarian literature” (Боян Пенев, История на новата българска литература, vol. I (София: Български писател, 1976). 5 Κωνσταντίνος Οικονόμος, Εγχειρίδιον περί επαρχίας Φιλιππουπόλεως. Βιέννη, 1819, quoted in Надя Данова, “Българите и гръцката книжнина през XVIII и началото на XIX век,” Балканистика 1, (1986): 267. 6 The poet and musician Dimitrakis Georgiadis Papasymeonidis or Dimitar Georgiev Popsimeonov, a Greek according to Greek scholarship and a Bulgarian according to Bulgarian scholarship, but most probably just a Romaios, an Orthodox Christian, to himself, calls his native town Arbanasi, with its ethnically mixed Orthodox Christian population, a Romaion katoikia—a “settlement of Romaeans.” Маньо Стоянов, Опис на гръцките и други чуждоезични ръкописи в Народната библиотека “Кирил и Методий” (София: Наука и изкуство, 1973), 157. See also the comments in Paschalis Kitromilides, “In the Pre-Modern Balkans … : Loyalties, Identities, Anachronisms,” in An Orthodox Commonwealth: Symbolic Legacies and Cultural Encounters in Southeastern Europe, ed. Paschalis Kitromilides, Variorum Reprints IV (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 26–8. 7 Љубен Лапе, ed., Домашни извори за македонската историja, vol. 1 (Скопje: Институт за нациобална историja, 1951), 21, 26, 31, 32, 33, quoted in Bernard Lory, La ville balkanissime. Bitola, 1800–1918 (Istanbul: Isis, 2011), 263. 8 Archival Unit No. 31 of the Archives of the Bishopric of Adrianople, kept in the Historical Archives of Macedonia, Thessaloniki. 9 Sir Harry Luke wrote in 1936 (!): “[But] to this day Orthodox peasants, not only in Greece, but even at times in Serbia and Bulgaria speak of themselves as ‘Romans’ … The word ‘Roman’ thus included not only the Greeks of Hellas, the islands, the capital city and the various Greek centres of Asia Minor, but also the Serbs, the Rumanians and the Bulgarians of the Balkan Peninsula and the Arab-speaking Orthodox communities of Syria, Palestine and Egypt.” Harry Luke, The Old Turkey and the New: From Byzantium to Ankara (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955). 10 Димитър Ангелов, “‘Българи,’ ‘българска земя,’ ‘българско име,’ ‘българска вяра’ в песенния фолклор XV-XIX век—терминологични проучвания,” Palaeobulgarica 4, no. 3 (1980): 5–30. 11 For an in-depth discussion, see Raymond Detrez, “Pre-national Identities in the Balkans”, in Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vol. 1. National Ideologies and Language Policies, eds. Roumen Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 35–45. 12 Bernard Lewis and Benjamin Braude, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, vol. 1–2 (London, New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1982), 3. 13 Gagauzes and Karamanlis are Turcophone Orthodox Christians, the former in the Balkans, the latter in Anatolia. Vlachs speak an Eastern Romance language, close to Romanian. 14 Милтенова, История, 712–13. 15 In one of his sermons, the writer and monk Josif Bradati (Joseph-with-the-Beard) blames Christians who convert to Islam after they had sinned, hoping thus on the Day of Judgment to stand before God’s throne with a slate wiped clean. Донка Петканова-Тотева, Дамаскините в българската литература (София: БАН, 1965), 152.

Bulgarian Literature in a “Romaic” Context

39

16 Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, I430–I950 (New York: Random House, 2004), 85–7. 17 Published in Климентина Иванова, Стара българска литература, Vol. 4. Житиеписни творби (София: Български писател, 1986). 18 Ирина Ф. Макарова, Болгарский народ в XV–XVIII вв. Этнокультурное исследование (Москва: URSS, 2005), 94. 19 Донка Петканова, “Четивото на българина през XVI-XVIII век,” in Народното четиво през XVI-XVIII век, ed. Донка Петканова (София: Български писател, 1990), 17. 20 For instance in Ohrid; see Кузман Шапкарев, За възраждането на българщината в Македония (София: Български писател, 1984), 267–8. 21 Джузепе Дел’Aгата, “Гръцко-български успоредици по въпроса за езика в епохата на Възраждането,” in Студии по българистика и славистика (София: Български месечник, 1999), 53. 22 Charles A. Ferguson, “Diglossia,” Word 15 (1959): 325–39. 23 Full title: Δαμασκηνός ο Στουδίτης, Βιβλίον ονομαζόμενον Θησαυρός, όπερ συνεγράψατο ο εν Μοναχοίς Δαμασκηνός ο υποδιάκονος και Στουδίτης ο Θεσσαλονικεύς (Венеция, 1557–1558). 24 Пенев, История, 422; Джузепе Дел’Агата, “Гръцки и славянски встъпителни формули към словата на Дамаскин Студит”, in Студии по българистика и славистика (София: Български месечник, 1999), 42–3. 25 On the damaskins and the damaskinari in English, see Charles A. Moser, A History of Bulgarian Literature, 865–1944 (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1972), 34–6. 26 Петканова-Тотева, Дамаскините, 202. 27 Димитър Ангелов, Българската народност през вековете (Стара Загора: Идея, 1994), 230. 28 An exception are the writings by Partenij Pavlovič, a Bulgarian from Silistra. However, Partenij lived and worked among the Serbs, who had never discontinued writing in Church Slavonic. 29 Карл Гутшмит, “Към за връзката между развоя на културата и книжовния език в епохата на българското национално възраждане,” in Езиковедска българистика в ГДР (София: БАН, 1973), 100. 30 Елена Георгиева et al., eds., История на новобългарския книжовен език (София: БАН, 1989), 18–19. 31 Nadia Danova, “La modernisation de la société bulgare aux XVIIIe- XIXe siècles: la communication et le rôle de la langue grecque,” Bulletin de l’Association Internationale d’Etudes du Sud-Est Européen 32–34 (2002–2004): 200–1. 32 Jouko Lindstedt, “When in the Balkans, Do as the Romans Do—Or Why the Present is the Wrong Кey to the Past,” Slavica Helsingiensia 41 (2012): 110. At variance with Lindstedt, I do not consider Church Slavonic to be a high code to low code vernacular Bulgarian in the same way as scholarly Greek. 33 Richard Clogg, “A Millet within a Millet: The Karamanlides”, in Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism, eds. Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1999), 116–17; János Eckmann, “Die Karamanische Literatur,” Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta 2 (1964): 820. 34 See, for instance, the claim that in eighteenth-century damaskins, when “the germs of the early National Revival (Renaissance) ideas” had appeared, a “purposeful selection

40

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

of new Bulgarian linguistic features” can be observed “as an expression of a new collective consciousness,” which allegedly explains the archaization of the language as a means to avoid “words of Turkish, Arab, and Persian origin and Greek words.” Елена Георгиева et al., История на новобългарския книжовен език (София: БАН, 1989), 28. (In fact, the damaskins abound with Turkish and Greek words and the archaic words and grammatical forms are due to the influence of Church Slavonic.) The same monograph states (quoting Румяна Радкова, “Националното самосъзнание на българите през XVIII и началото на XIX в.,” in Българската нация през Възраждането, eds. Хр. Христов et al. [София: БАН, 1980], 51) that the “common” or “simple language” used by the damaskin-writers is “mainly the fruit of the ongoing processes of turning the language into a means of national selfawareness.” 35 Маньо Стоянов, Стари гръцки книги в България (София: Народна библиотека “Кирил и Методий,” 1978), 47–168; Маньо Стоянов, Българска възрожденска книжнина, vol. 1. (София: Наука и изкуство, 1957), 471–2. The figures are based on the collection in the National Library H. H. Cyril and Methodius in Sofia. One may assume the Bulgarian librarians collected Bulgarian books more carefully than Greek ones. That is what Stojanov himself warns the reader of; see Стоянов, Опис, 13. 36 Стоянов, Стари гръцки книги, 291–313. 37 Danova, “La modernisation,” 200–1. 38 Надка Николова, Билингвизмът в българските земи през XV–XIX век (Шумен: Епископ Константин Преславски, 2006), 109; Стоянов, Стари гръцки книги, 455–75; see also the anthology of Greek literary works by Bulgarian authors: Афродита Алексиева, Книжовно наследство на българи на гръцки език през XIX век, vol. 1, Оригинали, (София: Гутенберг, 2010). 39 Έξαρχος, Γιώργης. Αυτοί είναι οι Βλάχοι (Αθήνα: Γαβριηλίδης, 1994), 51–3; Peter Mackridge, “The Greek Intelligentsia 1730–1830: A Balkan Perspective,” in Balkan Society in the Age of Greek Independence, ed. Richard Clogg (London: MacMillan, 1981), 71. 40 Robert Elsie, History of Albanian Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 122–30. 41 Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 64–5. 42 Боньо Ангелов, “Самуил Бакачич в южнославянских литературах,” Труды Отдела древнерусской литературы 23 (1968): 293–9. 43 Петканова, Четивото, 9–10. 44 In Serbia, Church Slavonic continued to execute all functions and was not replaced by Greek as “high code.” In Wallachia and Moldova, from the seventeenth century onward, the Romanian vernacular started executing also “high” functions that so far had been performed by Church Slavonic and from then onwards, due to the influence of the Greek Phanariotes, (also) by Greek. 45 Василка Тъпкова-Заимова и Павлина Бойчева, “Св. Варвар във византийската и среднобългарската традиция,” in Българската църква през вековете, ed. Пeтко Петков (София: Св. Климент Охридски, 2003), 153. 46 Goethe refers to Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian ancient literature. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, eds. Friedmar Apel, Hendrik Birus et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, I, 13, 1993), 175.

3

The Bulgarian Literary Space and Its Languages: Monolingual Canon, Plural Writings Marie Vrinat-Nikolov

The research I have been carrying out for the past three years on the “ignored languages” of the Bulgarian literary space is part of a broader project that aims to write a history of this literary space that will take into account what Bulgarian literary historiography ignores or marginalizes. Since its creation at the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of the young nation-state, Bulgarian literary historiography has been based on one nation, one literature, one language, proposing, thus, a national, monolingual, and masculine canon. According to this canon, Bulgarian literature is a corpus of texts written in Bulgarian by Bulgarian authors. Since the changes of 1989, which have allowed for a better circulation of ideas and texts, scholars from Bulgaria and elsewhere have questioned and enriched this canon in their studies of the founding, identity-based national myths, of neglected women writers, of periodization, and more. To my knowledge, however, there is to date still no literary history from a transnational perspective, i.e., a literary history that takes the Bulgarian territories1 of the Ottoman Empire not as a closed, almost “national” entity—a nonsense—but as a multilingual, multi-confessional, and multicultural ensemble characterized by an impressive circulation of people, ideas, texts and languages, even if “Ottoman society developed an art of living side by side far more than it did an art of living together.”2 This “nationalization” of literature is not specific to Bulgaria; as Johann Strauss points out, it is noticeable in all Balkan states: Modern historians have tended to create a separate literary identity for each of them according to the Western European concept of “national” literature. Literature is restricted to the production of one “nation” in one single language; the established canon consists, of course, of original works, emphasizing specimens of the different genres which had developed in the West (novel, drama). The literary activity in the Ottoman Empire with its very specific features does not fit this pattern and is therefore not taken into account.3

To avoid such a “nationalization” of literary production, the notion of literary space is central to my point, as it is not limited to a territory bounded by national

42

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

borders: Istanbul, Bucharest, Braila, Odessa, for example, are part of the Bulgarian literary space of the nineteenth century. Taking advantage of the work and reflections carried out since the 1980s in the context of what is now called the spatial turn in the social sciences, I propose to give space to time, in order to highlight some phenomena that remain outside of the canon: the circulation of people, ideas, and texts, the multilingualism of writing (Armenian, Ottoman, Turkish, Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, Arabic, and Persian), the multi-layered identities on Bulgarian territories that were, for five centuries, incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. This absence within the Bulgarian literary canon is highlighted and deplored in a recent publication by the Bulgarian critic Milena Kirova, who argues: It may seem unbelievable, […] but we still do not have a literary history that serves as an alternative to the “general” line; […] Our canon continues to have a masculine face, we have not endeavored to seek out and organize the literature produced by Bulgarian gypsies or Pomaks or Turks, for example; … ] Each of these (possible) stories would question and reorder the general line, it would foreground “marginal” phenomena.4

The brief cartography that I will present, which excludes Old Slavic, Slavic, Bulgarian and Greek, the language of the Slavic elite, educated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is only one element in the current state of my research. This chapter is, therefore, a work in progress that should lead to a book that will study the modalities and consequences of the construction of one national, literary, and linguistic identity on the conditions of production, dissemination, and reading of written and printed texts in the Bulgarian literary space.

The Bulgarian Literary Space: Transnational, Trans-Identitarian, Multilingual The Trans-Ethnic and Religious Communities of the Ottoman Empire During the first decades following the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan territories, the status of non-Muslims (dhimmī) was defined: Christians and Jews—People of the Book—were protected by Sharia law, but subjected to taxes and discrimination until the nineteenth century. The term millet is used to describe them, though it did not appear in the Ottoman archives until the nineteenth century, under the influence of Western conceptions of “nation.” They nonetheless formed non-ethnically differentiated communities (tayfe), organized by religion. According to Benjamin Braude, “As for the so-called millet system, or, perhaps better, ‘the communal system,’ it was not an institution or even a group of institutions, but rather it was a set of arrangements, largely local, with considerable variation over time and place,” which “afforded each of the major religious communities a degree of legal autonomy and authority.”5

Monolingual Canon, Plural Writings

43

In this system, Orthodox Christians (Rumiyan), irrespective of their ethnicity (Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian, Vlach), came under the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who also performed secular administrative and judicial functions. “Greek” signified Orthodox Christian and represented an enviable social status: that of an affluent, Europeanized, urban trader bourgeoisie whose native language was Greek.6 The term only took on an ethnic meaning after the foundation of the Greek state in 1830, which had a significant impact on the emergence of the national idea among the Bulgarians.7 This idea became concrete for the first time in 1870 with the establishment of an Exarchate independent from the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and then again, in 1878, after the Russian-Turkish war, with the creation of the Principality of Bulgaria and the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia,8 before they united in 1885. After the unification, people who identified as Jewish (Romaniotes, Ashkenazim, and mainly Sephardim) or Armenian formed distinct communities of their own.

A Multilingual, Diglossic Literary Space: Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turk, Church Slavonic (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries) Benjamin Barker, who devoted forty years to the Bible Society and to spreading the word of the Bible, left an interesting account of the linguistic diversity of the Balkans: “The Holy Scriptures destined for towns and villages must be in modern Greek, Turkish written in Armenian script, Bulgarian, a little in Armenian, in Spanish written in Hebrew script, and a little in Hebrew.”9 This linguistic diversity (noticed by many Western travelers) differentiates the Ottoman Empire from other empires: despite centuries of domination, Turkish had never been imposed as the only language, nor as a language shared by the different communities. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, instruction remained religious and was above all designed for future clerics. Depending on the religion, it was delivered in monastic, Quranic (mekteb and medrese), or rabbinical (meldares) schools, where pupils studied the Divine Law and its commentaries, and where they recited prayers and sacred texts in Arabic, Hebrew, and Church Slavonic— that is, prestigious languages related to worship and distinct from spoken languages (Turkish, Judeo-Spanish, and Bulgarian).10 Before the installation of the first printing presses in Istanbul (Hebrew in 1493, Armenian in 1567, Greek in 1627, and Arabic in 1727), religious texts in the Bulgarian territories of the Ottoman Empire were written and copied in these languages for the purposes of clerics and the limited literate public. There were no books written and printed in modern (vernacular) Bulgarian prior to the nineteenth century. The first book authored by a Bulgarian was Abagar, a short breviary by the Catholic Bishop of Nikopol, Philip Stanislavov, printed in Rome in 1651. It is not written in Bulgarian, but in a blend of Croatian and Bulgarian Church Slavonic. Medieval manuscripts (hagiographies, panegyrics of the saints, liturgical texts) continued to be copied in a Bulgarian variant of Church Slavonic in monasteries—mainly in the region of Sofia at the Rila monastery, and in the Slavic monasteries of Mount Athos. Yosif Bradati was trained here along with other authors of damaskini (late sixteenth to early nineteenth century), compendiums, originally

44

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

made up of translations of the sermons of Bishop Damascenus in a language aimed to be more accessible to readers, to which more lively texts (apocryphal texts, moral texts, and translations of texts from antiquity) were added later on. It was also at Athos that the monk Paisius of Hilendar wrote his Slavonic-Bulgarian History in 1762,11 one of the first profane texts that, a few decades in advance, presented the main attributes of the Bulgarian national consciousness. Recent works by Stoyanka Kenderova (2009) and Orlin Subev (2017) on Muslim libraries and books in Bulgaria shed light on the significant literary activity—in terms of both writing and copying—that began with the seventeenth century, intensified over the course of the eighteenth, and continued into the nineteenth century in major towns with large Muslim populations. Several of these manuscripts were destined for libraries frequented by a large number of readers (notably the libraries of Vidin, Shumen, and Samokov, linked to waqf).12 They were the work of Turkish Muslim authors and copyists often belonging to the bektaşi and halveti mystical orders.13 They wrote or copied them mainly in Arabic, but also in Persian and in Ottoman Turkish, working in Sofia, the seat of the Rumelia Beylerbey in the sixteenth century, which drew many Muslims; in Samokov, where a literate Muslim elite formed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries around one of the richest libraries in the Balkans; in Shumen, around the great Tombul Mosque, its madrasa and the library of the waqf; and in Kyustendil, an active center of Naqshbandi Sufis, where Sufi treaties, hagiographies, mystical commentaries, and also divân were written. The national archives in Sofia, the Sofia Jewish Museum, and the Plovdiv Synagogue have preserved approximately 14,000 ancient books concerning Judaism, most of which are printed in Hebrew and some in Ladino (in Rashi and Meruba script). These are, namely, the Talmud, Torah, Tanakh, mahzor, and question-response books dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Apart from Rabbi Yaakov Culi’s famous commentary of the Tanakh, Me’am Loez, written in Salonika (today Thessaloniki) and published in 1730, the works in Ladino do not belong to the religious sphere. These ancient books were either brought by Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, ordered from major Italian printing presses (Venice, Bologna), or printed in the Balkans, mainly in Istanbul and Salonika.14 A few were the works of Bulgarian Jewish authors.15 If we take into account all the texts that have been copied, written, and printed in these various languages, and that have circulated in the territories that make up Bulgaria today, we are struck by a diversity and richness that complete the usual observation of indigent literature, in Slavonic and Bulgarian between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, before what is traditionally called Национално възраждане (National Revival). For example, the chapter devoted to the literature of this period in Svetlozar Igov’s Brief History of Bulgarian Literature (1996), entitled “Светлинки в мрака. Старобългарската литература в епохата на робството (XV-XVIII в.)” (Glimmers in the Darkness. Old-Bulgarian Literature at the Time of the Yoke), begins with this very dark picture: “The invasion of the enslavers devastated the country, cities and countryside were reduced to ashes. The foreign yoke not only interrupts the political life of Bulgarians, it is also a serious blow to Bulgarian culture” (translations mine).16

Monolingual Canon, Plural Writings

45

Injecting geography into literature, as Franco Moretti does in his Atlas of the European Novel, and contributing to what would be an “Atlas of world literature,” a “geography of literature” reveals unknown phenomena: “Making the connection between geography and literature explicit, then—mapping it […]—will allow us to see some significant relationships that have so far escaped us.”17 It is an approach that allows us to consider literary production from a different point of view than the usual canonical vision. Indeed, before the creation of a nation-state in 1878, literary production written in Bulgarian was part of a vast multilingual ensemble. If literature written in Armenian, Ladino, and Turkish after 1878 is considered to be that of the minorities of the Bulgarian state, this is not the case before 1878. Research is yet to establish whether these texts have been, at least in part, shared by readers from different communities.

The Tanzimat and the Secularization of Education, the Rise of the Press, and the Emergence of Literature in Vernacular Languages (Nineteenth Century) In an attempt to consolidate their weakened Empire, the Ottoman sovereigns introduced a series of reforms—the Tanzimat—between 1839 and 1876, mainly destined to centralize power in this immense territory and to create an Ottoman “nationality.” Rescripts of 1839 and 1856 notably instigated equality before the law for all of the empire’s subjects, regardless of their religious affiliation, and encouraged the secularization of education dispensed by the different communities. Within the Orthodox community, Greeks had already developed quality secular education through a network of secondary schools and academies since the foundation of the academy in Moscopole in 1700. Before the opening of Helleno-Bulgarian schools in 1815, where instruction was conducted in classical Greek and Bulgarian according to the “mutual instruction” elaborated by Bell and Lancaster, and later of Bulgarian “class” schools in 1835, cultivated Bulgarians wrote in Greek until the mid-nineteenth century. This was also true of writers who became part of the Bulgarian canon and who, prior to supporting the national cause, wrote in Greek. Some of these authors include Nikola Piccolo, whose collection of poems, Paragorimata (1839), was the first by a Bulgarian author;18 Petar Beron (known for the so-called Fish Primer, the first primer written in modern Bulgarian in 1824); Vassil Aprilov (founder of the first Bulgarian high school in 1835 in Gabrovo); Ivan Bogorov and Konstantin Fotinov (the former, the creator of the first Bulgarian newspaper in Leipzig in 1846; the latter, the founder of the first Bulgarian periodical in Smyrne in 1844); and Grigor Parlichev, the 1860 winner of an annual Greek poetry competition for his poem written in Greek, Ὁ Ἁρματωλός.19 The empire’s reforms encouraged the secularization of the Sephardi community and the spread of writing in Ladino (Rashi script), which limited the use of Hebrew to religion. Schools were opened, offering an education that was no longer only religious. The first Ladino journal, La Buena esperanza (1842), was created in Smyrna, the center of a multi-ethnic economic and intellectual bourgeoisie. Periodicals published serialized novels (romanso), often adapted from French novels that dominated the Sephardi book market until the beginning of the twentieth century.20 From 1862

46

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

onward, the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) founded in Paris opened free schools where lessons were conducted in French. These schools spread rapidly throughout the empire, including in the Bulgarian territories from 1870 onward, giving wide access to reading in French.

A Shared Cultural Horizon: Dissemination Through the Periodical Press and Translations in the Nineteenth Century The diglossia characteristic of the communities in the Ottoman Empire, the different degrees of literacy, the different timeframes of development of schools, high schools, and universities, providing secular education in the vernacular languages, the variety of alphabets used: all these suggest that the shared culture is oral (popular songs, proverbs and sayings, “travelling” figures such as Nasreddin hodja) rather than written. Yet, according to Johann Strauss, “the different communities were much less exclusive than it may seem at first glance and various types of contacts were much more frequent than might be expected. … Many readers were only familiar with one single language, but there were many channels of transmission.”21 This is corroborated by Günil Özlem Cebe’s study of translations in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century: “the millet of the Empire affected each other’s choice and taste.”22 A large number of “first” works written in the different languages of the empire, whether translated or original, first appeared in the periodical press. Almost exclusively in Istanbul (the center of cultural life of the communities), they took the form of serials, thus reaching a literate, but also non-literate, male public through reading aloud in cafés. The large number of Russian and especially Western novels (mainly French) shared by translation were almost exclusively printed in Istanbul: “Classics” (Molière, Fénelon, Cervantes), contemporaries (Maupassant, Zola, Gorki), writers now considered as minor or reserved for a young audience, or even ignored by their respective national canon (Eugène Sue, Paul de Kock, Jules Mary, Jules Lamina, Michel Zévaco, Ponson du Terrail, Jules Verne, Defoë, Alexandre Dumas, the Grimm brothers, Christoph von Schmid) were translated at most every thirty years into Turkish, Bulgarian, Armenian, and Jewish-Spanish. Robinson Crusoe was the first novel translated into Bulgarian (1849, Цариградски вестник) and into Turkish (Greek alphabet in 1853, Arabic alphabet in 1864). Schmid’s Genevieve (in Bulgarian in 1872, in Turkish Greek alphabets in 1854, in Armenian in 1855, in Arabic in 1869), and Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus, translated entirely into Bulgarian in 1873 and Turkish (Arabic alphabet) in 1859, were very popular. These translations not only helped forge a common taste and pleasure in reading among readers of different communities but also served as a kind of writing laboratory before the emergence of original novels.

Minority Writings in the Bulgarian State (Late Nineteenth to Late Twentieth Century) The Treaty of Berlin (July 1878) founded the Principality of Bulgaria and the Ottoman autonomous province, Eastern Rumelia; the two were united in 1885. For the Bulgarians

Monolingual Canon, Plural Writings

47

it brought the dreamed-of nation-state; for Jews, Armenians, Greeks and Turks—the transition from the status of a religious community within a vast multicultural empire to that of an ethnic-confessional community inside a little monolingual Christian nation-state that promised to respect their rights and freedoms. Throughout the entire twentieth century, this religious and linguistic tolerance—notably manifested in the freedom to open schools and to print books and newspapers—took on different forms, dependent on political changes, wars, and the international situation. As of the 1960s in particular, which marked the nationalist turn of the communist regime established from 1944 onward, the desire for linguistic integration was strong, to the detriment of multilingualism. In 1893, Bulgaria’s first Ladino printing press in Ruse commenced publishing the newspaper El Tresoro. Henceforth, book publishing in this language developed in Sofia, Plovdiv, and Ruse. The directory of Bulgaria’s periodical press (1844–1944)23 listed some fifty newspapers and magazines written in Hebrew and Ladino, often with titles and articles also written in Bulgarian or in French. Sephardi newspapers written in Bulgarian also emerged in the final years of the nineteenth century, encouraged by the disappearance of the AIU schools: young Sephardi first attended private Jewish schools in which the general subjects were taught in Bulgarian, before continuing in Bulgarian establishments. While a considerable number of periodicals were linked to Zionism, which developed in Bulgaria from 1896 on,24 several of them published literary texts (notably serialized novels written in Ladino, or translated from French, Hebrew, and Yiddish). In the absence of studies of books published in Ladino, researchers dispose of the catalogues compiled by Gaëlle Collin and Michael Studemund-Halevy (the collection of the Ivan Vazov library, Plovdiv; the state archives in Sofia; and the Binjamin Arditi collection in the Yad Vashem library in Jerusalem).25 Approximately 250 works were published in Ladino in Bulgaria between 1873 and 1946. They include Zionist brochures, administrative regulations, and history books. The catalogue lists twentyfive literary works (plays, poems, short stories, and novels), of which nine are translated from French, others from Hebrew and German. Of these twenty-five works dating from 1892 to 1931, twenty-one are written in Hebrew script, two in Cyrillic script (1931), and one in Latin characters (1930). While the 45,000 Jews of the Bulgarian Principality—an ally of the Third Reich—were not sent to extermination camps, unlike those in the “administrated” territories (Macedonia and Western Thrace), they did nonetheless suffer discriminatory measures from 1941 on, including deportations to provincial towns, forced labor, and the plundering of their belongings. Over 40,000 Jews left for Israel between 1948 and 1951. In 1989, only 3,000 remained. During the Ottoman period, Armenians, who had been living in the Bulgarian territories since the seventeenth century (the war between the Ottoman Empire and Persia) mainly spoke Turkish, while Armenian was primarily used in church. Before 1885, when the first Armenian printing press appeared, religious books written in Krapar (Classical Armenian) and those in Armeno-Turkish destined for a wider readership were mainly printed in Istanbul and Smyrna. In the newly created Bulgarian state, the acquisition of the mother tongue through the creation of schools was one of

48

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

the Armenian community’s priorities. In 1885, two historical books were published, one written in Armeno-Turkish and the other in Armenian. They were followed a year later by the first Armenian newspaper, Houïs (Hope), published in Latin characters by a Romanian Armenian in Varna. From 1878 to 1944, there were about sixty Armenian journals and newspapers. They were shut down in 1944, replaced by a unique socialist propaganda newspaper, Erevan, which was first printed in Armenian, and then in a bilingual Armenian and Bulgarian edition. Today, three bilingual Armeno-Bulgarian newspapers exist: Erevan (Sofia), Vahan (Plovdiv, since 1991), and Hayer (Bourgas, since 1994). Thanks to Nerses Kasabian and Agop Guiliguian’s catalogue of Armenian books published in Bulgaria in the 1885–1989 period (2008), researchers have at their disposal a nearly exhaustive list. It includes 381 titles in Armenian and six titles in ArmenoTurkish. The majority (163) are literary works by Armenian authors and translated works by foreign and Bulgarian authors (including Molière, the Brothers Grimm, Gorki, and French non-canonical authors such as Michel Zévaco, Jules Mary, or Jules Lermina): forty novels, forty-three short stories and narratives, thirty-two collections of poems, and thirty-seven plays and operetta librettos. Some are important texts for Armenian literature, written by major authors: The Fool (1881) by Hagop Melik Hagopian (Raffi), Honorable Beggars (1887) by Hagop Baronian, Rejected Love (1929) by Ervant Eruhan, or Comrade Chahnazar (1927) by Nichan Bechigtachlian. Of the authors published, I have identified fourteen who lived in Bulgaria. The Armenian language press and literature were particularly prominent in Bulgaria after the 1894–1896, 1915, and 1919– 1922 waves of immigration that followed the genocides perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire and the war between Turkey and Greece. The community grew significantly and a fairly well-off middle class emerged. After the Second World War and the establishment of a communist regime, Armenian lost ground to Bulgarian; thirteen titles, of which two literary works were published in 1947 and in 1956. Books and the press in Turkish were quantitatively the most numerous. Contacts and exchanges between Bulgaria’s Turkish intellectuals and those in Turkey began during the autocratic reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II when part of the liberal intelligentsia emigrated to Bulgaria and published newspapers and journals that spread the ideas of the Young Turks. Of the forty-four periodicals published between 1878 and 1908, then, over half appear to have been published or funded by the Young Turks. A number of newspapers appeared in the 1920s to 1930s advocating good relations between Bulgarians and Turks in the country.26 The rapid reforms introduced by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey contrasted with the cultural and social conservatism in which the Turks of Bulgaria were maintained. From its foundation in 1944 on, the Bulgarian communist regime adopted a contradictory opportunistic policy concerning the Turkish population. Thirty-nine Turkish periodicals were in print between 1944 and 1985 as opposed to approximately seventy between 1844 and 1944. After the April 1956 Plenum, the policy toward the Turks radically changed and the authorities began erasing anything that ethnically distinguished the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, most notably its language. From 1969 to 1985, only two newspapers were tolerated; one remained after 1985, Нова

Monolingual Canon, Plural Writings

49

Светлина (New Light), an organ of the Communist Party, printed in Bulgarian, and a driving force of the policy to assimilate Turks, which became particularly violent during the “revival process” in 1985. During this process, Turks had to give up their names for Slavic ones in order “to become conscious of their origin”—Bulgarian and Christian—“lost” during the Ottoman era. A diversification of the Bulgarian Turks’ literary genres took place between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the majority of texts being published in journals and newspapers. Love of the native Bulgarian land and its nature (the Rhodopes, the Deliorman, the Black Sea, the Balkans) is often evoked by poets, living “between two countries.” Yet, which audience was targeted when writing in Turkish within a majority Bulgarian-speaking country? That—and the negative and somewhat caricatural image of the Ottoman period—is one of the reasons for the lack of interest in this rich literature: fifty works were published between 1920 and 1943, printed by Turkish publishing houses in Plovdiv, Shumen, Sofia, Oriahovo, Varna, Pleven, and Svishtov;27 eighty-nine works (forty-five poetry collections, forty-four prose works) were printed between 1957 and 1969 by Народна просвета.28 These texts have not been reprinted in Bulgaria; in Turkey, on the other hand, they were included in the eighth volume of the History of Turkish Literature Beyond Turkey.29 To date, no research has been carried out in Bulgaria to put this literature into comparative perspective with regard to Bulgarian and Turkish literature. Yordanka Bibina’s articles (1999 and 2001) offer researchers access to several of the many Turkish poets and prose writers who wrote in their language from the interwar years to 1989, the year of “The Great Excursion”—a massive exodus between June and August in which 360,000 Turks moved to Turkey following the “revival process.”

The Bulgarian Literary Canon: One Nation, One Monolingual Literature The first history of Bulgarian literature, authored by Dimitar Marinov, is dedicated to “the ongoing memory” of Paisius of Hilendar, considered to be the “father of the history of our nation.” Indeed, after 1878, this conception became “institutionalized” in historiography, and particularly in literary historiography, according to which the Bulgarian National Revival—the period in which the idea of a national identity emerged after centuries of “lethargy” and the “double yoke” (Turkish and Greek)— dates back to Paisius of Hilendar’s История славянобългарска (Slavonic-Bulgarian History),30 completed in 1762 and published in 1844 in Buda, decades after the author’s death. Paisius did indeed exhort the Bulgarians to learn their language and history, and not to be ashamed to call themselves Bulgarian. However, the national idea, before the 1840s, had not yet emerged and the very notion of identity did not, at that time, have the unique and fixed character that it took with the rise of nationalism: it was plural and encompassed the village or urban community in which people lived, their linguistic and religious community (Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim).31 Thus, Marinov’s

50

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

История на българската литература (History of Bulgarian Literature) favors an event-driven history and aims above all to inculcate the memory of the “Turkish/ Ottoman yoke/slavery” and the “cunning and villainous Greeks/Phanariotes.” It takes interest solely in Bulgarian and foreign authors who serve the Bulgarian patriotic cause and who were deemed “useful to the people.” We can, therefore, assert that it presents a national pantheon focused on “Bulgarianness,” not on literarity. Nine years later, Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan’s history of Bulgarian literature links literature and nation even more closely. The introduction opens with these words: “By literature we mean the corpus that includes all the productions of the spirit created and belonging to a people. […] The core of the Bulgarian people today constitutes the Principality of Bulgaria, and the literature of this core group is representative of the cultural activity of the Bulgarian spirit (дух).32 “The people” (народ) has been understood to mean “the nation” since the mid-nineteenth century. Etymologically, народ evokes the native land and all those who shared and continue to share it. The word нация, “nation,” borrowed from the French, is more recent, less “emotive,” and more “institutional.” As the Bulgarian critic Alexander Kiossev points out, by 1896, the debates about “Bulgarianness” appeared to have abated: “the problematic character of the national had settled down; it transformed into unproblematic preliminary prerequisites of national scholarship.”33 The first Bulgarian literary history to undertake the compilation of a truly literary canon was Boyan Penev’s История на новата българска литература (History of New Bulgarian literature), published in four voluminous tomes from 1930 to 1936.34 He began with the premise that pre-1878 Bulgarian literature was victim to preconceived representations and clichés, his main task being to constitute a corpus of the key works of Bulgarian literature for analysis. Penev’s History tells us nothing about the languages of the Bulgarian literary space (with the exception of Greek) and only focuses on the canon written, translated, and published in Bulgarian. The final “grand narrative” of national literature is История на българската литература (History of Bulgarian Literature) by the literary critic Svetlozar Igov,35 written a few years before the fall of communism. Igov also links literature and nation ontologically right from the foreword, entitled “National Destiny and Literature,” and reiterates notions and representations inherited from the late nineteenth century: the “tragic destiny” of the Balkan people; the idea of successive ruptures that periodically slowed, or interrupted, the “natural course of things” and undermined a constantly sought and asserted identity. Critics have pointed to the glaring absence of women in the canon that this literary history has established as well as to its teleological character. But it also contains other absences: reduced to just the Bulgarian language, the pluralinguistic character of a Bulgarian literary space is once again effaced.

Conclusion “The contribution of the Turkish community, but also of other communities (Armenian, Jewish, Roma, etc.) to the cultural life of our country is still waiting

Monolingual Canon, Plural Writings

51

for in-depth research,” argues researcher Yordanka Bibina in 2013.36 The “mapping of absence” that I have just outlined opens up many paths for exploration of the circulation of forms, themes, and ideas, possible contacts between texts written in a great variety of alphabets and the potential crossbreeding that may have resulted. Such exploration would be a precious contribution to the reflection on cultural transfers in Eastern Europe and Turkey.

Notes 1 This anachronistic designation is used here as a practical convention. It refers to the territories of today’s Bulgaria and, in part, today’s Macedonia. 2 Bernard Lory, “Parler turc dans les Balkans,” in Vivre dans l’Empire ottoman. Sociabilités et relations intercommunautaires (XVIIIe-XXe siècles), eds. François Georgeon and Paul Dumont (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 241. 3 Johann Strauss, “Who read what in the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th centuries)?,” Arabic Middle Eastern Literatures 6, no. 1 (2003): 39. 4 Milena Kirova (Милена Кирова), Българска литература. От Освобождението до Първата световна война (София: Колибри, 2016), 17. 5 Benjamin Braude, ed., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Abridged Edition, with a New Introduction (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014), 16, 70. 6 Similarly, non-Muslims very often called Muslims “Turks,” even if they were, for example, Albanian. 7 On this subject, see: Raymond Detrez (Раймонд Детре), Не търсят гърци, а ромеи да бъдат, Православната културна общност в Османската империя. XV-XIX в. (София: Кралица Маб, 2015). 8 The Treaty of Berlin (13/07/1878) created the Principality of Bulgaria, an Ottoman vassal state, in the north, and Eastern Rumelia, an Ottoman autonomous province in the south-east. 9 Nadka Nikolova (Надка Николова), Билингвизмът в българските земи през XV-XIX век (Шумен: УИ „Епископ Константин Преславски, 2004), http://shu.bg/ tadmin/upload/storage/719.docx. 10 On diglossia in the Ottoman Empire, see: Johann Strauss, “Diglossie dans le domaine ottoman. Évolution et péripéties d’une situation linguistique,” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée, no. 75–76 (1995), Oral et écrit dans le monde turcoottoman, ed. Nicolas Vatin, 221–55. 11 Paisius of Hilendar (Паисий Хилендарски), История славянобългарска. Йордан Иванов, et al. Исторїя славѣноболгарская, собрана и нареждена Паисїемъ Iеромонахомъ въ лѣто 1762 (София, Българска академия на науките, 1914). 12 A non-profit-making pious foundation of public utility. 13 See Nathalie Clayer, Mystiques, Etat et Société: Les Halvetis dans l’aire balkanique de la fin du XVe siècle à nos jours (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 14 This information has been gathered from the following: Ели Ешкенази and Страхил Гичев, Опис на еврейските старопечатни книги в България (София: БАН, 1966), (Sixteenth century, part I, until 1540); Николай Кочев и Джак Бомберг, “Сефарадските евреи и книгопечатането в балканския полуостров,” La estreya, 12 (2016): 55–63; Ваня Гезенко, “Пренесено от Сфа’рад,” La estreya, 12 (2016): 36–54.

52

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

15 Gaëlle Collin and Michael Studemund-Halevy, “Un trésor oublié: le fonds judéoespagnol de la bibliothèque municipale Ivan Vazov de Plovdiv,” Miscelanea y Estudios Arabes y Hebraicos 55 (2006): 83–117. I would like to thank Marie-Christine BornesVarol at INALCO, who introduced me to Gaëlle Colin and Michael StudemundHalevy’’s work; Michael Studemund-Halevy, who sent me their articles not available on the internet; and Gülser Çetin (University of Ankara), who helped me in my research into the literature of the Turks of Bulgaria. 16 Svetlozar Igov (Светлозар Игов), Кратка история на българската литература (София: Захари Стоянов, УИ, 2005), 153. 17 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London and New York: Verso,1998), 3. 18 Janette Sampimon, Becoming Bulgarian: The Articulation of Bulgarian Identity in the Nineteenth Century in its International Context (Amsterdam: Pegasus, 2006), 70. 19 See Raymond Detrez, Grigor Parlicev, een case-study in Balkannationalisme (Antwerpen: Restant, 1992). It was translated into Bulgarian by Жерминал Чивиков, Криволици на мисълта (София: Лик 2001). 20 Olga Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture, Press, Belles Lettres and Theatre in the Late Ottoman Empire, Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 21 Strauss, “Who read what in the Ottoman Empire?,” 40. 22 Ayaydin Cebe and Günil Özlem, “To translate or not to translate? 19th century Ottoman communities and fiction,” Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016), 187. 23 Димитър П. Иванчев, ed., Български периодичен печат 1844–1944, vol. 3 (София: Наука и изкуство, 1969). 24 Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Histoire des Juifs séfarades. De Tolède à Salonique (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002), 270–4. 25 Collin and Studemund-Halevy “Un trésor oublié: le fonds judéo-espagnol de la bibliothèque municipale Ivan Vazov de Plovdiv,” but also “Un trésor oublié, deuxième partie: le fonds judéo-espagnol bulgare de la bibliothèque de Yad Vachem (Jérusalem), le fonds Binjamin Arditti,” Romanistik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 13, no. 2 (2007): 221–32; and “Le fonds de livres judéo-espagnols des Archives Centrales d’État à Sofia: description et catalogue,” Romanistik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 15, no. 1 (2009): 37–60. 26 On the Turkish press in Bulgaria, see: Михаил Иванов и Ибрахим Ялъмов, “Турската общност в България и нейният печат,” Българско медиазнание, 2 (1998). 27 İbrahim Tatarlı (Ибрахим Татарлъ), “Литература на турците в България— състояние на изучаването ѝ и някои нейни теоретични и прагматични проблеми,” in Литература на малцинства в България след Освобождението, eds. Вера Мутафчиева, Георги Цанков, Магда Карабелова (София: Карина М., 1999). 28 Bilal Şimşir, The Turkish Minority Literature in Bulgaria (Ankara, 1987). 29 Yenisoy H. Süleymanoğlu, “Bulgaristan Türkleri Şiiri,” Türk Dili, Türk Şiiri Özel Sayısı V (Ankara, Mart 1996), 449–57; Başlangıcından Günümüze Kadar Türkiye Dışındaki Türk Edebiyatları Antolojisi, Cilt 8, Bulgaristan Türk Edebiyatı, T. C. Kültür Bakanlığı Yayını (Ankara, 1997). 30 Marin Drinov (Марин Дриновъ), “Отецъ Паисий: Неговото време, неговата история и ученицитѣ му,” Периодическо списание на Българското книжовно дружество 1, no. 4 (1871), 3–26.

Monolingual Canon, Plural Writings

53

31 Raymond Detrez Grigor Parlicev and Не търсят гърци. See also Roumen Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov, eds., Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vol. 1 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013). 32 Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan (Александър Теодоров-Балан), Българска Литература, Кратко ръководство за средни и специални училища, 2nd ed. (Варна: ЕИ “LiterNet,” 2007) 33 “Проблематичността на националното се е утаила и превърнала в безпроблемни предпоставки на националната наука.” Alexander Kiossev (Александър Кьосев), “Позитивизъм, романтически метафори, институционални метафизики. Учебниците по литературна история и конструирането на националната идентичност,” Литературна мисъл 2 (1999): 29–38, www.slovo.bg/old/lit-mis/199902/akyosev.htm. 34 Boyan Penev (Боян Пенев), История на новата българска литература, vol. 1, eds. Пантелей Зарев и Иван Сарандев (София: Български писател, 1976). 35 Svetlozar Igov (Светлозар Игов), История на Българската Литература 1878– 1989 (София: БАН, 2001). 36 Yordanka Bibina (Йорданка Бибина), “Познаваме ли се отнякъде? Отново за Турците в България,” www.bghelsinki.org/bg/publikacii/obektiv/iordankabibina/2013. For the state of research in Bulgaria and a fairly exhaustive bibliography, see: Orlin Subev (Орлин Събев), “Bulgarian Historiography on Ottoman Writing in Bulgaria,” Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi 8, no. 15 (2010), 245–62, www.talid. org/downloadPDF.aspx?filename=464.pdf (accessed August 15, 2018).

4

Post-Liberation Literary Quests: From National Nostalgia to Social Anger and Modernist Dreams Milena Kirova

Bulgaria’s Liberation from Ottoman rule in 1878 constitutes an important dividing line in the history of Bulgarian literature. However, prior to any mention of the events that took place during the following decades, it is necessary to outline, if only briefly, the principal tendencies in the mentality that Bulgarians developed during the five centuries of residence within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire. This mentality did not magically vanish with the advent of the single, yet momentous, event of Liberation, and understanding it would shed light on the meaning and dynamics of what took place during the period between the Liberation and the First World War.

Post-Liberation Depressions The absence of a national state and regulative institutions, employing nationally conscious individuals, significantly impeded society’s development along the line of what brought about the emergence and practice of the social contract in Europe after the end of the eighteenth century. The notion of mutual dependency between power and people, or the idea that the empire’s subjects can exert influence on its governance, never existed at all. Even at the end of the Bulgarian Revival period (1860s–1870s), the horizon of political expectations did not go beyond the general idea of a bright future, when the foreign domination would be replaced by freedom in the fatherland and all problems would be resolved once and for ever. Bulgarian society had developed a tendency to mythologize the Liberation, equating it with the somewhat magical emergence of a brave new world. Hence, it proved to be utterly unprepared for the reality of the modern national state, which cannot exist without taxes, institutions, bureaucracy and, in Bulgaria, even a palace with all of its attendant luxury and brilliance. Only a few years after the Liberation, particularly after the unification in 1885,1 the utopia crumbled, dreams evaporated, and Bulgarians were forced to face the reality of a young, starving, and destitute bourgeois state. Despite being one’s “own” national homeland, the Bulgarian state grew remote, alien, and threatening in the perception of its people; social governance was viewed as situated outside the

56

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

“real,” i.e., personal, mostly familial, life. The people (meaning largely the peasants, since, in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation, 82 percent of the population inhabited country villages) attempted to cope with the situation in an already familiar fashion: by hiding behind the tall fences of the family home, only this time the effort proved hopeless as the very fences were crumbling, the barriers—between “them” and “us,” between domestic and foreign, between inside and outside—were all practically gone. This unexpected situation gave rise to two powerful tendencies in Bulgarian literature. First, the state with all of its institutions—palace, parliament, government, army, police, and judicature—was demonized as the ultimate enemy of the “ordinary person,” i.e., the peasants and the increasingly impoverished artisans that together made up 90 percent of Bulgaria’s population. Meanwhile, writers remained faithful to their revivalist education in expressing the ailments and the hopes of the people. Literature adopted an almost uniform course toward social negativism: it denied what was wrong, frightening, or revolting in the newly founded state, viewing it through the eyes of the common individual who lived consumed by the powerful feelings of being downtrodden and deceived. Second, the rift between the state and the people, between legislation and the individual, opened up a vast space for the import of anti-bourgeois ideologies that ran counter to modernity’s course, particularly of the type that promised a utopian return to the lost “natural” order. A direct result of these tendencies was the sweeping expansion of socialism and the Narodnichestvo (People’s) Movement.2 Their attractiveness stemmed from the widespread mood of discontent, accompanied by an unwillingness and inability to take the long road of historical progression. Nothing else could explain the paradoxical situation of both ideologies settling deep within the same environment, which actually lacked the necessary conditions that would allow them to thrive and expand. Socialism swayed over the imagination of the young and the educated (including novice writers) even before the formation of a proletarian class (the only subject of revolution, according to the movement’s ideology). The Narodnichestvo movement longed to return to the extended family of patriarchy, although in Bulgaria this type of family relationship has never been documented as popular practice. Very quickly, in less than a decade after the Liberation, a general, deeply rooted, and permanent attitude evolved within the mentality of the Bulgarian intelligentsia and, consequently, within the common people’s mentality: the opposition yesterday/ today, functioning entirely in the mythological mode. Yesterday—the past time of the late revival, where the ideals and spiritual needs, along with all the virtues and the peaceful life of Bulgarians, were believed to be living. Today—the ugly and revolting reality where the thirst for money had replaced the need for ideals, where the state had turned into the ultimate evil and people were selling their souls, lusting after riches and power. This opposition is of a mythological nature but it exerted a powerful influence upon Bulgarian literature. Not only during the period until the First World War but also during the course of the entire twentieth century and even today this opposition has not ceased to generate unrealistic evaluations of historical reality.

Post-Liberation Literary Quests

57

National Identity as a Literary Production Yet, in the first ten to fifteen years after the Liberation, the greatest task of the new Bulgarian literature was neither to expose social reality, nor to construct social utopias. There was a much more important task of universal necessity: to constitute a national identity, meaning to write down an adequate history of the Bulgarian people, to establish the fundamental myths of the collective memory, to legitimize the desire for belonging to the newly founded state. And since at that time there was neither historiography, nor historians, it was literature that undertook this task. Even before the end of 1878, all writers who lived abroad before the Liberation returned to their homeland. In the beginning of the 1880s, they had already converged in the city of Plovdiv. By virtue of the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, the lands populated with Bulgarians were partitioned into three sections: northern Bulgaria, called the Principality of Bulgaria, was an independent state with the city of Sofia as its capital; southern Bulgaria, with Plovdiv as its capital, became Eastern Rumelia and remained in the vassalage of the Turkish sultan; Macedonia and Eastern Thrace received no autonomy and continued to serve as peripheral provinces of the Ottoman Empire. This partitioning, experienced by the totality of the Bulgarian population as cruel and unjust, would generate revolutionary unrest and a collective drive for martial “corrections” for years to come in the history of Bulgaria; the unresolved national question would become the reason for three national catastrophes during the first half of the twentieth century. Although Sofia was the capital of the only existing Bulgarian state, Plovdiv experienced a true cultural heyday. Here, as already mentioned, gathered almost all of the writers and journalists that had become prominent before the Liberation. They carried on their activities in favor of the Liberation of southern Bulgaria. Thus, the spirit and the practical tasks of the Bulgarian Revival lived on for another seven years. A great number of newspapers and journals were published (including the first literary journal “Зора” [Dawn], edited by Ivan Vazov). Plovdiv became the point of convergence for amnestied political prisoners from the Turkish prisons in Asia Minor; former leaders of revolutionary movements such as Zahari Stoyanov and Dimitar Petkov headed the struggle for unification. Finally, on September 6, 1885, the unification was declared through improvised political and military activities. Power was seized by the local government, and Eastern Rumelia and the Principality of Bulgaria became one single country. This significantly “drained” the cultural forces of Plovdiv, since many of the writers and journalists living there quickly relocated to Sofia. From this moment on, the current capital would become the unchallenged center and chief location of Bulgarian cultural life. The task of constituting a national identity was recognized and undertaken even before the Liberation, yet not from the inside of “pure” literature (which did not exist at the time) but from the outside—from the people that took part in revolutionary activities during the Liberation and were now prompted to describe everything seen and heard in memoirs. Bulgarian memoir literature from the first two decades after the Liberation is a peculiar yet an important phenomenon. It spans thousands of pages, the

58

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

major part of which remained in the form of manuscripts, buried in various archives without becoming public property.3 Literary history singles out only a few books, less than ten, published in their own time, as the books that were used with the immediate and conscious purpose of mythologizing the revolutionary past and of building a pantheon of Bulgarian national heroes. Even today, the most well-known and influential of these books is Zahari Stoyanov’s Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings. It was published in three volumes (around 2000 pages) between 1884 and 1892. Stoyanov (1850–1889) was the total opposite of a professional writer: a poorly educated, aggressive journalist using coarse language, a revolutionary before the Liberation and a politician in the aftermath. His life was full of vicissitudes and controversies—from a superstitious shepherd boy to a leader of the April Uprising in 1876, from a criminal prisoner to a chairman of the national assembly, from a staunch republican to a monarchist, from a russophile to a ferocious russophobe. He wrote within a period of only seven or eight years but left behind a dozen books and hundreds of pages of journalist articles. Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings was of particular importance for two reasons. First, it offered a heroic conception of Bulgarian history: arranged in accordance with time and significance are only those revolutionary events that took place in the “true,” i.e., noteworthy past of Bulgaria. Second, because the book’s poetic merit remains, even now, uncontested for its fusion (ostensibly naive) of literary and non-literary devices, and of multiple (one can count at least twenty) narrative genres: from the medieval hagiography to the now modern autofiction, in a self-ironic mode at that. The other prominent figure in the construction of collective memory and national identity during the 1880s was Ivan Vazov. Vazov was generally a central figure in Bulgarian literature during the whole period. Even before reaching the age of fifty, he received the appellation “national poet” along with a silver laurel wreath as a token of popular appreciation; today, he is the chief representative of the Bulgarian literary canon. His oeuvre is enormous (and too uneven in artistic merits), yet not a single thing written by him later on can be equaled by the works published during the 1880s. Epic of the Forgotten (1884) is a cycle of 12 odes written in a solemn romantic tone. Each ode immortalizes a prominent figure or event of the Bulgarian Revival, while the entire cycle constructs a pantheon of Bulgarian heroes and of the ability of Bulgarians to muster up courage in past ages. Under the Yoke (1889) is considered the first world class novel in Bulgarian literature. Its plot is of the romantic adventure type but the underlying suggestions are crucial for the national self-esteem of Bulgarians. The novel describes the life of a small town in 1876 and praises the evolution of the ordinary and meek, yet already spiritually liberated people into fighters for national freedom—the sublime “madness” of yesterday’s slaves. The metaphors of “madness” and “drunkenness” are Vazov’s favorites when describing the excessive or “epic” upsurge of the national spirit. Alongside the great task of constructing a national identity, the 1880s inaugurated many other tendencies to be developed during the following decades. An interesting example among them is the emergence of philosophical poetry, whose prominent representative Stoyan Mihailovski (1856–1927) studied law in France and was to become the most ardent denouncer of social injustices in Bulgaria during the 1890s.

Post-Liberation Literary Quests

59

Literature and the Country Life The end of the nineteenth century differs from the first decade after the Liberation. It was a period of growth, maturation, and transition into a modern mentality. Critical reflection began to overcome the naively sentimental worldview; tradition was for the first time brought into question; a desire for poetic sophistication of the literary text emerged among Bulgarian writers. During the 1890s, social discontent, ambition to expose the defects of social reality, and intolerance toward the moral deficiency of Bulgarians were the prevalent thematic tendencies. The genres that allowed for an exaggerated representation of defects, a grotesque portrayal of character types, and a direct expression of personal attitude—the feuilleton, the feature article, and satirical poetry—were booming. The desire to impact society directly in order to set right all the wrongs (inherited from the revivalist Enlightenment strain) led to the employment of unliterary, mostly publicist genres. Characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century is the lack of a clear-cut demarcation between literary and non-literary devices, especially in fiction. This could be explained simply by the lack of tradition (Bulgarian fiction had developed only some twenty years earlier) but it would be more productive to consider the refusal to distinguish between fiction and prose writing in general as a result of the absent necessity to trace such a demarcation, which was a specificity of the mentality of that period. The most popular fiction genres during the 1890s were the short story and the novella.4 The most well-known authors of fictional stories at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century were Ivan Vazov, Todor Vlaikov, Elin Pelin, Anton Strashimirov, and Mihalaki Georgiev. Despite the differences in their individual styles, their works share many common traits: acute social problematics; overall negativism in relation to government rule; eagerness to portray the “little man” in modern reality and to express compassion for his fate; demonization of all who possess riches and power (even lawyers and physicians)—the rich are necessarily represented as evil, cynical, and lecherous; a writing style that aims to be colloquial, “popular,” in order to communicate with the widest audience. Under the influence of the Narodnichestvo movement, the figure of the teacher, especially the one who works in the countryside, became very popular (during that particular period teachers were the largest group of all educated people in Bulgaria, comprising about 90 percent of the entire intelligentsia). The personage of the teacher in the literature from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century is presented as sensitive and sentimental (especially the female teacher who is usually seduced and abandoned by some minor government official), torn apart by the struggle between two impulses: to stay in the countryside and perform the mission of enlightening the people, or to continue their education at university and take the path of personal advancement. The greatest discovery made by Bulgarian fiction at the end of the nineteenth century was the ideologically oriented representation of traditional country life. Fiction before the Liberation, insofar as it existed, unfolded its plots within the environment of a particular town. The patriarchal countryside did not provoke the writers’ imagination at the time because it did not generate specific messages, corresponding to the ideology

60

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

of national independence. Only when the traditional village began to dissolve in the process of bourgeois modernization, did it start working as a mechanism of idyllic depictions and nostalgic longings as a counterpoint to the disillusionment with social reality. Along this line of thinking, Bulgarian fiction at the end of the nineteenth century invented the patriarchal countryside that it needed in order to react to (and overcome) the traumas of historical actuality. This took place along two different paths. The first one was the literature of critical engagement (usually defined as “realistic” in the history of Bulgarian literature): emotional pictures of the shattered happiness of family life and of the countryside’s harmony in general. Along the other path, the traditional countryside was an object of powerful idealization; its most prominent representative is Todor Vlaikov who started the trend with the short novel Old Slavcho’s Granddaughter (1889). In all works that belong to this group, the patriarchal countryside is a utopian topos, a kind of a Golden Age, where the Bulgarians lived happily and all problems were solved in harmony with the unwritten laws of natural order. The nostalgia over the lost (most probably never existing in this form) countryside also transpired in the texts of those writers who worked in the vein of social criticism. Behind the ruined countryside of their day was hidden the retro-utopia of the irretrievably lost traditional (rural) past. The disappearance of a “historical” countryside was presented as the disappearance of the good from the world, as a collapse of the very ability to live in understanding and social harmony. This lent literary works an apocalyptic character: each of their plots was a scaled-down replica of the “end of the world” idea. The most prominent exponent of the apocalyptic moods in the representation of the Bulgarian countryside is Elin Pelin, and the work that is emblematic of these moods is his short novel The Gerak Family (1911). Elin Pelin has been recognized as the best painter of the Bulgarian countryside. He is indeed the first writer who managed to overcome the publicist aspect in literary representation and the sentimental attitude toward the problems of the “little man.” The heroes of his stories are not only “Bulgarian peasants” but people in general. With Elin Pelin’s works Bulgarian fiction moved past the stage of ethnographic depictions of everyday life, and of all sentimental and didactic dispositions in general.

Early Bulgarian Modernism and the Мисъл Circle The 1890s witnessed the emergence of the first authors with a modern individualistic mentality (philosophical individualism, rooted in Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s works, was a criterion for modern thinking throughout all of Europe at the time). Poetry, in this case, was first to react. The great breakthrough came with the appearance of a twenty-two-year-old poet, Kiril Hristov (1875–1944). For the first time there was verse with no trace of national romance or social issues. The first three of Hristov’s collections of poems, published during the second half of the 1890s, launched the resistance against all notions of “serious” and “significant” poetry, which had been

Post-Liberation Literary Quests

61

topical until then. They attacked the mainstays of the Bulgarian literary tradition, declaring old values as irrelevant and invalid: patriarchal morals, collectivistic worldviews, even patriotism, and the very necessity of cherishing ideals. The paradox lies in the fact that Hristov’s early verse was enthusiastically accepted by all critics and the entire reading audience at the time, despite the moral and ideological preferences of various groups of people. Hristov’s youth became a symbol of the already pressing changes, waiting for some “crazy,” or at least young, poet to materialize them before the public and to say what “normal” adults did not dare voice. Literary modernism started along a different line with the works of Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912). The son of renowned revivalist poet Petko Slaveykov, he attended lectures at Leipzig University and was captivated by Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s ideas—he longed to see the Übermensch take root in Bulgarian culture and, holding a romantic belief in the extraordinary nature of the true artist, he undertook the creation of a poetry that would reform the old-fashioned tradition. During the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, he published a series of philosophical poems portraying the human genius, starting with Prometheus, through Michelangelo and Beethoven, to romantic poets like Nikolaus Lenau and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His work demarcates the trajectory of conceptual modernism in Bulgarian literature. And while the youthful bacchanalia in the poetry of Kiril Hristov exhausted its thematic novelty in five or six years, turning into neurotic egotism, Pencho Slaveykov’s path, recognized as the first stage of modernism in the history of Bulgarian literature,5 quickly developed and attracted the best poets of the new century. Pencho Slaveykov is also important for the subsequent development of Bulgarian poetry due to another characteristic trait of his work. In the very beginning of the new century he surmounted the inertia to publish poetry in poem collections and began to design poetry books. Thus, in 1907, Dream of Happiness appeared, composed of a hundred lyrical miniatures that depicted various stages and aspects of the lyrical character’s life course. The most interesting of all his books—the anthology On the Isle of the Blessed—was published in 1910. In it, after describing in the preface how he found himself on a fictitious island of his creation, the author offers—both in poetry and prose—a utopian vision of an ideal national literature, profuse and diverse. It is this mystified anthology that underwent a true revival of interest at the end of the twentieth century. After half a century of ideological stagnation, Bulgarian poetry caught up with the philosophy and literary practice of postmodernism. Slaveykov’s anthology was a precedent of postmodern writing, featuring some of its typical poetic devices, such as mystification, parody, reconstruction of the literary canon, and pastiche. The first stage of Bulgarian modernism took place with the establishment of the Мисъл (Thought) circle. It consisted of four writers who were very different from each other, yet alike in their resolve to outrun tradition and set the beginning of a new type of literature. They were the previously mentioned Pencho Slaveykov; Krastyo Krastev, the first Bulgarian professional critic, doctor of philosophy from Leipzig University, raised in the tradition of German aesthetics from the end of the nineteenth century; Peyo Yavorov, ten years younger than all of them, acknowledged as the best poet of his time already with his first collection (Poems, 1901), a key figure in the Bulgarian

62

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

literary canon; and Petko Todorov, a coeval of Yavorov’s, also raised in the German philosophical tradition, a writer of fiction and a playwright, inventor of a peculiar type of narrative that expresses modern ideas through folklore motifs, termed by him idylls. The significance of the Мисъл circle can be summarized in a few principal ideas—when related to each other, they piece together the philosophical and aesthetic program of early Bulgarian modernism: a writer is above all one who is concerned with nothing else but writing; the artist does not serve society but the literary deity; he is a professional, not a social activist. His attempt at being popular signifies a failure, since popularity is a vice, a degradation of true art (this was the basic reason for the strife between the Мисъл circle and Vazov who was the most popular Bulgarian writer at the time). Three decades before the establishment of the Frankfurt School, Bulgarian modernists were already at war with the so called “yellowback” or “penny dreadful” literature, which, according to them, expressed the lowly tastes of the crowd and promoted the lack of spiritual necessities. The greatest value a literary work could possess was to express the individuality of its creator; only an elevated personality was capable of creating grand poetry. And the elevated personality, of course, can only be an individualist—the Мисъл circle worshiped the Nietzschean Übermensch. As is evident, early Bulgarian modernism contains latent late romantic characteristics.

The Second Generation of Bulgarian Modernism The Мисъл circle was active throughout the first decade of the twentieth century.6 During that period, Bulgarian literature developed at a steady pace and not only reached but surpassed the modernist outlook of its early revolutionary conceptions. The second generation of modernists recognized those belonging to the first one as their teachers, yet the first generation, especially Slaveykov and Krastev, did not recognize themselves in the works of the new poets that came to replace them. They even mocked the “mannerism” and “nonsense” of the new literary vogue, which took over Bulgaria even before the end of the first decade of the new century. The name of this vogue, which would become the second stage of Bulgarian literary modernism, was symbolism. It emerged around the middle of the first decade of the new century, initially as a series of translations of poems by French and German poets, but fairly soon as a passion among the young Bulgarian poets. In just a few years, symbolism came to dominate the pages of all literary journals. Amongst its authors was a multitude of epigones of the great European tradition and, alongside them, master hands of Bulgarian literary writing. It was during these years of practicing refined symbolist poetics that Bulgarian poetry reached an artistic perfection it had never previously possessed. It became exquisite, passionate, and oversaturated with enigmatic symbols—a sharp turn away from the pragmatic, sober, and often socially engaged tradition of Bulgarian literature up to that point. The first author whom we may call a symbolist was Peyo Yavorov (while still associated with Мисъл); in 1906, he abruptly stopped publishing revolutionary and

Post-Liberation Literary Quests

63

social poetry.7 A whole generation of brilliant poets born during the 1880s succeeded him: Nikolai Liliev, Dimcho Debelyanov, Teodor Trayanov, Emanuil Popdimitrov, Hristo Yasenov. They differed greatly from each other in temperament and life course, yet shared the common peculiarities of the symbolist poets of all countries: they were painfully sensitive and incapable of adapting to their own social environment; they believed that their lives were in the hands of an incomprehensible, irrational fate that forced them to feel lonely and suffer constantly; they were not only alienated from others but divided within themselves. In the works of these poets the Bulgarian language reached its highest degree of melodiousness and beauty, despite the overall clichéd poetics based on a few repeating, commonly employed symbols. Here are two examples of poetic sophistication: “Dimly dawns in dreamy gardens, / Drops of dew and yesterrain / Mirror heavеn’s serene azure / Of the morning azure plain,” (Nikolay Liliev’s “Dreamy Gardens”)8 and: “Two lovely eyes. The spirit of a child. / Two lovely eyes. Sunrays and music. / They don’t want anything and they don’t vow. / My soul is praying, / Child!” (Peyo Javorov’s “Two lovely eyes”). Symbolism emerged in Bulgaria some twenty years after having become an autonomous trend in France. Bearing in mind, however, the centuries of complete isolation from West European literary development, we could say that it was through symbolism that Bulgarian literature came closest to the frontline of European modernism in the period up to the end of the First World War. Besides symbolism, various other significant processes and phenomena began to emerge during the first decade of the twentieth century—modern dramaturgy, to name one. It was not that Bulgarians had lacked appreciation for the theatre until then; on the contrary, already during the Revival, the amateur theatre performance was a favorite type of entertainment not only in the city but in many villages as well. This tendency was carried on after the Liberation, since the wide audience did not change their habits easily—they went on seeing plays so as to laugh at their own defects or to feel proud through idealized visions of their past. It is not surprising that, up until the end of the nineteenth century, writers produced plays to accommodate this type of expectations. Then came Henrik Ibsen. His significance for the maturation of Bulgarian literature can hardly be overstated.9 Already in 1893 Pillars of Society was translated, and by 1906 a total of fourteen of Ibsen’s plays were rendered in Bulgarian, some of them undergoing two or three translations. Ibsen became a popular trend, conquering the imagination of the more intelligent public and the ambitions of Bulgarian writers. Alongside him, due to a common rise of popular demand for modern drama, a number of Scandinavian authors were introduced, including August Strindberg, in addition to Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Sudermann, Maurice Maeterlinck and a couple of Russian playwrights, Leonid Andreyev and Maxim Gorki. Two of the writers from the Мисъл circle set the beginning of the modern dramatic play in Bulgaria. Petko Todorov initiated the process: already as a student in Leipzig, he published the play Masons (1902). Its protagonist is the typically Ibsenian individualist-loner, and the plot treats events from Bulgarian history, weaving into them the folklore motif of immuring a young woman in the foundations of a church. Peyo Yavorov was also tempted to become a founder of modern dramaturgy. Even before the end of the first decade, he

64

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

stopped writing poetry and produced two psychological plays. One of them, At the Foot of Vitosha (1911), is still staged today. In parallel with the emergence of modern drama, theatre art in Bulgaria became increasingly professional. The first state-funded theatrical troupe appeared in 1888; professional theatre emerged four years later, and, in 1907, the beautiful building of the National Theatre was inaugurated in Sofia. Up until the end of the First World War, the plays of twenty Bulgarian authors were staged there; not all of them were perceived as good but the public had already learned to separate the wheat from the chaff and grown to understand the specificity of modern theatre. It may seem strange that, so far, not a single name of a female writer or poet has been mentioned. This silence reflects the situation of the Bulgarian literary canon; it is no different from the traditional literary history. This is not the case because Bulgarian women did not write until the First World War, but because Bulgarian history has remained indifferent to their efforts and has stigmatized them to near invisibility.10 Already in the 1880s Ekaterina Karavelova (1860–1947), the wife of Petko Karavelov (four-time prime minister of Bulgaria), wrote powerful political satire. In 1890, the books of three poetesses were published for the first time. Their collections of poems are not among the critically lauded achievements of Bulgarian poetry from the end of the nineteenth century, but during the first decade of the following one, the elite journal Мисъл welcomed and promoted three talented poetesses: Ekaterina Nencheva (1885–1920), Dora Gabe (1888–1983) and Mara Belcheva (1868–1937). Belcheva is also the first and best translator of Nietzsche’s Thus Said Zarathustra. A no less significant breakthrough was achieved by women writers of fiction; they proved themselves inventive within the context of some genres. Vela Blagoeva (1858–1921), a leading activist of the women’s socialist movement, published a historical narrative about medieval Bulgaria, Queen Theodora (1894), and made the first attempt at producing a political novel based on actual events, A Process (1898); she continued to write in the beginning of the new century. The presence of Ana Karima is noteworthy. A curiously unconventional and individualistic woman, who denounced the unwritten standards of femininity pertaining to appearance and conduct (on account of which she was severely mocked), she was an editor of women’s journals, founder of the Bulgarian Women’s Union in 1901, and one of the leaders in the struggle for the civil equality of women. Ana Karima began to publish collections of stories during the 1890s, along with a couple of plays and short novels in the beginning of the century; she was also actively working on novels in the interwar period. Five years before Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, Karima declared a woman’s need for personal room for her own spiritual cultivation in the novel Pure Love (1924). Another woman writer, Evgenia Dimitrova (1875–1930), a socialist in her youth, produced the first successful psychological novel in Bulgarian literature entirely devoted to female mentality—Zara (1914); she was completely forgotten during the following century. Having considered the time period from the Liberation to the First World War, it could be said that, in less than a century, Bulgarian literature developed almost all of the genres and trends that were popular in Central and West European literature at the

Post-Liberation Literary Quests

65

same time. A number of authors and works emerged and came to serve as a foundation of the national literary canon. Yet, there are two different ways of evaluating this period. If we were to expect that the liberation would enable Bulgarian literature to make a magical leap forward and compensate for all that had been missing from it for hundreds of years, we would be disappointed. Few are the works that could match the artistic merits of European literature during this period. But if the Bulgarian language did not belong to the so-called “minor languages,” Yavorov, Debelyanov, and Liliev could have been among the best European poets of their time. Yet, if we make the effort to evaluate the development of Bulgarian literature in the context of its own history, we will see that it has managed to achieve a very substantial (although not magical) leap to overcome the past, to compensate for what had not taken place, and to adopt the modern ideas of the time. Searching for favorable paths between tradition and the present, between domestic and foreign, it quickly matured and acquired the variety characteristic of the culture of a modern nation-state. Historically speaking, this upsurge ended in an unexpected way: with three consecutive wars and two national catastrophes, on account of which Bulgaria lost portions of its territory along with its international prestige. All of these events took place within a period of only seven years (1912–1919). What is interesting, however, is that, even during wartime, Bulgarian literature did not lose the momentum of its development and paced rapidly onward, despite the fact that many writers died at the frontline. New subjects and ideas came to life that would become fundamental to its growth during the subsequent interwar period. The hardships and tragic events radicalized the inclination to psychological reflection and introspection, and expanded the outlook of Bulgarian artists that filled in the deep rifts between domestic and foreign. In the wake of the First World War remained the same. As throughout all of Europe, La Belle Époque had bid farewell to Bulgaria.

Notes 1 The Berlin Congress in 1878 (which followed the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878) restructured the political map of the Balkans, dividing the lands inhabited by ethnic Bulgarians in three: the independent Principality of Bulgaria; Eastern Rumelia, an autonomous province under Turkish administration; and the region of Macedonia, which remained a part of the Ottoman Empire. A strong revolutionary movement for unification with the Principality of Bulgaria developed in Eastern Rumelia, and in September 1885, following a revolt and a coup supported by the Bulgarian prince Alexander I, Rumelia joined the Principality. 2 While socialism was at the same time modern and popular among the intelligentsia in central Europe, the Narodnichestvo movement as an ideology was entirely developed by the Russian intelligentsia of the 1860-70s. In general, the doctrine’s purpose was to halt the advent of modern capitalist society, particularly the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratization of state institutions. To this end, the educated were to move to the countryside in order to enlighten the rural masses. The Russian Narodnichestvo motto was “Go among the people!”

66

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

3 For example, two very interesting and noteworthy manuscripts were published for the first time only at the end of the twentieth century: Видрица by the priest Mincho Kanchev (Минчо Кънчев) (София: “Български писател,” 1985), and Записки от Терсханата 1868–1878 (Notes from Prison, 1868–1878) by Stoyan Zaimov (Стоян Заимов) (София: “Парадокс,” 1999). 4 Novella stands here for the typical Slavic genre of повест (povest) that is longer than а short story, but shorter than a novel, and shares features with both genres. 5 For a recent discussion on the historical stages of modernism in Bulgarian literature see Boyko Penchev (Бойко Пенчев), Български модернизъм: Моделиране на Аза (София: Софийски университет “Климент Охридски,” 2003), 9; Tsvetanka Atanasova (Цветанка Атанасова), “По въпроса за етапите в развитието на българския модернизъм,” in Българско и Модерно, ed. Елка Димитрова (София: Боян Пенев, 2014), 47–56; Elka Dimitrova (Елка Димитрова), “Българският литературен модернизъм,” in Българско и модерно, 21. 6 The group’s organizational unity was backed up by the publication of its own journal, Мисъл (Thought), with Dr. Krastev as editor-in-chief, which remained active until 1907. 7 Besides, Yavorov was a former socialist and an active revolutionary, a figure in the Macedonian movement, fighting for the Liberation of Macedonia while it was still under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, as well as for its annexation to the Bulgarian state. 8 Translation by Natalia Afeyan. 9 Bulgaria experienced the strong advent of Scandinavian literature at the end of the nineteenth century. 10 Only in the last twenty years have a few women researchers displayed a more profound and systematic interest in Bulgarian literature produced by women. Yet, there is still no general history that pays equal attention to the works of men and women, especially during the period till the middle of the twentieth century.

5

Does Bulgarian Literature Have a Place within World Literature? Amelia Licheva

Toward the end of 2018, a heated debate erupted in Bulgaria over the question whether we could consider Bulgarian literature as world or at least as European literature, or whether it remains too provincial, with no way of becoming a part of the world literary repository. Both parties in this dispute have their advocates, who fervently step into their respective roles as defenders and opponents. The former, who assert Bulgarian literature’s convertibility, claim that, both in terms of topics and in terms of the success of individual authors, it has managed to overcome its regional character and can boast certain breakthroughs and achievements. The latter, who are of the opinion that Bulgarian literature is a national literature in which nobody is interested, claim that its successes are overstated and that we are simply not present on the world map. There are others who take great pride in their national roots, consider talking about common European values a cliché, and believe that literature must “stand by its nation” (whatever this might mean). Many literary scholars and writers have theorized the place of a minor literature within the context of the world, but here we will not return to the theories of Gilles Delеuze, Felix Guattari, or Milan Kundera. We will limit ourselves to mentioning that nowadays the way out into world literature has various manifestations and cannot be reduced merely to a literary text’s presence in anthologies forming the canon. Another way to enter it is through literary prizes such as the Nobel Prize for literature, the Man Booker prize, or Prix Goncourt, where authors from marginal literatures have grown more conspicuous. In this respect, even Bulgarian literature has had its breakthrough: Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was nominated for the international Strega Prize in Italy, which is a significant recognition. Translations into major languages and especially into English can also open new points of entry into world literature. This is another aspect in which Bulgarian literature has had its accomplishments. Translations are often the result of the individual preferences of Bulgarian-language translators and of personal contacts, yet the very choice of translators always determines what ends up translated. Institutions, such as the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, have been promoting Bulgarian writers in the United States and the United Kingdom and their efforts have proven successful. Despite the minuscule number of books in translation appearing

68

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

in the United States, quite a few translations of contemporary Bulgarian authors from different generations as well as of some classics like Ivailo Petrov’s 1986 Хайка за вълци (Wolf Hunt), rendered into English by Angela Rodel, have managed to leave a mark. Among Bulgarian authors, Georgi Gospodinov is not only the most translated but also the one who has had the most positive reception abroad. Flattering reviews of his books have appeared in some of the most renowned newspapers and magazines around the world—The New Yorker, The Republic, El Mundo, Die Welt, etc. Among them is worldacclaimed philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s review of Физика на тъгата (The Physics of Sorrow) (2011), expressing his appreciation for Gospodinov’s writing.1 The ability to write globally is also a point of entry into world literature, as Tim Parks would say,2 because in such writing every reader would be able to identify with the characters and feel at home in the places described. This universality also enables translation. Finally, paradoxical as it may sound, one can go beyond national borders by turning the locally or regionally specific into something “exotic,” as it makes one interesting and different. A number of writers owe their success to the “exotic”3 in their texts, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Orhan Pamuk, and Khaled Hosseini. A Bulgarian example is Miroslav Penkov, who won the BBC National Short Story Award for a story that presents his native Bulgaria as a place of unique (one might say “weird”) customs and beliefs.

What Does “World Literature” Mean? Today literature has expanded its boundaries, and that is why we reckon world literature is not so much a canon of extraordinary works but a compilation of renowned works that have been hugely successful and garnered large audiences. This takes us to David Damrosch’s definition of world literature, which perhaps suits the contemporary situation best—works circulating beyond their place of origin and gaining in translation.4 Moreover, each interpretation of world literature includes the idea of a cultural melting pot and the relationship between host and guest cultures. If we follow Damrosch’s line of thinking, a single work of world literature can be interpreted as the result of an amalgamation between two different cultures. In this respect, it is a radically different entity that can serve as a basis for defining a local, domestic tradition. If we employ Damrosch’s image, world literature presents a window both to the outside world and to our own inner world. In this respect, Anna Balakian’s views of world literature as a human epistemological activity seem nostalgically unproblematic.5 She suggests that literature can attain global status only if it concerns universal anxiety, universal human motivations, psychological and philosophical human manifestations in the natural world, the political and societal landscape. Contemporary global literature is bound to reflect the conflicts of modern times that often challenge the very concept of universality. If we attempt to apply our own view to the definitions, the pair “world”—“language” would necessarily have to serve as our starting point. Few literary scholars would

A Place within World Literature?

69

disagree that literature creates different worlds, regardless of whether they rely on mimetic theories, favor form and style, or try to read the author’s mind through its reflection in the text. With the increasing amount of cultural research and the reorientation of comparative literature studies toward the end of the last century, the boundaries of the literary world have broadened; now it is no longer Eurocentric but able to accommodate India, Afghanistan, or any other country from the so-called “third world.” Terrorism is a powerful driving force in this regard, due to its destructive effect on the concept of a stable world. Hence, world literature now discusses the expansion of frontiers and integrates political and social issues in fiction in an effort to respond to questions such as: What defines the modern day? and why does world literature concern the contemporary individual whose problems do not extend beyond their mere survival? This type of literature, propounded by Emmanuel Lévinas, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida, introduces the idea of an effortless tolerance of others, which sounds a tad naïve. The I/others dichotomy no longer concerns testing the limits of intimacy and the conditions for communal living but rather focuses on the question of whether intimacy can exist in this world and whether the world is not, in fact, bound to take radical action toward the destruction of one of the entities in it. It is by no means an accident that world literature is interested in what happens to our world in times of refugee crises, terrorism, and political and ecological impasse. The term “world literature” is no longer defined by Eurocentric writing; rather, it is defined by all writing that bears the spark of dystopia. This is why while we do not suggest a complete rejection of the canon, we believe that world literature is comprised of those contemporary texts that ask questions about the present-day world and, to a greater extent, about the future that awaits us. We would like to think about world literature as bearing causes, messages, and visions and not just as a compilation of texts that have achieved some success at different points around the globe. Whereas we cannot reject the globalism of thrillers in the geographic sense, we cannot accept them as forbearers of the new world literature’s high values we set out. According to Damrosch, world literature can consist of any text that has overcome the bounds of its origins. This definition sees the world in all its political, informational, economic, technological, and other connotations. We must not forget where we are situated whenever we talk about world literature—do we live in a major Western metropolis, or in countries such as Syria or Libya? Our view of the world depends heavily on the place we inhabit and on the perspectives we can adopt. Researchers cannot leave out the perspectives of local populations; only then can the “world” in world literature bear real meaning and only then can it be global indeed. Following Sandra Bermann,6 we should ask: What makes world literature what it is in a different geo-linguistic and cultural context? A crucial part of the debate of what defines world literature is the question of the language in which it is written. Again, the division is between two schools of thought: one claiming that world literature is written in one of the prevailing or major languages and the other that world literature is comprised of translated works (into such languages). From Goethe’s time until recently, the first statement rang true; it is associated with the idea of the prominent role of Europe and the United States, as

70

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

well as with an idea popularized by comparative literary studies concerning powerful literary traditions and with the notion that the canon is comprised of classical works of literature, founded on the legacy of the Greek and Roman traditions. The latter assertion can be applied to the ever-changing world, where English has become lingua franca and translation is a condition for globalization in that a translated work is regarded as completely equal to the original in terms of status. In our concept of world literature, however, language is not regarded as a source and target of translation; rather, language is viewed in terms of the kind of world that it constructs. It is our opinion that contemporary world literature should be able to spell out the dilemmas, fears, and hopes of modern-day people and, thus, become a modern discourse that shies away from prejudices and parochialism while remaining current and comprehensible. With that, we return to the exercise of existentializing the definition of world literature— only when it bears such qualities does world literature have any meaning in the present (where the demand for literary works with meaning limited to their own existence is diminishing, while the demand for the ones that attempt to tackle real problems and complex situations is on the rise). This attitude may seem obsolete but only when such great expectations of literature have been restored can it be said that literature has a future. Last but not least, let us quote Damrosch’s definition of world literature that he gives in his 2016 Harvard University lecture “What Isn’t World Literature?”:7 world literature must be pluralistic and not uniform in terms of its voices, cultures of different sources, attitudes toward the world, policies, and dialogue between what is well-known and what is foreign.

New World Literature and Its Dialogue with Bulgarian Literature Here we will set aside the more general terms and explore the extent to which Bulgarian literature harmonizes with the quests of European and world literatures in terms of topics and trends through a set of examples. Due to the limited space, these instances will be few in number and will comply with several trends that we have identified as leading at this time, such as contemplating the past, writing about the present day, basing texts on mythology or Christian tradition and some forms of dystopia, as well as emigrant writing. This chapter aims to serve as a roadmap for new Bulgarian literature’s development toward becoming world literature. The choice of examples, especially those taken from recent world literature, will follow the trajectory set by today’s key global issues.

Past The trend of looking back to the past and reflecting on its repercussions in the present remains strong in world literature today. Most texts in it are devoted to the two world wars and the consequent crises they sparked. Some authors, such as Bernhard Schlink, continue to explore the topic of guilt and the intergenerational gaps opened by World

A Place within World Literature?

71

War II. Still, most modern fiction writers seem to be less interested in these themes, typical of 1950s and 1960s writing, and would rather focus on experiencing warfare and its effects on the lives of individuals in emotional terms (this brings to mind writers like Kate Atkinson and Pierre Lemaitre). Their countries’ past and the issues of colonialism and the damage it caused are subjects chosen by many authors from South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, and others. Some of the most renowned among them include J. M. Coetzee and V. S. Naipaul. For writers from Central and Eastern Europe, including Nobel laureates Herta Müller and Svetlana Alexievich, turning back to the past means talking about totalitarian regimes and how people survived them. Bulgarian literature is no exception since it displays a similar interest in looking back to the past. Naturally, a dominant setting remains communism/socialism, its everyday minutiae, and the ways in which it de/formed personalities. In this regard, the most representative text of recent years is Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. There are many thematic lines in the novel including everyday life, childhood, intertwining identities, etc.; but the political intensity of the book stems from its narrative about life under socialism as well as the all-encompassing entropy of daily existence and the individual self to which this leads. Yet, modern Bulgarian literature has gradually begun to delve deeper into the more distant past by discussing, for instance, the regime changes and political terror associated with September 9, 1944, which heralded the shift from monarchy to Soviet-style communism in Bulgaria. At the literary forefront are also events that marked the transition of power when hundreds of politicians and intellectuals were given the death penalty by the so-called People’s Court and its sham trials. Кротките (The Meek) (2015) by Bulgarian novelist, translator, and scholar Angel Igov examines these events; it refers to historical documents and introduces the image of the impersonal collective who accepted everything passively, even with a dose of contentment and satisfaction, as if watching a spectacle (a clear reconceptualization of the role of the choir in Ancient Greek tragedy). These historical situations are also the subject of two volumes about the sisters Palaveevi—Сестри Палавееви в бурята на историята (Sisters Palaveevi in the Storm of History) (2013) and Сестри Палавееви по пътя към новия свят (Sisters Palaveevi on the Way to the New World) (2017)— by the well-known and widely translated Alek Popov. He places events in Bulgaria against a European historical backdrop and examines the twentieth century with its violent transitions from capitalism to communism and the repressions accompanying this change. The author introduces the grotesque as well as caricature and laughter, all the while striving to show the ugliness and moral decay of the past in order to make them more memorable. Чамкория (Chamkoria) (2017) by Milen Ruskov, one of the most original Bulgarian writers, also looks back on important moments in Bulgarian history. It focuses on crucial events for Bulgarian society from the 1920s such as the terrorist attack on St. Nedelya Church in Sofia, police misconduct and brutality, and the spread of anarchist movements, through an engaging, though controversial, linguistic experiment. In the text, Ruskov stylizes the language spoken by people in certain social strata as well as their peculiar Sofia-region dialect. In the novel, a cab driver is witness to the events. Ruskov’s previous novel Възвишение (Summit) (2011) recovers, or rather (re)creates

72

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

a language from the period of the Bulgarian Revival. In a similar attempt, Chamkoria introduces a language that is in equal parts borrowed and invented. Experiments such as these have appeared in many literary traditions, inevitably dividing readers and critics alike, but they help literature look real and close to the ordinary people while encompassing grand historical processes. Lastly, Zahari Karabashliev’s Хавра (Havra) (2017) looks back on Bulgaria’s Liberation from Ottoman rule and, in particular, on the history of intellectual empathy of foreign journalists and intellectuals. The novel fictionalizes the story of the American journalist MacGahan, a war correspondent for the London Daily News, who arrived in Bulgaria during the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), following the April Uprising of 1876, and became a prominent advocate for the Bulgarian national cause. Karabashliev brings together this narrative and a story from contemporary Bulgaria that deals with corruption and organized crime. In addition to skillfully reconstructing the speaking styles and characters from that time period, Karabashliev successfully connects the Bulgarian storyline to world events. In sum, the trend toward interpreting the past exists in both world and Bulgarian literature. The interpretative scopes, however, are quite different. The Bulgarian approach seems to be particularly local (and East European to a certain degree); it emphasizes matters pertinent to Bulgarian history to a much greater extent than it does those pertinent to world history. This seems to ring true for all trends. While a general observation may reveal that Bulgarian literature is consistent with world literature, the specific examples demonstrate that there are considerable differences present, which creates a significant gap between the two. Thus, Bulgarian literature does not automatically become world literature by virtue of sharing common trends with regard to the past. Even when attempting to comply with global trends shared by contemporary authors, Bulgarian literature joins them by bringing a distinct domestic twist. At the same time, the subject of living under socialism and the damages it has caused have taken several Eastern European authors (Dubravka Ugrešić, Svetlana Alexievich) to the world stage and helped a number of authors of Bulgarian background to achieve global or national success (for instance, Ilija Trojanow in Germany and Elitsa Georgieva in France). The process of re-assessing the wounds of Bulgaria’s past, we believe, will produce novels that will redefine the boundaries of Bulgarian literature as a whole and enable it to become truly worldly.

Present A great many new world novels observe the present day, informed by a desire to demonstrate how one can bear it and continue to live in it. The themes in such novels are so varied that it is difficult to draw more general conclusions. Nevertheless, terrorism, refugee migrations, and, by extension, the new takes on living with someone different seem to be among the most popular subjects. They go beyond the subjects typical of the dawn of the twenty-first century such as loneliness, searching for oneself, the absence of real love, and society’s moral decrepitude; these typical subjects, inherited from authors of previous generations, have been adopted by the

A Place within World Literature?

73

proliferating genre of autobiography. This trend seems to suggest that legitimizing the self is of primary significance, while the rest have to reconcile and accept this self for what it is. Examples of this trend include discussions of the moral crisis of modern society (Herman Koch’s 2009 The Dinner), the increasing problems related to refugees (Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 Exit West), contemporary terrorism (in the fiction of Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and Frédéric Beigbeder), and migration (in the works of Jhumpa Lahiri and Khaled Hosseini). In the Bulgarian context, however, the emphasis is again placed on contemporary Bulgarian reality. It is as if the novels fail to notice global problems and instead look intently at the political and social problems of Bulgarian society. This type of writing is typical of the novels and stories of the widely translated writer Zdravka Evtimova Юлски разкази (July Stories) (2017), Зелените очи на вятъра (The Green Eyes of the Wind) (2018), who is often said to be a social writer; of the thriller Български рози (Bulgarian Roses) (2016) by Georgi Tenev, who explores the peculiarities of the Bulgarian Transition from communism to democracy; and of  the aforementioned contemporary storyline in Zahari Karabashliev’s Havra. A parallel to this kind of writing can be found if one looks at Italian mafia novels like Roberto Saviano’s emblematic bestsellers. When Bulgarian authors are considered against the background of their foreign counterparts who tackle global issues, the impression is that Bulgarian literature is far too national, provincial even. Maybe that is precisely why novels whose concern is present-day criminal Bulgarian life are not translated. The novels that succeed in tugging on the strings of social sensitivity make it abroad since they manage to tap into a universal mode of social suffering. The last assertion is particularly relevant for the works of Zdravka Evtimova, whose stories have been translated into a number of foreign languages including English, French, Italian, and Chinese. It was the proponents of cultural studies who noticed that the sense of a melting pot and cultural diversity can be invoked only in those societies that face the reality of living with someone different. In this respect, even though Bulgaria is a European country, it remains largely unaffected by the problems and dilemmas of countries with a constant influx of refugees like Italy, Greece, and Germany. Maria Stankova’s novel А Бог се смее (And God Laughs) (2016) takes into account the changes in the world that Bulgarian society is bound to be a part of and tells the story of an immigrant Bulgarian. Still, this novel remains a singular event, although immigration has been among the most acute problems for Bulgarian society after the fall of communism. Its downside is the clichés and stereotypes in the way foreigners are presented that reveal peculiar prejudices stemming from the still relatively homogeneous nature of Bulgarian society.

The Mythological and the Biblical Perhaps the most obvious trend that demonstrates the striving of Bulgarian literature to come closer to and at the same time shy away from world literature can be observed in texts that rewrite the mythological. Ten years ago, one of the major world literary

74

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

projects was the Canongate Myths Series:8 Canongate Books invited famous writers to reimagine world myths and rewrite them in the form of modern stories. Some of the writers involved in the project include Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Bulgarian author Kristin Dimitrova, who won the national competition with her novel Сабазий (Sabacio) (2007). Consistent with Bulgarian literature’s preoccupation with processes that mark Bulgarian society, the author uses myth in two ways: as a satirical attempt to go beyond the present and as a manifestation of humanism with which she tackles the eternal themes of love, death, and friendship. Yet again, we find an example of Bulgarian literature’s tendency to consider its subject matter through a national perspective even when presented with an opportunity to become a part of world literature. In Sabacio, myth is used as a vehicle for social criticism the target of which is contemporary Bulgarian society. That may be the reason why the Bulgarian participant in this global literary project has only one translation (for the Mexican audience). Years later, another text continued this tradition, Пътят към Тива (The Road to Thebes) (2017) by Yanitsa Radeva. Here, the myth is grounded in psychology, as the author attempts to portray the myth’s human element and to explain the sense of proclivity in it, which manages to overcome human doom through motivations and choices. This makes the interpretation of the myth particularly intriguing and universal in nature. When translated, the novel has the potential to become one of the world adaptations of the Oedipus myth. It seems that the most universally themed Bulgarian texts are the ones that attempt to incorporate the Biblical, i.e., Christian imagery and themes. This might be the result of the long period of prohibition and communist suppression of religion and religious practices in Bulgaria. Emiliya Dvoryanova and Teodora Dimova are the authors that have become exemplary of this type of writing. Dvoryanova, for instance, incorporates Christian topics into novels that occupy the liminal space between utopia and dystopia, crafting original universal human parables with emphasis on the image of the woman. Dimova endeavors to rewrite evangelical stories, as in the emotionally intensive and meticulously worded gem of a novella Първият рожден ден (The First Birthday) (2016), or includes the subject of faith and the paths that lead to it in our modern times, as is evident from her novel Влакът за Емаус (Train to Emmaus) (2013).

Dystopias One of the prominent genres of contemporary world literature is the dystopian. The concept of dystopia has its origins in the Western European tradition, so it comes as no surprise that writers from Europe and the United States have enjoyed exploring it. Dystopian texts tackle global issues, show new worlds, and expose the reader to different cultures; their authors are globally renowned—Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, and Michel Houellebecq, for instance. Bulgarian literature offers a few timid attempts to comply with this dystopian narrative trend. Vassil Georgiev’s novel, Ex Orbit (2016), examines the topic of ecology and the idea that the world of the future depends on it.

A Place within World Literature?

75

Изрично възражение (Еxplicit Оbjection) (2017) by Evelina Lambreva-Jecker, who writes in German and translates her own books, reflects on the topic of organ donation and its place in the future. Dimana Trankova’s political dystopia, Празната пещера (The Empty Cave) (2017), is a part of a tradition of political projects for the future. We can observe seemingly realistic novels being permeated by the fantastic and testing the boundaries of human consciousness or the various futures that people can have; instances of this kind of writing include Последната територия (Тhe Last Territory) (2016) by Momchil Nikolov and Galin Nikiforov’s Лисицата (The Fox) (2019). These are psychological novels that touch upon the search for selfhood and the multitude of identities through which the self may manifest. Recently, Bulgarian literature has begun to realize the need for contemporary novels to offer expert knowledge, to incorporate science and, thus, to be both engaging and useful. Authors like Ian McЕwan and Jonathan Franzen have made this a requirement in literature. In Bulgaria, Nikiforov’s writing is of this kind—it expands the boundaries of the realistic novel, introducing science (most often medicine) to it and demonstrating that empirical knowledge can be a part of fiction. His novels Къщата на клоуните (The House of the Clowns) (2012) and Тяло под роклята (А Body Under the Dress) (2018) are particularly representative. Having examined Bulgarian authors’ novel-writing, we can conclude that they follow the same general trends as their global counterparts. Yet, in terms of topics (barring a few exceptions), they tend to be more local, less tempted to investigate those events that leave a mark on our common life in Europe and throughout the world. This is not due to a minor literature’s inferiority complex; rather, it stems from the anxieties of a society that spent half a century behind the Iron Curtain, in isolation, and was instructed to gaze only inward. At the same time, the exceptions that we have already cited—writers like Teodora Dimova or Georgi Gospodinov, who know how to broaden the ego and universalize it, bespeak the budding interest of Bulgarian literature in what is going on beyond the boundaries of the place. The present is a time of translation. It is enough to mention Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s study Born Translated.9 In her review of contemporary world literature, she highlights several possible cases. There are novels written for translation, which she dubs “born translated.” Some of them may rely solely on their convertibility and global nature, while others—and these are particularly interesting to her—are novels in which translation works on a thematic, structural, and even typographic level. She cites the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro as examples, but to these we could also add A Heart So White by Javier Marias (1992), Windows on the World by Frédéric Beigbeder (2003), as well as the novels of Amélie Nothomb, among others. Additionally, we encounter texts by authors who are not satisfied with translation and write in one of the global languages, as did Milan Kundera (in French), Elif Shafak (in English), and Jhumpa Lahiri (in English and recently in Italian). Walkowitz also cites another example—Nancy Huston who, not unlike Samuel Beckett, writes her texts in French and in English and considers both versions original; or the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who publishes his novels in one of the local languages but also translates his own writing in English.

76

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Let us now consider the image of Bulgarian literature through the work of writers who write in foreign languages. Here, we will not discuss well-known authors like Ilija Trojanow (a German and world writer rather than a Bulgarian one, even if some of his novels examine the subjects of Bulgaria’s communist past, repression, and state security, as does his 2016 novel Macht und Widerstand (Power and Resistance). Even when he talks about his personal experience as a refugee, Trojanow adds a degree of universality to his writing, introducing topics such as homelessness, a feeling of being a perpetual foreigner doomed to flee from something that marks each person’s existence as in Nach der Flucht (After the Escape) (2017). Instead, we can focus on Bulgarian writers living outside of Bulgaria that we can define as authors who wish to impress the foreign audience, as Milena Kirova suggests.10 These are, to a lesser extent, Miroslav Penkov (whom we already mentioned) and, to a greater extent, Krasi Zurkova (Wildalone, 2015). Both rely on the “exotic” in the Bulgarian cultural tradition and its links to folklore. Especially for Zurkova, Bulgarian tradition is closely related to folklore, which she considers to be connected to Greek mythology. She intertwines stories about wood nymphs with tales about maenads and relates the stories of Orpheus and Dionysus, making the exotic attractive but also commenting on spirituality, traditions, and endurance that command respect. In this sense, her novel places Bulgaria alongside Ancient Greece and makes its past a worthy subject of exploration and inspired writing. This, however, is a rather odd (and old) mystification from which Bulgarian literature might not gain much. The other niche “occupied” by Bulgarian writers living abroad comprises narratives about communism. The works of Ruzha Lazarova and Elitsa Georgieva, who attempt to make a breakthrough in France, stand as examples of this. They offer an interpretation of the Bulgarian past through stories from their respective childhoods, which are construed as a part of the country’s collective history. While to foreign audiences these stories might seem interesting and quite exotic, Bulgarian readers may find it difficult to identify with them because they seem hyperbolized, inauthentic, and rather narrowly suited to the expectations of a foreign audience. They, too, rely on the exotic even though it is of a different kind. Perhaps this is a reason why these authors, who seek to entice readers abroad, have been received well neither by the local nor by the foreign cultures, and have not had the success of other East European writers who examine similar topics. To conclude, let us note that, unlike national literatures that invariably require adherence to a single mode of interpretation, new world literature offers an infinite number of interpretations that rest on numerous, vastly differing traditions that have little common ground between them. Perhaps we should assume that this ambivalence is a strength and not a weakness; that world literature is not to be painted in a monochromatic way and that its meanings can only grow more plentiful; that its geography and its culture cannot be predicted and that its readers are too radically diverse to be neatly categorized. The time is ripe for a world literature that cannot easily be confined to one specific tradition.

A Place within World Literature?

77

Notes 1 A translation of Nancy’s review is included in this volume. The original French version is available here: www.liberation.fr/livres/2015/04/15/entrainbulgare_1241907. 2 Tim Parks, “The Dull New Global Novel,” The New York Review of Books, February 9, 2010, www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/09/the-dull-new-global-novel/. 3 The term is associated with Mads Rosendahl Thomsen’s idea that migrant writing can be seen as transcultural because it makes for a mix of cultures and sometimes traditions and genres. This type of writing eases the exchange of history and knowledge between cultures by combining the exotic with the well-known, and not by trying to make the reader understand a culture from the outside. Sometimes nuance gives way to hyperbolized exoticism in authors who are desperate to incorporate their home culture into the foreign one. 4 David Damrosch, How to Read World Literature (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 5 Anna Balakian, “The Pitfalls of the Definitions of World Literature,” Neohelicon 10, no. 1 (March 1983): 33–9. 6 Sandra Bermann, “World Literature and Comparative Literature,” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, eds. Theo D`haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 169–79. 7 David Damrosch, “What Isn’t World Literature?”, Institute for World Literature, August 6, 2016, video, 1:09:23, https://iwl.fas.harvard.edu/keynote-plenary-lecturesvideos. 8 More about the project can be found on the Canongate website: https://canongate. co.uk/collections/the-myths/ 9 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 10 Мilena Kirova (Милена Кирова), “Комунизъм за продан. Тоталитарното (ни) минало в романите на български писатели-имигранти след 1989 година,” in Езици на паметта в литературния текст, ed. Амелия Личева et al. (Велико Търново: Фабер, 2014), 248–56.

Part II

Geographies: Bulgarian Literature as Un/common Ground within and without

6

Europeanization or Lunacy: The Idea of World Literature and the Autonomization of the Bulgarian Literary Field Boyko Penchev

A common trait among the national cultures formed in the periphery of Europe during the Age of Nationalisms was the ambivalent attitude toward cultural influences and stylistic patterns, recognized as pertaining to the “core” of Western civilization. The Bulgarian case was no exception. Almost completely severed from its medieval past, Bulgarian literature came into being and developed its thematic and generic system in the nineteenth century by selectively adopting different models of European literatures. (In the beginning, this occurred mainly via the mediation of translations and original works in Russian and Greek). The process of cultural Westernization, however, almost immediately provoked resistance and opposition toward everything considered to be an immature imitation of the “West,” unnecessary and even harmful with regard to the actual needs of the Bulgarian public. The new conservative intelligentsia eagerly denounced the claims of “universal” values and cultural products as alien to the Bulgarian national character and the interests of Bulgarian society at the time. This attitude is best summarized by the title of Dobri Voynikov’s comedy play from 1872, The Misunderstood Civilization, where the imagery of false imitation and the theme of seduction are tightly interconnected. In the last 150 years, the shifts between two imperatives—that of “catching up” to Europe and that of getting “back to the native roots of Bulgarianness”—have formed the internal dynamics of Bulgarian literature. The interplay between identification and dis-identification with the normative models of Western civilization as a constitutive mechanism in the formation of Bulgarian culture has been the topic of discussion of a number of scholarly studies in the last twenty years, starting with Alexander Kiossev’s seminal essay “Lists of the Absent,” published in 1998. According to Kiossev, the Bulgarian national self-consciousness that emerged in the nineteenth century was based on absence—a void that must be filled and thus replaced by presence and possession. “This self-consciousness was constituted through its normative relation with prestigious models—Western culture, civilization, literature—and regarded itself as made up by deficiencies which must be supplemented.”1 In his essay, Kiossev brings attention not only to the process

82

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

of “filling”  the deficiencies and gaps but also to the different rhetorical reversals, which Bulgarian authors and intellectuals used in order to represent the absence of “Europeanness” as a source of pride and positive identification.2 My aim in this chapter is to show how the European/Native dichotomy contributed to the formation of an autonomous literary field in the beginning of the twentieth century and established long-lasting patterns for distribution of the symbolic capital within this field. In Bulgaria, the emergence of a literary field as an autonomous area, governed by rules of its own and detached from the spheres of politics and education, was a slow process, which dates back to the period between 1890 and 1910. This process, which involved many authors, critics, and readers, could be divided into two phases, with the figures of Ivan Vazov and Pencho Slaveykov as their respective emblems. Vazov was the first professional writer in Bulgarian literature, and, thus, he has become the ultimate “father figure,” known by generations of school students in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries as “the Patriarch of Bulgarian literature.” Pencho Slaveykov, meanwhile, was the founding figure of Bulgarian modernism, whose most distinctive feature was the introduction of aesthetic individualism as a social value and a cultural norm. The primary objective of Pencho Slaveykov as a poet and critic was to defend the autonomy of the individual and the autonomy of literature. The autonomization of the literary field cannot be separated from its broader context—the nation-building and the establishment of new political, educational, and cultural institutions after the formation of the Bulgarian state, following the RussianTurkish War of 1877–1878. In the 1880s, Bulgarian literature was still evaluated according to its immediate “usefulness” in the political and ideological strivings of the nation. Vazov, through his literary activities during that decade, was the author who affirmed and established a new, broader, and more universal vision of literature and the artist. At that time, Vazov was the chief “importer” of genres, themes, and stylistic devices from the prestigious European “cultural treasury.” The influence of the mainstream romantic mode of expression is easily discernible in his poetry, but even more interesting is the way he used the narrative models of Victor Hugo and Eugene Sue in order to lay the foundation of the Bulgarian novel with Под Игото (Under the Yoke)—a book representing the Bulgarian strivings for independence during the last years of Ottoman rule, which was considered a “national Bible” in the twentieth century. Generally, throughout the 1880s, Vazov insisted on the rights of the “heart” and its realms—poetry, love, and a feeling for nature. Thus, he opposed the “reason” of calculation and conformism, considered to be the “spirit” of the post-1878 period. The turning point came in 1895, when the government organized a pompous celebration of Vazov’s jubilee, proclaiming him as “the national poet” of Bulgaria. From that moment on, the younger generations of writers started to regard Vazov as a “passé” conformist. Vazov himself took an aggressive “nativist” stance and from 1905 onward insisted that every artist was obligated to identify with the “national fate.” With the proliferation of literary discourse in the beginning of the twentieth century a more sophisticated use of “Europeanness” began to take shape. In the 1880s, Vazov appealed to the authority of “world classics” in a moderately romantic manner, trying to defend the value of expressing “noble,” elevated feelings in a time of partisan

Europeanization or Lunacy

83

political strivings and narrow-minded utilitarian pragmatism. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Pencho Slaveykov and his associate Krastyo Krastev (the first “professional” literary critic in Bulgarian literature), were aiming to sever the ties between a literary work and its social context. Ordinary people’s strivings and ideals now came to be considered alien and unimportant for the true artist. Slaveykov laid out his argument in a long, semi-programmatic, and semi-historical article, titled “Bulgarian Poetry,” in 1906. He explained the confusion in the minds of Bulgarian readers (his contemporaries) as a result of the influence of Russian revolutionary democrats like Vissarion Belinski and Nikolay Chernishevski, and their professed credo that “poetry must aim to teach directly only ideas that are progressive and valuable for society.” According to Slaveykov, these Russian critics had brought “temporary benefits to their society, but serious art didn’t go astray and the true literary artists like Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevski won lasting victories not only in their homeland, but abroad as well.”3 Slaveykov and his disciples claimed that the true artist goes beyond his or her national context, acquiring relevance for humanity beyond national borders and historical times. “World literature” for these writers represented the eternity of spiritual life, which is something quite different from the historical time of a nation, comprised of political events with ambiguous significance. Slaveykov believed that through intensive inwardness the true poet could reach into the national soul and thus achieve an overlap between the individual and universal. Following this principle, Slaveykov cherished the idea that poetry must bypass the social context and the political time of actual events in an effort to reach the imaginary time and space, where the creative individual and society could achieve their selfawareness. Between 1905 and 1914, the next generation of Bulgarian modernists, the symbolists, went even further. In their manifestos, they insisted on disencumbering the artist’s work of the framework of national time and of national space as well. The symbolists proclaimed the need for a “new literature,” which will be synchronized with the development of the great European literatures (by which they usually meant modern French literature). This “development” was nothing other than the revelation of the “modern soul.” It was not the whole of European literature that was taken as a benchmark now. For the symbolists, the canon of world literature was split. It is quite telling that one of the programmatic manifestos of Bulgarian symbolism, written by the critic and translator Ivan Radoslavov, was titled “Baudelaire or Turgenev?” (1912). Radoslavov forced the public to make a choice between the supposedly popular, banal, and old-fashioned (Turgenev) and the yet-unpopular, decadent, and “modern” (Baudelaire). It was a strategy that sought to legitimize a literary movement that was quite marginal at the time and ridiculed in the popular media for its obscurity and mannerism. The most spectacular symbolist manifesto in the Bulgarian literary archive is “Modern Poetry,” an article published by Geo Milev in 1914. Geo Milev defined modern poetry as an emanation of the modern soul: Modern poetry is not an offspring of one narrow present, but an offspring of an extended historical universality, which requires a psycho-historical, not a

84

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature sociological analysis. It is this analysis that will reveal the Soul as the primary and essential foundation of modern poetry (not literature!); it must track down the birth and the growth of this Soul—the Modern soul.4

This modern soul, according to Milev, has nothing to do with the social and political conditions of the present—it was born in the Middle Ages, “in the Cloister.” The modern soul is not the soul of the modern times—it has a history of its own, defined in dichotomies like “Pagan/Christian.” (Milev’s narrative is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals). In his manifesto, Milev even locates precisely the place where the emanation of the modern soul, namely modern poetry, was born—this place is Flanders, with Maurice Maeterlinck and Émile Verhaeren as its founding figures. Through a panoply of provocative statements and rhetorical tricks, Milev tried to persuade the Bulgarian public of his time that Bulgarian poetry must finally enter the transnational and transhistorical realm of “Modern poetry.”5 The underlying assumption behind the texts of the modernists was that Bulgarian literature had not yet become “truly European.” They built a framework for evaluation and reference parallel to some universal “world” model, which was, in fact, a construct of their own (and this construct changed as the modernist generations changed). Their efforts to make Bulgarian literature a truly “world literature” resulted in stylistic experimentation, always in potential discord with the common taste. On the contrary, the “traditionalists” believed that Bulgarian literature is European (and always had been) “by default”—simply by virtue of having been created by authors, belonging to the Bulgarian nation, which is part of the family of European nations. It is not a coincidence that, for Pencho Slaveykov, the Bulgarian nation was not actually born yet and the same applied to Bulgarian literature. What is more, the true Bulgarian individual, with his/ her creative and critical self-consciousness, was somehow a task of the future, according to Slaveykov. The task of literature in the modernist program was not to represent social reality, but to participate in the birth of all these entities and identities. Modernism in Bulgarian literature, from Pencho Slaveykov to Geo Milev, was far from a dominant trend in the literary field. Modernists were opposed both by the socialist and the nationalist camps. Generally, the struggles within the literary field in Bulgaria over the last hundred years have run along the following fault lines: native/ foreign; simplicity/complexity; clear, “readable” diction—obscure, “un-readable” diction; sharing the national fate—detached from the national fate; and pertaining to the national soul/spirit—alien to the national soul/spirit. The strategy of the “traditionalists,” appealing to the collectivistic ideologies of socialism and nationalism, was to reaffirm the social value of the left part of these dichotomies. It was the shortest route to affirming the social value of the literary texts produced. One of the emblematic examples of this attitude is the preface to Ivan Vazov’s book of poems Легенди при Царевец (Legends near Tsarevets) (1910). Referring to the younger generation of modernist poets, “the national poet” wrote: Our young poets […] detached themselves from the people’s milieu and started to sing according to the modern influences of Western European literature. They

Europeanization or Lunacy

85

wandered in the realm of Olympic alienation and indifference and cut all ties with the surrounding life. They became symbolists, individualists, decadents, Übermenschen [свръхчеловеци], and God knows what else. It is a poetry cosmopolitan, cold, non-Bulgarian, unwarmed by lively human feeling, because it has not grown up on Bulgarian soil, being foreign to the Bulgarian spirit.6

In this passage, we can easily recognize the recurring themes of the Nativist discourse, prominent in the 1920s, 1970s, 1990s, and even nowadays. Modern poetry, according to Vazov, is uprooted from the “Bulgarian soil,” which makes it “cold” and indifferent to the common “human feelings.” Obscurity and mannerism as well as artificial formality were all regarded by traditionalists as futile attempts to compensate for these deficiencies. In the preface to Legends near Tsarevets, Vazov blamed modernist poets for their adherence to the “modern influences of Western European literature.” The antidote, proposed by Vazov, was drawn from Russian literature. He quoted Belinsky, who insisted that the origin of poetry is national consciousness and that poetry should be closely connected with the life of ordinary people. Then Vazov refuted the claim of the modernists that true poetry must be opaque and “difficult,” referring to the popularity of authors like George Byron, Victor Hugo, and Friedrich Schiller. In order to fortify his position, Vazov constructed a different kind of “world literature,” consisting primarily of Romantic poets, who had become “mainstream” in nineteenth century literature. The question of popularity is crucial for the establishment of an autonomous literary field. The logic of autonomization is based, as Pierre Bourdieu shows in his work “The Rules of Art,” on the “inversion of the fundamental principles of the field of power and of the economic field.”7 The logic of the autonomous literary field requires that art not be “consumed” at the time of its production; it belongs not to the present, but to the future. We can see this line of reasoning in the French art scene of the 1860s or in the programmatic articles of Pencho Slaveykov in the beginning of the twentieth century. Reacting to public speeches and articles by Slaveykov and his close associate Krastyo Krastev, in a 1905 interview, Ivan Vazov pronounced a sarcastic verdict on this kind of unpopular, decadent poetry: “the impotence of inspiration is substituted for the deliberate obscurity of the diction, with poetical madness and complete lunacy. In fact, there [in Bulgaria] nobody reads such nonsense, except their authors.”8 Vazov’s strategy aimed to establish a “closed” national literary market, based on the immediate consumption of literary works, which were “appropriate” and “necessary” at that historical moment for precisely that public. We could safely suggest that this kind of immediacy is in fact provided by the shared ideological assumptions between text and readers. It is significant that in Bulgaria after the First World War, when the collective ideologies of nationalism and communism started dominating the public space (actually dividing the public space into two antagonistic parts), the autochthonous discourse became even more radical. In an open letter to one of the popular literary periodicals in 1921, Vazov commented on the foreign plays in the repertoire of the National Theater, dismissing the works of August Strindberg and Knut Hamsun as “lifeless and ludicrous creations, born out of sick imagination, eager to grab the

86

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

attention of the blasé Western public with something new, peculiar, and beastly.” His call was unambiguous: “Let them be staged there [in Western Europe]! We don’t need them. We need sane, truly human, real art. The Hell with these foreign plays”9 An examination of Vazov’s critical assaults on the modernists’ writings and strategies reveals a mighty pattern at work in the literary field during different historical epochs and ideological regimes.10 The legitimation of literary works according to this pattern is based on the idea of immediate consumption, which was used as evidence for a work’s ability to satisfy the current “needs” of a society. A second source of legitimation sometimes became famous Western literary classics, the popularity of which was put against the unpopularity of the “obscure” or “formalistic” modernist “maniacs.” Thus, the established canon of Western literature was used in a manner that fortified the ideological framing of art—authors like Shakespeare and Goethe were used as examples of “sane,” “true art” even during the period of socialist realism. The submission of art to the ideological “immediacy” of consumption made use of the “mass classics” in order to dismiss the possibility of art and artist that are not understood (or bought) by the wide audience. The modernist writers (or the artists outside of the historical school of modernism, but sharing its basic attitude toward art) very often created their own version of “World classics,” which they set up as a cornerstone of their aesthetic platform. Strategic counter-distinctions like “Baudelaire or Turgenev” appeared (bearing different names) for a long time. The dissatisfaction of the modernists with the “mainstream” European canon was probably most blatantly articulated by Geo Milev, who, in a letter to his father from 1914, exclaimed: “it couldn’t be that the fool (серсеминът) Goethe is bigger than [Richard] Dehmel.”11 The “fool Goethe” is the symmetrical counterpart to the “sick imagination,” attributed to Strindberg by Vazov. What is at stake here cannot be accounted for as a mere divergence in taste. In his diatribe against the modernist in 1910, Vazov concluded “And there emerged a rupture between these poets and the People. And the People don’t read them.”12 For Vazov, “the People don’t read them” is the final nail in the coffin of modernism. For artists like Pencho Slaveykov and Geo Milev this very “rupture” between the poet and the “masses” was an essential prerequisite of the new art. They insisted on the possibility and desirability of the rupture, because in it they saw a guarantee not only for the autonomy of art, but for the autonomy of the self as well. These dispositions and discursive stratagems were not confined to the polemics between writers and poets. They permeated the discourse of literary criticism and even the literary studies in academia. We can easily point out scholars who followed Vazov’s line of argument (Michail Arnaudov), and others, who followed the opposite path, Slaveykov’s and Milev’s (Boyan Penev). Thus we could talk about two competing images of “world literature,” serving as a legitimizing authority and a model to be followed by Bulgarian authors. The first one is based on the names of mainstream classics and “acknowledged geniuses,” interpreted in the manner of trite humanism. This type of “worldliness” reinforces nativist claims for tight connections between author and readers. Because this image of “European” and “worldly” is too broad and lacks defining features, it doesn’t provide recognizable markers in the literary texts.

Europeanization or Lunacy

87

The second type of “Europe” or “world” in Bulgarian literature is based on the idea of autonomy—the autonomy of the author, the autonomy of the work of art, and the autonomy of the self. This is the canon of unorthodox authors, or at least of authors who were disputed and marginal during their lifetime. Modernism, its predecessors, and the late postmodern offspring form the core of that alternative “Western canon.” This alternative canon permeated critical discourse as a spectrum of thematic and stylistic features, recognized as markers of Western-ness and “worldness”: inwardness, formal elaboration and embellishments, intertextuality, trespassing of the national framework of cultural references, rupture with the national time and national space, problematic relations between the self and the society at large. We can recognize these features in the new trends in Bulgarian literature during the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century—for example “postmodernism” and “écriture feminine,” which have been at the center of literary debates over the last thirty years. The general opposition European/local could be interpreted as an opposition between the universal (significant) and the provincial (insignificant), thus providing a powerful algorithm for evaluative judgments. This was the stance taken by Pencho Slaveykov, Geo Milev, and the critic and translator Tsvetan Stoyanov in the 1960s— the stance of the “modernizers.” However, there is a perennial possibility for reversal. The opposition European/local could be countered by the corresponding dichotomy imitative/authentic, which allows re-evaluation of the “provincial,” endowed now with the features of “authenticity.” This is the stance of “nativists” like Vazov and the critic Toncho Zhechev (a major figure in the 1960s). The rhetorical operations with the markers of “worldliness” could be considered a strategy for breaking up with the actual cultural market and establishing a new one, which pretends not to be a market at all. The “borrowed” cultural capital facilitates the autonomization of the literary sphere, but the “foreign” genealogy of autonomous art makes it vulnerable in a way similar to the perennial weakness of pro-Western political elites in regard to populist movements. Periods of autonomy, legitimized through reference to European or world literature, are relatively rare in the history of Bulgarian literature, though there are some that could be considered as such: the period between the beginning of the twentieth century and the early 1920s, followed, in a peculiar way, by the interval during the liberalization of the socialist regime in the 1960s and the “transitional period” of the 1990s. But the European card was not always able to trump the traditional one. An alignment with the schools and fashions of world literature, especially when they bear the mark of liberalism and individualism, could be easily discarded as lunacy by the “sane” prophets of Bulgarian-ness.

Notes 1 Alexander Kiossev (Александър Кьосев), “Списъци на отсъстващото,” in Българският канон? Кризата на литературното наследство, eds. Александър Кьосев и Бойко Пенчев (София: Александър Панов, 1998), 8.

88

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

2 A special note should be made on the meaning of the terms “world” and “European” in the Bulgarian literary discourse. Generally, in the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries (up to the First World War), these terms were used interchangeably. They usually designated not geographical entities, but qualitative features—universality and other literary merits that transcend geographical and historical boundaries. World literatures, viewed from the Bulgarian perspective, had seemingly preserved their national flavor, but, as a whole, represented the continuum of the developed, evolved Western civilization (which didn’t exclude Russian and American literatures). The situation changed after the First World War, when the East–West dichotomy was articulated in a different manner (Spengler’s ideas found fertile ground here). In the interwar period the distinction European–American also started to take shape, splitting the previous homogeneous image of the “West.” 3 Pencho Slaveykov (Пенчо Славейков), Събрани съчинения, vol. 5 (София: Български писател, 1959), 160. 4 Geo Milev (Гео Милев), “Модерната поезия,” Звено 1, no. 4–5 (1914): 302. 5 It is quite ironic that Geo Milev will enter the canon of the Bulgarian literature for the tragic binding of his later work and his violent death in the context of the social tensions and civil fights in the 1920s. 6 Ivan Vazov (Иван Вазов), Събрани съчинения, vol. 5 (София: Български писател, 1975), 547. 7 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 217. 8 Ivan Vazov (Иван Вазов), Събрани съчинения, vol. 10 (София: Български писател, 1977), 369. 9 Ivan Vazov (Иван Вазов), Събрани съчинения, vol. 20 (София: Български писател, 1979), 479. Geo Milev reacted to Vazov’s open letter in a caustic text, where he refers to the “Patriarch” with the words “The dead men speak …” 10 It is curious how the Marxist literary critics adopted the term “decadent” (декадентски) from Vazov and his associates, substituting it with “effete” (упадъчен), in order to designate the same type of authors, representative of European modernism, who were scorned by Vazov. 11 Geo Milev (Гео Милев), Съчинения в три тома, vol. 3 (София: Български писател, 1976), 296. 12 Vazov (Вазов), Събрани съчинения, vol. 5, 547.

7

Anthology Anxieties: Maturity and Mystification Bilyana Kourtasheva

In the Beginning Was … Mystification: The Cross-Century Adventure of a Book If there is a rare curiosity within Bulgarian literature, a literary case that could find its place intertextually somewhere in the lineage of (and before) Pessoa and, why not, Bolaño, that would be Pencho Slaveykov’s book, On the Isle of the Blessed, published in 1910. Although it is usually referred to as an anthology and as a mystification,1 it is actually neither. On the Isle of the Blessed brings together nineteen poets from the eponymous mythical insular country and presents each of them to the local Bulgarian audience via a graphic portrait, a biographical essay, and a small number of wouldbe selected poems. Slaveykov assumed the modest mediating role of translator and author of the bios. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to guess that all these poetic personae are versions of a self-portrait.2 At the same time, “the Blessed” poets resemble figures of the Bulgarian literary scene and allude to famous German poets, since Slaveykov was an ardent disciple of Leipzig University. This complicated early-modernist gesture performed around the time when “human character changed,” as Virginia Woolf would write later on, perplexed Slaveykov’s contemporaries. Yet the book managed to sell 700 copies in about a month.3 In a postcard from Paris, Peyo Yavorov, one of the most significant Bulgarian poets and a friend of Slaveykov’s, wrote to him: “A mad desire is urging me to go up the Eiffel tower and show it [the anthology] from there to all of Europe.”4 In minor literatures, even the most individual and individualistic gestures are communally and politically charged, as Deleuze and Guattari have demonstrated. Disseminating his own ego, Slaveykov created, in a subversive way, a fictive national literature. The object of mystification in his book is not the authorship (as in earlier romantic forgeries) but the very idea of a Bulgarian national literature and the ability to present it in an anthology. Thus, the other object of mystification is the genre of anthology itself. And here is the punch line. In secret haste, Slaveykov deliberately published his book a bit earlier than Bulgarian Anthology: Our Poetry from Vazov

90

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

on, the first (real) anthology of Bulgarian literature which was in preparation the same year by two younger and more marginal poets, Dimitar Podvarzachov and Dimcho Debelyanov. So, in a rather Baudrillardian way, the simulacrum preceded the original—early modernism anticipated postmodernism. Thus, it is of no surprise that On the Isle of the Blessed became one of the most important books in Bulgaria during the 1990s. Reprinted and widely discussed, it befitted perfectly the carnival spirit of political changes, the proliferation of (literary) languages, and the disruption of hierarchies after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In a way, the 1990s in Bulgaria was also the decade of Borges, and the insular anthology is perhaps the most Borgesian Bulgarian book. It was interpreted as a library, an (anti-)utopia, a dream-book, a “novel about our political and literary mores,” an “impossible” book. Along with the contextual reconstructive interpretations, there were also deconstructive, feminist, mythological, esoteric, and other approaches to it. Three new mystifications alluding to On the Isle of the Blessed appeared in the last decade of the twentieth century. Slaveykov’s book not only tolerated but seems to have been waiting for that. The 1990s were its element. This rather unusual cross-century beginning aims to show that tracing the history of Bulgarian literature through its anthologies could open interesting perspectives with regard to its aspirations, acknowledged affinities, and hidden agencies in the process of its cannon formation.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Anthologies There is, at first sight, an invisible homonymy in the use of the term “anthology” in the Bulgarian and in the English-speaking context. Especially in the American usage, “anthology” has become nearly synonymous with “reader,” i.e., a compendium of frequently excerpted texts for educational purposes. In Bulgarian, the latter would usually be called a “chrestomathy” (from the Greek chrestós, “useful,” and mathéin, “to study”) due to the closeness and influence of the Greek tradition. The active usage of both words, “anthology” and “chrestomathy,” allows for the differentiation between their meanings and functions. Chrestomathies are more utilitarian and schooloriented, while anthologies are more aesthetically motivated and representative. In the early twentieth century, the dividing line between them would eventually become one of the demarcation lines between Young and Old in Bulgarian literature, a division conceptualized and imposed by Slaveykov, and constitutive of the modern(ist) Bulgarian literary consciousness. Associated with the Old, Ivan Vazov, the Bulgarian literary patriarch, compiled the capacious Bulgarian Chrestomathy in 1884. Slaveykov, Vazov’s self-imposed young rival, however, practiced “the art of anthology” and wrote contemptuously of “chrestomathy-makers.” Among the numerous literary collections and miscellanea, anthologies are a relatively late phenomenon in Bulgaria. To a certain extent, their belated appearance is due to a structural condition, to the very specificity of the anthology combining a higher selectivity and a higher level of representation. Anthologizing presupposes

Anthology Anxieties

91

an already accumulated corpus of literary works, already formed criteria for their evaluation, and established authoritative figures able to apply these criteria. Making an anthology is a discursive gesture that puts aesthetic presumptions before utilitarian ones and implies a consciousness of maturity and exemplariness. In the Bulgarian case, however, this consciousness is ambivalent, doubled by feelings of uncertainty, immaturity, insufficiency, and absences. And these exact feelings are expressed, as we will see, by the first compilers of literary anthologies. As an instrument of a literary field’s self-representation and self-reflection, the early anthologies play a significant part in the cannon-formation processes. They represent not just authors and works but literary values and— ultimately—the nation. Competing with foreign masterpieces and romanticized folklore, a young national literature struggles for emancipation, and an anthology efficiently combines the individual and the collective efforts in this direction. It is noteworthy that the first Bulgarian anthologists are poets, which makes the first anthologies not the product of external institutional gestures but of the literary field’s spontaneous internal drive for self-reflection and self-representation. Institutions started to publish anthologies at a later time—the army during the Balkan wars and the First World War, followed by the state and the academy afterwards. A whole separate anthology could be comprised solely of anthology definitions coined by poets. “An anthology is a wedding invitation,” wrote Pencho Slaveykov in the foreword to On the Isle of the Blessed, hinting at maturity as an indispensable precondition for anthologymaking and questioning the maturity of Bulgarian literature at the time. Geo Milev, avant-garde poet, critic, publisher, and anthologist from the 1920s, to whom we will return at the end of this chapter, insisted that an anthology makes sense only if it is a “revaluation of values” (in a Nietzschean sense), if it is “a verdict” and the anthologist—“a judge.” Atanas Dalchev, a highly intellectual poet from a subsequent generation (denied recognition by Geo Milev), agreed; “an anthology is a form of criticism,” he stated, although Dalchev was not an anthology maker but an anthology thinker, so to say, since his fragments and articles are replete with scattered ideas for original anthology projects.

The Anthology Dream The anthology as an idea, as a dream in the shape of more or less concrete projects, has haunted the Bulgarian literary imagination ever since the late Revival period (the second half of the nineteenth century when Bulgaria was still under Ottoman rule). For example, in 1873, a certain “Zah. P. Gradinarov” announced in Istanbul, in the Bulgarian pro-Turkish newspaper Turkey, that he was preparing a collection “of various Bulgarian poetries.”5 Apparently, it remained only an intention, since no such publication appeared later on. Among the announced and unpublished Revival projects, there was one from the previous year, 1872, with the clear-cut manifesto title Bulgarian Anthology, planned by Petko Slaveykov (poet, journalist, and Pencho Slaveykov’s father) and T. Ikonomov. Their project was recorded in the archive of the Bulgarian Printing Society in Istanbul and discussed twice. The second time, two

92

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

possible titles, Bulgarian Anthology and Bulgarian Chrestomathy, were the subject of the discussion regarding the project, which was imagined as a “collection containing all fine Bulgarian literary works along with some foreign ones”6—a formulation hinting at both literary self-confidence and self-doubt. The idea of publishing a Bulgarian Chrestomathy had been announced (also without a tangible outcome) a few years earlier, in 1864, by another Revival man of letters, Emanuil Vaskidovich. Apparently, the two titles, Bulgarian Anthology and Bulgarian Chrestomathy, were so appealing, implying such a strong literary-national statement, that both of them acquired material dimensions, though much later. It seems as if a first chrestomathy of Bulgarian literature could have had no other name but Bulgarian Chrestomathy, and a first anthology no other title but Bulgarian Anthology. Yet, at a later point, these titles were not at all synonymous; they implied different types of selection, presentation, and purpose, different phases of the literary field’s development. Bulgarian Chrestomathy, edited by the poets Ivan Vazov and K. Velichkov for the schools and the general public, was allegedly the second largest Bulgarian book at that time, the first being parliament records. It was a kind of a multifunctional reader, containing Bulgarian and translated examples of all genres. Among more than 100 authors only twenty-one were Bulgarian. Thus, the chrestomathy juxtaposed the young native tradition with the European classics, demonstrating both the achievements and the insufficiencies of Bulgarian literature. Bulgarian Chrestomathy came out in 1884, six years after the Liberation (the end of Ottoman rule in 1878). Bulgarian Anthology: Our Poetry from Vazov on, edited by Podvarzachov and Debelyanov in 1910, and inclusive only of Bulgarian poets, became possible thirty-two years after the Liberation and thirty-eight years after the failed plans of the Istanbul Printing Society. The Revival anthology projects, it seems, failed to come to fruition because of various financial, personal, and publishing mishaps. Yet, there is a deeper structural reason: these were decades of accumulation, not of selection. Literature was not quite emancipated as such; literary language was in a state of formation. In short, it turns out that there are epochs that cannot anthologize themselves, and the Bulgarian Revival is one of them. Revival literature was in a pre-anthological phase, and miscellany remained the Revival genre par excellence—all sorts of calendars, song books, ABC books, etc. An anthology of Revival poetry in print would appear retrospectively much later, in 1925.7 Still, the incomplete/impossible Revival anthology forms a horizon of expectation, a literary program that links the idea of anthology with the idea of national representativeness. The ultimate object of anthologizing was to define the nation and its (literary) values. Those early aspirations also set up something of an “anthology dream” among the other genre dreams of the Bulgarian literary imagination.

Collective Literary Reveries and Personal Genre Missions Doubtless there are some greatly cherished and long-awaited literary phenomena, and their anticipation permeates collective and personal imaginations. What I call here an “anthology dream” could find its parallel in the “epic dream,” born from the feeling that

Anthology Anxieties

93

there is no proper Bulgarian national epic poem neither in folklore, nor in literature, corresponding to the Polish Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz, for example. In the late nineteenth and even in the early twentieth century, the epic poem was still regarded as a high, prestigious genre through which past and heroism were to be tethered to the symbolic machine of the nation. Of course, not every epic text could attain the status of national epic. Ivan Vazov succeeded in this with his Epic of the Forgotten (written and published in 1881–1884), a sequence of twelve odes dedicated to figures and events of the late Revival period, especially the April Uprising of 1876. With its fragmentary episodic structure, Vazov’s poems fulfilled his longing for the genre, albeit by subverting it. His odes soon became contemporary classics. His rival, Pencho Slaveykov, however, took on the epic mission, believing that this should be the work of the Young and not of the Old. Slaveykov’s long and ambitious epic poem Song of Blood, pertaining to the same historical period, aimed at combining folklore, the national revolution, and Nietzsche. It gained the attention of Alfred Jensen, a Swedish Slavic scholar, and his promise for an eventual Nobel Prize nomination in 1912. Yet it seems both the material and the form of the epic poem resisted completion. Song of Blood turned into an exhausting lifelong super-ambition, to which Slaveykov’s untimely death in the same 1912 (aged forty-six) put an end. It left the poem unfinished, and the Nobel Prize nomination was withdrawn. We could also trace a Bulgarian “novel dream” back to the Revival period. Initially, that collective reverie was not so salient since the novel was still considered a lower genre or at least a genre of lesser substance and quality. But gradually, the Bulgarian literary consciousness became obsessed with the idea of the never-quite-realized “great Bulgarian novel.” Present even today, this obsession is doubled by the ever elusive Bulgarian literary Nobel Prize. The “anthology dream” was similarly rife with passions, scandals, and curiosities. The anthology genre is by definition a collaborative one, a genre of collective and personal literary recognition that raises the stakes and pledges even more. In a way, it is a meta-genre, hence the “anthology dream” is a meta-dream, so to speak.

1910: The Anthology Threshold In 1910, the long-cherished and imperceptibly intensifying Bulgarian anthology dream materialized not in the form of one but of three books, including Pencho Slaveykov’s ironic, subversive version of this dream. These three books had different concepts and ambitions, there was mutual bias and tension between them, and they were received differently, yet they created a stable context, a new disposition in the literary field. Thus, the tacit taboo against the term “anthology” was lifted. The “anthology threshold,” as I would call it, was crossed. Until then, the anthology had been an unattainable literary object of desire in the Bulgarian cultural space. Compilers, editors, and publishers of all sorts of collections and readers refrained from using it, not having enough selfconfidence for higher selectivity and representativeness. From then on, even miscellanies without any exclusive qualities dared to fancy and call themselves anthologies.

94

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

A quick but close look at the first three anthologies, however, would be illuminating: Bulgarian Anthology: Our Poetry from Vazov on, edited by Dimitar Podvarzachov and Dimcho Debelyanov; Slavic Anthology, compiled by Stilyan Chilingirov; and of course, On the Isle of the Blessed by Pencho Slaveykov. Bulgarian Anthology is the first nationally representative collection of Bulgarian poetry (anthologies of fiction appeared later), published as a free artistic endeavor, without any institutional support, by two young poets (especially Debelyanov, twenty-three at that time). Slavic Anthology is the first broader presentation of foreign poetry in translation. Commissioned and subsidized by the Slavic Charity Society on the occasion of the Slav Assembly in Sofia in 1910, it was compiled by a man of letters who was conscientious but lacking in talent. Presenting the poetry of the Slavic countries to which Bulgaria felt the closest cultural and linguistic affinity, this book also fulfilled literary intentions dating back to the Revival period. On the Isle of the Blessed appeared along with and slightly ahead of these two books as their antithetical doppelganger: a book that pretends to be both a national anthology and a translated anthology, launched by one of the most influential literary figures at the time. The strong reverberations around Slaveykov’s book overshadowed the two “real” anthologies. So, the Bulgarian anthology dream was both achieved and undermined. The anthology threshold was simultaneously overcome and raised even higher. Bulgarian Anthology: Our Poetry from Vazov on, the book that embodied the long anthology aspirations, is a peculiar gesture of manifestation without manifesto. It doesn’t proclaim itself to be the first representative anthology of Bulgarian poetry in any way except in its title. Slavic Anthology, by contrast, features a foreword by its compiler, Stilyan Chilingirov, though a rather short, self-critical, and apologetic one, while Bulgarian Anthology offers no introductory words. The editors declined to make a statement, to give any direction or instruction to the reader. They chose to remain “behind the scenes,” implying, thus, with a silent gesture: that’s it. The editors’ silence implies modesty and awareness of their lack of public and literary authority. And the critics of the time were quick to attack them exactly on this weak point. Yet in the case of Podvarzachov and Debelyanov there is no lack of literary taste or courage.8 In fact, the selection of authors and the modeling of time in the anthology were a function of the literary field and its condition. Still, in the beginning of the twentieth century, in spite of the already accumulated lyrical production, there was no sense of tradition and hierarchy, no clear criteria for selecting authors and works. The editors oscillated between the harsh “conviction that Bulgarian poetry does not exist” and the conciliatory “all of those who have written something more or less good will be included” (both quotes are from Debelyanov’s private letters). As a result, Debelyanov and Podvarzachov made a very liberal, inclusive anthology containing thirty-eight poets, all of them living and active at that time. They are presented as equal in their contemporaneity, their entries organized according to their birth dates. So, the anthology turned out to be not a strict selection but an account of the available. This is why it has no historical dimension—there are no great dead poets in it. Hristo Botev, the sublime poetic and heroic figure of the late Revival period, is symptomatically absent. His presence apparently would have been too demanding and too lonely. In

Anthology Anxieties

95

1910, Bulgarian Anthology could be only from Vazov on, the living Vazov being the landmark on the visible horizon of contemporaneity. Slaveykov, the leader and ideologist of the Young, though properly presented in the Bulgarian Anthology couldn’t accept calmly being just one among the many poets after Vazov. As was already mentioned, with his pseudo-anthology, On the Isle of the Blessed, he questioned the very idea and capacity of making a national poetry selection: “The question is—a great question!—whether an anthology of works by Bulgarian poets is possible: because we have not many poets and even less poetries by which to do a proper anthology” (the translator’s foreword.)9 This was the shortest and sharpest negative review of Bulgarian Anthology which actually appeared in advance of the still forthcoming anthology. Slaveykov was also in an odd position with regard to Slavic Anthology. He and his literary circle protested against the Slav Assembly in Sofia, since it was motivated by Russian imperial policy. On the other hand, Slaveykov, as head of the National Library at that time, helped Chilingirov in his compiling work and was mentioned with special thanks in the book. On a purely literary level, Slavic Anthology was overshadowed by another anthology edited by Slaveykov, German Poets, published the following year (1911). In this volume, Slaveykov offered a truly well conceptualized, rich, and well translated presentation of the selected poets and of German poetry as a whole. Slavic Anthology, on the contrary, was an inventory of the spontaneous and scattered reception of Slavic poetry in Bulgarian literary periodicals. The somewhat chaotic material was organized in five sections: Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, Polish, and Russian (with the last taking up half of the volume). More of a compiler than a judge, Chilingirov was profoundly hesitant about his project, much like Debelyanov and Podvarzachov. In his preface, he writes that if he insisted solely on quality, this would have been an anthology of only a few pages. Nearly all literary people of his time appear with one or more translations in the book. This is why Chilingirov saw his effort as a collective one: “my fault is our literature’s fault.”10 The book remained rather a historical fact and did not have any subsequent editions. In 1910, Peyo Yavorov published a volume of his collected poetry, Following the Shadows of the Clouds (his last poetry book, as it turned out, and perhaps the most influential one in the Bulgarian lyrical tradition). A kind of a personal anthology, the book starts with a section titled Anthology. Evidently, right around the year 1910, the personal and the collective strategies for selection and representation worked in the same direction and, in spite of all doubts and hesitations, brought about a specific sense of accomplishment. But the urge did not come to an end with the passing of the year, and the anthology boom continued in 1911. Along with Slaveykov’s German Poets, Ivan Vazov published From the Great Poets. Thus, the two rivals met in the field of translation and anthologizing, brandishing their “elective affinities” in the realm of European poetry. Another poet, Kiril Hristov, offered his selected translations from Russian, Italian, and French. Also in 1911, the first children’s anthology appeared in print. Anthology became the word of the year, or rather of both years 1910/11. This boom was a part of the growing capacity of the literary field to produce meaning and value. Because anthologizing presupposes and designates a relative maturity of literature and its powers of reflection and self-reflection, the anthology became a kind

96

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

of a “maturity certificate” of pre-war Bulgarian literature and a powerful agent of its Europeanization.

Unexpected Consequences, New Paradoxes Casting a final glance at the inverse beginning of the Bulgarian anthological tradition, we could say that, strictly speaking, the omnipresent Slaveykov had nothing to do with the anthologizing of Bulgarian literature. Yet, he plays a central role in our anthology tradition. Both his On the Isle of the Blessed and German Poets shaped the idea of anthology in the national context. Formative in a peculiar negative way, they are fundamental on the structural level. These collections, for instance, prescribe the personalized11 model of presentation (with a focus on the author/person and not on the work), a model that predominates in the more ambitious Bulgarian anthologies until 1944. Perhaps unwittingly, Slaveykov also suggested a “representative quota” for a proper authoritative anthology: nineteen to twenty authors (one less in his insular anthology than in his German one). And obviously it did not matter that the literary resources were supposedly different. The “Isle of the Blessed” was described as a small country with a small population. As for “big” Germany, Slaveykov wrote: “The German poets are so many—thousands!—that in any selection there would be omissions.”12 The ideal poetic “quota” implemented in the two anthologies became imperative for (the real) Bulgarian poetry. In 1910/11, it was yet another indirect criticism of the crowded Bulgarian Anthology. Whether due to Slaveykov’s subtle statistical intuition or to his omnipresent anthology authority, the same ideal representative “quota” appeared in the most exquisite, most conceptually astute—and in a way most influential—poetry selection after the First World War, Anthology of Bulgarian Poetry (1925), edited by Geo Milev. About its influence, I argue in detail elsewhere;13 here, it would suffice to say that, in his selection, Geo Milev managed to delineate and order the core of the Bulgarian poetry canon as we know it today, and he did it as early as the mid-1920s. The anthology was planned as an act of closure. An avant-garde expressionist poet and critic, Geo Milev wanted—“with love and squalor” (Salinger’s expression is quite fitting here with its radical ambivalence)—to put an end to the seemingly endless symbolism and open the gates of Bulgarian poetry to the new “barbarians.” The result was a selection of rare historical precision and balance, completed in the last year of Geo Milev’s life.14 He presented the historical development of Bulgarian poetry through eighteen poets— from Petko Slaveykov and Hristo Botev to Hristo Smirnenski. In his interpretation, literature is no longer a synchronic horizontal plain as in 1910 but is rather of diachronic vertical dimensions. A careful reading of the introduction, “A Short History of Bulgarian Poetry,” shows that, for the post-Revival part of his selection, Geo Milev used as a palimpsest the list of thirty-eight names included in the Bulgarian Anthology fifteen years earlier. Milev mercilessly crossed out more than half of these names as epigones. The result of these cuts was that the number of poets matched Slaveykov’s ideal representative quota.

Anthology Anxieties

97

But in the course of this radical operation, Geo Milev ignored one “sub-category” in Slaveykov’s model—women poets. The subcategory exists in On the Isle of the Blessed where two women poets, Silva Mara and Vita Morena, are included, and it is even more prominent in German Poets where there are four women poets (“too many, really,” according to the straightforward reaction of one otherwise subtle commentator).15 It seems four was indeed the upper limit of female presence in an anthology for the literary consciousness of that time. The number of women in the broad and inclusive Bulgarian Anthology of Debelyanov and Podvarzachov was the same—four out of thirty-eight: Mara Belcheva, Ekaterina Nencheva, Roza Popova (better known as an actress), and Dora Gabe. So Bulgarian women’s writing naturally and lightly overcame the anthology threshold in 1910 but stumbled and stopped (or was stopped) at the new 1925 threshold, more of a barrier, of rigorous selection criteria imposed by Geo Milev. Two years later, in 1927, Elisaveta Bagryana made her official debut with a muchacclaimed book, The Eternal and the Holy. Chronologically, the threshold was already behind her, and she moved on without the need to overcome it. This, according to Miglena Nikolchina, might be one of the reasons why exactly Bagryana (and not an earlier female poet) was recognized as Bulgaria’s “literary mother.”16 Yet, the second anthology threshold actually coincided with the threshold of the canon, of the already advanced canon formation in the middle of the 1920s. As a result, Bulgarian women’s writing remained symptomatically in an ambiguous—still pre-canonical and already post-canonical—situation. Paradoxically too, in spite of its rich and adventurous anthology experience, Bulgarian literature did not manage to find its proper “export” anthology image abroad. This problem could also be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century and to the first anthologists’ precarious sense of maturity, but the argument would require a separate investigation.

Notes 1 See for example: Mihail Nedelchev (Михаил Неделчев), Завръщане към На острова на блажените, accompanying text to На острова на блажените. Фототипно издание (София: Български писател, 1986). 2 The small graphic portraits of each poet made by the artist Nikola Petrov are based on Slaveykov’s photos. The images of the two female poets in the book are based on photos of Mara Belcheva, poetess and Slaveykov’s partner in life and literature. 3 Plamen Doynov (Пламен Дойнов), 1910 и годините на литературата (София: Кралица Маб и НБУ, 2014), 167. 4 Peyo Yavorov (Пейо Яворов), Събрани съчинения, vol. 5 (София: Български писател, 1979), 110. 5 Kiril Stavrev (Кирил Ставрев), Литературно-художествени сборници и антологии (1878–1944) (София: АИ “Проф. Марин Дринов,” 2003), 15. 6 Ivan Radev (Иван Радев), Погребаните книги на Възраждането (Велико Търново: ПИК, 1994), 35. 7 Vasil Pundev (Васил Пундев), ed., Първи стихотворци (София: Държавна печатница, 1925).

98

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

8 Debelyanov was still an emerging author but already on his way to becoming one of the finest Bulgarian lyrical poets. His early death in 1916 (sadly, in a battle with English troops on the Macedonian front during the First World War) only reassured his place in the literary canon that emerged after the war. Debelyanov and Podvarzachov had a sharp judgment of poetry values and a healthy sense of humor, both necessary for anthology editors. 9 Pencho Slaveykov (Пенчо Славейков), На острова на блажените. Събрани съчинения, vol. 2 (София: Български писател, 1958), 5. 10 Stilyan Chilingirov (Стилян Чилингиров), ed., Славянска антология (София: С. М. Стайков, 1910), 3. 11 According to Mihail Nedelchev, anthologies are the most visible representation of what he calls “literary personalism”—the dominance of the personality in Bulgarian literature before the First World War. Михаил Неделчев, Социални стилове, критически сюжети (София: Български писател, 1987), 27–47. 12 Pencho Slaveykov (Пенчо Славейков), Събрани съчинения, vol. 7 (София: Български писател, 1959), 105. 13 See Bilyana Kourtasheva (Биляна Курташева), Антологии и Канон (София: Просвета, 2012), 214–33. 14 As a leftist intellectual he was arrested, killed without any trial, and buried in a mass grave during the undeclared civil war in Bulgaria at that time. 15 Vasil Pundev (Васил Пундев), “Двете антологии на Пенчо Славейков,” Златорог 5, Year VIII (1927): 378. 16 Miglena Nikolchina (Миглена Николчина), Родена от главата. Фабули и сюжети в женската литература (София: Сема РШ, 2002), 20.

8

Anomaly and Distext in Bulgarian Literature: Kiril Krastev Vassil Vidinsky, Maria Kalinova, and Kamelia Spassova

Beyond Young and Old In each national or world literature there are plenty of anomalies, aberrations, malfunctions, or exclusions regarding what was formed as an institutional norm and as normativity. These anomalies can be analyzed in at least four different ways: (1) as noticeable or unnoticeable fluctuations in the established literary canon or (2) as a conscientious avant-garde revolt against an understanding of classical literature. We could also think about anomalies in (3) a conventional (sometimes even commercial) sense—the sudden popularity of certain themes, genre, style, or taste preferences among readers, which represses particular literary alternatives that already exist marginally or in the periphery; or even (4) the objective mathematical frequency that conditions the abundance of certain themes, genres, styles, and preferences in a given context that eventually forms a Gaussian curve, a normal distribution that also points out the exceptions. The history of Bulgarian literature constitutes a master narrative that can be traced throughout the twentieth century, forming both its canon and the main tendency of its normative background. This narrative categorizes authors and processes on the axis between Young and Old, (the Young) modernists and (the Old) traditionalist. This opposition stems from a book called Young and Old. Critical Notes on Contemporary Bulgarian Literature (1907) by Dr. Krastyo Krastev (1866–1919), a critic who belonged to the most influential modernist circle, Мисъл (Thought). According to Dr. Krastev, the trend toward realism typical of the Old is represented first and foremost by the “patriarch” of Bulgarian literature, Ivan Vazov (1850–1921), while the apt example of the Young is Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912). In a time of newspaper snippets and opinionated “bean eaters,” Dr. Krastev argued, the popularity of a given author deprives him of aesthetic value. Slaveykov, an outstanding poet in spite of the fact that he was not a part of the wider public’s mass taste, nevertheless posits the “the new” trend as aesthetically self-reflexive and autotextual (self-modelled) art. In this way, the “uncrowned king of the Young and of contemporary Bulgarian literature” initiates a

100

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

new order. Thus, the traditionally realistic, patriarchal literature that unites the national with the social comes to be embodied by Vazov, while Slaveykov, the modernist king, combines the new with the historical and the fictional. The dynamic between the Young and the Old is analogous to that proposed by Friedrich Schiller in his “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795–1796), even though the reference is not made explicit by Dr. Krastev. “Naïve” art, i.e., the Old, is immediately and necessarily linked to nature and ancient times, while the modernist disposition presupposes a mediated reflection, which is also subjective, distancing, and antagonistic; according to Schiller; it is a transition from a state of nature to a state of freedom. This self-reflexive aspect of the Мисъл circle, coupled with its genre-related consciousness, draws the attention of Bulgarian and world literature scholar Galin Tihanov, who points out the temporal paradox that emerges when literature is tailored post factum. According to Tihanov, Dr. Krastev’s theses regarding the Old and the Young “are united by the notion that up to that point, Bulgarian literature exists as an uncoordinated, chaotic whole, which needs to reassign itself as tradition. Still, together with a logic paradoxical for a modern literary consciousness, tradition emerges in a syncope as departing from the past which is called forward in order to be forgotten.”1 In that way, Tihanov argues, Bulgarian literature inscribes itself in the modern Western European project, in which the will for modernity conditions both the (non)existing past and the points of its rupture. At the same time, it is the same “inscription” in the Western model that causes internal contradictions within both the national and the literary identity: the theme of one’s own and the foreign, as well as the important distinction between borderline (or marginal) and periphery.2 The dichotomy between the Young and the Old or modernists and traditionalists is paradigmatic for the history of Bulgarian literature—a series of genealogies can be listed, all relying on a similar narrative. Whether rediscovering, reaffirming, criticizing, or attempting to deconstruct it, they still come back to this foundation— positioning the modernist king against the Old Vazov. Precisely this dichotomic narrative makes up the normative background of Bulgarian literature’s history. Is it possible, however, to pinpoint an event that avoids the constitutive role of the Old, of the fathers and ancestors, as well as of the “empowered”; that also disrupts the normative narrative and, in the end, transcends the delineation of Old and Young? What kind of freedom would originate from such an event? How would one conceive normativity then? And what relation to the future would it forge? Such an anomaly was proposed by another Krastev, since modernism conceals something clandestine, something forgotten, and dysfunctional—not the journal Мисъл circle but Crescendo, not the modernist Dr. Krastyo Krastev but the avant-gardist, art theoretician, and critic Kiril Krastev (1904–1991).3 Kiril Krastev composed most of his avant-garde works between 1922 and 1927 as a student and a graduate; his work is almost simultaneous with late Dada manifestos in Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, and New York. Around this time, New York Dada was published (April 1921), a oneissue magazine by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, with the important participation of Tristan Tzara.

Anomaly and Distext

101

“Lutte contre les Poètes” In 1926, the famous Italian Futurist Tommaso Marinetti received a hard copy of the radical “Manifesto of the Fellowship Fighting Against Poets,” signed by Bulgarian avant-gardists Krastev, Vasil Petkov, Nedyalko Gegov, and Totyu Branekov (today the copy can be found in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library). The manifesto states several metaphysical, social, and aesthetic reasons for the birth of the fellowship against the categories of poet (particular) and artist (universal). Celebrating the rejection of “the reign of traditional absolutes,” typical for this context, the manifesto addresses the “primal value of the internally original and true art” and proclaims the social and civil responsibility of the poet as opposed to their stooping to some whimsical rhyming. The authors are terrified by the banality of art up to this point, by “the immutability of a poet’s conception of reality,” which assumes that each poet from antiquity to the present day4 is nothing more than a translation of any other poet, all of it utterly uniform, one and the same. The difference between the Young and the Old is not constitutive any more, since the manifesto juxtaposes “humane science” to “frivolous art” and insists that “professional art can only hold a third-rate position” in life. Alongside all kinds of extreme or legitimate observations on contemporary literature, the authors exclaim: “Here we celebrate the dadaist motto: life can do without a poet but not without a joiner.”5 The manifesto denouncing poets and artists was sent to most of Bulgaria’s newspapers and periodical editorials. In his Memories of the Cultural Life between the Two World Wars (1988), Krastev, in his old age, tells the story of the manifesto, sharing that it received a lot of feedback, yet he regards it as an “ephemeral event” that had a strong Dadaist thread woven into its fabric.6 Even if we consider that the old Krastev is partially blind to his own early achievements (it is typical and paradigmatic for senescence to misrepresent its past), we can still refer to the event as ephemeral from a historical or contextual perspective. The manifesto was an indirect continuation of the ideas of the literary circle formed around the most avant-garde Bulgarian periodical Crescendo, with three editions published in two volumes, in the span of two months (vol. 2 and vol. 3–4, 1922), in the small town of Yambol. Marinetti, receiving volumes of the periodical as well as literature in Bulgarian, had already corresponded with Krastev, but this manifesto was definitely the most radical gesture. The Italian futurist gave his personal copy the following title: Manifeste du Cercle “Lutte contre les Poètes,” and under the last line that reads “Yambol, August 1926,” he added the more recognizable Bulgarie.7 At first glance, this manifesto is perhaps the most extreme act in the history of Bulgarian literature, and it has been perceived and analyzed thus since. Still, several theoretical and historical questions emerge: To what extent does it really come down to radicalism, and isn’t it “late again” in comparison to events that had unfolded in Western Europe?8 Has this idea been influential (despite its “ephemeral” characteristic) outside of this small literary circle, and what is, in fact, its relation to the Dada movement? And, most importantly, what does this anomaly say about the history of Bulgarian literature?

102

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Ingratitude: Liberation or Smugness If we are to trace the genealogy of the anomaly of Krastev and the Crescendo periodical, then we should better take a step back to his school years, when, at age eighteen, he published the first Bulgarian Dadaist manifesto under the blunt and symptomatic title “Ingratitude” in the Лебед (Swan) periodical. On the one hand, this typical ingratitude is the “emotionally ethical formula of a disrupted continuity,”9 and this is what happens in the diachronic plan (Young vs. Old). On the other hand, this ingratitude is also directed at fellow artist, an ingratitude toward other avant-gardists. As Krastev writes— this being the key problem the avant-garde has to solve—“The question is to rethink the liberation,”10 not the fact of leaving behind realism or tradition and transiting to the other riverbank, that of “True Art,” but the rethinking of this transit, the analysis of this rupture, that is, what to do with freedom once it is achieved. This question is of utmost importance not only when it comes to Bulgarian literature but also within the context of Bulgarian history; it stands as a deeply traumatic issue connected both to the national Liberation in the nineteenth century and its cultural consequences and contradictions. For Bulgarian culture as a whole, it is a reference point (or direction) from whence to form its exemplary figures and determine where it is headed, what it wants to resemble, or what it would want to become. Of course, this contradiction between modernist genuine gesture and its reflexive distance is crucial and typical for the avant-garde itself—it happens synchronically in Yambol, Zürich, and New York. Still, how does Krastev rethink this freedom and the ways to approach it? Little is directly stated; albeit not always clear and firm enough, mostly in a playful manner, it always fits the ludic avant-garde aesthetics: “man understood that there is no furthermore. Tragicism gave birth to laughter,” or “And it [The Soul] aspired—and it should aspire—to: Death: Nothingness: Absolute,” or “It logically entails that we should always keep the only white book—for painting, and the interval—for music,” or “Art—ah, the perfect pneumatic machine, that could drag the meaning of things down to the deep bottom, only to place them in a new rotation—living a new meaning of its own: Meaninglessness.”11 Of course, we can easily see a common thread uniting the “lack of furthermore” with death, the interval, meaninglessness, nothingness, and the absolute. But what kind of a rethinking would that be? About two months later, Krastev expressed his idea more clearly in his next manifesto: “The truth about human nature demands liberating ourselves from the whole of Art …”12 According to this statement, it seems, that the liberation that we need to rethink can be conceptualized in several ways. Firstly, as a question of liberation from the classical notion of normativity, and that seems to have already been achieved. This is also the typical dichotomy between Young and Old that we already pointed out in the beginning. But in that case, the question Krastev himself asked emerges: What are we to do with the attained freedom, once we have reached the island of True Art? Secondly, complicating the previous question, liberation can be seen as a neverending, synthetic, and absolute strive of the soul toward nothingness (aspiration to

Anomaly and Distext

103

meaninglessness, death, and the interval). No other aspirations are left, since this one is eternal. It also generates a clear a-historicity, as it relies on absolute play, on absolute presence of the moment—this hic et nunc modernist act is preventing its transformation into past and tradition. But then what is the role of art within this kind of liberation? Thirdly, liberation is by all means a form of catharsis, i.e., purification via art from art itself. This is, according to Krastev, a synthetic return from art to man. Only after this tripartite exposition does the part of liberating and the synthetic strive13 in Lutte contre les Poètes become more evident.

Unsuccessful Distext: Ephemerality and Smugness So far, we have described the avant-garde’s typical radicality of disruption and play in its diachrony as well as in its synchrony. Krastev implemented the theme of liberation—an emblematic topic in the Bulgarian political context—precisely as a condition for the synchronic disruption from the rest of the avant-garde, presenting it in a surprising, tripartite way. Still, the following moment is of utmost importance, even though it is rarely mentioned by literary critics—the final line of “Ingratitude,” with its offense, denial, irony, and grit, goes: “(Bulgarian art shrugs and smiles).”14 Aside from its graphic representation, content-wise, this meta-comment, placed in brackets, is one of the most crucial observations that we can elicit from Krastev’s reflections on Bulgarian culture. On the one hand, Krastev has the remarkable skill to be at once immersed deeply into the avant-garde milieu, with its language and rage, and at a distance, in command of another language, or, should we say, a metalanguage. On the other hand, it is not his personal or intellectual skills that count in this case because precisely this dual condition, described by him, is the structural (and methodological) representation of the issue we are framing. In short, this is the premonition of a revolution that was to no avail. And the reasons for its failure are internal ones, just as the smug smile of a conservative realist victory pushes against the brackets. In 1927, Krastev stated: “In social forms, in the conclusions of contemporary Naturphilosophie, as well as in artistic forms, in all cases we seek to soothe (or neglect) the contradictions.”15 From today’s viewpoint, the normalization of the 1920s, described by Krastev as “Orthodoxy,” is a systematic event, i.e., a repetitive one. We can even call it the recurring historical context of Bulgarian literature and art. In that case, how can we describe the structural function of ingratitude in Krastev’s works using the same terminology? This is, of course, a break, but if we have to be more specific: ingratitude is an attempt to create a distext within the recurring context.16 In his memoirs of the 1980s, Krastev regularly returns to the word “ephemeral,”17 when describing the avant-garde rage. The same epithet is used to depict the short life of the Crescendo periodical. The ephemerality or decrescendo of the most extreme avant-garde gestures are a structural part of the history of Bulgarian literature. Ephemeral is that which slips away and cannot hold; and just as with dreams that fade

104

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

away, one might ask oneself—did the ephemeral actually take place, did the avantgarde really happen? But happening itself structurally prevents longevity and identity. If we spell out the systemic issue in such a manner, then we can also turn around the juxtaposition with which we have been working: in the end, the smugness of Bulgarian art faces the ingratitude that tried to oppose (though ephemerally) this same smugness. We should remember this description as coming from the expectations articulated in the manifesto itself, as well as from its conclusion. In that case, liberation is not (yet) an object of rethinking, as Krastev would say—it has not even happened yet. Is it not one of the typical crises that the avant-garde needs to face? The difference, in the context of Bulgaria, is that it remains a systematic anomaly within a traditionally realistic and sentimental canon. Later, Krastev confesses that “Unfortunately, I was alone, there was no other theoretician that would support my claim, that would form a group, a movement, a school; not a publisher, nor institution that would want to develop this Bulgarian futurology (this word, back then, was quite unknown, there was only the Italian and Russian artistic movement called ‘futurism’).”18 This remarkable philosophical and culturological rethinking of futurism as futurology is not a product of later editing, nor an interpretation post factum. In his “Romance and Slavic Futurism” (1927), Krastev discusses the culture of futurism by stating: “In its classical meaning, futurism (as a passion for the future times) has always existed,” and “The appearance of Futurism in art is probably less significant than the Futuristic culture and its philosophy. Only a few Futurists would claim that they had understood it.”19 This unrealized futurology, this “Slavic Futurism” (or in other words, “the beginning of the last”) is not just an anomaly but a myth of Bulgaria’s own.

Normative Backdrop, Sentimentality, and Decrescendo In the spring of 1922, Krastev received a written invitation to take over the college periodical Лебед, from its previous editor and art theorist to-be, Nikola Mavrodinov. The title of the periodical itself (Swan) and its content are both representative examples of the literary field’s sentimentally romantic inertia. In his memoirs, Krastev states that the new title of the periodical should act as a progressive overstepping of boundaries, as an impetus, an “offensive” move against an established repertoire, one that has a distinctly sentimental character. This “offensive” can be traced back to the transformative turning of Лебед into Crescendo.20 Back in the 1870s, sentimentality was regarded as the mass-consumer taste in literature, making a pejorative out of the concept within the framework of a contramodernist project that both doubles the modernist project of Bulgaria’s National Revival and parallels it. Intellectuals who held contra-modern views judged the public’s reaction to the first translated sentimental plays and novellas based on their conservative notion of “common sense” (compared with the first Bulgarian novel Под игото [Under The Yoke] by Vazov) as well as the negative influence of such literature on the morals of young ladies. After the Liberation, the sentimental tone solidified as a synonym for

Anomaly and Distext

105

naivety, i.e., eluding the meaning that Schiller vested in the word sentimental: selfreflexive art and the poet’s own literary conscience. Of course, the sentimental mode is part of the normative order and its presence can be found even in various hybrid literary forms, for instance among the socio-sentimental examples of leftist poetry, or as a part of the postmodern collage. To have a clearer idea of the framework of the concept within the 1920s, we need to turn to the issues of Лебед: comprised largely of “youthful” poetry, celebrating strong stirrings of the soul, outbursts in cliché phrases, easy jumps to moral conclusions about the straightforward distinction between good and evil, and ostentation, accompanied by endless sighs, tears, and joy. Crescendo was published for the first time starting with its second issue (the content of its first issue was printed under Лебед). We can observe here an unusual and provocative intersection of both sentimentalism and futurism in Bulgarian literature—a point of interest to literary historians. On the one hand, Crescendo abruptly breaks the sentimental line of Лебед; on the other hand, it exists as its successor: “The offensive begins from issue number two, which gave the sentimental Лебед its new dynamo-futuristic name Crescendo (Italian: crescendo—increase to climax)”21—an intricate displacement, a growing deformity, stasis, unfolding as dynamic, continuative interruption. If we are to provide a brief description of the norm and normative backdrop of the 1920s, the aesthetic and theoretical transformation from Лебед to Crescendo offers a clear picture. In the context of the 1920s, normativity can be defined according to: (1) its tone— emphasized sentimentality; (2) its literary history—proclaiming the new in art within the framework of continuity (without any form of disruption); (3) political relations— defending the Old art; and (4) its own “mechanics”—keeping the equilibrium (stasis) of the powers within the literary field. Despite the relatively clear program of Crescendo to formulate new art as well as its immaculate orientation within the contemporary (static) context, the larger literary field did not engage in a philosophical rethinking of futurism, nor was a Bulgarian futurology ever established. Thus, it is difficult to point out artistic examples of these ideas. The anomaly of Krastev fails to produce successors or school within the history of Bulgarian literature, in the same way in which Dadaism fails to inscribe itself within the national literary canon.22 Beyond the manifestos, it seems that Bulgarian literature is left with nothing; within this context, both futurism and Dada seem like unattainable poetry. Because of that, issue 3–4 of Crescendo publishes translated works by Benjamin Péret, “Notes pour les bourgeois” (1916) by Tristan Tzara, “An Anna Blume” (1919) by Kurt Schwitters, instructions for new poetic techniques, etc. In this way, key avantgarde texts and figures are included in Crescendo in order to make Bulgarian literature synchronic and simultaneous with world literature. Alongside the translations mentioned, an important place is given to Marinetti’s aeropoetics,23 “Bulgarian aeroplane,” with the subtitle of “manifesto thrown down from a Bulgarian aeroplane on October 30th 1912 at 5PM,”24 as an abstract from his poem Zang Tumb Tumb (1914). The avant-gardists from Yambol re-enacted the poem at night time to the horror of dormant civilians.25 In its graphic representation, the text “testifies” to the siege of Edirne during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), when Marinetti was a military correspondent for the French newspaper Gil Blas. The author

106

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

of “Bulgarian aeroplane” represents both audibly and typographically the moment of the “monoplane’s buzzing” over Edirne as well as the operation of discharging the manifestos, which are, on the one hand, proclamations against the Turkish government, and, on the other, evocations of the peaceful rescue of the Muslim population. Between these Bulgarian manifestos and the “burnt Turkish villages” seen from up high, we can see a “big T” dominating the space.26 Marinetti’s text, of course, was a challenge both to Crescendo’s polygraphy and its design. The beginning of “Bulgarian aeroplane” was also a challenge with its “indifferent” coupling of a “sun” and the sphere-like “balloon” of the aviation department, the two “spheres” lingering over the Balkans, conjoined by the plus symbol [+]. A major difficulty were also the vertical lines: “perched flames” / “pillars (made) of smoke” / “spirals (made) of sparks.” At the end of the work, the editors left an ironic note about the impossibility of such poetic texts to be “realisable” in Bulgarian language and within the Bulgarian context: “As for the miserable—in this case—Bulgarian language, this deed remains, of course, impossible / Note Cresc.”27

Weltliteratur, Movimento Futurista di Jamboly, and the Meeting That Never Happened In his essay “The Ideal of ‘World literature’” (1970), the literary theorist Tzvetan Stoyanov (1931–1971) seeks to map out the place of Bulgarian literature within world literature and points out three threats: a) cultural isolationism as a consequence of nationalism and the atomization of the world; b) cosmopolitan assimilation or the rejection of the national in favor of the universal; c) national turned exotic, amplified by the commercial relations that sell artworks as unknown animals from a zoo.28 Krastev’s ideas about literature’s development do not fall into any of these dangerous categories. It might come as a surprise, but sustaining and enduring cultural contradictions is a strikingly effective technique for overcoming these risks.29 Besides this, Krastev’s texts (curiously enough) can be regarded as anomalies with regard to all four perspectives:30 they are aberrations from the strict Bulgarian canon and from the self-proclaimed canonical modernist context; they do not belong to the notion of classical literature at all (from Homer to the Bulgarian Revival epoch in literature); they are indiscernible when it comes to popular taste (i.e., sentimentality or other popular forms); and last, but not least, they voice issues that are going to be statistically irrelevant in Bulgarian literature (i.e., “Manifesto of the Fellowship Fighting Against Poets”). This is why we investigate this anomaly not as a singular event, but as a structural phenomenon within the periodic context of Bulgarian literature. One of the morals shared by Krastev himself is that avant-garde radical gestures—the scissions and the breaks—are almost instantly neutralized and normalized within any inertial context.31 In this way, the normative backdrop manages to absorb all of its irregularities by treating them as ephemeral mumbling, daydreaming, and dreaming without any consequences.32 Thus, it poses the issue of ingratitude as a structural function and as a feature of ephemeral

Anomaly and Distext

107

chaos.33 So, Krastev’s resistance to the three previous threats outlined by Stoyanov actually enables the placement of Bulgarian literature within world literature.34 The existence of an avant-garde in Bulgaria but outside of Sofia is peculiarly similar to the birth of Dada in 1915, at the “Cabaret Voltaire” in Zürich, i.e., at the periphery. In the 1920s, Yambol, albeit far away from the capital (which marks the intellectual center), had gathered anarcho-communists, socialists, occultists, theosophists, protestants, francmasones, and futurists. For the Yambol avant-gardists, the single most inspiring name of Bulgarian literature is that of the expressionist poet Geo Milev (1895–1925), who supported them and published some of his own works in Crescendo. Geo Milev is also the most influential avant-garde figure of the 1920s, editor of the periodicals Везни (Libra) (1919–22) and Пламък (Flame) (1924–25). They even sent him a group photograph in 1922, presenting themselves under the blatant name Movimento Futurista di Jamboly.35 Krastev understood the characteristic of Yambol as periphery (or maybe a borderline territory), describing it post factum as follows: “Today I understand that we were not possessed by a feeling of exclusivity, mania, and aristocratism (only when it comes to the soul), that we have found a new ‘America.’ Our horizons, the information we had, and our creative powers back then and afterwards, they were not enough for big accomplishments, still that was of no importance—our strives that inspired us, they were crucial.”36 Precisely this excitement about the synchronicity with the world’s artistic processes gives Krastev the right to call it “the Yambolian spiritual universe,” and to compare its temporal intensity to a Yambolian “clicking of ideas.” It is both exemplary and comic to see the end of Marinetti’s letter, addressed to Krastev: “Veuillez me dire si Jambol—Bulgarie est une adresse suffisante” (“Please, inform me whether Yambol, Bulgaria is a sufficient address line”).37 Yambol, Bulgaria was, indeed, a sufficient address line. Marinetti’s letter arrived and the manifestos of the ephemeral periodical Crescendo were in consonance with the world avant-garde events. To summarize, the anomaly of Krastev, albeit underrepresented as а part of Bulgarian literature, remained open to the cosmopolitan project of world literature. In this sense, Krastev’s distext finds its own context within Weltliteratur. In 1932, when Marinetti made his visit to Bulgaria, he wanted to meet his friend Krastev, asking his hosts in the capital of Bulgaria: “I do have a futurist friend here, is it possible to see him?”38 Despite being there, and a part of a group photograph, Krastev did not introduce himself. The reason for this is made clear both in Krastev’s texts from the end of 1920s and in his memoirs: it is Marinetti’s relationship with Benito Mussolini.39 This political break is the strict differentiating line between the 1920s and the 1930s and their contrasting polit-aesthetics. In Bulgaria, as world-wide, the premonition of another war, as well as the preparations for it, became more tangible and imminent, and political delineations were more necessary than ever. Similarly to Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur, the important characteristic of intellectual exchange (Weltumlauf) does not confine itself to swapping letters; people should meet each other. Yet, in this case we have Weltliteratur without an actual meeting. There is just a photograph.

108

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Notes 1 Galin Tihanov (Галин Тиханов), Жанровото съзнание на кръга “Мисъл” (София: Е. Т. Кирил Маринов, 1998), 220. Tihanov parallels the Мисъл circle’s strive for artistic autonomy with the idea of the classical and autonomous in Goethe and Schiller within the open receptive horizon of world literature (194). 2 Yordan Ljuckanov, “Bulgarian Cultural Identity as a Borderline One,” Interlitteraria 20, no. 2 (2015): 88–104, 10.12697/IL.2015.20.2.9. Marginality or borderline status, unlike “periphery,” implies the potentiality of gravitating toward more than one “center.” For an alternative approach to the avant-garde, see Yordan Lyutskanov, “Notes on how the avant-garde could recall non-modernity on a European periphery,” in Transferts, appropriations et fonctions de l’avant-garde dans l’Europe intermédiaire et du nord, ed. Harri Veivo (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), 185–99. 3 Krastev studied philosophy (1923–25), graduating with a degree in natural sciences from Sofia University in 1930. He specialized in Visual Arts in Paris in 1938–39. After that he worked at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. 4 Or from Sappho to Peyo Yavorov, the latter being a part of the Мисъл quartet. Thus, the manifesto explicitly proclaims itself against the Young from Мисъл, who follow an individualistic sacerdotal principle of autonomous art. 5 Kiril Krastev (Кирил Кръстев), Vasil Petkov (Васил Петков), Nedyalko Gegov (Недялко Гегов), Totyu Branekov (Тотю Бранеков), “Манифест на дружеството за борба против поетите” (Ямбол, 1926), 3. At the time, Dada is, of course, past its prime in Europe and some of the Dadaist authors have oriented themselves toward the more comprehensible practices of surrealism. Bulgaria never had surrealist authors, so Crescendo seems to be the ultimate radical position. 6 Kiril Krastev (Кирил Кръстев), Спомени за културния живот между двете световни войни (София: Български писател, 1988), 56. “The manifesto was a real post-war cultural and historical dadaist joke that only a few could understand, even though it provoked a lot of responses.” Ibid., 54. 7 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesto in Bulgarian. Marinetti added on top of page: “Manifeste Du Cercle “Lutte Contre Les Poètes.” (Bulgaria, 1926), [4773–1], https:// brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/4151525. Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, GEN MSS 475. Slides are derived from a microfilm copy of Marinetti’s seven Libroni (scrapbooks) documenting futurism, the futurist movement, and the avant-garde. 8 “Delayed development” is one of the most important, painful, frequently discussed, and difficult themes in Bulgarian culture. It emerges in the nineteenth century and is also prominent today. This topic has to deal with some of the most crucial theoretical questions regarding the concepts of context, world literature, self-colonialism, stages of historical development et al.; it also presupposes the notion of the “Western model.” 9 Elka Dimitrova (Елка Димитрова), “Манифестите на Кирил Кръстев,” in Критическото наследство на българския модернизъм, vol. IV, eds. Едвин Сугарев, Елка Димитрова and Цветанка Атанасова (София: Боян Пенев, 2011), 202. 10 Kiril Krastev (Кирил Кръстев), “Неблагодарност,” Лебед 3, no. 1 (1922): 5. 11 Ibid., 6.

Anomaly and Distext

109

12 Kiril Krastev (Кирил Кръстев), “Началото на Последното,” Crescendo, no. 3–4 (1922): 15. 13 “The psyche and culture of our contemporaneity are conceived under the sign of Analysis. The real life, nevertheless, means Synthesis.” Kiril Krastev (Кирил Кръстев), “Романски или славянски футуризъм?”, Стрелец 1, no. 12 (June 23, 1927): 3–4. Krastev’s attitude toward the notion of synthesis is dual—it is of absolute necessity, and at the same time it is the death of art: “The Synthesis of art is its own destruction.” Krastev (Кръстев), “Началото на Последното,” 16. 14 Kiril Krastev (Кирил Кръстев), “Неблагодарност,” Лебед 3, no. 1 (1922): 7. 15 Krastev (Кръстев), “Романски или славянски футуризъм?”, Стрелец, 1, no. 11 (June 16, 1927): 4. 16 We can define context as the “cultural conditions of possible or actual emergence or existence.” While distext is the cultural conditions of impossible emergence or existence. But there is another possibility: distext is any given state in which we observe a break with the cultural conditions of possible or actual emergence or existence. Or, briefly put: context itself can contain distext. This is not a necessary condition, yet distext is an extremely important part of the more intricate real contexts in which we exist and which we attempt to understand. Distextual relations themselves can assume more intense or milder forms. At its highest level, distext can be considered an isolated case of external or internal empty relation. Sometimes distext can be contextualized, but only post factum. See Васил Видински, Мария Калинова, и Камелия Спасова, Хаос и безредие. Случайното на езика, литературата и философията, поредица “Тълкувания” (София: Литературен вестник, 2018), 176–7. 17 Krastev (Кръстев), Спомени, 54. 18 Ibid., 44. 19 Krastev (Кръстев), “Романски или славянски футуризъм?”, no. 11, 4. 20 The name Crescendo means a scream, a shriek, intensification of force. The periodical had “an uncomplimentary big format,” resembling a white notebook, the cover of which was painted by the avant-gardist Mircho Kachulev, a diagonal inscription of the title Crescendo, “in an expanding manner bulky and constructivistic,” giving the concept’s etymology a suitable graphic and material dimension—Krastev (Кръстев), Спомени, 43. 21 Ibid., 43. 22 More about somewhat of a theoretic Dadaism beyond the works of Krastev and more of a comment on the polit-aesthetics of Western Dadaism, see Vladislav Todorov (Владислав Тодоров), Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). 23 On the genre of aeropoetics, see Nadezhda Stoyanova (Надежда Стоянова), “Поглед отгоре. Жанрът на аерописа в българската литература,” Литература и техника, https://bglitertech.com/pogled-otgore-zhanrat-na-aeropisa. 24 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Bulgarian aeroplan,” Crescendo, no. 3–4 (1922): 8. 25 Krastev (Кръстев), Спомени, 39. 26 Marinetti, “Bulgarian aeroplane,” 8. 27 Ibid., 9. 28 Tzvetan Stoyanov (Цветан Стоянов), “Идеалът за ‘световна литература’,” in Културата като общение, Събрани съчинения, vol. 1 (София: Български писател, 1988), 65–6.

110

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

29 Krastev (Кръстев), “Неблагодарност,” 7. 30 See the first paragraph of this essay. 31 Compare with the analogous position on Dada according to Alexander Kiossev (Александър Кьосев), “Господи, колко си хубава! Размишления на възрастния дадаист,” Литературен вестник, no. 18 (2011): 9. 32 This periodic context of the status-quo coexists with the periodically recurring opposition between Young and Old. Both of these normative contexts mutually determine each other, overlap, and enforce each other. 33 See Видински, Калинова, и Спасова, Хаос и безредие (2018). 34 The way we use the notion Weltliteratur is neither that of Goethe, nor that of David Damrosch. We follow Galin Tihanov’s ideas which question the dominant AngloSaxon discourse through a conceptual grid of four factors: time, space, language, and self-reflexivity that opposes neoliberal notions of globalization and transnationalism. We can also think of Weltliteratur as a pre-modern term. See Galin Tihanov, “The Location of World Literature,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 44, no. 3 (2017): 468–81. 35 “The youth around Crescendo take a group photograph in the same year of 1922 and post it to Geo Milev for St. George’s Day with the glorious inscription Movimento Futurista di Jamboly,” Georgi Gospodinov (Георги Господинов), “Crescendo— провинцията като авангард,” Българският литературен модернизъм (2012), https://bgmodernism.com/Nauchni-statii/georgi_g. 36 Krastev (Кръстев), Спомени, 32. 37 Ibid., 39. 38 Ibid., 46. 39 Even in his “Romance or Slavic futurism,” Krastev ironically remarks that futurism kept on existing and flourishing, especially as “the most beneficial factor turned out to be the patronage of Italian dictator Mussolini.” Krastev (Кръстев), “Романски или славянски футуризъм?”, no 11, 4. See a later comment in Krastev (Кръстев), Спомени, 46.

9

Telling History in Many Ways: The Recent Past as Literary Plot Ani Burova Translated by Traci Speed

In contemporary literature, so strongly pluralistic both artistically and thematically, it is difficult for dominant themes to stand out, and it is almost impossible to identify such themes as characteristic for particular literatures. This applies to Bulgarian literature as well as to East European literatures in general, even more so since the past three decades have been a period of exceptionally dynamic processes and heterogeneous phenomena for them. But it is precisely this specific character of the literary context after the pivotal year of 1989—let us call it the post-totalitarian era—that has led to the identification of a thematic line that could be designated as typically East European. The very fact that Eastern Europe is marked by a specific historical experience in the second half of the twentieth century turns its literary interpretations into one of the most characteristic literary trends of the last decades. Its existence in multiple works, a large part of which, without exaggeration, can be designated as emblematic of the period from the beginning of the 1990s on, speaks to the importance of this theme. In most cases, these works also belong among the most translated of the respective literatures, and this is probably due to their literary qualities as well as to the fact that they present a specific experience, realia, and realities connected with the life of several generations of East Europeans. The fact that this theme is perceived as typically East European, for example, is attested to by the following excerpt from an article by Katharina Raabe, an editor in the division of East European literatures at the well-known German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag, in which she comments on the reception of East European books in the “West” after 1989: The literature of the countries of Eastern Europe was perceived above all as documentary testimony. Readers also paid attention to style to some extent, but they were interested above all in information. A new Nabokov or Márquez was sought who would awaken the imagination of the Western audience. People wanted to understand the conflicts and tragedies, the psychological and intellectual

112

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

situation, as well as that ubiquitous pressure to which the residents of these isolated countries had been subjected. It was a matter of the burden of history. History that could be recounted only now, after these countries had been freed from the monopoly of the party. Much was expected of literature in this respect.1

The expectation of which Raabe speaks is that literature process and summarize the complex personal and societal experiences of recent history. And this is quite logical, insofar as one of the functions or social roles most inherent to literature is to give meaning to events of universal significance in a profound and complex way. If, as it seems, contemporary literature is, theoretically, increasingly more engaged in the reflection of different layers of the past and its legacy in the present, then from the  1990s on, in East European literatures, this engagement is reflected precisely in the interpretation of the historical and human experience through the age of socialism and the period that followed it, the Transition, which began after the societal change of 1989. Yet, the resoluteness with which the recent past emerges as an emblematic theme for East European literatures does not mean that its artistic interpretations are uniform or that the images of this past are unambiguous. On the contrary, their variety or, more precisely, their heterogeneity is enormous. In fact, the great variability in interpretation emerges as a substantial distinction between contemporary literature and that of previous periods. The traditional literary attitude toward reconstructing historical epochs and social processes, familiar from previous centuries and decades, is marked above all by an aspiration toward large-scale images in which the entire historical and social experience is synthesized. But such a generalizing point of view is not intrinsic to contemporary literature; its account of life is usually fragmentary, personal, and subjective. Post-totalitarian literature abandons the pretense of completeness and universality even when it reconstructs a past fixed in the collective memory of several generations both due to the logical reaction against artistic norms from socialist times, when literature was expected to express first and foremost generalizing messages, as well as because of the strong influence of postmodernism on East European literatures after 1989 and its doubt about the legitimacy of grand narratives. The well-known Czech writer Jiří Kratochvil, in whose works the history of the twentieth century is an invariable theme, sums up this attitude to a certain extent when he says that realism (with its inherent narrative possibilities and range of images of the world it constructs) “was created for a completely different century and is no longer able to relate ours.”2 Within the context of these reflections, in this chapter, we will attempt to outline the basic models of artistic interpretation of the recent past (the second half of the twentieth century and the Transition after 1989). The main focus will be on Bulgarian literature, discussed in typological terms in the context of East European literatures.3 In Bulgarian literature, the topic of the legacy of socialism and the events from and immediately after 1989 began to emerge as a significant trend primarily after 2000, somewhat later than its appearance in most of the other East European literatures.4 As its very nature presupposes, it developed mainly in prose, especially in the novel, whose parameters, even with all of the genre experimentation in recent decades, remain most intrinsic to literary interpretations of history. But if in previous literary periods the

Telling History in Many Ways

113

logical genre choice was the epic novel, with its narrative and plot possibilities for creating a comprehensive perspective, in contemporary East European literatures, because of the already mentioned disassociation from extensive generalizations, its equivalents are difficult to find. Today’s literature approaches the past through various artistic and thematic perspectives, modes, and aspects. As a result of this, the novel deploys a very broad palette of genre possibilities, which we will attempt to outline here. The search for new artistic perspectives on a series of events led to the emergence of modern interpretations of classical genre models. The epic novel, even if not particularly relevant in its traditional parameters because of its primal connection with the theme of the historical past, has been the object of numerous interpretations. The novel City Sister Silver, by one of the most famous contemporary Czech writers, Jáchym Topol,5 can serve as an example of the highly altered conception of its boundaries. Written in 1994, it represents one of the first literary interpretations of the events surrounding 1989 and the early post-totalitarian years. The book has long been established as emblematic of East European prose and is often seen as an epic of modernity; in her article, Raabe describes it as an “epic of post-communism.”6 But the epic scope in City Sister Silver is achieved by sharply alternative artistic means—the plot refers to recognizable historical realities and events, but intertwines them with phantasmagoric incidents and images, and the structure of the text is highly fragmented at every level— from the plot to the literary language itself. In Bulgarian literature, the narrative perspective of the entire “social landscape” of society is intrinsic to the novels Девети (Ninth) by Ancho Kaloyanov,7 and Разруха (Ruin) by Vladimir Zarev.8 As its title suggests, the plot in Kaloyanov’s book unfolds immediately before and after that date—September 9, 1944—so crucial for contemporary Bulgarian history, and the dramatic social change it presented in the broad social perspective of several storylines.9 Ruin, on the other hand, is a novel about the transitional period of the 1990s, in which Zarev turns the main representations of this period, deeply rooted in public opinion and bluntly stereotyped—the disintegration of the social fabric, disillusionment, the upsurge in criminal capital, and so forth—into the storyline of a novel; for this reason, the social realignment in the book is presented through the antithetical plots about an unemployed writer and a suddenly wealthy parvenu.10 Despite their marked affiliation with the tradition of epic narration, both books also possess traits (and very important ones at that, in terms of composition and plot as well as in the messages expressed) that reveal more of an impulse toward the rewriting of this tradition rather than direct entry into it. In Ninth, for example, the various storylines generally flow parallel to one another without intertwining into a single narrative, rendering the structure of the novel fragmentary, composed of plotlines with a relatively high level of autonomy. But most important in terms of “modernizing” the genre model is the metaliterary character of the two works. Zarev’s book is constructed on the formula of a “novel within a novel”—the plotline about the nouveau riche character is presented in Ruin as the manuscript of a novel written by the writer character—while in Kaloyanov’s book, most of the characters are writers with real prototypes in Bulgarian literature who have found themselves in different public roles and positions in the course of historical change, which strongly propels the book

114

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

toward topics such as literature and power, the responsibility of the writer’s choice, and others.11 In short, literature itself is presented as a very important perspective on the interpretation of history—actually more important and central than ever before in the  long tradition of literary tales about the past. Also related to this is the fact that, in the novels examined here, the themes of the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting history and of shaping its images (through the stories about it, of course) dominate the description of events. The classic genre form likely exerting the strongest influence over interpretations of the past in the contemporary novel is the generational chronicle or family saga. Because of the very logic of the genre, books of this type usually span a longer period of time (most often, the history of the twentieth century), and as a result, the second half of the last century is part of a chronologically larger narrative. In the context of contemporary prose, the narrative typical of the family saga is also transformed to varying degrees into different literary forms. Some works remain closer to the classic structure of the genre and the chronological sequence of the plot development (as in The House of the Deaf Man, a 2012 novel by the Slovak author Peter Krištúfek).12 Elsewhere, the genre experiment is demonstrated, exposed, and transformed into a structural and conceptual focus of the work (in the novel The Walnut Mansion by one of the most authoritative Croatian prose writers, Miljenko Jergović,13 time, historical and generational, runs “backwards,” with the narrative starting from the more recent periods and gradually proceeding to those further away). In other cases, the generational story is highly fragmented, and the references to the interpreted genre model are nuanced and expressed at a deeply implicit level, as in Primeval and Other Times by the iconic contemporary Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk,14 in which historical and human times are contaminated by the mythological and natural chronotope. In Bulgarian literature, the structure of the generational chronicle can be recognized in The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov15—a book emblematic of the last decade, as well as one of the most translated works of contemporary Bulgarian prose. The novel is a complex text in terms of meaning production, plot, and structure. It collects, on a mosaic principle, many heterogeneous stories—the ancient myth of the Minotaur, stories about the lifestyle and daily routine in socialist Bulgaria in the 1970s and 1980s and about life in post-socialist Bulgaria in the 1990s. On one level, the novel is a family chronicle that tells the story of the last century (the First and Second World Wars, socialism, the Transition) through the biographies of three generations of men. Of course, in this highly fragmented novel, the narrative model of the generational chronicle is applied very minimalistically—whereas the classic form of the genre would develop entire storylines, here we have instead “micro-stories” from the family history. Even so, the mode of the narrative is highly functional simultaneously through the historical times and generations in both The Physics of Sorrow as well as in the entire literary tradition examined here, for which the problem of memory—personal, generational, societal, historical—is central. One of the clearest literary directions to emerge in the interpretation of the recent past is reconstructing it through the personal experience of the individual. Typologically, this belongs among the most representative phenomena in East European literatures

Telling History in Many Ways

115

after 1989 and is in accord with the tendencies, characteristic of the period, toward the rehabilitation of the personal point of view and subjective experience.16 For the majority of works associated with this tendency, autobiographical or auto-fictional writing and a strong stylization in the direction of authenticity of the experience are characteristic (logically, the narrative is almost always carried out in the first person). But despite its emphatically subjective perspective, this type of story in fact articulates not (only) personal memory but the collectively experienced past. The biography of the self is constructed in such a way that it becomes collective for the generations who lived through the decades of socialism and post-socialism. In this sense, the approach of strong subjectivization represents not so much a rejection of generalization as the choice of an emotional narrative mode turned toward a collective memory, eventful and emotional. The very nature of this literary attitude toward recent history supposes that its character is constituted not so much of major events, but above all, of the incidents from individual lives, the everyday, even lifestyle, which, however, history and ideology have heavily infiltrated. This creates stories logically, first and foremost, about the clash between great history and personal biography, between ideology and the intimate human world. Because of all this, the image of the past is ambiguous here—it is usually a complex amalgam of tragedy (born of the lot of the individual in the totalitarian world or of the chaos of the post-totalitarian reality), irony (toward the lifestyle and customs of socialism and post-socialism), and sentimental nostalgia (toward the personal past). In the Bulgarian context, Georgi Gospodinov is iconically associated with this thematic stance. It may be said that he not only expresses it powerfully in his works (besides in The Physics of Sorrow and his first novel, Natural Novel,17 in many of his stories and in some of the essays from the book Invisible Crises18) but also conceptualizes it—in the novels themselves, in essays, interviews, and so on. For Gospodinov, writing about the past is a part of a comprehensive writing agenda based on the idea that literature is a means of rehabilitating and salvaging personal history and individual human biography from oblivion. By adding his claim that “our personal stories are universal,”19 we receive, to a large extent, exactly the formula of the “subjective” approach to the reconstruction of the recent past in East European literatures described above. Incidentally, Gospodinov has dealt with the period of socialism also as a compiler of two non-fiction books: Инвентарна книга на социализма (Inventory Book of Socialism),20 dedicated to the routine and everyday life of the socialist decades, and Аз живях социализма: 171 лични истории (I Lived Socialism: 171 Personal Stories),21 a collection made up of authentic stories told by real people. It is interesting to observe how for Gospodinov (as well as in general in the technique of literary memory of the past discussed here) that which in the two non-fictional books is an approach to history becomes a literary device in the novels—in The Physics of Sorrow, for example, a series of short fragments are included, styled as authentic stories of different people, which actually constitute the complex mosaic of Bulgarian life between the 1960s and 1990s. The use of child characters and children’s experiences occupies a key position in this interpretation of the past strongly tied to personal experience. (In most cases, it is a matter not of reconstruction of authentic perception, but of stylizing the child-

116

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

like response in perceiving the world.) This perspective carries enormous meaning potential with respect to topics of twentieth-century history, especially totalitarianism. The spontaneity of the child’s reaction is an ideal mechanism for exposing the falseness of the totalitarian world; the innocence inherent in childhood embodies the whole vulnerability of human identity subjected to the pressure of ideology; and—not least— the child’s perception exposes the absurdity of totalitarian existence in a categorical but not unambiguous way, thus contributing to the semantic and emotional complexity so important for this thematic direction. This high efficacy of meaning explains why a distinct approach has formed around the literary functions of childhood in East European prose in recent decades. The fact that a child’s clash with ideological reality can even produce a comic effect, without losing the drama resulting from the experience of the totalitarian world, has been effectively used in a number of works of contemporary prose. In the novel Bliss Was It in Bohemia by the Czech fiction writer Michal Viewegh,22 the Prague Spring of 1968, the decades of the so-called “normalization” that followed its suppression, as well as the Velvet Revolution of 1989 are recounted through the prism of the main character’s childhood and coming of age. In B. Proudew by the Czech writer Irena Dousková,23 the atmosphere of mature socialism is recreated through the naïve point of view of the ten-year-old protagonist. A characteristic peculiarity of Bulgarian literature is that stories about the past through the prism of personal experience and childhood have emerged much more strongly in the works of immigrant writers. Probably the most famous in this regard is the book Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall (The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner) by the German author of Bulgarian descent Ilija Trojanow.24 Written in 1996 and first published in Bulgarian in 1997, then again in 2007, Trojanow’s novel is constructed around the classic plot device of a journey (in this case—of the main protagonist to his native Bulgaria, which he left long ago) as a path to oneself. The World is Big is perhaps the most multifaceted interpretation of the theme of returning to one’s own past, experienced in the once-socialist Bulgaria, in search of an identity that has been fragmented in the immigrant experience, with the change of residency and language. In different variations, this topic, or others similar to it, forms the basis of a series of works by authors of Bulgarian origin writing abroad who left their homeland not before 1989, but after (unlike Trojanow, who emigrated at the beginning of the 1970s). This makes childhood and coming of age in Bulgaria during the time of mature and late socialism a logical subject for the autobiographical tale—this is the case in Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova25 and in the novel Mausoleum by Rouja Lazarova,26 as well as in some of the stories from East of the West: A Country in Stories by Miroslav Penkov27 (all of which were written in other languages and translated into Bulgarian afterwards). Despite the genre heterogeneity of the works—those of Lazarova and Penkov are fictional, while Kassabova’s book is documentary prose (an amalgam of memoir, travelogue, and fiction)—they each create a very similar typological image of socialist and post-socialist Bulgaria. Crafted from a perspective of distance and intended for a foreign audience, this image is much more homogeneous and categorically unambiguous than those in books written in Bulgarian by authors writing in Bulgarian.28 (The appearance of socialist life in Kassabova and Lazarova is literally and metaphorically gray; its invariable symbol

Telling History in Many Ways

117

is the prefabricated apartment complex.) It can be said that the position of the writer and the purpose of the text lead to a number of symptomatic differences in the literary interpretations of the past between the “domestic” authors and those writing outside of Bulgaria. In the latter, the very function of the narrative perspective based on authentic experience has been changed to a large extent—here it is no longer so much a part (or not only a part) of the semantic and emotional range of the text as it is a guarantee of its legitimacy and truth: “And the only authentic way to do this was to tell the story of growing up and coming of age in the not altogether sane last decade and a half of the Cold War,” Kapka Kassobova says in Street Without a Name.29 In general, “immigrant” writing expresses much more declaratively and assertively the very grounds of the story through and about memory, which among the non-immigrant authors are usually more organic and implicitly embodied in the text: “With this book, I want to help us to get rid of it [the ghost of the Berlin wall] from our lives forever,”30 writes Kassabova, for example, emphasizing the therapeutic effect of relating history through literature. Parallel to the literary reconstruction of the past through the code of the authentically experienced, another attitude has also developed in East European prose—antithetical, but just as emblematic. We can define it as an abstraction and universalization of the historical experience. In this approach, a novel’s plot refers to recognizable events from the second half of the twentieth century, but at the same time, abstracts them from their concrete context in order to comment not only on a particular historical moment, but on the human experience with the trials of history and the pressure of ideologies in general. This effect is most often achieved through the contamination of concrete historical facts and realities with universal, highly recognizable cultural codes— archetypes, mythological and fairy tale storylines, myths and imagery from Christianity, earlier historical events with universal significance, and so on. Jiří Kratochvil, in whose books this type of literary interpretation is not only strongly and consistently developed but is also conceptualized as the only adequate means by which contemporary literature can narrate the history of the twentieth century, sums it up in this way: “The language of modern fiction writers is more and more noticeably the symbolic language of myth, and this mythological language makes visible the archetypal origin of all stories and plots …, whose birthplace is in the depths of the collective unconscious.”31 In addition to the works of Kratochvil, representative of this trend are also the novels of Jáchym Topol, which are devoted to the history of the Second World War until the end of the last century, and the novel The Moscoviad by Ukrainian writer Yurii Andrukhovych,32 which recreates the atmosphere in the Soviet Union immediately before its disintegration. The great potential of this interpretation comes from its high degree of literary convention. It makes historical time multidimensional and the messages associated with it universally relevant not only to a particular moment but to the course of history as a whole. Also important in this type of modeling of the past is the fact that, in most cases, the novels include, revise, and contaminate genre models with long traditions in literature—adventure and crime fiction, the picaresque novel, the Bildungsroman, romance, and more. It can be said that they use cultural archetypes together with literary archetypes. As a result of this, the works created are heterogeneous in terms of genre and theme. Some of them are similar to dystopian novels in their messages,

118

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

which is a logical consequence of the process of allegorizing the historical events in the works. In other cases, a phantasmagoric image of history is created—this is the case with The Moscoviad, whose action is constantly balanced between the real and the fantastic and takes place simultaneously in a “real” Moscow and in its underground, chthonic counterpart. Other novels develop “alternative,” fictionalized versions of what really happened—in Jáchym Topol’s novel Gargling with Tar33 for example, the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 by the Warsaw Pact troops leads to a Czech uprising, which itself evolves into a third world war. This strong tendency in East European literature in general is less pronounced in Bulgarian literature. We can partially observe it in Stefan Kisyov’s novel The Executioner,34 a phantasmagoric, hyperbolically grotesque account of socialism, built around the absurd history of the main character, spun from tall tales. The approach of historical abstraction is developed more comprehensively and categorically in Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow—an encyclopedia of possible literary stories about the past. (Somewhat paradoxically, the book actually combines, and in equal proportions at that, the two opposite literary perspectives toward history—the personal-subjective and the abstract-universal.) It is embedded in the interpretation of the ancient myth of the Minotaur, which has a number of roles in the novel, including the basic function of uniting the fragments within it at the level of composition, plot, and meaning. (Actually, the imagery of the Minotaur’s labyrinth even provides the very outline for the novel, substantiating the many themes, narrative digressions, microplots, etc.) The interpretation of the myth in the book is also its conceptual thread—here the Minotaur is not a monster, but a child abandoned in a subterranean labyrinth, and his story represents the archetypal model of childhood experienced by the characters in the novel. In this way, the theme of coming of age throughout the different periods of the twentieth century, including during the socialism of the 1970s, becomes a part of a long line of human experience, a link in the cultural memory. Related to this tendency to some extent is another literary vision of the past—we can conditionally call it an interpretation of history through the models of genre literature. The affinity comes not from the poetics or the messages, but because in this case, too, historical events are largely detached from their real context and turned into objects of high literary convention. The realities of the second half of the twentieth century are interpreted in the genre conventions of “mass” literature—of crime or adventure novels, comic books, and so on. In most cases, irony, comedic effects, and parody play an important role in the production of the meanings and images of history. This does not mean, however, a defacement of historical problems or a devaluation of their meaning. Adopting this genre strategy is rather a result of searching for new and unexpected thematic and literary angles from which to expose the absurdity and tragedy of human existence through the vicissitudes of history. Representative in this regard is Vladislav Todorov’s novel Zift: Socialist Noir,35 which uses the plot model of the noir genre to recreate the reality of 1960s Sofia. The action takes place within a twenty-four-hour period during which the protagonist, who had been put in prison before September 9 and finds himself in a new and unfamiliar social environment after his release, is fighting death and confronting the socialist reality.

Telling History in Many Ways

119

This reading of history is most extensively developed in Alek Popov’s novel Сестри Палавееви в бурята на историята (The Palaveevi Sisters in the Storm of History)36 and its sequel, Сестри Палавееви по пътя към новия свят (The Palaveevi Sisters on the Road to the New World).37 The parodic plot of the two books follows the adventures of twin sisters Yara and Kara, daughters of a wealthy industrialist, who run away from home to join the partisans at the end of the Second World War. The youthful rebellion against their parents puts the heroines in the very epicenter of historical events: in the first of the two novels, they wind up as participants in the partisan movement and are direct witnesses to the change of power on September 9, 1944. In the second, the action of which unfolds in the 1950s, circumstances send them to the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. The narrative follows the well-established scheme of the adventure story, constructed as a continuous series of peripeteias, and the portrayal is supported entirely in the code of satire and parody, causing critics to associate the novel with the aesthetics of the comic book.38 In his 2006 book Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe, the American Slavicist Andrew Baruch Wachtel states that, before 1989, interest in East European literature by Western publishers and readers was primarily due to curiosity about the realities of the socialist world (“whatever the author’s style or theme, these books were marketed as political statements”39). With the disappearance of this politically motivated interest after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it became impossible for East European authors, according to Wachtel, not only to replicate the former success of a book like The Gulag Archipelago, for example, but to reach the “Western audience” in general at all. Nearly fifteen years after the appearance of Wachtel’s research, his prognosis does not seem quite accurate. Indeed, none of the contemporary East European authors has acquired a reputation commensurate with that of Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, or any of the other major emigrants of the second half of the last century, but their books are translated and published in different languages, and some of them have even attracted significant attention (or at least attention comparable to that of works from other so-called “small literatures”). Both because of their qualities and because of increasingly intensive translation in today’s literary context, East European literatures have not fallen outside the field of vision of foreign readers or critics. Wachtel, however, was certainly right about one thing: the historical experience of Eastern Europe is not enough in and of itself to draw attention to its literatures—a circumstance that is in no way unfavorable, because reading a work of literature as a “documentary testimony” or a “political text” is good fortune neither for a book nor for a literature from any part of the world. In the final analysis, all of the works discussed in this article were created above all out of the conviction that fiction can do much more for memory than the study of facts and documents. Furthermore, contemporary authors clearly share the point of view that, today, it is no longer sufficient to write about the past in ways already familiar in literature. The great achievement of the East European prose of the last nearly thirty years has been the expansion and multiplication of the possibilities for literature to narrate history, or more specifically, the human experience with history. And this continues one of the longest and most important stories of literature about the world.

120

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Notes 1 Katharina Raabeová, “Když se zvedla mlha. Literatura východní Evropy po roce 1989 očima Západu,” in Otevřený rány, ed. Ivo Říha (Praha: Torst, 2013), 318. 2 Jiří Kratochvil, “Nový čas příběhů,” in Vyznání příběhovosti (Brno: Petrov, 2000), 87. 3 The period after 1989 is characterized by a high degree of proximity between the processes and phenomena in the context of East European literatures that is presupposed both by the characteristics of the post-totalitarian context and by the similar legacy of the previous decades. This makes it particularly suitable for typological studies. With the topic of literary interpretations of the past from the second half of the last century, the typological similarity is even more strongly expressed because of the common historical experience that has become a literary plot. 4 For example, in his research on the contemporary Bulgarian novel, Mladen Vlashki notes: “Crisis situations like this should have been the perfect subject of novel writing after the changes in 1989, but the epic beginning of discussion about them was delayed in Bulgaria.” Младен Влашки, РоманОлогия ли? (Пловдив: Хермес, 2014), 149. 5 Jáchym Topol, City Sister Silver (North Haven: Catbird Press, 2000), original title Sestra, 1994. 6 Raabeová, Když se zvedla mlha, 316. 7 Ancho Kaloyanov (Анчо Калоянов), Девети (София: Труд, 2003). 8 Vladimir Zarev (Владимир Зарев), Разруха (София: Пет плюс, 2003). 9 Here we should note that most Bulgarian works regarding socialism focus on the period from the 1960s to the 1980s; there are significantly fewer books devoted to the dramatic early decades of the late 1940s and 1950s. Among these, we should mention Angel Igov’s novel Кротките (The Meek) (2015), whose plot is connected with a series of trials in the People’s Court in the late 1940s. We mention the book in a footnote not because it is not deserving of more thorough attention, but because it can hardly be inscribed directly into any of the literary tendencies discussed. In view of the typology of literary images of history, however, it is worth noting that Igov’s novel focuses not so much on historical eventfulness as on the issues of personal moral choice in the trials of history. 10 Investigations of the interpretations of the Transition in contemporary Bulgarian literature are still rare, but they describe as a general problem the extent to which the literature reproduces stereotypical ideas about the period, clichés imposed by the media, and proposes alternatives to them that promote a deep comprehension of reality. Novels about the transition are discussed from this point of view in Alexander Kiossev’s article “Retracing the Footsteps of the Enlightenment” (Александър Кьосев, “Обратно по стъпките на Просвещението,” Култура LXI, no. 41, [2017]: 5–8) and Boyko Penchev’s article “The Invisible Boundary of the Bulgarian: Shaping the Reader in the Newest Bulgarian Fiction” (Бойко Пенчев, “Невидимата граница на българскотото: моделирането на читателя в най-новата българска белетристика,” in Спорните наследства [София: Литературен вестник, 2017], 257–68). 11 It is worth noting that in Angel Igov’s aforementioned novel Кротките the protagonist is a poet. 12 Peter Krištúfek, The House of the Deaf Man (Cardigan: Parthian, 2014), originally published as Dom hluchého (2012).

Telling History in Many Ways

121

13 Miljenko Jergović, The Walnut Mansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), originally published as Dvori od oraha (2003). 14 Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times (Prague: Twisted Spoon, 2010), originally published as Prawiek i inne czasy (1996). 15 Georgi Gospodinov (Георги Господинов), The Physics of Sorrow (Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2015), originally published as Физика на тъгата (2011). 16 As Albena Vacheva notes in her research on the literary thematization of the period of socialism, “For the authors of these novels it is important to depict life in the previous epoch not in its entirety and in the tendentious opposition of ideological constructs …, but through the attempts of the individual to live in the different spheres of public and private life.” (Албена Вачева, Социализмът: памет и разказ. Романът и мемоарната литература за близкото минало [Благоевград: УИ “Неофит Рилски,” 2017], 338). 17 Georgi Gospodinov, Natural Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), originally published as Естествен роман (1999). 18 Georgi Gospodinov (Георги Господинов), Невидимите кризи (Пловдив: Жанет 45, 2013). 19 Georgi Gospodinov, “От какво сме направени, от какво са направени нашите книги,” in Невидимите кризи, 126. 20 Georgi Gospodinov and Yana Genova (Георги Господинов и Яна Генова), Инвентарна книга на социализма (Inventory Book of Socialism) (София: Прозорец, 2006). 21 Georgi Gospodinov, Аз живях социализма: 171 лични истории (I’ve Lived Socialism: 171 Personal Stories) (Пловдив: Жанет 45, 2006). 22 Michal Viewegh, Bliss Was It in Bohemia (London: Jantar Publishing, 2015), originally published as Báječná léta pod psa (1992). 23 Irena Dousková, B. Proudew (Brno: Pálava Publishing, 2016), originally published as Hrdý Budžes (1998). 24 Ilija Trojanow, Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1996). 25 Kapka Kassabova, Street Without a Name (London: Portobello, 2008). 26 Rouja Lazarova, Mausolée (Paris: Flammarion, 2009). 27 Miroslav Penkov, East of the West: A Country in Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 28 This is the reason why—despite the considerable interest in Bulgaria in books by immigrant authors—the topic of socialism in them is not perceived as an opportunity for insight through literature into a shared past, but as a subject oriented and adapted to the horizon of the foreign audience: “Our writers abroad sell their new readers an expected and recognizable ‘totalitarian Bulgaria,’ at the cost of (less or greater) mistrust in literary ideas about it.” (Milena Kirova [Милена Кирова], “Комунизъм за продан. Тоталитарното (ни) минало в романите на български писателиимигранти след 1989 година,” in Езици на паметта в литературния текст, eds. Амелия Личева et al. [Велико Търново: Фабер, 2014], 254). 29 Kassabova, Street Without a Name, 3. 30 This quote is from the Bulgarian edition of Street Without a Name (Капка Касабова, Улица без име [София: Сиела, 2008], 7). 31 Kratochvil, Nový čas příběhů, 85. 32 Yurii Andrukhovych, The Moscoviad (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), originally published as Московiaдa (1993).

122

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

33 Jáchym Topol, Gargling with Tar (London: Portobello, 2010), originally published as Kloktat dehet (2005). 34 Stefan Kisyov (Стефан Кисьов), Екзекуторът (Пловдив: Жанет 45, 2003). 35 Vladislav Todorov, Zift: Socialist Noir (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010), originally published as Дзифт (2006). 36 Alek Popov (Алек Попов), Сестри Палавееви в бурята на историята (София: Сиела, 2013). 37 Alek Popov, Сестри Палавееви по пътя към новия свят (София: Сиела, 2017). 38 “Alek Popov, with a sense of humor, turns the communist ideology around the topic of the partisans into reading material with roots in the comic book (for younger readers) and into a parody of the likes of the ’Allo, ’Allo! series (for more mature readers)” (Влашки, РоманОлогия ли?, 33). 39 Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 67.

10

Between the Local and the Global: Aporia in Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West Mihaela P. Harper

When a Bulgarian émigré in the United States publishes a collection of short stories in English about intimate nuances of his motherland’s cultural self-consciousness, questions of the author’s as well as of the literary text’s national belonging come to the fore. Miroslav Penkov’s case is not the first to pose such questions, but it is a recent instance of somewhat global consequence. While Salman Rushdie selected Penkov’s “Buying Lenin” for inclusion in the 2008 Best American Short Stories, the BBC National Short Story Award went international in 2012 and to his “East of the West,” included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Penkov has been on the radar of literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic since the publication of his collection East of the West in English in 2011 in the United States and in his own Bulgarian translation, На Изток от Запада, in 2011 (the book was also printed in fourteen other countries around the globe). And their assessments have been predominantly positive:1 some find the eight stories included in the volume to be highly impactful, born out of “the ache and sorrow, elicited by parting and the severed bond with the native”;2 some maintain that the stories “open interstices in time/space, where one can find salvation, take shelter, forget in order to remember, return to the spring of their life, look upon past events from a distance.”3 Others find the expectation of a distanced perspective upon homeland concerns by a migrant author to be thwarted in Penkov’s work. Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, for instance, suggests that his “search for roots is not accompanied by a distanced perspective but rather by empathy toward all elements of the local color and by the author’s desire to show the world the country of his childhood,” the least familiar state among the European Union members.4 This approach, she insists, “predisposes the writing to exoticization, reminiscent of fairy tales, chronicles, and traditional folk legends.”5 Whether the stories exoticize Bulgaria in a “self-colonizing”6 or artificial7 manner, and what the repercussions of such exoticizing may be,8 has become a central line of inquiry in the critical discourse that surrounds East of the West in Bulgaria. But even if the stories exoticize, most critics agree that they never slip into “a deliberate exploitation of difference.”9 For Alexandra Glavanakova, the exoticism “serves not only to offer a highly distinctive socio-historical and cultural context, but also suggests

124

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

an intertwining between identity and memory.”10 What is more, I find that, through exoticizing (or “othering”) Bulgaria, Penkov is able to examine both the country’s and his own (even self-imposed) othering by, in, and against the backdrop of the West, while simultaneously attempting to do what he acknowledges in an interview to be impossible, namely to put into words the essence of Bulgarian culture or the Bulgarian “spirit.”11 My reading of East of the West takes up a kindred impossibility. Equally impossible to rendering lived experience (in its innumerable, multilayered nuances, obscurities, and fictions) into language is finding a harmonious, glocal synthesis between local/familiar and global/foreign forces, particularly when they are caught up in an incessant struggle for supremacy over one’s value system, worldview, and life-practices. The aporia that become legible in the glocal conceptual realm of an émigré (but not only, since a glocal contact zone can also emerge between a dominant, mainstream culture and a peripheral subculture within a single national space), as Penkov’s stories demonstrate, necessitate resolution, though they remain, ultimately, insoluble.

World Literature (and) East of the West As a literary phenomenon, East of the West displays what David Damrosch calls “the dual nature of world literature, as at once a global phenomenon and also a local one, always experienced by individual readers within their particular national context.”12 In Bulgaria, the global renown of Penkov’s stories has been unparalleled—his book is the first of Bulgarian authorship to be printed by a US publisher, major enough to hold sway over the global book market.13 This, however, constitutes a problem regarding the collection’s critical assessment, according to Yordan Eftimov, since many treat “българската литература зад граница” (“Bulgarian literature abroad,” a category reserved for literature by Bulgarian émigré authors, who write in languages other than Bulgarian) as successful by default, by virtue of its having been produced outside of Bulgaria.14 Though this may be true for some, it exposes a sentiment that has persisted for several centuries in Bulgaria, fueled by internalized Eurocentric colonial perspectives as well as extant “developing country” narratives that proceed from lack and use a West-based measurement to evaluate progress. Penkov is not unaware of this ongoing self/marginalization15—many of the stories in the collection query into said problematic, particularly those located directly at the conceptual crux of the East/ West, local/global, own/foreign dichotomies (though readers may find it difficult at times, by design, to determine which of the two latitudes is local and which is global). “Devshirmeh,” the last story in the collection, for instance, focuses on the struggle of Михаил or Mihail/Michael, a Bulgarian immigrant in the United States, to self-identify without recourse to US/West-based values and criteria of success, while observing his ex-wife’s and her new husband’s seemingly full embracement of them. Mihail feels himself as one with his national roots, haunted by the story of his Bulgarianness— which turns into a bloody story from Ottoman times—that he wants to pass on to

Between the Local and the Global

125

his daughter, Elli. “I was born and I knew it. It was in the earth and in the water, in the air and in the milk of my mother,” he tells Elli, “But it was not in your mother’s milk and not in your air, so you must listen now as I tell you.”16 National belonging is presented as a complex process—part interaction with the natural environment, part imbibing of maternal nourishment, part fiction, and part choice to listen or not. The last part emerges as most critical vis-à-vis the pull of the world (or the US as it were)— simultaneously a centrifugal and a centripetal force—that repels some to an imaginary (Eastern) periphery while drawing others toward a perceived (Western) center. The collection embodies a notion of world literature by virtue of its thematic content, since, as Longxi Zhang argues, “the tension between two opposite forces has always resided in Weltliteratur as a concept, which stands poised between the local and the global, national specificities and cosmopolitan claims to literary universality.”17 Weigui Fang articulates the entities involved in the local/global dynamic as cultural identity and cultural alterity; he returns to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s conception of Weltliteratur, extracting from it the sense that world literature involves “getting to know the Foreign or ‘Other’ and seeing ‘the Own’ mirrored in the Foreign.”18 Although in Penkov’s stories encounters between cultural identity and cultural alterity predominate, they are rarely productive of knowledge or understanding. Particularly in “East of the West,” the short story that I will examine at most length in this chapter, the “other” remains other, and the “own” gets little, if at all, closer to oneself than to the other. In its very title, East of the West puts into question the relations between two commonly conceptualized opposites—two divergent directions, philosophies, and cultural traditions, with the West retaining its landmark position (though this is challenged by the stories which ascribe a paradoxical, alternative centrality to the East). But as much as the volume focuses on the dynamic between East (a construct and a geographical location, Eastern Europe, which serves as the primary setting) and the West (also an idea and a geographical location, both of material consequence), it probes far or deep (whichever spatial metaphor one might adopt) into the complex interactions among fluid constitutive forces (political, historical, social, and economic, among others) involved in the production of subjects. In this way, too, Penkov’s work meets definitions of world literature, Homi Bhabha’s, for instance. More than two decades ago, Bhabha suggested that the “transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees—these border and frontier conditions—may be the terrains of world literature.”19 Historical contexts play a significant part in East of the West, though the migrations featured in the stories do not necessarily involve physical removal. In fact, many of the stories expose not merely that migration is at the crux of the relation between the local and the global, but that each is always already made up of migrations layered upon and sedimenting into each other over time. The collection conveys this idea through its own complicated position: written by a Bulgarian in English and first printed in the US. Perhaps this complexity, coupled with its thematic concerns, makes Penkov’s volume world literature par excellence— an unsettled and unsettling hybrid that challenges “social and scholarly ways of focusing on the triad of language, literature and history, respectively culture.”20 Such an

126

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

articulation of world literature comes close to Sigrid Löffler’s rather optimistic notion of “new world literature,” by which she means “a dynamic, rapidly growing, postethnic and transnational literature, a literature without a permanent domicile, written by migrants, intercultural commuters, transit travelers in a world in motion.”21 Her sense is that the authors of “new world literature”—tongue-switchers, who write not in their native languages but in dominant ones, particularly in English—will creolize the colonial tongues they inhabit, accenting and transforming them into new languages.22 Their work, she argues, open “novel narrative worlds and experiential spaces”23 that eradicate the center/periphery dichotomy. As much as Penkov belongs in the category of authors that Löffler generates, and as much as his stories do what she claims with regard to language and narrative, in my reading, they are deeply invested both in the struggle with the dichotomy global/local (center/periphery) and, paradoxically, in exposing the near impossibility of reconciliation between the contrasting operative systems frequently identified thus.

Glocalization and Its Aporia To claim that world literature is poised between the local and the global assumes their existence and even their opposition; the latter necessitates the work of articulating exactly what is perceived as “the global” and “the local” respectively. While “the local” may be easier to define as a particular place with a history, customs, and sensory material, defining “the global” poses more of a challenge. What, then, is “the global?” In one of its broadest current conceptions it is a threat.24 “The global” is often perceived as foreign, dominant, majoritarian, and pervasive, associated nowadays with market networks, exploitative corporations, ineluctable capitalism, and complicity-inducing neoliberalism. And yet, “the global” encompasses the entire world;25 by general definition, it includes every locale. Matthias Freise points out that “the global is only in the local”26—without the latter the former cannot exist. At the same time, the local is within the global and, especially in the twenty-first century, it is usually shaped by global trends and demands. Because of this complex correlation between the local and the global, “intermeshed in ways we are still struggling to understand,”27 as Diana Brydon notes, a relatively new term, glocalization, has been adopted in various critical discourses. Like world literature, glocalization, is “both a concept as well as a critical tool with which to read the world,”28 and it focuses directly on the interpenetration between the national and international, native and foreign, local and global. Far more people today than in earlier historical periods are consciously affected, not to say, entirely produced by this mutually pervasive interchange, and this is especially true for migrants. As Sandhya Rao Mehta observes, “diasporic consciousness and fluid selves have promoted and facilitated the glocal.”29 Penkov’s stories, written in English and interspersed with Bulgarian words, are but one of myriad examples, though rather than celebrating “the creative potential of fluid selves,”30 they focus on the multiform aporia created by diaspora and fluidity.

Between the Local and the Global

127

According to Victor Roudometof, “The glocal is a concept that registers a fundamentally spatial dimension of the interaction between the global and the local.”31 In its initial articulation, the concept described the adaptation of global practices to particular local conditions, but as its definition developed, it turned more prominently toward the local. “This ‘glocal’ orientation,” Steven Jay Schiffer points out, “valorizes and celebrates locality, often inscribing it with qualities of escape, resistance, and salvation in the face of globalization’s homogenizing influences.”32 This can be observed most clearly in Penkov’s “Buying Lenin,” where the protagonist’s grandfather goes back to his village home,33 while the protagonist, Sinko, returns in every other way but physically to his homeland both to seek sustenance and in order to resist the US/global influences that he perceives (which he had been adopting earlier seemingly as a form of resistance to his grandfather’s professed ideological stance). “I wanted the old man to promise he’d wait for me out in the yard, under the black grapes of the trellised vine. Instead, I started laughing,”34 Sinko shares at the end of the story. Unlike the prodigal son, Sinko (literally Sonny in the Bulgarian) has recognized that there is no turning back, that even if there were, nothing would be the same, but, at the same time, that there is also no absolute departure, that something remains—a memory fragment, a habit, Lenin “glorious, refrigerated, as peaceful as a lamb”35 in one’s (“innermost”) room. One of the glocal’s most significant aims as a term is to present the local and the global not as opposites but as “mutually constituent”36 as well as mutually constitutive concepts. It endeavors, thus, to return to the local its agency, that is, to bring back into conceptual discourse the relational power of the local to shape and alter the global, which the deployment of terms, such as globalization, had neutralized. What is more, rather than presenting seamless fusions and neat resolutions to the frictions between local and global forces, the glocal exposes their “synchronicity”37 and what Brydon calls an emerging sensibility, “in which it is possible to live attuned to different temporal and civilization systems without needing to choose definitively between them.”38 Most of the characters in East of the West display such a “glocal” sensibility, though they feel pressured by the need to choose—Nose (“East of the West”) and Sinko (“Buying Lenin”) between East and West, Kemal (“The Night Horizon”) between her two names and two genders, and, so too, Ali Ibrahim and Mihail (“Devshirmeh”) between national identities. Their experiences of the nexus between what they perceive as the local and the global are of interpenetration and of irreconcilability, aporia, impossible choices that they feel relentlessly impelled to make.

Aporia: Stories from East of the West In his review of East of the West, Zlatko Anguelov reflects on Penkov’s status as a migrant and outlines three options: that Penkov elect to continue belonging to his native culture, that he opt to belong to US culture, or that he choose to belong to both, i.e., “succeed in melding his senses and knowledge of both cultures into an amalgamation that reflects his personal intercultural existence,” an alternative that “offers new,

128

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

unexamined human conditions.”39 But what if such an amalgamation, a synthesis of the kind implied, is unattainable? What if a migrant, open to multiple cultures but unwilling or unable to give prevalence to any one of them, must shuttle indefinitely between value systems, sensations, languages, ways of knowing and being? Both phenomena—diasporic consciousness and glocal sensibility—bespeak the presence of aporia, a nonpassage, and the difficulties of living with not choosing (or choosing not to choose). In a fascinating essay, Sarah Kofman writes: “Whenever indeterminacy (apeiras) reigns, wherever there are no limits and no directions, whenever we are trapped, encircled or caught in inextricable bonds,”40 we face aporia and the need to escape from it. By linking indeterminacy/infinity (apeiria) and impassability (aporia), Kofman identifies the source of a creative drive, a desire and a need to invent a way to pass through an impasse conceptually and materially. The obvious paradox is indicative of the infinite nature of the process of encountering what she calls true aporia—a kind that generate ingenuity rather than paralysis. As a philosophical term, aporia is often associated with Jacques Derrida, particularly because of his 1993 text Aporias in which he relates the notion to dying. But between Kofman’s and Derrida’s discussions of the Greek terms in the family of aporia, a number of connections to migration become visible. For Derrida, “The ‘I enter,’ crossing the threshold, this ‘I pass’ (peraō) puts us on the path, if I may say, of the aporos or of the aporia: the difficult or the impracticable, here the impossible, passage, the refused, denied, or prohibited passage, indeed the nonpassage.”41 The links to peras (end, limit, extremity), peran (beyond), and peraō (cross, traverse, penetrate) suggest that, by crossing beyond the limits (of one’s national or identity borders, I add), one encounters aporia—one is at a loss (living with loss), caught up in a difficult, infinite experiment/ passage (peron, peira) or at least one that lasts as long as the crossing (migration) does.42 “The aporetic state,” according to Kofman, “always arises as one moves from a familiar environment or space to a space to which one is unaccustomed, during a transition.”43 The loss of the familiar produces disorientation and at the same time the need to orient oneself, to invent a way across the novel expanse, since none of the extant paths might suit one’s singular encounter with the foreign. This is why, for Kofman, the true aporia, always productive of new ways of thinking or approaching a given situation, “pertains to the logic of the intermediary,” having broken with the logic of identity.44 What or who is “the intermediary,” though? The intermediary has the difficult task of recognizing their aporetic state and devising a way through it. In the case of East of the West, a migrant embodies the intermediary in that s/he must invent ways to pass through or in-between the local and global, to live with a migration that is a nonpassage. Such is the case of Kemal, the girl with “a boy’s name,”45 an apprentice bagpipe maker in “The Night Horizon,” caught between the violence of domestic nationality/paternal expectation and that of state nationality, between the gender imposed upon her by her father and the gender to which she feels her sex enjoins her. “She spoke her old name—Kemal—and the more she repeated it, the more it flowed in itself, the deeper it bit its own tail. She repeated her new name, Vyara, and kept repeating—the old name, the new name, until one devoured the other. Until both felt foreign.”46 The land and the workshop that she inhabits expose the complexity of the glocal with its

Between the Local and the Global

129

superimposed, endlessly sedimenting layers of global and local signification: gender roles, religion, folklore, language, political and social interaction between Turkish and Bulgarian systems, to mention but a few. Estranged from her body and name—a name that was never hers, since it belonged to her father and his father before him—Kemal recognizes the glocal aporia of her self, a gender and national in-betweenness that remains unresolved (an irresolution directly emphasized at the end of the story, as Kemal waits for a black or a white ram to take her away to another realm). The closest cognate to aporia is poros, an unprecedented way that must be found anew every time across a vast liquid expanse (perhaps the Atlantic or the rivers prominent in two of Penkov’s stories). In Kofman’s view, “One speaks of poros when it is a matter of blazing a trail where no trail exists, of crossing an impassable expanse of territory, an unknown, hostile and boundless world, an apeiron which it is impossible to cross from end to end.”47 For the characters in East of the West, the glocal spaces and states that they inhabit and embody are aporetic and inhospitable, ensnaring them in eternal traversals. This is particularly true for the married couple in “A Picture with Yuki,” whose incomplete journey at the end of the story (though they have packed their bags and are ready to go) magnifies their unfinished quest for reproduction and the untold story of a little boy’s death that they choose to bear silently forever.48 The pictures taken throughout the story constitute a glocal space themselves—material expressions of the local, framed and produced by the global view and its technology: “I held them locked inside the LCD screen … There were no living in this box, no dead. Just perfect stillness.”49 They expose the unbridgeable gap between the Japanese/ American, the (global) picture-taker who possesses a camera, and the (local) village context (the Gypsy family, the old house, etc.) into which she is unable to and he can no longer merge, disappear, or find her/himself. Seeking a way through or out (poros) of their states of puzzlement (aporia) and indeterminacy (apeiras), the characters in East of the West find little solace beyond fiction—letters, notes, oral narratives; they are, after all, (in) “A Country in Stories,” as the subtitle of the collection refers to them. For Penkov himself, it seems there is no passage other than fiction itself. Caught in-between East and West, he offers no consummate synthesis between global and local, though writing constitutes a way into or across the glocal, “a voyage of exploration which is always unprecedented, dangerous and uncertain,”50 but it is also the glocal itself—a discursive expanse that brings together a dominant and a minor language. Unable to resolve its aporia, each story offers, nevertheless, a temporary reprieve and meets Ana María Fraile-Marcos’s vision of the literary as “a conflict-ridden space that gauges the effects of glocalization over culture and identity.”51

“East of the West” Is the glocal not the birthplace of foreignness, where something is not recognized as own, or familiar, but as other, different, incommensurable? And yet, the foreign is a

130

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

constituent part of that very zone by virtue of its foreignness, since it defines the own, exposing what the own perceives as its homogeneity (or the appearance thereof). The question of the foreign and of the own arises in the glocal region, as does aporia born out of the friction and interpenetration of the two (with all of their attendant, albeit frequently ignored, cultural polyphony). In “East of the West,” the foreign and the own emerge around “the murky water”52 of a river—a glocal space—that extends inbetween two national territories, Serbia and Bulgaria. Blind to the wishes of the people trying to reroute it westward and use it as a border, the river had “twisted, wiggled and tasted with her tongue a route of lesser resistance; through the lower hamlet she [had] swept, devouring people and houses,”53 sparing not even the local church, handpainted for two years by a master зограф (painter, especially of icons). The river is given a body that can move and even a tongue; she has a sense of taste and gender (as it is in the Bulgarian—the noun река, river, is feminine), all of which give her character as well as a difficult to deny material solidity and presence. In contrast to land (an opposition that reverberates throughout the story), the river bears positive qualities: freedom, mobility, and independence. And yet, she is a destructive force, seemingly willful in her choice of lesser resistance, as if to imply that the river has a mind and not merely a body of her own. “[A] realm of pure movement, a space where any way that has been traced is immediately obliterated”54 is how Kofman defines the liquid expanse of the sea, but the river, too, constitutes a space of infinite indeterminacy—a turbulent flow generative of chaotic mixing. With its transnational waters that literally carry the global onward (be it a foreign boat or pollution55) into every local space along the way, the river is a complex glocal realm. In the story, she appears in her paradoxical duality as both that which makes a path across the land and that across which a path must be made. Nose, the main character in “East of the West,” longs to inhabit this realm permanently. “I wish we never had to leave the water,”56 he says to Vera, his cousin and love interest, who lives on the other side of the river, in “Srbsko,” synonymous for him with the West. They meet in the river, in “no-man’s-water,”57 where they are simultaneously sheltered from and threatened by man-made territorial divisions— the river offers them a middle “ground” for face-to-face encounters, but she is also dangerous, as the death of Nose’s sister, Elitsa, at the hands of the border guards, makes clear. Elitsa attempts to cross the river permanently, so to speak, but is unable to do so—the paradoxically fluid expanse between East and West58 emerges as impassable, an aporia to which the volume’s ironic title points. Nose’s failed attempt at reuniting with Vera permanently at the end of the story also points to this impasse, despite his professed feelings of wellbeing as he sees himself breaking the chain links of belonging that tether him to land, water, and people from his past. The glocal waters offer no way out of the aporia of East/West that the characters encounter, and no one comes out of the river cleansed: Vera’s hair drips “dark with dark water,”59 and when Nose dives alone and nearly drowns himself, there is “only darkness, the booming of water, of blood,”60 no miraculous salvation, no epiphany, despite the presence of the submerged church in this (holy?) water. The “spineless, muddy thief,”61 as Nose calls the river neither is nor provides a resolution. “People can’t live in rivers,”62

Between the Local and the Global

131

Vera points out, as if to say that the very concept of a human being is inextricably entwined with identity, bound to nationality and to land. And the land holds its people the way family or a chain link might; it “could never forget,”63 which prompts Nose’s desire “to gut the land.”64 When he finally decides to go to Vera, a Serbian cabdriver asks him to identify himself as Bulgarian or Serb; Nose answers that he doesn’t know which he is.65 His reply is met with a curse and a command to exit the taxi, and he is spat upon. Indetermination with regard to national identity produces not merely anxiety but a visceral reaction on the part of the cabdriver who insists on knowing whether Nose is “own” or “foreign.” Nose’s uncertainty bespeaks the aporetic space that he inhabits, underscored by his expressed wish: “how much I wanted to be like the river, which had no memory.”66 To remember one’s language, one’s place of residence, one’s history class (where one’s sense of nationality is if not established then confirmed) is to have a sense of self. Memory here is equated with a definitive identity, which the river, as a fluid glocal realm, does not have. On the one hand, this raises the question of the land beneath the river, since under the churning, watery sweep lies a very particular terrain, Staro Selo, the river’s local bedrock, interspersed with submerged but still distinct man-made edifices. The riverbed is indicative of the simultaneously protean and singular nature of the local (as is the Serbian village in the story that used to be Bulgarian) and its interpenetration with the global (as does the identification of Serbia with the West, where “We live better than you, we have more stuff, stuff you can’t have and never will”67). On the other hand, the river’s memorylessness is reminiscent of the identity indeterminacy concomitant with diasporic consciousness and glocal sensibility—does a river that flows through or in-between multiple countries have a single, distinct nationality? Taken on a more abstract level and along with Löffler’s point regarding the creolization of language that migrant authors are able to undertake in their writing, the observations regarding the river are also applicable to the language of “East of the West” and to the collection as a whole. If language, too, is a fluid glocal expanse—“For discourses are forces which are no less disturbing and no less dangerous than the sea and its depths,” as Kofman cautions—its flow can be rerouted, though not necessarily in the ways intended. The last sentence of the story points to a similar ambiguity: “I am no river, but I’m not made of clay,”68 Nose says. He has found no way to synthesize East and West, and he will return home, like a river actually, if the priest in his nightmarish image of Elitsa’s funeral is to be trusted that “all the rivers run away, East of the West,”69 carrying the global, one might add, in or as their waters. Nose does not know what he is, though he affirms what he is not. But if he is neither the global river waters, nor the local land, then what does this leave? If we assume that every definition or identity marker constitutes an immobilizing parameter of being, then Nose’s inability to state what he is sets him free. His renunciations bespeak resistance, not capitulation, a double negation that affirms his nonpassage (his failed migration, a crossing that did not occur) or the infinite impasse (aporia) that he—and millions70 of other “intermediaries” across the globe—must ceaselessly navigate. The aporia of interpositionality that this chapter endeavors to articulate is not unlike a blind spot in the visionary field, a mental scotoma within the overlap or interchange

132

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

of discrete contexts in a single person’s emotional and conceptual worldscape. Rather than permitting the brain to fill in the blank, literally, between divergent contexts with their respective and often incompatible sensory material and conceptual frameworks, Penkov’s stories seek out the blind spot by metaphorically closing one (Western) eye while keeping the other (Eastern) open, and vice versa. The quest is not necessarily purposive; often it appears as an experiment that was blundered into or, on the contrary, as a pro-forma experiment, the outcome of which has long been predetermined. But this paradoxicality, incognizant self-awareness, may be yet another strategy at getting around the problem of feeling out and conceptualizing what one’s own cognitive schema is not already equipped to conceptualize. This kind of opening may offer new ways of relating to the world and articulating the relations of which the world and world literature are made.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Vessela Krasteva for her research assistance. 2 Anita Nikolova (Анита Николова), “Носталгията в ‘На Изток от Запада,’” Литературен Клуб, May 24, 2016, www.litclub.bg/library/kritika/anita/miroslav_ penkov.html. 3 Irena Mirolyubova Vladimirova (Ирена Миролюбова Владимирова), “За ‘На Изток от Запада’ от Мирослав Пенков,” Public Republic, May 31, 2012, www. public-republic.com/magazine/2012/05/91834.php. 4 Marie Vrinat-Nikolov (Мари Врина-Николов), “Екзотизация срещу европейскост: българското—поглед от България и от САЩ („Физика на тъгата” и „На Изток от Запада”),” trans. Елица Захариева, Литературен Вестник 33, October 17–23, 2012, https://litvestnik.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/екзотизациясрещу-европейскост/. 5 Ibid. 6 News (Вести), Култура 34 (2696), October 12, 2012, http://newspaper.kultura.bg/bg/ article/view/20159. 7 Zlatko Anguelov (Златко Ангелов), “Нито от изтока, нито от запада,” Либерален Преглед, October 17, 2012, www.librev.com/index.php/arts-books-publish er/1809-2012-10-17-08-12-30#_ftnref2. 8 My sense is that at the root of concerns with regard to exoticizing may be what Marin Kern calls “global literature,” the kind of literature that is not interested in complex engagement with ambiguous and difficult cross-cultural exchange, as world literature would be for him, but instead “bends under the pressures of the globalized marketplace where any literature, from anywhere, is already inflected by the experience, usually through translation, of European and American literature.” Martin Kern, “Ends and Beginnings of World Literature,” Poetica 49 (2017/2018): 6. 9 Angel Igov (Ангел Игов), “Гледано от запад, четено на изток,” Култура 4 (2666), February 3, 2012, http://newspaper.kultura.bg/bg/article/view/19284. 10 Aleksandra Glavanakova, Transcultural Imaginings (Sofia: Critique and Humanism Publishing House, 2016), 138.

Between the Local and the Global

133

11 “Едно интервю с Мирослав Пенков,” Сиела, December 15, 2013, http://ciela.bg/ medias/article/471. 12 David Damrosch, “Frames for World Literature,” in Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal, ed. Weigui Fang (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 100. 13 Anguelov, “Нито от изтока, нито от запада,” 14 Milena Dimova (Милена Димова), “Толерирането на ‘младите’ е червиво с клиентелизъм,” Сега 5632, no. 161, July 16, 2016, http://old.segabg.com/article. php?id=813888. 15 “Едно интервю с Мирослав Пенков.” 16 Miroslav Penkov, “Devshirmeh,” in East of the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 209. 17 Zhang Longxi, From Comparison to World Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 169. 18 Weigui Fang, “Introduction: What is World Literature?” in Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal, ed. Weigui Fang (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 23. 19 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 12. 20 Fang, “Introduction,” 29. 21 Sigrid Löffler, “Einleitung—Worum es geht,” Die neue Weltliteratur und ihre großen Erzähler (München: C. H. Beck, 2013), 17. 22 Ibid., 15. 23 Ibid., 17. 24 I am thinking here of Martin Kern’s notion of “global literature” but also of Emiliya Dvoryanova’s depiction of the global, included in this volume. 25 Oxford English Dictionary Online, “global, adj.”: “Of, relating to, or involving the whole world, worldwide; (also in later use) of or relating to the world considered in a planetary context,” September 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/79019. 26 Matthias Freise, “Four Perspectives on World Literature: Reader, Producer, Text and System” in Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal, ed. Weigui Fang (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 201. 27 Diana Brydon, “Cracking Imaginaries: Studying the Global from Canadian Space,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, eds. Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsch (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 112. 28 Sandhya Rao Mehta, ed. “Introduction: Framing Studies in Glocalization,” in Language and Literature in a Glocal World (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 8, https://doi. org/10.1007/978-981-10-8468-3_1. 29 Ibid., 5. 30 Ibid. 31 Victor Roudometof, “What is Glocalization?,” Glocalization: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1–19. 32 Steven Jay Schiffer, “‘Glocalized’ Utopia, Community-Building, and the Limits of Imagination,” Utopian Studies 29, no. 1 (2018): 69, https://muse.jhu.edu/. 33 Penkov, “Buying Lenin,” in East of the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) 62. 34 Ibid., 79. 35 Ibid., 78.

134

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

36 Roudometof, “What is Glocalization?,” 12. 37 Ana María Fraile-Marcos, ed. “Introduction: Urban Glocality and the English Canadian Imaginary,” in Literature and the Glocal City Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2014), 7, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315773681. 38 Brydon, “Cracking Imaginaries,” 112. 39 Anguelov, “Neither from the east nor from the west.” 40 Sarah Kofman, “Beyond Aporia?,” in Post-structuralist Classics, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1988), 9. 41 Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another) at the “Limits of Truth” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 8. 42 I am thankful to Emiliya Kazandzhieva for her help with the Greek. 43 Kofman, “Beyond Aporia?,” 19. 44 Ibid., 27. 45 Penkov, “The Night Horizon,” in East of the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 182. 46 Ibid., 190. 47 Kofman, “Beyond Aporia?,” 10. 48 Penkov, “A Picture with Yuki,” in East of the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 131. 49 Ibid., 128. 50 Kofman, “Beyond Aporia?,” 10. 51 Fraile-Marcos, “Introduction,” 8. 52 Penkov, “East of the West,” in East of the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 37. 53 Ibid. 54 Kofman, “Beyond Aporia?,” 10. 55 “The areas in between or downstream of river groynes are extremely challenging river segments due to their complex and ever varying flow conditions that influences sediment motion, bed formation, transport of nutrients and pollutants.” Márton Zsugyel et al., “Detecting the chaotic nature of advection in complex river flows,” Periodica Polytechnica 56, no. 1 (2012): 97. 56 Penkov, “East of the West,” 43. 57 Ibid., 36. 58 In part, the fluidity is due to the instability of the geographical terms “east” and “west,” which are forever caught up in pursuit of each other along the parallel of latitude (arguably the east pursuing the west, rather than vice versa, as in fairy-tales about the sun and the moon). In part, it is due to Penkov’s play on the very land of “Srbsko,” which used to be the East, but is now the West from the Bulgarian vantage point at the time. One can also read in the relationship between Vera and Nose as well as between “Srbsko” and Bulgaria, “nesting orientalisms” or “nesting balkanisms” that underscore both the fluidity of the terms and the lines of division built into the world schema of a national self-consciousness. 59 Ibid., 43. 60 Ibid., 51. 61 Ibid., 48. 62 Ibid., 43. 63 Ibid., 47.

Between the Local and the Global

135

64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 53. 66 Ibid., 47. 67 Ibid., 33. 68 Ibid., 56. 69 Ibid., 47. 70 According to Amelia Hill, “About 258 million people, or one in every 30, were living outside their country of birth in 2017.” Amelia Hill, “Migration: how many people are on the move around the world?,” The Guardian, September 10, 2018, www. theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/10/migration-how-many-people-are-on-the-movearound-the-world.

11

Bulgarian Literature: Beyond World Literature into Global Literature Emiliya Dvoryanova Translated by Traci Speed

Metaphor Some time ago I started to write a story, but somehow I didn’t end up finishing it. This is how it begins: Dusk. A young woman is standing in front of a window in her twelfth-floor apartment. The city is spread out before her eyes; in the darker apartments, here and there, lights are beginning to come on, while other windows are still reflecting the last rays of the setting sun. And roofs, myriad roofs draped like shrouds over the human community. The woman’s baby has fallen asleep on the sofa behind her, and a television flickers in the corner, droning faintly. The woman is watching and, at the same time, listening out for something, perhaps waiting for her husband. But all that reaches her straining ears is the words from the screen. The woman gradually makes them out. A man’s voice is saying that the earth’s population has reached seven billion … … Seven billion, the woman’s mind begins to repeat, and the figure remains and will not disperse. The roofs of the buildings and the windows are multiplying before her eyes, seven billion, it continues ringing in her head … It’s like some kind of short circuit in her brain, and this could be described either dramatically and at length, or neutrally and quite succinctly. While it lasts, however, the baby on the couch begins to stir and the woman turns toward it; it reaches out its little arms and looks at her with eyes wide open. The woman doesn’t stir. It becomes clear that she’s bewildered. Her baby is completely foreign: until just before it fell asleep, it had limpid, clear blue eyes; now they are dark, almost black, and the light doesn’t penetrate them. It can’t be, the woman thinks, and she continues watching … A picture suddenly forms in her imagination, an actually unimaginable one: seven billion little beds with babies in them, and out of all of these, one is hers.

138

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

The woman can’t move, she cannot find the strength to reach the baby; it stares at her but doesn’t cry, just looks at her with its black eyes.

Years ago I happened to visit France with a group of Bulgarian writers for “literary reasons.” Along with our other events, we had a meeting with an editor at a prestigious publishing house. He talked to us about the publishing business. I no longer remember anything about it; only one unforgettable fact remains. In France, he said, around 50,000 novels are published annually. Every single novel sits there in the bookstores from six months to a year. Then it goes back to the publishing house, and the publisher pulps it. The idea of “pulping” turns out to be especially important for the survival of the publishers because warehouses are very expensive, and storing books doesn’t pay. This problem was solved by special pulping factories. It crossed my mind that a book is, therefore, a semi-liquid commodity—it spoils in about a year … Around that time, I also began writing the story about the mother and her baby, but it remained unfinished. I probably wanted to give form to a thought, to an “intuition” that claims the following: The concepts of “global” and “world” do not coincide—on the contrary, there is a tension between them; the “global” devours the “world” and picks it clean, while slyly insinuating itself as its “synonym.” The war between them, even if its outcome is already predetermined, could be dramatic and could become the subject of a story with an unexpected ending. I’m writing these lines today in my house in the village, in August. In the village, most houses are empty. Ten winter residents and around forty summer residents live here. I am one of the latter, with a prospect of becoming the eleventh year-round resident. To one side of me are the forest and a burbling brook; to my other side is the road that several cars drive down per day, but not always. Above me is the sky, absolutely genuine and far from the traffic of airplanes. Why am I saying all of this? Because where you write from matters, especially when the question is about “the place”—the place in the world or on the globe—even if this is about a literature that hardly has a place. Despite that, I am marking in and on in italics because indicators for “place” are important, if I manage to discover this place. From the perspective of this village, not marked on the globe, this question is not urgent, and it puts the author of a text like this, i.e., me, in an awkward position, compelled to justify myself: “Forgive me. These are superfluous things to discuss and, yet, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the tension between ‘world’ and ‘global’ eradicated literature. That in itself wouldn’t be a great misfortune, but the tension could, all of a sudden, wipe out the village as well, which would be a catastrophe.” I feel justified to some extent: I was asked, and I will answer like a student whose teacher has posed a rhetorical question that contains the answer within itself, and she has only to elucidate and describe it. The question is doubtless of a rhetorical nature: if one asks whether Bulgarian literature is and whether it can be “world literature,” that is, whether it is inscribable into the worldness of literature, the only politically correct answer is “yes.” The same applies to the question of whether it can be inscribed into the “global world,” because “world” and “global” are, to a large degree, thought of as synonyms. And since the answer is obvious, the student has only to “illustrate” it.

Beyond World Literature

139

Illustration Everything starts from the body. It is undeniable because of the space that it occupies. So, if I want to find the place of Bulgarian literature, I have to see where its body is situated. A bookcase is the only real “place” of literature as a space: there its body rests, there literature is at home between the covers of the books (as I am at home in the village), closed and orderly, kept safe until someone “visits” it and wrenches it out of its dormancy. Literature’s “place” is a significant problem, but recently this problem has been considered solved, or at least solvable, because literature has been endowed with virtual existence, like a “hologram.” For me, this is not a solution; I am of the old generation, for whom virtual love is a mystery. Because of this, I go into the house to seek help from my library and to look at the “body” of literature in its undeniable reality—where and how it is situated. The shelves in a library can tell a story without the books upon them being leafed through and read. Moreover, this library is my library: literature in its place of concealment for me, literature as mine, because literature is always someone’s, and cannot be no one’s. Everything for me occurs as a consequence of my library. My hope is that it will reveal to me on its own something regarding the question of its world and global “purpose” and use, a question I unwisely agreed to answer without its being at all relevant to me here, in this place of forty summer and ten winter residents. My library is large. For a village that is unmarked on the world map, let alone on the globe, it is even huge. It consists of one wall of shelves from top to bottom and two bookcases against the walls on either side. Тhe books оn the shelves are visible and exposed, but in the bookcases, they are concealed: it requires a special effort to extract a book from them. The central part, however, is perfectly organized. This is the place of world literature (according to general opinion as well as my own), and I dare say my library is quite impressive: it contains everything of significance from Homer to Proust, Thomas Mann, and Joyce. The misfortune is that it truly is “complete”: it is crammed full and cannot fit a single book more. In the last ten to twelve years I’ve managed to add to its shelves only a few volumes of Thomas Bernhard and The Kindly Ones (2006) by Jonathan Littell, but they, along with Borges and some more recently deceased authors, are already in a horizontal position on top of the others, though this way they protect the books under them from dust, like some kind of roof or shroud. I could continue this horizontal arrangement … It’s just that I buy books quite rarely nowadays. Humans are limited creatures, and the books in the library will probably suffice for me: I prefer to reread them. When you do not come across anything to hold your attention for a long time, you gradually stop looking. After a certain age, time becomes too short for “current news,” curiosity diminishes, and world literature turns out to be enough. Fulfilled, accomplished, and perfect. In this central section, there is no Bulgarian literature. It rests in the bookcase to the right. The reason is its special status, because I am a part of this literature. I only need to find out whether there could be a place for it in the “world section” if I imagined a hypothetical additional shelf. Hardly, I say to myself. The question

140

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

doesn’t concern me at the moment, however: it is a question of interpretation, and now I’m simply contemplating. I love to contemplate these books because, for me, they “radiate” light and order. It is far more difficult to contemplate the bookcases on either side, but still, the books in them don’t get dusty as compensation for the fact that they can’t be seen. The Bulgarian literature in the bookcase may not even be visible, but it is organized and I can describe it from memory—from Lyuben Karavelov’s Маминото детенце (Mommy’s Boy) (1875) through Yordan Yovkov’s Вечери в Антимовския хан (The Inn at Antimovo) (1928) to Dimitar Dimov’s Осъдени души (Damned Souls) (1945), and so on, to the present day, awaiting my grandchildren to read it someday, though there is no great hope of this. That Joyce is not in a more favorable position provides no consolation. All the same, I can’t bequeath them a bookcase in disarray. The bookcase on the left, however, makes me feel somewhat ashamed. I wouldn’t open it in front of strangers because total chaos reigns within it: the books are piled one on top of another with no rhyme or reason. If I decide to make use of one of them—but this won’t be necessary—I would have to pull out more and more books until I find it. When the bookcase overflows, the books in it make their way to the garage. This makes me an involuntary follower of that editor from the Parisian publishing house and his factories for the “auto-da-fé” of superfluous books. The garage is the “end point,” which will also run out of room and will not be able to take “circulating” books, but then I won’t be around either, and so I don’t think about it. This “not-for-strangers” bookcase hides literature from the last twenty or thirty years. In it are Beigbeder and Coelho, but I’ll refrain from mentioning Nobel laureates, for example. This is the bookcase with the well-known literature from the time period when the world transformed from a world into a globe: its context is the globe. I can call it “englobed literature” and even patent this concept: the globe is that “ball” that we can turn, toss in our hands, and “possess,” like Chaplin’s character in The Great Dictator (1940). The comprehensible incomprehensible. My excuse for the chaos in my bookcase is that I cannot find its organizing principle. In my “world” section, it’s language. Literature written in German, French, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and so on: a clear principle, never mind that most of the books are in translation. Despite their translatedness, these books remain in their languages, enriched in another, and especially if the translation is good, their “soil” is carried over. The “soil” of literature is, indisputably, language. It is a hard material оf many layers, and it requires effort to transport it; it also requires a “place.” A meadow, a forest, a valley, a sky … Whatever its individual “place” may be for its own context. If I were a mystic or a Borges character, I would write that my librarial wandering was a conversation with the French “spirit,” the German “spirit,” the Russian “spirit” … But I am neither one nor the other. In the bookcase of whim and disarray, the books also have authors, but with most of them, I quickly forget where they’re from as well as the languages they were written in. Actually, these books are written very well in one language (I don’t keep “not-well-written” books—they’re cast off directly to the garage). If someone blames me for this carelessness, I can justify myself with an excerpt from a favorite book in the central section: The poet Ivan Bezdomni finds himself in a

Beyond World Literature

141

Soviet insane asylum. An unexpected visitor enters his room in the night—the Master. He asks Bezdomni what he does for a living, and he admits that he’s a poet. “What a pity!” exclaims the Master. “Are my poems that bad?” the poet asks, dejected. “They’re bad.” “Which ones have you read?” “I haven’t read any,” answers the Master. “Then how do you know that they’re bad?” “I’ve read others”—and with this, the visitor ends the conversation, because people who are insane are completely sincere, and the subject is changed.1 And so that I, too, may change the subject, let me add something nice—this bookcase is completely liberal and would even accept authors who have written their books in Bulgarian. But I don’t put books written by friends there, for sentimental reasons. I continue to stack them in the bookcase on the right, even though many of these books are worthy of the “left bookcase”—there is no particular difference. Actually, most would prefer to be in the latter; association with the left brings concrete everyday benefits. The principle of association, however, remains nebulous: sometimes it depends on chance, sometimes on the political strategies of the author, because the only context of the globe is the emotional-political. With regard to Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari observe: “minor literature is always political.”2 I do not agree at all with their interpretation of Kafka, but I like this thought, without relating it to Kafka. It is valid today because literature is a “project.” There is no way for it to be otherwise: on the globe, which is a “model,” literature is a projection. The work requires “soil,” which the world has, but the globe does not. This thought I owe to Heidegger and his reading of Van Gogh’s shoes;3 it is stolen. These thoughts, however, are from that other world that has already passed and can no longer absorb anything else. The globe, though, is a receiving surface; it is “omnivorous” and has no problem with storage space because, in its essence, it is a nonspatial network. Thus, an author coming from a country like Bulgaria, in spite of the unfavorable position she/he occupies, has every opportunity, but this hardly has anything to do with “Bulgarian literature.” Other authors from “hard to find” parts of the globe are in a similar position for reasons of an extraliterary nature. It can’t be otherwise: books have to be bought before their expiration dates, and interest, when there are 50,000 novels published per year, does not depend on the novel. Ultimately, the struggle upon the globe for “global glory” is a struggle with quantity rather than quality. My village, however, is not merely “hard to find”—it is perfectly imperceptible and unmarked on the globe, which is an exclusive basis for freedom. Probably also because of this, the questions and problems of global literature are not vital for me. They are not vital also because the globe is no more than a model, an abstraction; there is neither soil nor grass upon it, and I—when I’m done contemplating my library and its adjacent bookcases—will sit at a little table under the walnut tree, brush away the ants headed for my laptop, and listen to the woodpecker hammering rhythmically in the trees: all things for which the soil is essential, as is also, incidentally, the sky, because of the essentialness of the rain. I’m calm, and I can even summarize: the books from this bookcase do not have a place in this central section with world literature because they are, in their essence, already without a “place”; they are languageless and subordinate to that love which is a mystery to me.

142

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

About “my” Bulgarian literature, however, well organized in its own bookcase, I have to say a few more words, irrespective of any kind of “worldness” and “globalness.” When a person is a part of this literature, they are obligated to possess it, and it happens to fit in a medium-sized bookcase. It isn’t hard to have it and it won’t give anyone difficulties, because it is “young” and “new,” or so its researchers insist, and to some extent, they are right. When I say that it is “young” and “new,” I fall into a certain inaccuracy with regard to my own library, that is, regarding what I see. Because the surface on top of the bookcase also plays the part of a shelf and upon it are arranged more books—old, black, some quite tattered, but also some newer editions. It is not by accident that they have been sent to the top and cannot commingle with the books inside of the bookcase; their language is “different,” it is of a different “order.” It is Bulgarian, but as “other,” something like “one’s own other” both in terms of the sense of the language and the grounds for its usage. These are books in Old Bulgarian, metamorphosed to some extent into “Old Church Slavonic” because of its liturgical use over the centuries, as well as some old publications in modern Bulgarian that are in a certain sense translations or modernized versions of the same old language. These books contain a kind of language that is called “literature” only conditionally and out of inertia because it is actually a literary heritage. The literary heritage is literature that does not care about literature. If I should ever have to abandon my house for good, I would undoubtedly take this literary heritage with me. I would take it because it is the soil of the language in which I write, its deepest layer, without which my language would dry up. And now that I mentioned this carrying away of books, I remembered one shelf that is not directly before my eyes, but that I would take along as well for “extraliterary” reasons. Its logical place is in the “world section,” but for me, this shelf is almost secret, intimate, anchored in the bedroom. There sit the volumes of Dostoevsky and those of Kafka. Aside from the fact that I read them rather frequently, which is why I keep them close to my bed, I also like looking at them. And when journalists ask me their most inane question: who is my favorite author, I have a ready answer, which also happens to be true: Dostoevsky. “Why?” they ask me. Because he is the only writer who can change a person’s life; this makes him a writer “outside the brackets”; all others simply “bracket” life. I do not usually mention Kafka; it requires too long of an explanation, and it would end in almost the same thing along an apophatic route. It is simply that one of them opens life upward, towards an accessible sky, and the other, downward, towards the absurdity under an inaccessible sky. It is instructive. I mention this shelf since the books on it have not taught me “literature,” but other, more important things. These books, together with the literary heritage of my “other” language, are “other than literature,” and because of this, they are the most valuable to me. This is the obviousness of my library. Still, why is the literature in the central section “world,” and why, with such misleading obviousness, do I contrast it with the “global” without any kind of explanation? The reason for my assertion is the tautology that every explanation slips into because of the language in which I write, and its unconscious into which I am interwoven. Why a literature is or can be “world literature” really is obvious in my language if, as Heidegger asserts, we have truth in the exegesis of language.

Beyond World Literature

143

The Bulgarian word свят (svyat or world) is a direct descendant of the Old Bulgarian свѣтъ (light), which itself proceeds from the Proto-Slavic *světъ, again “light.” Many derived words originate here, all with the meaning of “light,” “enlightenment,” and “illumination”; from this Old Bulgarian language comes Church Slavonic as well, which we use in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to this day. And there the basic word is again svyat (world), in its sense of svyatost (holiness). The kernel of the world is light and holiness; this is tautologically apparent in my language, and we could even pose the question: is there a world without holiness? In “my” language, there is not. From light, through illumination (visibility and presence), to holiness, all concepts are built upon vertical hierarchies literally encoded in this word with which we rather simply say “world,” the world (svyat) in which people are simultaneously with the world-in-which-we-are-calledto-be and which is holy (svyat). I don’t know whether this whole series of meanings makes sense in languages other than the Slavic ones, but I do know that language has an unconscious, and that the only true writing—the only writing in the truth —is writing from the unconscious of language. But there is not one language, there are many languages, the world is a multistoried structure made of languages, with their unconscious and “revelations.” In the shade of the walnut tree and to the rhythm of the woodpecker that measures the pulse of the tree, language is easily heard, and along the path of its detours I can reach one more “definition” of “worldness” in its relation to language. In this same Old Bulgarian, the word yazik (language) means “people.” The people are language. In one lovely liturgical chant from the first week of the Easter fast, it says: Разумейте языци!—“Understand, peoples!” The word “language” in the meaning of “people” has been lost in modern Bulgarian, and only its meaning of “language” remains. For the one “condemned to the unconscious,” however, the layers and transformations of words are not a casual linguistic interest, but a way of being that operates with the force of predetermination. This is whence the potential of literature to be world literature comes. This is the way literature was when it could be and wanted to be “world”— an illuminated/sanctified “enworldment” of languages in their history, their everyday existence, their downfalls and revivals: tales of the human life of languages. Namely because of this, every world literature is concrete and is always “French,” or “German,” or “Bulgarian.” The literature of some illuminated/sanctified language in the world that can be seen because of the light within it, a liberation of the voice of language, a revelation of its voice. In this sense, literature is a relative of myth as “being in image.” “It is not I who speak the language, the language speaks me”—this would have been the writer (poet) during that time when literature carried the intent to worldness, illuminated/sanctified, and its “place” was vertically positioned from the soil to the skies of its land. This is a past hidden in the language. Today literature is global, it wants to be global, a misleading attempt that erases and transforms the inceptive meaning of its birth from the womb of the languages (the peoples). There is no longer world literature, the library space has been used up. This is not a painful inference; the world has simply transformed into a “globe,” and the “context” of the globe can only

144

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

be political or universal-psychological, horizontal, and literature is inevitably forced to trace new paths for itself, to tear itself away from the root of language and to inscribe itself as “news” into the network traffic of new technologies and ways of thinking. The place of Bulgarian literature along these vertical and horizontal axes really is unusual. As literary heritage, it literally creates language: it has created a world (свят), illuminated (осветен) and with intentions toward holiness (святост). For historical reasons, this literary heritage did not transform into literature during the period when literature entered its worldness and became meaningful to humans and their world. It did not emerge again until the nineteenth century, and in this sense, “my” literature truly is new, always falling behind “worldness” and remaining outside of it, late, having “arrived” when worldness is leaving the world; maybe this is the case also because, in the fever of its modernization, it had difficulty glancing back in order to realize the significance of that world whose soil it had created as language. When finally, after all of its obstacles, including socialist-ideological, the world “stage” seems to open before it, the world has transformed from a “world” into a globe, and there is simply no longer a place for “world literature.” Examined under the lens of “exegesis” in “my” language, the term “the global world” appears contradictory to the point of being an “oxymoron,” similar to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). This is what my library tells me. And now, at the end, let me describe how the story I began with would end. Then the text itself will “make sense” for me, too. After the mother emerges from her stupor, she grabs the baby, who frightens her, and rushes to the doctor, in hopes of getting help, or at least an explanation. In this twilight hour when the day is spent, the street lamps have come on, and the nurse has left, the doctor has just taken off his white “work” shoes, but before he manages to put on his street shoes, the woman bursts into his office with her baby and he meets her in his stocking feet. Oh, no!, he says to himself, almost pronouncing it aloud, but there is no way to get rid of her: after all, it’s about a baby. The conversation between them is slightly absurd: Does it have fever, the doctor asks, because this is the usual, but the baby has no fever. What’s wrong with it, the doctor asks, expecting symptoms, but the mother just doesn’t know how to articulate them. “My baby’s soul is sick,” she says, thus driving herself into a trap, because how can she explain what she understands as “soul?” Besides, she has uttered it through some kind of linguistic inertia. The doctor immediately understands that his concern is not with the baby, but with the mother, and that he in fact cannot be concerned at all, because he’s a pediatrician. Nevertheless, he asks what exactly she is trying to say, and finds out about the unexpected, abrupt change in the baby’s eyes. Oh, he exclaims gladly, this is completely normal, all babies’ eyes change over time … And he even adds that they’re gorgeous. But it seems the problem wasn’t just with the color, but rather with the estrangement that the baby looked at her with … And this is another thing that she can’t manage to express. The doctor tries to convince her that autism cannot be determined with any certainty at five months of age. But just in case, he asks the necessary questions—does the baby coo? does it smile?—it does all of this, and

Beyond World Literature

145

all the same … all the same … What “all the same,” the doctor continues, acting polite. The baby doesn’t cry anymore—the mother suddenly remembers, and again she is stunned, because this begins to seem like a “revelation”—it hasn’t cried for a week now … The doctor again shows gladness, “so we are dealing with a very calm baby …” he says and smiles kindly. The mother, however, remains completely unconvinced and simply radiates worry. “A person stops crying when everything is clear to them, and this is an illness, because …”—and again, she fails to formulate her thought. … The doctor is now certain in his diagnosis and begins to write a referral on a slip of paper for the mother to see another doctor. What is this?—the mother asks. A referral to a psychologist—answers the doctor and gives her the slip of paper. Are there psychologists for babies? No. The baby’s psyche is not yet developed. The referral is for you.

The woman wraps the baby up and leaves the office; the doctor puts on his shoes. Suddenly he realizes that the baby had stayed there the whole time without making a sound, with a studying gaze. That really is strange, he thinks to himself, but there is no time to think about it more, and he leaves as well. … And now comes the ending. Or more precisely, two endings: It’s almost dark outside and the woman is hurrying. When she reaches her apartment building, she notices that the window she had been looking out of is lit up. He’s come home, she thinks to herself, while she enters the elevator. Then she rings the bell, and her husband opens the door. He hugs her, her along with the baby, takes it from her hands, and begins to play with it. He doesn’t notice any kind of change. The mother watches them, watches them and decides: this is also fine. She goes into the kitchen and begins getting dinner ready. The other ending is fantastical: Outside it hasn’t gotten completely dark, it’s still dusk, ideal for a walk with а baby on a summer day. The mother walks slowly down the street with the baby in her arms and is in utter despair; she’s understood that no one can help her. She makes a turn into a park and sees a lot of mothers with baby strollers. She circles around among them but can’t find a place, all the benches are taken. Still, she sees one with a stroller in front of it but no mother, she’s clearly gone to the kiosk in the middle of the park where they make coffee. She sits. There’s a baby in the stroller, exactly like hers; it looks at her with blue eyes and smiles. This is it!—the mother thinks. She takes the baby from the stroller and puts hers there. It doesn’t cry.

Now she almost runs home because her husband will probably have returned from work, and she has to make dinner.

146

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Notes 1 Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Grove Press, 1994). 2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 3 I have in mind Martin Heidegger’s text “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Martin Heidegger, The Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), originally published in 1950.

Part III

Economies: Bulgarian Literature and the Global Market

12

Tame Domesticity and Timid Trespasses: Travels and Exoduses Todor Hristov

Modern Bulgarian writers wanted to see the world. But no matter how far they got, they saw only routes, landscapes, cities. The world kept receding into an unreachable horizon. This chapter will argue that one of the significant contributions of Bulgarian writers to world literature consists precisely in the experience of the world as an unbridgeable expanse.

Invisibility Aleko Konstantinov, one of the canonical Bulgarian writers, hoping to see the world, visited the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition. He described the latter in a travelogue, To Chicago and Back, that would be studied in the Bulgarian schools even at the turn of the subsequent century.1 The nineteenth century world exhibitions were sophisticated disciplinary apparatuses composed of layers of the visible and the sayable,2 organized in a spatial order. The space of an exhibition was divided into palaces that represented the branches of human activity, and the palaces were split up into general displays and national pavilions. The solemn segment of the exhibition, the White Town, opened up into the Midway Plaisance, the entertainment section of the exhibition organized as a modern Kunstkamera. The value of the displays in the Midway Plaisance depended on their rarity, curiosity, or monstrosity. But the visible and the sayable were also organized in a temporal order known as galeria progressiva,3 which led the visitors from primitive artifacts through Middle Eastern, classical, medieval, and early-modern machines to the sublime power of modern technology, which held them in awe. So the pathways of the visitors were also journeys through time. And the superimposition of the temporal over the spatial order articulated a surplus meaning, a living picture of progress. The Bulgarian place in this living picture, the official pavilion of Bulgaria, was the first independent, formal representation of the country at an international forum. It seemed rather vacant against the background of the riches of the developed nations:

150

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

At first one sees in this little shop two beautiful cabinets with rose oil. In the middle, along the whole length of the pavilion, other cabinets filled with textiles, mostly from Vratsa; between the textiles, if you are looking closely, you will discern a couple of bottles with some liquid, and if you are curious, they will tell you that those are our famous wines and rakia.4

Bulgaria was also represented at the Midway Plaisance by a small pavilion, called “Bulgarian Curiosities.” Surrounded by the marvels of pavilions like “Turkish Coffee House,” “Samoa Theater,” or “40 Beauties from 40 Nations,” the Bulgarian presentation paled by comparison: At first you can see mannequins dressed in male and female folk costumes from Shopsko. On both sides—glass cabinets with all kinds of old and new coins, stamps and cards; on the other two sides is arranged everything that Ayvazian [the shop owner] was able to buy from our peasant women in a couple of years: towels, kerchiefs, socks, earrings, belts, rings, and scores of rattles that the peasant women pretty themselves with.5

In contrast with other nations that Konstantinov considered small or peripheral, like Japan, for example, the Bulgarian representation at the Columbian world exhibition failed to make a difference. The gaze of humanity passed through it or by it with indifference, and even the national costumes turned out to be indistinguishable, because they were strangely similar to some Native American costumes to such an extent that, after the end of the exhibition, the Smithsonian Museum declined the offer to buy them at a very affordable price, or even to receive them as gifts.6 Neither modern nor premodern, neither colonial nor independent, caught in-between the West and the Orient, Bulgaria turned out to be nothing, nothing to see.7 Less than a year after his return from Chicago, Konstantinov published a series of feuilletons about Bay Ganyo, a Bulgarian traveling across Europe.8 Actually, Aleko met Bay Ganyo at the pavilion “Bulgarian Curiosities,” where he was representing a rose oil merchant. The feuilletons can be roughly divided in two parts. The first part, “Bay Ganyo goes to Europe,” inscribes the disembodied gaze of the world in a series of repetitive scenes that can be summarized, for the purposes of this chapter, in the following way: Driven by the inescapable debt of national solidarity, one of the narrators, a Bulgarian living in Europe, takes Bay Ganyo to a public event or place. Bay Ganyo suddenly passes into an act,9 for example he dives into the pool of a public bath at Vienna, or pinches the maidservant of his host at Prague in a sexually unvirtuous manner. The act is unassimilable to the symbolic order, i.e., to the semiotic, cultural, and social codes that enable one to make sense of things. Therefore the act is perceived as meaningless; it is experienced as violence or scandal that shatters the symbolic order, and through its fractured surface appears a real body, impelled by drives, that makes the world avert its gaze: the bathing Viennese look at Bay Ganyo with the pity usually reserved for “the madmen on their way to the asylum,” and the Czech professor,

Travels and Exoduses

151

a former minister of culture in Bulgaria, tries his hardest not to see. In that sense, Bay Ganyo functions as a stain, i.e., as something visible that is beyond the sayable, a real thing that captures the gaze but is impenetrable to the eyes trying to see its meaning.10 Yet the stain personified by Bay Ganyo bursts with energy, perhaps even with power. Konstantinov tries to frame his protagonist in a series of oppositions between the European and the Bulgarian, the gaze and the body, the character and the narrators, the fictional actor and the real author, the idealist author and the real readers (“Take the opposite of Bay Ganyo, and you get Aleko,” claimed the first Bulgarian professor of literary history, Ivan Shishmanov).11 But the excessive visibility of Bay Ganyo spills over the oppositions: the narrators are embarrassed as if he is a stain on their bodies, the readers laugh in shame, the Bulgarian and the European seem indistinguishable in the borderline figures of the narrators, included as exclusions in the scope of the Bulgarian, and excluded from the European by their mode of inclusion (students, tourists, travelers). Moreover, in the second part of the book, the ostensible opposition between the Bulgarian and the European is folded onto itself, because Bay Ganyo comes back home, and claims to represent the European in order to dissimulate his political, economic, and discursive violence. In effect, the oppositions that frame the figure of Bay Ganyo are eroded by a subliminal negativity that Aleko Konstantinov tried to capture in his famous phrase: “We are Europeans but not quite.”12 Two years after the publication of Bay Ganyo, Konstantinov was killed by a stray bullet aimed at a friend of his. Another friend, Pencho Slaveykov, a leading Bulgarian modernist, wrote a poem commemorating Konstantinov’s death (“At the tomb of the murdered friend”) and, a couple of years later published a collection of his works. In the introduction, Slaveykov insinuated that Konstantinov was killed by the living Bay Ganyo who feared his moral idealism.13 “Aleko knew he was going to be killed,” commented Slaveykov, “he deemed it unbelievable, but now we know that in Bulgaria only the unbelievable is believable.” Bay Ganyo stained his country once again, this time with blood. But the stain now marked the real loss—the loss of life ending before its time, the loss of time running out before its end, the loss of creative potential lamented by the Bulgarian critics ever since. “He was one of the few summoned / To sing about what was coming / … He pricked the conscience of the guilty. / But he was chosen as a sacrifice of atonement!” proclaimed Slaveykov in the poem dedicated to Konstantinov.14 After Slaveykov, the Bulgarian critics used the discursive figure of Bay Ganyo to represent the violent force that shaped the real Bulgaria by constantly shaking the symbolic order, as if the country lived in a permanent virtual earthquake. This is the Bulgarian parvenu, claimed Shishmanov; it is rather the primitive accumulation of capital, retorted the Marxists; this is the vitality already lost by the European civilizations, argued the German translator of the book Gustav Weigand only to provoke respectful rejoinders that he did not really understand.15 In the 1980s Svetlozar Igov, in his academic history of Bulgarian literature, summed up the debate in the argument that Bay Ganyo represented a hypothetical tribe, Homo Balkanicus. His argument was taken up by an internationally renowned Bulgarian historian, Maria Todorova, in her concept of Balkanism.16

152

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

The stain personified by Bay Ganyo, however, had an additional function. Critics, writers, teachers, and students learned to use it as an explanation of why Bulgaria was globally invisible, as if the body of Bay Ganyo hid the true value of the country from the eyes of the world. Since the feuilletons allowed Bulgarians to make sense of their invisibility, Bay Ganyo soon became a national emblem, the archetypal Bulgarian even in the carnivalesque world of jokes. Yet, how can one make sense of a stain? Many Bulgarian writers tried to do that by inscribing into it a latent meaning. In the rest of this chapter, I will sum up two types of latent meanings as well as an alternative approach to the problem of global invisibility that invites us to recognize its aporetic nature.

Hope Shefket Chapadzhiev is a Bulgarian Muslim from a small mining town in the Rhodope Mountains. His family used to be relatively well-off—they could afford to eat mostly potatoes, occasionally even beans. But Chapadzhiev dreamed of another life, and, after studying To Chicago and Back at school, he firmly decided to go and make a life there. In 1963, risking his life, he crossed into Greece with his best friend. A couple of weeks later, he was in Chicago. Soon he was swamped with low-paid work that led nowhere. “If our people could see what we are doing to earn a living,” commented his friend one day, “our names would be stained forever.17” Indeed, Chapadzhiev was a cashier at the agricultural cooperative back home, and now he was selling sunflower oil door to door. But he had read a latent meaning in Aleko’s travelogue. Aleko contrasted the absence of Bulgaria with the full and living presence of Chicago, and Chapadzhiev saw in this contrast the “not yet” of a life that was to come, another life, the endless possibilities of which were described by a celebrated writer, whom textbooks often called Щастливеца (The Happy One). Aleko indeed described the real of Bulgaria as a stain. But as far as Chapadzhiev managed to read into Aleko’s travelogue the real possibility of a life that was not yet, the stain was transformed into a concrete utopia.18 Yet, unlike more popular immigrant novels, such as Victor Paskov’s Germany—A Dirty Tale,19 which described the waning of such concrete utopias amalgamated with an endless proliferation of stains, Chapadzhiev’s utopia grew over time, because it drew its symbolic energy from literature, from the countless anxieties and frustrations about the stained Bulgarian real, which sedimented into the literary canon. Decades later, the communist party was removed from power, which triggered an extensive process of privatization, and it seemed that anyone with some capital could buy for cheap public goods that promised future riches. So the aged father of Chapadzhiev called and asked him to buy for the family an eight-story hotel, a supermarket, and a couple of restaurants. But Chapadzhiev refused because, as he explained in the preface of his biography, success could be spelled only in English. The real success did not consist in owning an enterprise, but rather in taking good care of the workers, as the American capitalists did:

Travels and Exoduses

153

Once, educated in the period of communism, I disliked the word “wealth.” I was convinced that, in order to get rich, one has to exploit those who work for him. Quite later, in America, I realized that in order to get rich, one has to be of service to many others … The system and the laws in America oblige you to be of service to the others, no matter if you are an employer or an employee.20

The symbolic energy of Chicago as a concrete utopia had become powerful enough to eclipse even capitalism. So instead of paying for the ambitions of his father, Chapadzhiev paid a tribute to Aleko. He made a generous donation for the opening of a monument to Aleko from the Bulgarian community in Chicago, a monument to the father of his dream, in the form of five decent hotel rooms booked for a couple of nights.21

Otherness Georgi Danailov wanted to describe Chicago a hundred years after Aleko. Danailov used Aleko’s travelogue as a background and tried to point out the progress made by the United States in a century. Aleko complained about the pollution and the smog. Quite on the contrary, declared Danailov, today Chicago is a green city with clean air.22 Aleko’s attitude toward the United States was ambivalent. He described the slaughterhouses with mixed feelings of awe and disgust, fearful that Chicago represented the future of humanity. Now the slaughterhouses had disappeared from the sanitized landscape of the city, and Danailov could not believe Aleko’s dread. If he was so disgusted, commented Danailov, why did he not stop eating meat? Death is a part of life, and humanity has always lived by the death of other species. Of course, Danailov made that comment in the context of his hunting trip to Vermont. But, nevertheless, since the times of Aleko, perhaps because of socialism, capitalism had become invisible. As far as Danailov could sense a shadow of a threat, it came from the future. In the closing paragraphs of his travelogue, he tried once again, just like Aleko, to oppose and appease the anxious voices which claimed that America was the future. He did not know the concept at the time, but the voices he somewhat condescendingly dismissed spoke about the closing horizon of globalization. Following the conventions of the genre, in his travelogue Danailov described the Bulgarians that stain their country: There are Bulgarian millionaires. But unfortunately, there are a lot of our people who barely hang in, some of them are up to their necks in the swamp and any moment the boggy waters will consume them, and from their past dreams will remain only bubbles, which will bubble a little and then pop. They have come to America with the delusion that this is going to be the biggest hit in their lives, that America is waiting for them with arms wide open, that their life will run gloriously and abundantly from the very first day. They have not taken into account one thing though. They have not realized that, in this country, one has to work, and not like anywhere else, but as one should in America. Otherwise you are dead.23

154

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

The Bulgarians that stained their country did not know how to work, either because back home they were supported by their families, or because their education was not efficient, since they knew much more than the average American, but they did not know how to put their knowledge to work. And also, the stained Bulgarians misread the American dream as a promise of easy money: The bad thing is that they stain our name anywhere. Since they cannot, and stubbornly do not want to do some human work, they use their own inventiveness to get by, to gain some leftovers by petty schemes, pathetic frauds and the dishonesty of a Bay Ganyo, quite without the verve of their precursor.24

Was not that the cunning of the poor that helped them survive capitalist exploitation? In order to foreclose that reading, Danailov contrasted the behavior of the stained Bulgarians with a counterexample, the true story of an African American. As a boy, he wanted to study computers, his father disagreed and threw him out of their home. So now the young man worked from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., then went to school and studied until 10 p.m. He knew that he took a substantial amount of student loan, so his time at the university was valuable and, in the hope of not wasting any, he slept only four hours a day. “This is real performativity, this is the real America,” exclaimed enthusiastically Danailov.25 And he was even more enthusiastic about the student loans. In opposition to the lazy and crafty Bulgarians who stained their country, the figure of the hard-working and clever African American acquired a surplus meaning. It came to mean that everyone could succeed if he or she deserved it, that anybody had a chance, and if he or she would miss that chance, it was he or she that was responsible. Is not that the most irresistible ideology of today? Perhaps the surplus meaning of stories, like the one about the African American who made it, was imaginary. Perhaps it was the imagination of neoliberalism. But this neoliberal imaginary was inscribed in a real space, a space that was represented as irreducibly other, the space of the United States, which, in the eyes of Danailov, reflected and inverted the Bulgarian reality. In his travelogue, the United States had the latent meaning of heterotopia.26

Ambiguity The latent content read into the stained Bulgarian reality was often ambiguous. It oscillated between utopia, heterotopia, and trauma, and it was often framed as irony. Let me illustrate that oscillation through a scene from one of the best-selling travelogues of late socialism, About Japan as Japan by Marko Semov (1984).27 Semov traveled to Japan in 1983. Almost a century before that, Aleko had described the Japanese pavilion at the Columbian world exhibition as proof that underdevelopment was not fatal, that a non-Western nation could overcome its fate, as long as it worked together as a utopian machine of social harmony:

Travels and Exoduses

155

The bloody Japanese have made an awful lot of progress! It is not in vain that they are called the Englishmen of the East. Lively, intelligent, industrious nation! … They did not exhibit as their own products rakia from Stanimaka, cognac essence from Bordeaux, bottles from Prague, and labels from Vienna [like the Bulgarians]; everything that fills their giant pavilions is a product of their own industry.28

Semov described Japan in the same vein, as an objective lesson that the hegemony of the West was not due to its dominance, to the asymmetrical distribution of power, but rather to the fact that Western societies did better. Any non-Western nation could do better if it put enough effort into it. Like Japan, for example. At the end of his trip, Semov visited a shop called “100 yens:” We wandered for a long time in this shop. We were losing ourselves, finding ourselves, losing ourselves again between the shelves. … No matter how long I wandered through the store, no matter how wide I opened my eyes, we had to go. But we were lost again—and we were looking for each other again. The store should have been called not “100 Yens,” but “100 Lost Bulgarians.” One of us comes out, but the other has just found something interesting and so cheap. “Well, I should also find something more,” says the first one, and he once again plunges into the shop.29

Why do we not have that in Bulgaria, exclaimed Semov, this is such an easy thing to do, and it is so enjoyable? Of course, Semov was fascinated by the cheap abundance of the store. But his rhetorical question inverted that abundance into a lack. On the one hand, it referred to the lack of enjoyment, characteristic of the late socialist consumption, because although the Bulgarian goods were actually cheap, they were often in short supply, and they were intended to satisfy needs rather than to stir desire. On the other hand, Semov’s rhetorical question referred to the impotence of the Bulgarian communist leadership, which was obviously unable to do even the easiest thing when it comes to desire, or perhaps to a silent accusation that the party stole or forestalled the enjoyment of the Bulgarians. The surplus meaning of rhetorical questions of the type “why do we not have that” certainly involved a heterotopic otherness. But they also implied the utopia of consumerism as a real possibility, which was yet to come to Bulgaria. Such questions also referred to the trauma of underdevelopment, of a future closed off by a past of impotence. Perhaps the latent representations of Bulgarian impotence were read as an oscillation between such meanings rather than as just an observation or an accusation. The oscillation between utopia, heterotopia, and trauma transposed impotence into an affect, perhaps a meaningless frustration or a frustrating meaninglessness—the affect of a stained reality. This was probably the reason why the travelogue was confiscated from bookstores in the beginning of 1984, only to become a best-seller. Of course, in a couple of years Bulgaria would be flooded with cheap shops called “Goods for 1 lev,” but they would mean nothing other than poverty; their surplus meaning would be washed away together with the party leadership.

156

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Empty Signifiers Was another development possible? Another Bulgarian writer, Konstantin Konstantinov, often associated with modernism, traveled to France in the 1920s. His gaze was captivated by French vitality, which managed to revive itself even after the greatest of wars. In Marseilles, while dining with his companions, Konstantinov was approached by a disfigured person who asked him if he was Bulgarian. As it turned out, the man was disfigured in the war. He had been fighting against Bulgarians in the fields of northern Greece. Konstantinov anticipated an outburst of anger, perhaps a belated vengeance, so he offered his apologies and condolences. But the figure responded with the subdued wisdom of the soldiers who had lived on the brink of life for almost four years: “This is a Bulgarian bullet … And this one too,” he showed his forehead. … “Oh yes, yes, gentlemen … I know … But I am happy to see Bulgarians again, believe me … Good soldiers, they know how to defend their land, and they know how to die. … No, no, no, sirs, that is distant now. We all fought, we all killed and died. That is life … That is death …30

What does one know if one knows how to die? Is there a “how to” when it comes to dying? Do we not die anyhow, somehow, without any definite knowledge? Perhaps the recognition offered by the disfigured soldier lacked a signified. But it articulated a shared lack and, therefore, it turned the stain of the real, the return of which Konstantinov so anxiously anticipated, into an empty signifier. Relieved from the anxiety brought about by the revenant of the Bulgarian, the stained real of the home, Konstantinov concluded the Marseilles chapter of his travelogue in a note of sympathy: “He nodded and left with his awkward walk. We were silent and we felt uneasy. Was that man an actor, a wise man, or a wretched lunatic?”31 Not knowing the other, is that not an honest approach to otherness?

World Literature Was Bulgarian literature on travels and exiles world literature? World literature is not merely literature that is of value to the world; it is literature that represents the world. In that respect, Bulgarian travelogue literature has an important lesson to teach. It is shaped by the experience of being invisible to the world, and it has developed discursive strategies to make sense of invisibility. It represented its cause as a stained reality hiding the true value of the Bulgarian from the eyes of the world. In trying to comprehend this stained reality, the travelogues construed it as an empty signifier of otherness, as a dull background against which Bulgarians could see the utopia of progress, as a heterotopia that, as if through a dark glass, returned to the West the inverted image of what it is not. Through such discursive strategies, however,

Travels and Exoduses

157

the world in Bulgarian travelogues is characterized by negativity; it is constituted as a horizon that shines through the stained reality but irredeemably exceeds or transcends it like a heavenly realm of pure potentiality. Yet, how can one live at an unbridgeable distance from the world? How can one see the world, if even travelling makes it recede? Frederic Jameson claims that one of the functions of culture is cognitive mapping, “an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us.”32 Bulgarian travelogue literature is perhaps one of the most sustained failed attempts at cognitive mapping of the world, which work precisely because of their failure.

Notes   1 Aleko Konstantinov, To Chicago and Back, (Sofia: Abm Komers, 2004); originally published as Алеко Константинов, До Чикаго и назад (София: Български бестселър, 1894).   2 The concept of the layers of visible and sayable is drawn from Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Athlone, 1988), 38–9. For a detailed account of the world exhibitions as disciplinary apparatuses see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995): 75–88; for the history of the 1893 Columbian Exhibition see Neil Harris, Wim De Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert Rydell, Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993).   3 In the sense of a spatial arrangement of exhibits intended to represent the progress of humanity through time. See Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 76.   4 A. Konstantinov (Константинов), До Чикаго и назад, 56.   5 A. Konstantinov (Константинов), До Чикаго и назад, 58.   6 Todor Hristov (Тодор Христов), Отвъд идентичността (София: Извор, 1990), 27.   7 For a detailed analysis of the problem of global invisibility in Aleko Konstantinov see Nikola Georgiev (Никола Георгиев), Името на розата и на тютюна (София: Издателство на БАН, 1993).   8 Aleko Konstantinov, Bai Ganyo: Incredible Tales of a Modern Bulgarian, ed. Victor A. Friedman, trans. Victor A. Friedman, Christina E. Kramer, Grace E. Fielder, and Catherine Rudin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010); originally published as Алеко Константинов, Бай Ганю (София: Шивачев, 1895). Cited from Бай Ганьо (София: Български писател, 1963)   9 In the sense of Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X. Anxiety, 1962– 1963 (1963), 97–8, www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACANX_l_angoisse.pdf. 10 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2005), 260–1. The scandalous acts performed by the embodied real body of Bay Ganyo paradoxically reinforce the normative power of the symbolic order, because they are effectively rejected not only by the Europeans but also by the narrators—the only ones who speak the language of this meaningless body, being also points of identification for the author and the readers.

158

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

11 Ivan Shishmanov (Иван Шишманов), “Алеко Константинов. Материал за биографията му по една лична изповед,” in Българска сбирка (1897), 3. 12 A. Konstantinov, Bai Ganyo, 19, www.slovo.bg/showwork.php3?AuID=169&WorkID =4673&Level=1. 13 Pencho Slaveykov (Пенчо Славейков), Събрани съчинения, vol. 5 (София: Български писател, 1958), 1958), 316–17. 14 Pencho Slaveykov (Пенчо Славейков), “При гроба на убития другар,” Мисъл 1897, 5–6. 15 See Tihomir Tihov (Тихомир Тихов), Българската критика за Алеко Константинов (София: Български писател, 1970), 265–7. A couple of years after Weidand similar argument from the perspective of the allegedly premodern gender and family relations developed. Gerhard Gesemann, Heroische Lebensform: zur Literatur und Wesekunde der balkanischen Patriarchalität (Berlin: Wiking Verlag, 1943). 16 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 39–41. 17 Orlin Krumov (Орлин Крумов), Чападжиев (София: Бард, 1996), 44. 18 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 114–16. 19 Victor Paskov (Виктор Пасков), Германия – мръсна приказка (София: Христо Ботев, 1993). 20 Krumov (Крумов), Чападжиев, 6–7. 21 At the time, Chapadzhiev was running a very successful printing company. The rooms were booked for the folk singers that performed at the opening of the monument. Chapadzhiev probably also made a contribution for the monument itself but his biographer does not provide any details on that. See Krumov, Чападжиев. 22 Georgi Danailov (Георги Данаилов), До Чикаго и назад—сто години по-късно (София: Български писател, 1990), 31. 23 Ibid., 86. 24 Ibid. 86. 25 Ibid., 28. 26 In the sense of a real space with an imaginary dimension, see Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–7. 27 Marko Semov (Марко Семов), За Япония като за Япония (София: Български писател, 1984), https://chitanka.info/text/8345-za-japonija-kato-za-japonija. 28 A. Konstantinov (Константинов), До Чикаго и назад, 83. 29 Semov (Семов), За Япония като за Япония, 162. 30 Konstantin Konstantinov (Константин Константинов), По земята (София: Хемус, 1930), https://chitanka.info/book/403-izbrani-razkazi-i-pytepisi. 31 Ibid. 32 Frederic Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 3.

13

The End of Self-Colonization: Contemporary Bulgarian Literature and Its Global Condition Alexander Kiossev

Preliminary Theoretical Remarks For nearly two decades, we have witnessed a new condition of Bulgarian literature (although it is hardly restricted to Bulgarian literature alone), which could be defined as “the globalization of the national literary field.” And it is not a matter of what we see on the surface, i.e., that many Bulgarians, some of them living abroad, write their fiction or poetry in foreign languages, mainly in English. In fact, the overall mode of operation of the field in question has changed. Pierre Bourdieu defines the literary field as a network of reciprocal positionings and distinctions between writer’s roles, practices, and styles—in other words, as a shared space where each writer’s standing obtains its specific meaning in a network of entangled relationships, distinctions, positions, and oppositions.1 What he is referring to is a self-sufficient and isolated, immanent space, a French or even a “Parisian” writers’ community, that produces differential social meanings and roles internally. However, during the previous longue durée of Bulgarian literature, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the factors, which created such a network of relationships, were not limited to concrete writers’ roles and the differential topography of literary groups. Key normative elements of the social imagination, which transcended the isolated self-sufficiency of the field and all of its internal relationships, were crucial in the production of meaning. Back then, all Bulgarian literary roles and positions indispensably found their meaning not only in internal mutual juxtapositions and differentiations but in an inevitable relation to external cultural norms and models. The first of these normative horizons was, indeed, the vast imaginary community— the nation. At the beginning of modern Bulgarian literature, it presented itself as both the source and the great recipient of every public and literary message: by Herderian default, it was assumed that a national literature always originated from a native language and was designed to provide an expression of its “folk spirit.”2 Unlike the previous pan-European medieval and Renaissance literary production based on Latin,3 in the nation-building period (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries), the contribution

160

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

to the national “literary treasure” was the very reason for literatures’ existence; it legitimized it as a whole, simultaneously producing the meaning of every possible literary role within their national realms. Yet, the “imaginary community” in the Bulgarian case functioned as a norm of a peculiar nature: the whole national culture of the small nation was an ex-centric orientation system. Although every cultural production presumed that the ultimate value horizon in this era of nationalism was the nation, it was precisely the traditional image of the Bulgarian nation that was not self-sufficient. As an orientation system of values, its center was located without rather than within it. In all of its dominating public discourses from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century as well as in all of its key public discussions, the Bulgarian nation has consistently identified itself (not unlike many other small nations and minor literatures and cultures) as secondary, belated, backward, and insufficiently civilized. Its self-image was connected to a ceaseless catching up with an imaginary center, which epitomized world progress, “civilization,” and “culture” in this mature period of modernity.4 Thus, this Great Other, “Europe” or “the West,” functioned as a key phantasm in the Bulgarian imagination; it was perceived as a crucial normative entity from which to seek recognition. During the “longue durée” development of Bulgarian literature, the reactions toward this norm were various and ambivalent. But the national ideology and the local cultural production have ceaselessly oscillated between two poles: the imitative position of the Bulgarian Westernizers (“we must modernize, catch up, follow Europe” etc.) and the compensatory position of the Nativists (“we must be proud because of our Great Cultural heritage”;5 “we have given something to the world, too”).6 Elsewhere, I have referred to this complex process through the ambivalent metaphor of “self-colonization.”7 This metaphor served as a heuristic methodological instrument that enabled me to analyze the ambiguities of the Eurocentric modernization of nineteenth century peripheries: on the one hand, it indicated the positive implications of Europeanization (joining modernity, participating in a universal history, communicating with the progressive humankind, sharing the universal values of the Enlightenment, modernizing the infrastructure, technology, and production, etc.); on the other hand, it hinted at the darker side of Europeanization, too—the exposure of such small and “belated” cultures to the hegemony and the asymmetrical hierarchies of the Eurocentric colonial imagination. Moreover, the metaphor was capable of revealing that small national cultures, similar to the Bulgarian one, have internalized the controlling gaze of the great Other, i.e., the phantasmatic idealized double of the real colonial Europe, and, despite all their efforts to catch up, have always found themselves trudging behind, as far away as ever from the exemplary center, irredeemably deprived of high, universally recognized achievements, and replete with fissures, failures, imperfections, and imitations. Thus, born into this power-driven, asymmetric exchange of cultural goods and symbols, the emerging modern Bulgarian culture seemed to be bound to reproduce its own unremitting cultural trauma: second-ratedness, insignificance, belatedness, and marginality.

The End of Self-Colonization

161

Over the decades since, there have been abundant challenges to this constitutive cultural gesture of Bulgarian identity, but the goal of this chapter is not to elaborate further the metaphor of self-colonization; it is mentioned only as background, to frame certain historical conditions. What matters for us here is its lasting consequence: the paradoxical dual-centeredness of the field, beyond the nuts and bolts of writers’ relations and distinctions. Bulgarian literary culture emerged and developed for a century and a half as both nation-centric and Eurocentric, аnd this was both a constitutive and a self-traumatizing process. I argue that the new regime that Bulgarian literature has developed into over the last two decades could be described, also metaphorically, as the “end of self-colonization.” What determines the new state of the field is that both centers seem to have slipped out of normative power; having both lost their grip, they now fade away (though this does not necessarily imply a healthier current condition). The many historical reasons behind this waning norm are well-known: the collapse of Europe’s unconditional authority, caused by a series of historical upheavals within the “decline of the West”; the catastrophe of the two world wars; the demise of former colonial empires, where the decolonization processes have led to the rise of local, postcolonial nationalisms across Asia and Africa, etc. No lesser reasons were the emergence of the new, non-European world powers after the Second World War and the bipolar world of the Cold War, and the global rise of North America and Asia. Taken together, all these factors rendered every kind of Eurocentrism unrealistic. In its latest phase, the process was amplified by digital capitalist and neo-liberal globalization, by the global flows of information and visual images, by the transnational patterns of the economic, consumerist, and cultural behavior of mobile masses, which further eroded the nationstate and undermined its homogenizing ideology and cultural institutions.8 The Bulgarian case was further complicated by more recent circumstances that emerged as the paradoxical consequences of the accession of countries like Bulgaria to the EU in 2007: the imagined, ideal Great Other was abruptly replaced by the real, centralized administration of Brussels. The transformation of the long-craven dream of “Europe” into a practical and everyday reality took the form of bureaucratic intricacies and tardy, politically driven benchmarks of partial recognition. Contrary to the wellentrenched local cultural utopia, it never included cultural recognition. Instead of being the “realm of perfection,” the real EU has proven to be a political machine with many practical advantages, yet, with plenty of defects, too. This soon triggered the critical response of populist nationalists and Eurosceptics in Bulgaria, strengthened by the attacks of pro-Russian media hybrid: almost a century after the real Europe had lost its leading position in the world, its imaginary double—“the ideal Europe”— collapsed within the Bulgarian cultural imagination. In this new environment, the small Bulgarian literary field lost its traditional excentric structure. The void of this important and unifying collective cultural norm was now being filled with other, individual strategies for success, which allowed each writer to choose his/her own trajectory, not necessarily oriented toward a national “us”; the field lost its normative bi-polar center. The invisible collapse of the old selfcolonizing, “catching up” utopia took away its integrity and tattered its communicative space. Today, Bulgarian literature no longer perceives itself as an integral cultural and

162

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

historical agent and has lost its traditional role of a crucial national, cultural institution. And it might be more correct to posit that what went global was not Bulgarian literature itself, but its individual writers. The particular individuals writing today are the true agents of a centrifugal literary production: each one of them blazes his/her own trail, seeks recognition, prestige, authority, and market breakthroughs in his/her own way, using different systems of orientation, sometimes even different languages, and focusing on distinct audiences. In short, they target divergent scenes or standalone reference frameworks in pursuit of particular, sometimes incompatible types of literary success. In sum, they no longer constitute a shared communicative field.

Writers and Publishers The most telling example of the disintegration of the literary field is the peculiar structure of the publishing industry, the book market, and the literary media. Some contemporary Bulgarian writers contact directly the handful of serious publishing houses that market their works. These traditional market players (publishing houses such as “Ciela,” “Hermes,” “Lexicon,” “Colibri,” “Janet 45,” etc.) have certain, albeit modest, returns from publishing Bulgarian authors. But there are also serious publishers who have made staying away from Bulgarian literature a matter of policy (e.g., the publishing house “Bard”). Even for those who do get involved in it, this is a peripheral activity. The only way to sponsor the unprofitable (with a handful of exceptions) Bulgarian authors is to have sufficient margins from translated global bestsellers, textbooks, expensive albums, or high-demand stationery. Thus, contemporary Bulgarian literature is actually reduced to a philanthropic spin-off of some publishers’ profitable operations. Because the multitude of publishing methods in Bulgaria is quite heterogeneous, a large number of writers prefer very different publication channels. For some authors, it is a matter of personal policy to be connected to a “short term,” small-scale publisher that survives on a bricolage or makeshift strategies. The better performing sustainable publishers among the above-mentioned group typically stick to clear-cut profiles, putting out books with the financial help of government sponsorship or foreign support. They fill specific publishing niches, usually also isolated, by targeting a very particular readership. There is also, of course, vanity publishing, “samizdat,” sponsored by the authors themselves. In other words, the disparate publishing strategies typically do not transform the vast literary production into a publicly “visible,” available fact; many alternative publications are often distributed manually—by the publisher, within limited networks, or sometimes by the very author who shies away from selling and instead hands out his/her books to friends. Thus, attaining the former Bulgarian literary publicity is now not the final and crucial objective of everything created by Bulgarian writers. A considerable number of published books stay out of bookstores, the media, book fairs, and cultural festivals; they often use sub-public channels, and some of the books never make it to libraries’ depositories and catalogues. Some Bulgarian authors write directly in English and some, like the bilingual Amazon.com author Sylvia Atipova/Sylvia Ashby, are global

The End of Self-Colonization

163

success stories: her electronic novels in English are entirely outside of the Bulgarian literary scene. For all of the above, the publishers’ output and the literary market have failed to create the necessary infrastructure for the comprehensive and encompassing public “visibility,” i.e., inner connectedness, of modern Bulgarian literature. Another important factor contributing to this a-systemic situation is the “digital turn.” It opened abundant opportunities not only for free online publishing but also for free literary consumption: a plethora of hypertext links and multimedia use, combined with the influence of global commercial genres and the pressure of the visual on literary culture. In this online realm, the publishing entities and channels are also extremely heterogeneous, as well as poorly or not at all connected to each other. Old literary magazines and newspapers morph into online outlets. Apart from the big websites that act as large Bulgarian literary libraries or magazines (Literary Club, LiterNet, The Word, etc.), there are many sites that belong to one literary circle or another, to a group or a grouplet, e.g., The Slanders, Ugly Pelicans, The Rebels, Stihove. bg, Shtyrkel.net, New Social Poetry, New A-social Poetry, and Free Poetic Society.

The Field in General The new type of fragmentation should not be confused with the old fracas, hostility, and competition that have traditionally plagued mainstream literary fields. Nor is it due to the traditional split of literary publicity into circles, cliques, tastes, biases, and group doctrines. It is rooted in the almost complete lack of interest and exchange among the various print and electronic forums. Having turned into information bubbles, they are reluctant to read or discuss one another—if we use Charles Taylor’s term,9 there is no cross-referentiality among them, no interchange of themes, arguments, controversies, or key names to gradually come anywhere near a shared taste or norm. If something of the sort still does exist, it is thanks to television channels. Another example of the disintegration is the decline of literary criticism, a crucial consolidating factor of the scene, bound to assert its shared “nomos.” Active professional critics make a very short list (Milena Kirova, Angel Igov, Vladimir Trendafilov, Sylvia Choleva, Mitko Novkov and a few others); an uncompromising and field-realigning criticism has been displaced by the dominant pattern of behavior of some mainstream critics. They no longer nurture a privileged, professional, and neutral vantage point, but have instead opted for surreptitious lobbyist games, or peddling the interests of various literary circles and publishing houses. This is particularly evident when such critics are included in literary award panels. If I were to generalize: what is nearly extinct is the glue that binds individual fora into a shared imaginary public scene where authors, styles, and achievements could read, fascinate, compare, juxtapose, and discern one another—thus, in a collective effort of communication, producing what Bourdieu used to call the “nomos,” i.e., the field’s law and norm. The literary field has lost its integrating function of producing mutual relations and differential meanings between various types of literary production, various genres, and writers’ roles.

164

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Literary Condition In the second part of this chapter, we will depart from the realm of literary sociology and enter into the realm of genre, style, and poetics. What follows is a brief description of isolated genre and style niches both in popular literary production and in “elite” literature. We will start with Bulgarian imitators of global bestseller genres. They lean toward genres that, until recently, had been mostly exploited by the film industry, e.g., thriller, action, horror, chicklit, etc. Historical thrillers, akin to Umberto Eco and Dan Brown–epigones have, for instance, enjoyed copious imprints. The most prominent Bulgarian author in this vein is Lyudmila Filipova, with novels such as The Ink Labyrinth (2009) or Dante’s Antichton (2010) replete with sensations and historical mysteries, acted out by fairly cosmopolitan characters on a global imaginary canvas (from Roman catacombs through Swiss castles and the deepest cave in the Balkan mountains, all the way to Hitler’s bunker). Such texts are jockeying for Umberto Eco’s legacy, constantly striving to show off their authors’ pseudo-erudition, while peddling easyto-sell conspiracy versions of world history and information from Wikipedia. Weaving between the genre-required mysteries and historical-criminal puzzles, their narratives manage to touch on a “prehistoric Balkan civilization,” “mysteriously arranged stone figures,” “secret underground brotherhoods,” and “solar ciphers,” among others. Despite its similarity to the first one, the second niche substantially diverges from it: some authors (Tzontcho Rodev, Christo Krassin, Nikolay Penchev, etc.) give up on the global reference framework of the former and pivot to patriotic audiences, translating its genre devices into a local pitch that only appeals to Bulgarian readers. Thus, the usual global thriller-type nebulous secrets and criminal plots morph into local mysteries of Bulgarian history, which typically depart from its official versions, accommodating the occult and conspiratorial expectations of its readership. Most representative in this cohort is Nikolay Penchev, author of the historical series Old Bulgarian Riddles, a skillful popular fiction writer, whose fast-selling novels feature emblematic titles like The Stone Room (2017), Kill the Emperor (2014), The Yellow Box (2013), The Khan’s Head (2012), and so on. Popular literature and performance employ strategies that go in a very different direction by targeting diverse audiences in pursuit of higher returns. Konstantin Trendafilov’s books are an example; Trendafilov is a young author, who has chosen to depart from his role as a popular writer and who utilizes his high profile among young audiences as a kind of “auto-merchandizing” in the sphere of reality shows, dance, popular music, and media culture. He does not relate his literary role to other roles in the fragmented literary field—his pursuit of visibility is aimed at boosting the sales of an isolated, scandalous image, which competes with the images of other media stars. Bulgarian fantastic fiction represents another separate niche—or indeed a whole parallel literature—which does not communicate with the other niches. It accounts for a sizable, well-educated community writing and reading in both English and Bulgarian, adhering exclusively to fantastic genres. The latter have, in turn, multiplied into a whole genre network: fantasy poetry, fantasy films and series, cosplay, gaming,

The End of Self-Colonization

165

graffiti, urban fantasy and urban dystopias, psycho-fantasy, techno-thriller, cyberpunk, etc. The literary community of Bulgarian fantasists have their own isolated and self-sufficient literary institutions and rituals; this community is organized around the Bulgarian fantasy society and has a network of its own dedicated publishers (“Artline Studios,” “Kibea,” “Gayana,” etc.). They also have their own electronic literary magazines (Fantastica, Almanac for Fiction and Future Gathering of troubadours, Shadowdance, Drasus, etc.), where one can find only fantastic genres. This framework is populated by a whole group of intriguing authors (Alexander Popov, Haralambi Markov, Emanuil Tomov, Vladimir Poleganov, Jeni Koleva, and Georgi Penchev, among others), who are unknown to the other literary circles, but nevertheless produce vivid and engaging works. Bulgarian science fiction is subject to a global “nomos” that hails from world fantasy and science fiction literature rather than from the national literary field. Active in their international ties, Bulgarian fantasists have almost no truck with “nonfantastic” circles. Exceptions like Vladimir Poleganov, who recently published an excellent novel, called The Other Dream, a bridge between fantastic and “high claims” fiction, only confirm the rule. The other star of this English writing and reading community, Haralambi Markov, is an author whose career seems to have soared well above the Bulgarian scene. He writes fantasy exclusively in English and, having already made his way into international sites and prestigious genre forums in America and Europe, was even featured in some of the world’s renowned fantasy magazines. In this fragmented and centrifugal field, what used to be called “Bulgarian literature” only thirty years ago survives with difficulties. Regardless of whether it actually possesses or merely pretends to possess high literary quality, it remains aligned with tastes and habits from the era of print media. This deep, complex, and thoughtful writing requires slow, devoted, and engaged reading; it expects from its reader an intricate balance of empathy and distance, cultural erudition and imagination. The literary texts produced in this niche rely on the audience’s shared cultural memory and knowledge of cultural traditions, transformed into reading competences (command of national and international intertextual repertoires of key stories, personae, tropes and symbols, quotations and allusions). Yet, sociological research of reading practices in Bulgaria claims that all these preconditions for the old type of literary activity are in decline.10 In fact, what is valid for the entire fragmented literary field is also valid for this niche, i.e., for the present state of “high” Bulgarian literature. Here we highlight only a few of the consequences of the disintegration of the literary field’s authority center. The fragmentation in the first transitional decade (1990–2000) was a political one, between the oppositional Alliance of Bulgarian Writers and the ex-communist Union of Bulgarian writers; the post-Transition years saw further non-political fragmentation, based on communicative channels, target audiences, and success strategies, resulting in different styles, linguistic approaches, and genre conventions. The non-commercial, “high” Bulgarian literature disintegrated into a host of groups at odds with one another “on principle,” meaning that they abstained from reading the rest: the writers and poets associated with Литературен вестник (Literary Journal Weekly); Olga Nikolova’s Пеат некогаш (They’re Singing Some Time Ago) site for literature; the New Social

166

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Poetry Society, which subsequently split into New Social Poetry, New A-Social Poetry, and Free Poetic Society; the Metaphor circle; the Chaos manifesto literary circle; the Tree Hole literary circle (“A boutique for words, images, and meaning”); Crossroads; etc. Plovdiv has a writers’ group of its own, as does Bourgas (around the Sea Almanac), and Veliko Tarnovo (around the Sveta Gora Almanac), among others. Most literary circles have become hardly distinguishable from their own digital publications. Many of these circles have published their own manifestos and have declared philosophical, social, political, stylistic, and genre preferences, while simultaneously producing hostile images of other circles that are not based on an indepth understanding of what they are about. In general, reviewers take rather favorably to “their own” group, lavishing it with grandiloquent praise. Vilifications and praises alike, however, are only being heard within their micro-communicative space. The micro-communities rarely develop their programs, writers’ roles, and literary success tactics in a network of mutually differential relations; they remain isolated and block the emergence of a large, controversial yet unified national literary “society,” i.e., they don’t take part in an integrated communicative field on a national scale. Having said that, I should note that the degree of disintegration is not as advanced within the “high” literature niche as it is beyond its boundaries. Within it, successful attempts for secondary consolidation and field visibility are being made via various strategies: overviews of the field by critics such as Svetozar Igov, Pancho Anchev, Marie VrinatNikolov, Milena Kirova, Mihail Nedlelchev, Plamen Antov, literary awards, literary cafés, author and title ratings, literary scandals (they become particularly raucous over literary awards), noisy manifests, TV shows with review sections, and others. All of these attempts are tactical, chaotic, and compensatory responses to the new void occupying the place of the past symbolic centre.

Into the World Similar to their popular and commercial literary fellows, a number of serious Bulgarian writers (Georgi Gospodinov, Alek Popov, Elena Aleksieva, and Vladislav Todorov, among others) have espoused global genres. In doing so, however, they have consistently embarked upon ambitious literary games with the former, venturing into collages and bricolages on the models of commercial literary success. They hope thus to entice wider audiences, while probing the opportunities for genre and style innovations. They seem to believe that they are capable of subverting, adapting, and transforming the global popular genres into an artistic and conceptual language that derives meaning from the chaotic contemporary world, Bulgarian or otherwise. In Zift (2006), Vladislav Todorov tries to render noir fiction and film (a typical “capitalist” genre) into a language fit to dissect Bulgaria’s communist past. He does the same in Zincograph (2010), this time working the global conspiracy theories into a spoof-alternative explanation of the whole of modern Bulgarian history. In his latest

The End of Self-Colonization

167

novel, Whipping Top (2017), he resorts to grotesque dystopia while describing the fate of the Balkan Peninsula. Deploying similar pastiche strategies in his novels about the Palaveev Sisters (2013; 2017), Alek Popov tries to combine the comic thriller genre with communist guerrilla stories from the country’s recent past in order to bring them closer to the language of television series. In The Nobel Prize Winner (2012), Elena Alexieva combines a classic criminal plot with meta-reflexivity: the story of a kidnapping becomes a reflection on the fate and the role of literature in Bulgaria and the world. A prominent author with high print runs in Bulgaria, Georgi Gospodinov has already been translated in a number of foreign languages. His experiments are concerned with the genre itself: he does not so much seek ready-made genre forms, but instead creates a genre brand of his own, using fragments and facets, ironically blending pieces of other world novels and all sundry cultural quotes. His dynamic characters, in possession of multiple, wavering identities, traverse global imaginary geographies: this geographically and culturally scattered world must unite around its meaningproduction center of childhood memory, radical sentimentality, and empathy, around which all shards of stories and cultural allusions are bound to gravitate. Gospodinov has stuck to his brand of global novel, based on a multiplicity of heterogeneous local fragments, and it has indeed, so far, been a model for world success, which he deftly reproduces and promotes on various world and Bulgarian scenes. Despite his success, however, his style and facet-like writing strategies remain idiosyncratic and have not become the “nomos” of the Bulgarian literary field. He seems not to be off the radar of local popular and commercial writers, whereas all the ingredients of his style and genre have been subject to vitriolic attacks within the Bulgarian realm of “high” literature. Because of the latter, Gospodinov’s figure can be seen as a peculiar negative consolidator of the local literary scene. The problem with all of these genre experiments (except for Todorov’s deliberately spoofed memory in Zincograph and Whipping Top) is that they usually stand well beyond the traditional intertextual lines of Bulgarian literature that we discussed above: global genres could hardly be concerned with Bulgarian cultural memory. The new novels respond to the global genre field but steer clear of the past Bulgarian narrative tradition: most of them have no truck either with the hoary Ivan Vazov, Anton Strashimirov, and Yordan Yovkov, or with more recent Bulgarian fiction writers such as Dimitar Dimov, Dimitar Talev, Yordan Radichkov, or Emilian Stanev. Yet, it is poetry, not the novel, that displays most clearly the disintegration of the official national cultural memory, understood in the manner suggested above—as a fading away of the traditional intertextual and connotative aura of the Bulgarian language. Since the 1990s, the cultural quotations, allusions, or erudite references (regardless of whether European or Bulgarian), traditionally used in Bulgarian poetry,11 have changed their function. They have transformed from signs of cultural struggle for recognition and inclusion (ambitious Bulgarian interpretations of the “European” cultural heroes) to figures of denial of cultural memory and empty pastiches. The deployed cultural repertoires—e.g., well-known heroes, quotes, allusions, symbols, parodies, etc.—refer

168

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

to some sort of inane, hollow “traditions.” The preferred new references could be to some strange, unknown personae from the European, Bulgarian, or ancient Greek history (as in the poetry of Kiril Merdzansky or Miglena Nikolchina) or to nonexisting kingdoms. Poets such as Manol Glishev or VBV (Vassil Vidinsky) refer to “Polish,” “Burgundian,” “Georgian,” or “Lithuanian” mythological worlds, invented by them. All of these poets manipulate unknown or non-existing cultural repertoires in order to produce new and unexpected poetic meaning. Such an eccentric citation policy no longer implies any kind of shared, overriding European or Bulgarian cultural heritage, a cultural memory of ultimate value. Nor does it appeal to a well-established, hegemonic center of a high cultural tradition. These are poetic contraptions, churning out alternative personal mythologies, pieces of a horizontal, decentralized, and ironic puzzle-pastiche. But this is again a symptom that the space of shared memory is shrinking: the imaginary literary publicity no longer has a shared universe. The most radical attempts in this direction are seen in places where the poetic language deliberately falls into a kind of cultural autism and amnesia. The poet Nadezhda Radoulova, for instance, appears willing to raze all symbolic-ideological levels of the Bulgarian language. She disposes of everything civilized and traditionally national, everything literary, symbolically enshrined in it, everything that smacks of a local or historical connotation. Her path leads self-destructively back through the layers of the linguistic civilized matter, through deliberately subversive imitations of English and an anagrammatic decomposition of famous works, through nonsense and limericks, through the breakage of sentences into fragments scattered across the page—to reach the zero-point where the Bulgarian language looks transformed into an alien, unknown, neutral medium, a poetic tabula rasa. With a similar gesture, Boyko Lambovski, extracting his messages from the linguistic materiel of neighborhood, macho and anglers’ jargon, titled his poetry collection Autiso (2016). This signaled the isolation of his style from the widely circulated traditional literary languages as well as from all the inherited cultural associations, be they Bulgarian or European, biblical, erudite, popular, or associated with tourism advertising. This attempt to empty the poetic language of any traditional meaning could be observed in various forms in the works of other poets, too: Krassimira Zafirova, Maria Virkhov, Kamelia Spassova, and the Bulgarian emigrant in Germany, Tzveta Sofronieva, among others. This “craving for cultural amnesia” on the journey to ground-zero language, however, met certain resistance. The poets resisting amnesia built a poetic Bulgarian language hyper-charged with “Bulgarian” memory. Their experiments started in the 1990s with Ani Ilkov, Zlatomir Zlatanov, Georgi Gospodinov, Plamen Doinov, Boyko Penchev, Plamen Antov, etc. The most typical example is Ani Ilkov’s verse, which sends the Bulgarian tongue back to imagined immemorial depths of meaning through the poet’s idiosyncratic archaeology and etymology. And his return to the intertextual memory of literary tradition has not gone through canonical intertext, crafted by canonical poets such as Botev, Karavelov, and Vazov, but rather through another, alternative tradition of secondary poets like Bozveli, Beron, and Rakovski, who were neither a part of the official canon nor of the intertextual memory, for that matter. From this alternative, self-made tradition, Ilkov has wrought his own, off-center poetic vocabulary, and through this new/old

The End of Self-Colonization

169

Bulgarian language he has cobbled together an extraordinary—and nearly impossible to translate—poetry. In his hyper-mnemonic poetic world, Bulgarian emerges as the cosmic language of ecstasy and the universe, a vehicle of a mystical cultural tradition, the language of which can describe the joyous merging of people and animals, of lions and Slavic maidens. This language of hyper-mnemonic resistance has spilled over even into the national prose, imprinting its most serious achievement of the past thirty years— Milen Rouskov’s novel, Summit (2011). It transfigured a failed version of Bulgarian, i.e., Rakovski’s ridiculed poetic language from the mid-nineteenth century, into a powerfully expressive, psychological, and discursive tool. Rouskov built a narrative capable of upturning and “exalting” the myths of Bulgarian history, demonstrating remarkable potential for an “elevated” and sublime cultural expression. But this entire line that we called resistance to literary globalization through poetic hyper-memory has a problem: whatever its authors might claim, they share a radical waiver of translation, which entails a radical isolation within some mysterious “Bulgarianness.” The depths of cultural memory, ensconced in the lyrical or prosaic language, are fashioned in a way that would be unattainable to a foreign reader. These depths should be vague even for those who have some command of the Bulgarian language and poetic tradition, but not of its complex, dramatic, sometimes idiosyncratic, intertexts—the uppermost and most complicated layer of Bulgarian linguistic memory.12 Before I close, I will go back to my initial assumption. The slow loss of authority by the symbolic bipolar center of the literary and cultural field (the deflating value of the Bulgaria-catching-up-with-the-ideal-Europe) has led to social, socio-communicative, genre, and style repercussions. The literary field has been fragmenting into isolated niches, even into insular writers’ success strategies, which has been accompanied by the disintegration of the cultural repertoires and shared historical as well as intertextual connotation of the Bulgarian language. It is impossible to impose a literary “nomos” on this kind of field, an autonomous norm and a law of the kind that Baudelaire and his fellow travelers, according to Bourdieu, established in the field of French literature in the mid-nineteenth century, which, in fact, unified it. Writers no longer exist as an imaginary national society, supported by national literary institutions. Instead, their roles are pulverized into a conglomerate of personalities, acting on individual intent. If we think this situation through to its possible limit, we could expect complete atomization, where each writer will realize his/her talent through different channels, for different audiences, with different genre and style experiments, maybe even in different languages. All of them play on isolated imaginary scenes that are neither the nation nor Europe or the West, but they will duplicate the structure of global book markets and their own marketing strategies. If the perfect storm does take place, this will naturally lead to the inability of local fields to produce their own literary law, to an omnivorous commercial “democratization” and globalization of literary production, as well as to a cultural memory loss of the Bulgarian language—as it would for any small language that has similarly been left out of the global race. Is this good or bad? I will not risk an easy judgement here, my preference being to observe the symptoms, to describe the processes, and to analyze them carefully in an effort to track possible scenarios and consequences.

170

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Notes   1 Pierre Bourdieu, Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).   2 Александър Теодоров-Балан, Българска литература. Кратко ръководство за средни и специални училища (Пловдив: Издателство на Христо Г. Данов, 1896).   3 Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalt (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1948).   4 See the work of Maria Todorova (Мария Тодорова, България, Балканите, светът: идеи, процеси, събития (София: Просвета, 2010).   5 Saint Paisius of Hilendar Slavonic-Bulgarian History, first print publication in Иванов, Йордан et al., Исторїя славѣноболгарская, собрана и нареждена Паисїемъ Iеромонахомъ въ лѣто 1762 (София: Българска академия на науките, 1914).   6 Ivan Vazov, “Paisii,” in Epic of the Forgotten, trans. Mark J Ripkowsky (Bletchly: JiaHu Books, 2017); the work was originally published in 1884.   7 Alexander Kiossev, “Notes on the Self-Colonizing Cultures,” in Cultural Aspects of the Modernization Process, eds. Dimitri Ginev, Francis Sejersted, and Kostadinka Simeonova (Oslo: TMV-senteret, 1995). Alexander Kiossev, “The Self-Colonization Metaphor,” Atlas of Transformation (2008), http://monumenttotransformation.org/ atlas-of-transformation/html/s/self-colonization/the-self-colonizing-metaphoralexander-kiossev.html   8 See Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992).   9 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). 10 See Alexander Kiossev, ed., “Reading Practices in Bulgaria 2009, 2014, 2018,” collective research projects (results published in 2019). 11 In the period between 1880 and the First World War, Bulgarian poetry developed a European symbolic repertoire by itself: the canonical Bulgarian poets created their own interpretations of pan-European mythological characters, cultural heroes, and symbolic figures such as Adam, Eve, Satan, Moses, Jesus, Prometheus, Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, Beethoven, Shelley, Nietzsche, divine or demonic women including Frina, Messalina, Cleopatra, etc. 12 See Alexander Kiossev (Александър Кьосев), “Прeводимост и непреводимост в съвременната българска литература,” in Надмощие и приспособяване, eds. Надежда Александрова, Диана Атанасова, Мария Калинова, and Румяна Станчева (София: Софийския университет “Св. Климент Охридски,” 2017), 21–35.

14

Bulgarians Writing Abroad: Import and (Re)export of the Outsourced Production Dimitar Kambourov

Bulgarian literature is famous for being unknown. Yet even this is an exaggeration. Bulgarian literature is neither exotically unique, nor even that esoterically clandestine. One might perhaps dare to say that it is famous for how unnoticed the fact that it is so unknown remains.1

The Import of “Bulgarian” Books into Bulgaria A phenomenon in Bulgaria of the last decade or so is the influx of works by Bulgarian immigrants writing in the languages of the countries they (or their parents) moved to. These books, promptly translated into Bulgarian (usually not by the authors themselves), used to be welcomed as a homecoming, particularly when their narratives are staged in Bulgaria and/or deal with its communist past.2 The sense of invisibility of Bulgarian literature abroad inspired a compensatory local initiative to recognize these books as some sort of alternative contemporary Bulgarian canon, arguably better equipped for export, or rather, for re-export.3 The publication of these works, written originally in German, English, or French, appeared to be intended as an initial step on the path of further translations and subsequent international circulation. The initiative also had to do with the accolades earned abroad. While the 1997 translation of Ilija Trojanow’s debut novel, The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner,4 remained practically unnoticed, its reprint in 2007 was a success, boosted by the orchestrated popularity of the eponymous film. Also in 2007, the jury of the Bulgarian theater awards ASKEER opted to tweak its own regulations, making Dimitré Dinev’s play Skin and Sky eligible to compete.5 Between the 2006 translation of Dinev’s novel Angel Tongues6 and 2017, when Kapka Kassabova’s Border7 was simultaneously published in Great Britain, Australia, and Bulgaria, a number of translations into Bulgarian appeared almost immediately after their original publications: Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name,8 Rouja Lazarova’s Mausoleum,9 Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West,10 Nikolai Grozni’s Wunderkind,11 Lazarova’s The  Organ of Silence,12 Trojanow’s Power and Resistance,13 and Penkov’s

172

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Stork Mountain.14 The list is hardly complete, but these titles arguably form the core: a Bulgarian canon in Bulgarian translation. The simultaneous publications, Bulgaria as the focus, and the revisiting of its communist past prompted some to interpret this alternative canon’s appearance as revelation. Mariana Melnishka exclaimed: “Why is it that it takes a whole lost generation … twenty years and a foreign language to begin to tell the Bulgarian experience?”15 The rhetorical question posits that Bulgarian writers abroad broke the silence about communism, opened its Pandora’s box, pulled the skeletons out of its closet, and exposed its lies and the ubiquitous hypocrisy. They uttered the truth on a grand scale: these panoramic frescos with epic élan and crass audacity allegedly both ravished and dumbfounded the Bulgarian readership, Melnishka implied. The stupefaction seemed justified: elite domestic writers appeared unfit to write such books. Bulgarian fictional idiom adheres to a different sense of measure, taste, tact, and decorum, to a démodé modesty. Writers who shy away from popular literature do this by securing genre, stylistic, and narrative complexity, based on ambiguous characters torn by internal conflicts and made to fit an evasive social reality. The immigrant writers, instead, eloquently engaged the communist past through demonizing selfvictimization (Kassabova 2008, Lazarova 2009), panoramic epics (Dinev 2003), indictments (Trojanov 2015), and bold metaphors upgraded to all-encompassing symbols. While Kassabova and Lazarova offer strikingly corresponding depictions, Dinev’s and Trojanov’s first novels share with Penkov’s short stories a children’s stream of consciousness and a fairy tale stylization. Horrific descriptions of the military service appear in Trojanov (1995), Dinev, Kassabova (2008), and Lazarova (2009); the school of hypocrisy and repression is Grozni’s trademark, but it is also disparaged in Dinev, Kassabova (2008), and Lazarova (2009); immune and food disorders are shared by Kassabova (2008) and Lazarova (2012). Frequent thematic correspondences, doubled by omnipresent autobiographical first-person narration, provoke the sense of a phenomenon. Milena Kirova calls it “communism for sale”16 and identifies its target groups as effectively non-Bulgarian. But why would the books be translated so promptly into Bulgarian? The act was hardly decisive for their international future. The originals were translated on their own individual merits.17 In effect, the “phenomenon” of Bulgarians writing abroad so far is exclusively a corollary of their being rendered in their authors’ native tongue.

The Bulgarian Response A book (Boycheva18) and a number of articles (Kirova,19 Lubka Lipcheva,20 Nikolay Aretov,21 Penka Angelova,22 Marie Vrinat-Nikolov23) focus on aspects of the Bulgarian presence of the “Bulgarian” books by authors of Bulgarian descent. Boycheva treats the novels as trustworthy accusatory documents capable of unveiling the truth of the communist period. Lipcheva compares Dinev’s and Trojanov’s representations of Bulgaria as well as the contrasting implications of their German linguistic choice. Aretov’s investigation situates the phenomenon within the long-standing Bulgarian

Bulgarians Writing Abroad

173

tradition of migrant writing. Vrinat-Nikolov protests against Bulgaria’s literary anonymity in France, while Kirova’s approach is of outright demystification. She outlines the phenomenon and explains why Bulgarian readers are immune to its persuasive power.24

Street Without a Name and Mausoleum: The Retribution of Two Female Exiles on the Communist Past A Bulgarian who “lived socialism,” to borrow Georgi Gospodinov’s apt expression,25 would easily realize that Kassabova and Lazarova addressed their Bulgarian readership by clearly suggesting that their books were not designed for it as a nationally self-defined entity. By abstaining from translating them themselves, the authors implied that their works should be perceived as not originally Bulgarian. Kassabova justifies the critical stance of her book thus: “Righteousness might be temporarily more important to the national ego, but truth is more important to a nation’s spirit which is eternal.”26 The key question that the book poses is about the character of truth it aims at. The first person narration about Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria, as the subtitle goes, is a frivolously witty lamentation that never shies away from all sorts of exaggerations or fabrications. “There was a strict State quota on everything, from apartments and cars, to female sanitary pads and sunflower margarine,”27 she writes, though sanitary pads and margarine were considered “luxurious deficit commodities” and socialism failed to bother about proportionate distribution of “bourgeois goods.” A whim of memory makes the author believe that her “family shared a bathroom and a kitchen with a whole floor of young student families,”28 whereas the bathroom within the one-room student apartments was then an absolute sanitary requirement. She writes: “Abortions were illegal, and those resorting to hurried back-street jobs were often unintentionally sterilized”;29 yet, abortions in Bulgaria have been legal since 1956; and on.30 Street without a Name begins as a non-fictional memoir. Perhaps traumatic experience and emotional memory should be absolved of inaccuracies. The book’s first half amounts to lengthy grievances, ascribed to permanently ashamed parents: “They knew the foreign guests saw the ugly panels, the cramped apartments, the mud, the overflowing rubbish bins, the stray dogs, the empty shops, the crappy cars, the idiots in the brown suits, and they were ashamed.”31 Shame, fear, passive resentment, overall disgust, and no one to be blamed but the system. Such a universal explanatory mechanism, to be sure, is a luxury. The second half of the book, a travelogue through the Bulgarian Transition, shares the same sense of shame, the same passive resentment; only the universal explanatory mechanism has been lost along the way. In Lazarova’s Mausoleum, the paint is even thicker, the factual inconsistencies— bolder, and the shame of and disgust with communism—deeper. Starting as a novel, the book takes off the literary disguise and turns into a memoir. Bulgarian readers once again should blunt the reflex for recognition, and turn a blind eye to the inconsistencies while upgrading exaggerations to hyperboles and fabrications to allegories.32 Kassabova’s irony is eloquent, defamiliarizing, and witty; Lazarova relies

174

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

instead on indignant, sensational grotesque. If Kassabova’s characters are cowering victims, Lazarova’s three generations of women’s resistance, non-compliance, and parrhesia33 remain rudimental, not least because of their stolen dignity.34 Despite the differences in genre, style, tone, and temporal scope, Street Without a Name and Mausoleum are pronounced acts of self-exorcism, of identical retribution on the communist past. Deplored as victims, characters perceive themselves as deformed by the sense of shame, self-loathing, and inconsequentiality, while the narrators indulge their materialistic obsessions with goods and possessions. Life during socialism, it turns out, was so unbearable because of its overwhelming inconsistency with Marxism. For Bulgarian readers, such an exposure provokes the uncanny effect of being voyeurs of their own global exhibiting under an ugly light. They also need to cope with a paradox: both authors declare a commitment to truth while relying on inaccuracies. It appears both books urged for an alienated response beyond primitive identification. The translations without adjustments are presumably meant to provoke such a figural, unburdened reading. The originals also reveal their translational status: they translate an alien Bulgarian experience. Still, the Bulgarian translation is not to be mistaken for a homecoming, for a restored unity between signifier and signified. The translational immanence is to account for procedures like simplification and removal of ambiguity, presumably unifying the audiences by turning them into witnesses of a higher truth. Such an ethical-aesthetic regime is justified by the standpoint of exile.35 Exile’s spaceand-time distance allegedly accounts for the monochrome generalization in the spectrum of black: one is incapable of separating from the past without departing from the place associated with it, the latter being doomed to remain forever haunted by it (which is, to be sure, a genre convention of horror). It takes an exile (literal or figurative) to deprive particular forms of life of complexity and ambiguity, of value and meaning. The exile’s standpoint augments the forms, simplifies the colors, totalizes people’s lives under the totalitarian regime. Exile ends up serving as an exorcistic literary exercise, severing them from the Bulgarian writers’ collaborationism of complexity, from their amnesia and amnesty of ambiguity, from their moral relativism of contradictoriness. Exile appears as both an ethical and an aesthetic stance. Such an approach also betrays a more intimate overtone: communism justifies and makes every exile meaningful. Therapy comes from the reconfirmed just choice of leaving for good: it helps not only with the traumas of the past, but with the present status quo, too. The unbearable lightness of being an exile accounts for these books’ poverty porn: exilic experience would hardly earn them the same measure of sympathy. Local communism revisited from the augmenting monochrome distance of exile is the formula for works designed to cross borders and unify audiences. Reciprocity and reversibility between ethics and aesthetics, simple definiteness, ascetic abstinence from any moral relativism and artistic vanity: such a stance is equipped for trespassing national borders and embracing exile as a credo. The prompt translations imply that both authors and their Bulgarian publishers calculated that Bulgarians would join the readers all over the world in enjoying these page-turners that dare to turn the historical page. The distant reading of Bulgarian communism has been a response not only to the Bulgarian authors, but also a retort to two novels written in German.

Bulgarians Writing Abroad

175

The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner and Angel Tongues: Two Male Immigrants’ Disregard for the Communist Past Ilija Trojanow’s and Dimitré Dinev’s first novels offer quite different representations of the Bulgarian communist past: they defy fear, deny poverty, and underrate communism’s capacity to affect reality and human nature. Patriarchal values as well as human passions, desires, and fears are left intact by the power relations and the ideological façade. Male writers deprecate communism, yet they belittle it as a Frankenstein-like social experiment with a negligible impact. Trojanow’s novel undertakes a family retrospection several generations back before focusing on a couple resolute to defect. Issues of poverty and dignity are eclipsed by more abstract motives: insufficient freedom at home, a better life abroad. The communist system is but another religion to be replaced in its turn. The narration is indebted to myth, legend, and fairy tale—a poetics corresponding to the protagonist’s young age as well as to the patriarchal values promoted. A similar mix of fairy tale mode of narration and stylized children’s oral diction is at work in Dinev’s novel. The characters—wives, children, parents—entangled in family relations with men in power positions find ways to emancipate themselves. Omniscient narration shifts between two young protagonists’ streams of consciousness. Their life trajectories remain parallel until the very end, despite “the family curse.” Their fathers’ egos, boosted by their respective ranks, clash with lasting consequences: an ouroboros symbol of self-devouring communism. After exposing their communist fathers as sinister imposters, the protagonists’ self-individuation is fulfilled through immigration to the West (the autobiographical Vienna). Their paths, would-be determined by their psycho-intellectual and social differences, ironically bring them face to face at the cemetery, where they beg the monument of an assassinated criminal for help. Their parallel itineraries bring them to the same verge of imminent defeat. In both Dinev’s and Trojanow’s worlds, communism and capitalism are equally problematic historical formations in which human desires thrive exuberantly. The genuine tension that drives the narration comes from the characters’ will to power and desire for love, sex, self-fulfillment, recognition, and acceptance. Each system alternatively undoes the patriarchal checks and controls. Still, communism’s hierarchies, ranks, and uniforms and capitalism’s ambition, greed, and vanity disguise the same human frailties, flaws, and folly: all humans appear equally doomed. Against any logic and plausibility, however, the imminent defeats are cancelled out by happy endings, evoking simultaneously a fairy tale and/or deus ex machina solutions, driven by wishful thinking. In Trojanow’s novel, the turn encompasses the entire second half, which makes it just a bit more palatable. In Dinev’s novel, however, the turn is abrupt and the trick—bared. The families, dismantled by communism, turn out to be miraculously fixed in the end because, as it is implied, authentic human desires represent the most resilient patriarchal values. In the end, both communism and capitalism prove equally powerless against human dignity, a spirit of defiance, and a

176

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

will to play the game of life (Trojanow) or to pursue one’s own happiness (Dinev). Each historical stage remains an epiphenomenal counterpart to human essence, revealed through resilient traditional values. Equally disillusioned ideologically, both books look to a would-be essential human goodwill for salvation. They try to reconcile an a-historic existential absurdism with a regressive utopianism idealizing the patriarchal family. Whereas the female authors depict their mainly feminine victims of the system, the predominantly masculine figures of the male authors are presented as victims exclusively of their human nature. Human beings are free to fail (Beckett’s to fail better) without becoming anybody else’s victims. While the female writers exaggerate sociopolitical dependence, the male authors inflate human freedom. The former adopt an overall Marxist monsterizing of communism, whereas the latter embrace an equally dated existentialist/absurdist fatalism, miraculously metamorphosed into an even more dated regressive patriarchal utopianism. When realistic novels, constantly citing and emulating the genre of fairy tale, opt for deus ex machina solutions, an alternative emerges: either to take this ending as an ironic demystification of the fairy tale surface, or to take it at face value. Had these books been taken as belonging to the German contemporary literary tradition, the demystifying reading would have prevailed. The critical responses there, however, lean toward the second, world reading.36 The happy ending is promoted as a genuine message, ultimately motivating the fairy tale genre choice of the novels. The tongue-incheek style is neglected in favor of the all-encompassing embrace that takes place at the end of the novels. Pessimism concedes to miracles. Salvation debunks demystification. Such a mode of reading is operational because of the implied reader of these texts. The inaccuracies, exaggerations, and fabrications in the books of the female writers provoke a mode of reading reevaluating them as devices harnessed in the bordercrossing ambitions of the books. An analogical implied reader undoes the deus ex machina happy ending as a baring device and foists it as a genuine message with a world literary horizon.

The Phenomenon of Bulgarian Writing Abroad: An Intertextual Reading of the Myth Such a horizon of reading provokes an imaginary plot, staging and enacting the Bulgarian writings abroad. The male tandem’s novels with fictionally developed narratives meet also on the level of messaging. The female duo’s response implies criticism: the male approach toward communism appears to be too lenient and the stake on the family and patriarchy somewhat naive and predictable gender-wise. Literariness, they suggest, should be sacrificed in favor of a regime of truth beyond both facticity and fictionality. What comes next deepens the intertextual dialogue. In Penkov’s East of the West, only three of the eight stories are set in the communist period. For him, communism and Bulgaria represent literary interest from the perspective of the articulated move to the West. Antithetical to Penkov’s book, Sibylle Lewitscharoff ’s novel Apostoloff 37 is a first person quasi-autobiographical narration under the auspices

Bulgarians Writing Abroad

177

of hatred. Where Lewitscharoff ’s (but also Kassabova’s and Lazarova’s) narrator opts for rejection and dissociation from Bulgaria and its all too inherent communism, Penkov responds with a painstaking strive for empathy and understanding, leaning further toward a ready-made patriarchal schmaltz. Grozni’s autobiographical novel, Wunderkind (2011), about a communist musical high school, is largely in Kassabova/ Lazarova’s vein: rebellious gifted teenagers fall easy prey to the system. Lazarova’s The Organ of Silence (2016) starts as a polished repetition of Mausoleum: it substantiates the anti-communist rage, not least because the exilic experience is already articulated. Trojanow’s novel with the non-literary title Power and Resistance (2015) indeed feels uncomfortable in its literary form. Based on actual dossiers, the book “proves” that the only free non-victims of the communist system were communist political prisoners. Hence, the author remains indifferent to the “human material” with authentic literary potential—the people in-between power and resistance. Trojanow thus joins Grozni and the female tandem. Penkov’s novel Stork Mountain (2016), staged in Strandzha, like the better part of Kassabova’s successful travelogue of 2017, Border, develops the line of mawkish folkloristic exoticizing. Kassabova’s book also fixes the holes of her earlier work and crosses the national borders as well as the communist time span. A border is a limit and a liminal area, but also an instrument to force people to cross it as well as to prevent them from doing so. Communism, very much like in Trojanow’s and Dinev’s early novels, is positioned on a par with the alternative socio-political systems, and all of them are unveiled as structurally inhumane. Bulgarian writing abroad then appears to be a more encompassing phenomenon. Lewitscharoff ’s negativity does not harm her Bulgarian affiliation. Victor Paskov writes in Bulgarian about his experience of East Germany’s peculiar communism.38 Vladislav Todorov writes in the United States in Bulgarian, yet his depiction of communist Bulgaria in Zift39 is so impregnated by popular Western genre conventions and theoretical idioms that the novel’s belonging turns out to be a tricky issue. Elizabeth Kostova’s The Shadow Land40 is an overt, possibly intentional response to Lewitscharoff ’s Apostoloff, but the novel’s gentle and generous endeavor to embellish Bulgaria’s world image proves counterproductive: one might prefer a skillfully smeared rather than sickeningly smartened national image.41 The most successful Bulgarian writing abroad is by far Georgi Gospodinov’s. A living classic, he writes in Bulgarian in a manner epitomizing Kundera’s dictum of “writing for translators,” and his capacity to connect with multiple audiences of all walks of life is unprecedented. His subtle approach toward Bulgaria’s communist past found its voice as early as Natural Novel42 and has been substantiated in The Physics of Sorrow.43 Bulgarians writing abroad share with Gospodinov an autobiographical mode of narration. But in contrast with him, Bulgarians abroad rely on a simpler and safer literary solution. Their monsterization of Bulgarian communism is opposed to their focus on patriarchal values and the family, as well as on various forms of border-crossing and world-straddling. The formula involves a totalized communism in counterpoint with patriarchal family values from the standpoint of a gaze from without (and somewhat from above). Border-crossing allegorizes these books’ innate translational essence: each of these books navigates its readers throughout its world-straddling. If

178

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

world literature is a mode of reading,44 Bulgarian writing abroad operates with such a mode through an implied reader smuggling alien yet universalized experiences. The originally translational modus vivendi of Bulgarian writing abroad positions the readerships everywhere in a paradigmatically identical perspective. Therefore, the dialogues and disputes among the books in focus are incapable of blurring the striking similarities of their writerly model.

The Phenomenon of Bulgarian Writing Abroad: A Structural Reading of the Myth The similarities crystalize on an alternative operational level: a structural one, after Levi-Strauss’s study of myth. Insufficiency of space will not permit more than a very concise description of the application of the Oedipus myth, but the key inspiration comes from the anthropologist’s claim that myth is translatable without losses. What should remain intact in any literary translation then would be the mythological aspect of the literary narrative. The average reader of translated books does not need to be a connoisseur of structural narratology to orient his/her reading toward those narrative aspects that are least affected by the translation. Therefore, s/he unintentionally tends to elicit and grasp the mythological dimension of narration. Levi-Strauss distributes a selected number of mythemes from the Theban cycle over four columns. The first column is filled with overrated blood relations, the second, with underrated blood relations; in the third column the autochthonous human origin is overthrown (heroes killing monsters), and the fourth is about the difficulty of doing so (a heroes’ crippledness indicates autochthonous origin), to conclude: “By a correlation, the overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it.” There are contradictions in Levi-Strauss’s famous readings of a number of mythemes,45 and these invite further freedom. The openness of myth has been exploited long before LeviStrauss’s reading. Autochthony was modernized in the classical period of Athens by not being opposed to blood relationship. The etymological and mythological meaning of coming from soil has been ideologically politicized, thus providing a rationale for patriotism/nationalism. In myth, the question of origin addresses the identity problem. The books of Bulgarians abroad tackle the issue whether they come from past or present experience or belonging, from the mother tongue or from the trans-languages. A constitutive game of world literature might turn out to be the Game of Homes. In the initially discussed four novels, a reciprocity is evident between family relations and communism. The female books overrate communist power; the male books underrate it. Kassabova and Lazarova’s early works underrate family authority, and the opposite is valid for Trojanow’s and Dinev’s debut novels. We might check the rest of the enlisted ten books on the basis of their identity/origin/belonging problem. Grozni’s Wunderkind, Trojanow’s Power and Resistance, and Lazarova’s The Organ of Silence belong to the first group, whereas both books by Penkov and Kassabova’s

Bulgarians Writing Abroad

179

Border join the second group. Dinev, Grozni, Trojanow, Penkov (2011), and Lazarova (2012) reveal not only the traumas inflicted by communism, but also the resilience and resistance against it (as well as against any socioeconomic system, for that matter). The correlation between communism and the family is presented as exemplary for the more general opposition between patriarchy and modern ideologies/systems: the more powerful communism (and capitalism) is, the more unequivocally evil it turns out to be; the more powerful the family is, the more capable of protecting the individual it proves to be. The socioeconomic system is capable of only temporarily dismantling the family. In the end, either the family restores its power and summons the individuals back, or the individuals (re)discover the family in its broader versions of friendship, love, solidarity, empathy, compassion, mercy, etc. Initially confined to blood relationships— parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren (Penkov’s “Buying Lenin” and “The Letter”), granduncle and grandnephew (Trojanow 1996), father and illegitimate daughter conceived during rape (Trojanow 2015)—the patriarchal values go beyond blood. Patriarchy thus always takes an upper hand. Communism is monsterized in order to be duly undone. Emancipation includes exposure of the fake claim that the communist nation extends the family. The monstrous self-emerging of an atomic individual through autogenesis or selforigination carries traumas inherited from the monstrous communist origin: anorexia (Lazarova 2012), food and immune disorder (Kassabova 2008), unidentified sickness, depressive indifference, lost Lebenstrieb (Trojanow 1995), promiscuity (Lazarova 2012, Grozni, Dinev), impotence (Trojanow 2015), asexuality (Kassabova 2017, Dinev). Every short story of Penkov’s exemplifies an inherited trauma/disorder. The most intimate form of crippledness as a corollary of monstrous individuation is exile. The books are themselves extended acts of managing exile: Kassabova’s border equally prevents and forces people to cross, to abandon, to undertake exiles; the author of The Collector of Worlds addresses nomadic experience in every single book of his. Defeating communism and enduring the traumas of self-birth therefore make a direct depiction of exile redundant. The differences between the two groups, therefore, turn out to be quantitative and spurious, since all the novels inevitably look for healing solutions through communal dedication. A common structure emerges. All the authors overrate a family ideal and underrate its actuality. Overrating family always corresponds to overthrowing communism through underrating (monsterizing and destroying) its agencies. The family here is a safe bay from which communism is banned, a last resort of parrhesia, non-compliance, resistance, and preserving some dignity and values. Families happen to go abroad (Kassabova 2007) and defect (Trojanow 1996). Underrating family always brings individual losses and traumas inflicted by the characters’ communist (monstrous) origin rather than by communism’s evil acts. The defunct family ushers compromises, fear, shame, humility, silence, betrayals, alcoholism, and violence due to the lack of goods, services, freedom, or simple decency. The problematic relations with regard to the family’s ambiguous origin are correlated with the individuals’ selffulfillment. Communism is monsterized in order to make its destruction legitimate, indispensable, and somewhat heroic. Communism, however, always reveals the

180

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

monstrous (self-)origin of the individuals. The books are as much about fighting and defeating communism as they are about individuals’ deformity and crippledness, conceptualized as a communist inheritance rather than as inflicted wounds. Therefore, the ambiguous attitude toward family, as well as the split between myth and history, translates on a personal level as fighting history’s agents—communism, capitalism. The books overthrow communism (as history) only to (re-)discover it as an autochthonous origin. This conflict, expressed through overthrowing one’s own origin, finds an alternative solution through the opposition between the self-birth of the reborn exile and the deus ex machina family resurrection meant to secure personal salvation. In effect, exile grasped as self-exile rediscovers patriarchal solutions and/or solaces. Patriarchy is promoted as an alternative to former Eastern and actual Western modernities. The structural formula of Bulgarians writing abroad is, then: an overrated a-historic family myth relates to its underrated historic status as the individual heroism of overthrowing communist autochthony relates to the inherited personal crippledness due to the communist origin as the monstrous self-birth of the reborn exile relates to re-installed and rediscovered patriarchy.

Bulgarian Writing Abroad as a Potentiality for a World Literature Eventfulness The works discussed so far possess world literature potentiality through the shared myth. Bulgarian experience is translated into this myth. The immediate translations or rewriting of the originals into Bulgarian reveal the initial self-perception and selfprojection of the books as world literature, certified by their translations into other languages. The originals refrain from hiding their trans-language, their ultimate non-nativeness, by exposing their inherent translational character. Their simplified and totalized depictions of life under communism in Bulgaria achieve a common monochromatic unequivocal unambiguity. The books reenact an origin myth by turning into players the family, autochthony, historic monsters, and heroes, who suffer and pass through self-originating and self-making. In the end, the books reconcile all forces and players at work. The implementation of Levi-Strauss’s reading of the Oedipus myth is exemplary and heuristic. Our suggestion is that books would require a world literature mode of reading by telling a universally translatable myth. The origin-oriented mythic aspect of a contemporary literary work is the positive, universally translatable part of world literature. The other aspect—that of its cultural, historical, linguistic, and literary untranslatability—is the negative guarantor of a world literature potentiality. A work of world literature is made out of a mythical component, inviting planetary understanding (or the sense of intelligibility), and a literary component that will guarantee a healthy level of untranslatability, of unfathomable mystery—the work’s otherness that will stand for the unknowability of any culture, history, and language of origin. Our works approach world literature by inviting a distant reading that inevitably includes the identification of mythic structures guaranteeing universal translatability.

Bulgarians Writing Abroad

181

However, they fail to provide world literature’s principal untranslatable otherness. The working balance between the mythic aspect of literature and its literary otherness is what provides a literary work with world literature potentiality. The “outsourced production” has so far failed to achieve such a balance: its mythic universal translatability eclipses its untranslatable literariness. World literature potentiality thus fails to turn into eventfulness, not least because the books fulfill their world literature formula through ready-made clichés of Balkanism; they all look like a timid Kustrurica’s Underground in action: narrative works addressing the Balkan past by reenacting the conflict between myth and history as a clash between patriarchal family and imposed individualism, reconciled in the healing utopia of modernized patriarchal values. Yet there is a single interpretation of the origin myth that proves exceptionally vital precisely because it manages to preserve, secure, install, and activate a vital level of ultimately untranslatable cultural, historical, linguistic, and literary otherness. Perceived as a dynamic corpus entangled in dialogue, Bulgarian writing abroad in fact provides the missing context for the actual fulfillment of Gospodionov’s The Physics of Sorrow as world literature. It starts as a postmodern family saga in which the narrator identifies with his predecessors through the literary gift of pathological empathy. The identification with the ancient Minotaur, imprisoned in his maze (мазе [maze] in Bulgarian means cellar, basement, underground), is reinforced by a series of empathic embodiments into a fly, a snail, a bull, a pile of bullshit … Such antiKafkaesque metamorphoses open up the concept of blood relations to the utmost by extending the family to the entire universe. The patho-empathic metaphor is developed by the metonymy of collecting stories and assembling lists, museums, and “time-bombs” of the ephemeral. Gospodinov’s immense literary project to “restore” the primordial “blood relations” with all the entities in the world is in a stunning reconciliation with the narrator’s overwhelming monolog. Gospodinov’s monstrously monomaniacal individualism of ultimate self-originating, whose model is the enormous solitude of the Minotaur—a little boy imprisoned in a maze—gives birth to the utmost extended family—that of the world. Very much like Dubravka Ugrešić’s, Gospodinov’s narrator is a philosophical exile, consumed by ελεούσα,46 the indifferent love of умиление (endearment) toward the world as a homeless womb, a world where the traditional concepts of family, crippledness (as a sign of self-made artistic monstrosity and autochthonous self-originating), individualism, and origin are thoroughly reconsidered and reconstituted, yet the model remains perfectly at work. The basic myth here is a synthesis of the Oedipus myth, exploding because of its critical hyper-mass. The Minotaur is an emanation of blood relations at once overrated and underrated, a monstrosity punished because of its indivisible divine/animal/human origin. The unfaithful Pasiphae is ultimately obedient to the family myth by emulating her mother-in-law Europa all too literally: the metamorphosed Zeus is reenacted by an actual bull, whereas she takes the role of a cow impostor; the killing of her monster child by a hero (Theseus) would never conceal the suicidal choice made by the Minotaur, supplementing human, animal, and divine origins. His mother’s human drive to mingle with gods has been expressed through an insight about the human original lineage with the animal world. The monstrosity of our blood relations with

182

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

gods and animals is thus revealed as crippledness. In fact, in the novel, the narrator’s masculine predecessors and the narrator himself are persistently crippled (blinded, deafened, their bones systematically broken); after all, the novel itself was defined as a labor of love between the author and his broken limbs due to a serious street accident abroad. Gospodinov’s novel is an exemplary realization of the model at work in the oeuvres of Bulgarians abroad, an exhausting epitome of both the phenomenon and the model discussed here. Yet his Bulgaria retains its mysterious opaqueness: it is a concrete geographic and cultural entity ravishingly (un)translatable as a readerly experience of a universal nostalgia for all sorts of real or imaginary origins—family, mythological and ideological monsters, self-birth, going out into the world, the ultimate sparagmos of self-scattering worldwide; a homesickness for a past and biography that never really were. Gospodinov’s communism is itself a crippled provincial monster, incarcerated in the maze of an all too patriarchal country in which the silent resistance was coming exactly from the family and its resilience, capable of preserving the dignity of the people despite the oppressions. Gospodinov thus distilled and refined the ultimate formula for Bulgarian literature as world literature while simultaneously defying and subverting it from within. Finally, we are entitled to draw our conclusions. Bulgarians writing abroad about Bulgaria elaborated a mode of reading that turned out to be productive with regard to a wider corpus of works, written abroad or in Bulgaria, in Bulgarian or in languages other than Bulgarian, by Bulgarians or non-Bulgarians. Our heuristic suggestion in this text is that a contemporary literary work addressing the issues of identity/origin/belonging would demonstrate a world literature potentiality if its story, history, culture, and language are partly translatable into a version of a universal myth and partly preserve their mysteriously—exotically—untranslatable otherness. The alternative between kinship and history is sublated in the double monstrosity of historical crippledness and self-originating. World literature translates local historical experiences into mythically universal origin quests, which succeed by failing to achieve such universality by opening a gap—a black hole—of insusceptible otherness. World literature is a home for such literature of non-belonging, a port for prodigal Crusoes telling fables about their strayed islands.47

Notes 1 2

3

Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, “Quelle place pour la littérature bulgare dans ‘La République mondiale des Lettres’?” (Florence: Studi Slavistici Vol. 11, 2014) 247–56. A note on the book cover of the first Bulgarian edition of Trojanov’s Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall (Münhen: Carl Hanser Werlag, 1996), trans. Gergana Farkova 1997, reads: “With this book the publishing house would like to address the author: Welcome to Bulgaria, which is a part of the united world.” Dimitar Kambourov, “Exile or Exodus, Post-modern or Past-mortem: D. Ugrešić and Iliya Troyanov,” in Shoreless Bridges: South East European Writing in Diaspora, ed. Elka Agoston-Nikolova (Amsterdam, New York: Sage, 2010), 149–81.

Bulgarians Writing Abroad

183

 4 Trojanow, Die Welt ist groß, 1996.   5 After Konstantin Iliev’s withdrawal, Dinev stated: “I accept the award ASKEER as the official ‘Welcome to Bulgarian literature!’” In the span of two years Dinev participated in four Bulgarian competitions.   6 Dimitré Dinev, Engelszungen (Vienna: Deuticke Verlag, 2003), trans. Gergana Farkova, 2006.   7 Kapka Kassabova, Border: a Journey to the Edge of Europe (London: Granta, 2017), trans. Nevena Krasteva in 2017.   8 Kapka Kassabova, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Portobello, 2008), trans. Mariana Melnishka in 2008.   9 Rouja Lazarova, Mausolée (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), trans. Reni Iotova in 2009. 10 Miroslav Penkov East of the West: A Country in Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), author’s translation in 2011. 11 Nikolai Grozni, Wunderkind (New York: Free Press, 2011), author’s translation in 2014. 12 Rouja Lazarova, Le muscle du silence (Paris: Intervalles, 2016), trans. Veselin Trandov in 2012. 13 Ilija Trojanow, Macht und Widerstand (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2015), trans. Lubormir Iliev in 2016. 14 Miroslav Penkov, Stork Mountain (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), author’s translation in 2016. 15 Kapka Kassabova, “From Bulgaria with Love and Hate: Anxiety as a Distorted Mirror,” in Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in Literature, Film and Culture, eds. Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Sissy Helff (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), 73. 16 Мilena Kirova, “Communism for Sale: [Our] Totalitarian Past in the Novels of Bulgarian Émigré Writers after 1989,” in Езици на паметта в литературния текст, ed. Амелия Личева et al. (Велико Търново: Фабер, 2014), 248–56. 17 Penkov’s East of the West keeps the record with sixteen publications, and his Stork Mountain already has four. Kassabova’s Border will be published in ten countries by 2020, her Street without a Name in four. The “communist” books seem to be less in demand: Penkov’s focus is on transition and immigration; Kassabova’s Border crosses the borders way beyond Street without a Name; neither Ilija Trojanow’s three books with a Bulgarian focus nor Dinev’s Angel Tongues got an English translation. Sibylle Lewitscharoff ’s outrightly anti-Bulgarian novel Apostoloff is indicatively the only German export with a Bulgarian focus into the English-speaking world. 18 Snezhana Boicheva, Communist Dictatorship in the “Bulgarian” Novels of Ilija Trojanow, Dimitré Dinev and Sibylle Lewitscharoff (Shumen: University Publishing House, 2018). 19 Kirova, “Communism for Sale,” 248–56. 20 Lubka Lipcheva-Prandzeva, “Mother or Author’s Tongue—Language as a Choice of Literary Identity” in Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, vol. 55 (Vienna: Harrassowitz Verlag; Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2009), 43–65. 21 Nikolay Aretov, “Bulgarian Émigrés and their Literature: a Gaze from Home,” in Shoreless Bridges: South East European Writing in Diaspora, ed. Elka AgostonNikolova (Amsterdam, New York: Sage, 2010), 69–82. Nikolay Aretov, “Bulgarian Literature beyond Kalotina,” Езиков свят, Orbis Linguarum 16, no. 2 (2018): 105–11.

184

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

22 Penka Angelova, “The Other Road: On the Bulgarian Topos in the Work of Three Writers Awarded the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize,” in Shoreless Bridges: South East European Writing in Diaspora, ed. Elka Agoston-Nikolova (Amsterdam, New York: Sage, 2010), 83–96. 23 Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, “Quelle place pour la littérature bulgare dans ‘La République mondiale des Lettres?’” 247–56. 24 All these “novels” apply traditional home models and satisfy the Western horizon of expectations about Bulgaria and (its) communism. The Bulgarian readership could not be impressed by the clichés and stereotypes about Bulgaria evoking gratitude among their Western readers for being born neither “there” (in Bulgaria) nor “then” (during communism). Kirova concludes that artistic results vary “from sentimental simplification, through amusing parody and outright fabrication up to the detesting grotesque.” She asks why “we are not discovering an attempt for ‘verisimilar’ social and ethical reassessment of our/their past; for a complex, psychologically diverse and polysemous description of yet another ‘types and mores Bulgarian’; for penetration in the controversial existential reality of totalitarian man. And why is the Bulgarian audience incapable of recognizing itself in the characters and the plots of the books about Bulgaria?” 25 Georgi Gospodinov, Аз живях социализма, (Пловдив: Жанет 45, 2006). 26 Kassabova, Street Without a Name, 3. A Scotland on Sunday blurb about the same book reads: “Kassabova is admitting that her portrait of Bulgaria is ‘always personal and almost never flattering.’ It is these two qualities, of course, which ensure that Street Without a Name makes for such a highly enjoyable read” (Kassabova, 2nd ed., forthcoming). Why the lack of flattering depictions of Bulgaria should ensure the enjoyment of Scottish readers remains a mystery. Or does it? 27 Kassabova, Street Without a Name, 20. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 24. 30 The Brazilian TV series The Slave Isaura ran in 1986, not in the 70s; the Bulgarian series At Every Kilometer was made in the late 60s and very early 70s and its production in the 80s is unthinkable; Vysotsky and the Beatles have never been banned. 31 Kassabova, Street without a Name, 65. 32 Instead of horses and carts, the communist merry-go-round she remembers features tanks and Katyushas; sexuality and eroticism are forbidden (what about M. Andonov’s Goat’s Horn or Konchalovsky’s Siberiade?); the name Miroslava is supposedly a communist coinage, meaning glory to peace, and not an old Slavonic name, meaning glory to the world. 33 While she calls these people “tightrope-walkers of socialism” (ibid., 47), she also claims: “Us they have broken as early as in the Autumn of 1944” (ibid., 49). 34 Kassabova mentions her parents’ friends telling biting political jokes. Although women sometimes utter the truth in Lazarova’s novel, the sense of social and personal collapse is overwhelming. 35 I call exile the whole variety of political emigrations, economic immigrations, country changes for self-realization, nomadic lifestyles, etc. Exile to my understanding preserves the psychological element of coercion that partakes in every act of even highly intended, willful moving abroad. See Kambourov, “Exile or Exodus,” 2010.

Bulgarians Writing Abroad

185

36 Lipcheva, “Mother or Author’s Tongue,” 59–65. 37 Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Apostoloff (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009). 38 Victor Paskov (Виктор Пасков), Германия—мръсна приказка (София: Христо Ботев, 1992), French translation: Allemagne: Conte cruel, trans. Marie Vrinat-Nikolov (Paris: Editions de l’Aube, 1992). 39 Vladislav Todorov, Zift: Socialist Noir (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010), trans. Joseph Benatov. Originally published as Владислав Тодоров, Дзифт (Пловдив: Жанет 45, 2006). 40 Elizabeth Kostova, The Shadow Land (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017). 41 Still, Kostova, who is American, is genuinely devoted to Bulgarian literature through her eponymous literary foundation. 42 Georgi Gospodinov, Natural Novel (Illinois State University: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), trans. Zornitsa Hristova. Originally published as Георги Господинов, Естествен роман (Пловдив: Жанет 45, 1999). 43 Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow (Rochester: Open Letter, 2015), trans. Angela Rodel. Originally published as Георги Господинов, Физика на тъгата (Пловдив: Жанет 45, 2011). 44 David Damrosch, What is World Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–36; 281–303. 45 Let us point out only three here. By killing the dragon (third column, overthrowing the human autochthonous origin), Cadmus provides causal argument in favor of human autochthonous origin (Spartoi emerge from dragon’s teeth). “It follows that column four is to column three as column one is to column two” (Levi-Straus 1963 [1955]: 216) contradicts the final statement, indicating that column one is to column two as column three is to column four. In the second column the mythemes “Oedipus kills his father” and Antigone’s brothers kill each other are preceded by “The Spartoi kill one another.” Spartoi are a people that grew from Dragon’s teeth and from soil, their name meaning “sown [men].” Why should an autochthonous people be considered brothers so that their mutual slaughter be interpreted as “underrating blood relations,” when they do not come “from two: from man and woman”? Their origin is unrelated to blood. Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1963), trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 206–34, a special focus on 213–17. 46 Умиление (endearment) or the Greek notion ελεούσα—“caressing”—is among the key visual hypostases of Our Lady and has to do with милост, i.e., “mercy,” and έλεος— compassion, sympathy, empathy. Kambourov, “Exile or Exodus,” 174–8. 47 Michel Tournier, Friday or the Other Island (London: Collins, 1969), original title Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).

15

In Between and Beyond: Diaspora Writers and Readers Yana Hashamova

An adequate opening of this chapter calls for a vignette, for my writing on Kapka Kassabova evokes a deeply intimate reflection on the roads I have traveled, professional and personal. Now, as I am typing my thoughts about Kassabova’s writings, I have lived in the United States longer than I lived in Bulgaria, but the senses and reflections Bulgaria continues to stir up in me are as complex and painful as when I left it, although now they are more mature and more acceptable. I have learned to embrace them and be content with them. Reading Kassabova’s works uncovered these emotions and words from underneath the hustle and bustle of my everyday life. More than any other Bulgarian expatriate writer, Kassabova illuminates the contradictory and conflicting sentiments of living outside one’s home country, beyond its borders, in today’s global world, even though it has shrunk to the size of a palm due to the ease of travel and digital communications. Every time I fly home (yes, Bulgaria still feels like home) and arrive at my gate in a European airport to catch my flight to Sofia, the sound and melody of the Bulgarian language shared by other passengers waiting to board bring both sweet tenderness and loving nostalgia for my mother’s tongue. They conjure up the image of my mother, who will be waiting for me at Sofia airport and whose warm and loving embrace I long for. My compatriots, whose appearances cannot be described in a way that would do justice to their diversity, but which I unmistakably recognize, awaken a whole gamut of feelings. My sundry emotions crystallize further on the plane, usually served by Bulgaria Air, as patriotic songs, such as “My Country, My Bulgaria” and “One Bulgarian Rose”—songs of my childhood and youth—are played, infused by the aroma of wet towels, often with the scent of rose oil.1 This contrived patriotic atmosphere is countered by the passengers’ somewhat aggressive and arrogant behavior, which quickly dampens the feelings of nostalgia. The woman in the seat next to me tries to squeeze her large carry-on under the front seats, leaving no room for my feet. Another removes my bag from the overhead bin and places it somewhere behind, so he can fit his two or three bags in one bin. At this point I know I am going home, a painfully familiar space that gave me an exceptional education and access to world-class culture, often smothered by unflattering manners

188

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

and shocking occurrences! An odd fusion of pride, longing for my mother(land), and aching sadness settles in my heart. This extraordinary blend of conflicting senses, this mental and emotional anguish of having left one’s country but not being able to leave behind the acute memories of one’s mother, childhood, school and university friends, language and culture are magnified in the writings of Kassabova. In the early 1990s, when she was sixteen, she left Bulgaria with her parents, settled in New Zealand and from there moved to Scotland, where she still resides, though she travels to Bulgaria often. For brief periods of time, she lived in other European and South American countries. The relationship between writers and intellectuals living outside their native countries and those remaining within is often fraught with complexities and tensions. In surveying literature written by Bulgarian-born authors living outside of Bulgaria, Nikolay Aretov outlines three waves of émigré writers and concludes that some of them truly “succeed in problematizing the emigrant’s existence.”2 Focusing more on those who engage with the memory and culture of their home country from the second and third waves would necessitate mentioning a few well-known authors: the political dissident Georgi Markov (1929–1978), who defected to England in 1968; the literary and cultural theoreticians as well as prominent intellectuals Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017) and Julia Kristeva, who both settled in Paris in the 1960s; and, in the last couple of decades, Bulgarian writers who live in Western Europe and the United States and write in English and German, such as Kassabova, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, and Dimitré Dinev. Most of them have been and are currently being translated into Bulgarian and have attracted the attention of Bulgarian readers, as explored in chapter 14 of this volume. But I will cite here only Kassabova’s work Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (2008), her short essay “From Bulgaria with Love and Hate: The Anxiety of Distorting Mirror (A Writer’s Perspective)” (2010), and, briefly Border: A Journey to the End of Europe (2017), as well as Kristeva’s essay, most engaged with her home country, “Bulgaria, My Suffering!” (1994). It is imperative to stress the different times in which these works were crafted, three decades that differ greatly in terms of the cultural and political transition of Bulgaria from state-sponsored socialism to democracy, decades during which Bulgarians and Bulgaria changed much according to some and little to others. These texts, I contend, reveal not only the authors’ relationship with and perception of Bulgaria, but also their individual, cultural, and intellectual identities and how they interconnect with the history and conditions of their home country. In these texts, the raw and traumatic emotions evoked by the home country powerfully captivate the reader (or at least they captivated me). And yet, the trauma of these two authors manifests differently. Kristeva’s and Kassabova’s “diasporic intimacies” (to evoke Svetlana Boym’s argument about intimacy connected to home and structured by the “collective frameworks of memory”) function in unique ways despite their common framework of memory.3 In her essay “Bulgaria, My Suffering!”, for instance, Kristeva reveals her complex relationship to Bulgaria and the imprint of the Bulgarian language and culture on her intellectual identity, although she declares that she belongs to the West:

Diaspora Writers and Readers

189

It isn’t I. It is my maternal memory, this warm corpse that can still speak—a body in my body—that vibrates in unison with the infrasounds and informations, the suppressed loves and blatant conflicts, the Gregorian music and commercial slogans, childhood tenderness and mafia brutality, wretched political, economic, ideological stupidities, and with you people who are confused or grossly ambitious, profiteers and idlers, driven speculators, individuals without shame or plan, you, history’s unclaimed baggage who try to catch hold of history again without much idea of how to go about it, you, Bulgarians, invisible, undesirable, a white patch of brightness, dark Balkans pierced by the incuriosity of the West that I belong to.4

Unflattering and harsh to her (former) countrymen and countrywomen, Kristeva nonetheless cannot deny the signs of her maternal memory, language, and culture in her present Western self and “suffering comes back” to her.5 Despite this uncomplimentary view of her former compatriots, in her “maternal memory, this warm corpse that can still speak,” and in her repeated address “Bulgaria, my suffering,” one senses Kristeva’s intimate and warm (and perhaps distressing) connection to her (ex)home country. Her concerted efforts to distance herself from Bulgarian mentality and culture are intercepted by her recognition of the ways Bulgarian language and Orthodox Christianity, for example, still invade and mold her being. Reflecting upon the relationship between language and being, she concludes: “Naming being makes me be: body and soul, I live in French.”6 And, yet, to underscore the complex and conflicting intellectual identity of migrants, or, as she calls them “hybrid monsters,” she admits that “a surge that is not made up of words but has a music all [sic] its own imposes an awkward syntax on me, and these unfathomable metaphors that have nothing to do with French politeness and obviousness infiltrate my calmness with a Byzantine unease. I depart from French taste.”7 Similarly, when elaborating on the nature of Orthodox Christianity, Kristeva acknowledges that she loves “its sensuality, its mystery, that seclusion that makes us feel, in the celebration of the liturgy, the sorrow and joys of another world.”8 She even proclaims that this unique sensitivity and spiritual experience is “illusory, but so happy, so liberating, so creative of good fortune!”9 Truthful to the mastery of Byzantine rhetoric, through a winding series of (seemingly discordant) arguments, in her essay, she hints at the possibility of Bulgaria’s role (with its mystical Orthodoxy and Byzantine unease) in the “transvaluation” of European culture and its subjectivity, which have reached an impasse.10 Conflicting thoughts and thick sentiments lurk similarly through the pages of Kassabova’s books and her essays mentioned above. The “invisible” and “undesirable” Bulgaria weighs heavily on Kassabova’s immigrant experience and her sense of belonging. In defining her two goals for writing the book, Street without a Name, she states: My chief delusion was that by becoming deeply absorbed by every other country on the planet except Bulgaria (which I carefully tiptoed around as if it was a ticking bomb in the shape of a country ready to detonate at the slightest touch of memory) I could get rid of two things. One, my Bulgarian past, which was not of the

190

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

miserable variety but bothered me nevertheless, like an infirm relative calling out from a darkened room at the back of the house. Two, the need to answer directly the question nice people ask when they meet you: so where are you from?11

Kassabova, although more forgiving and humbler than Kristeva, suffers like her older fellow intellectual and writer when she tries to come to terms with the memory and legacy of her home country. The younger author, however, investigates her connection to Bulgaria with greater intensity; she keeps returning to it, and, through various writings, rediscovers new layers of emotions and (wavering) identifications:12 Since leaving Bulgaria, I have gone backwards and forwards across the world several times, propelled by a slightly manic energy. I managed to convince myself that I’d left Bulgaria behind for good. I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from, they ask. Does it matter, I answer. But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other places and people, if you don’t even know where you come from?13

This sincere need to uncover layers of personal identity constructs, piled on top of each other, in order to reach the kernel of the self, strikes the reader in me as different from Kristeva’s (perhaps convenient) embrace of both “hybrid monster” as well as French identity that represent on the one hand the pulsation of the modern world surviving its famous lost values, thanks to or despite the flood of immigration and hybridization and, on the other hand, as a result, embody that new possibility that is forming contrary to national conformisms and international nihilisms.14 It is not the objective of this essay to critique Kristeva’s embrace of (or insistence on) a French identity, but it would be remiss not to mention that while she praises the universal humanitarian spirit of French democracy, she fails to recognize destructive sentiments and episodes of French history, such as colonialism, Orientalism, and anti-Semitism. Kassabova’s refusal, or inability, as she argues, to forget her origin despite the complex and throbbing sentiments this origin arouses, more than those of Kristeva, resembles the reflections and writings of other Balkan female authors who have chosen or have been forced to live outside their countries and who “write in ‘adopted’ languages, in newly acquired languages, in multiple languages, in mother tongues in non-maternal habitats.”15 I am reminded here of Dubravka Ugrešić and her book, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1994) as well as other collections of essays, The Culture of Lies (1998) and Nobody’s Home (2007). Written while Ugrešić was in selfimposed exile in Berlin and other places during the Yugoslav Wars, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender emulates the broken and fragmented experiences of people who have lost their homes, families, and friends. Through diary entries, vignettes, observations, and quotations, Ugrešić memorializes the loss, creating thus a “war museum,”16 but more importantly, she uncovers her memories of belonging, identity, family, and friends.

Diaspora Writers and Readers

191

The situations in Kassabova’s and Ugrešić’s homelands at the time of their departures were markedly different: in Bulgaria, the depressive—financially and emotionally—chaotic and lawless early years of a post-communist, transitional period, stymied by the legacy of failed socialism, and in the former Yugoslavia, the brutal wars driven by militant nationalisms. But the two writers’ candid search for the memories of their beginnings, the kernel of their identities strikes the reader as similar in the sincerity of their anguish and in some of the literary devices (fragmented and defamiliarizing narratives) employed by both. Kassabova’s guide to Bulgaria (travelogue) fuses intellectual and emotional episodes through space and time. She travels through Bulgaria and the parts of her book bear subtitles with geographic names and references, such as “Balkan Blues Survival in the Balkan” (italics are used in the book’s table of contents) and “Into the Memory Hole, Bulgaria, Turkey, and the Death Strip,” among others, revealing her disjointed and somewhat circular process of reconnecting with her memories and the first images of identity formation, or, her imaginary identification, to evoke Jacques Lacan’s order of the imaginary, in which the first relationships with the world occur based on images and senses.17 The return to her imaginary stage is layered with intellectual reflections, shaped by her life outside Bulgaria, and encounters with different cultures—reflections based, one can speculate, on the Lacanian symbolic order.18 Ugrešić, in turn, presents impressions both from Germany with German titles (Ich bin müde (“I’m tired”) and Wo bin ich? (“Where am I?”), and from former Yugoslavia, (“Family Museum,” “Archive: Six Stories with the Discreet Motif of a Departing Angel,” and “Group Photograph”), which take the reader to the past and her home memories, and have Croatian titles and longer vignettes. These interactions of two worlds and two experiences that mold her identity bring to mind the dynamics of the imaginary and the symbolic interfaces in the development of the individual’s identity.19 Her reconnection with her imaginary (her “maternal memory”) pokes holes in the grand narrative of the symbolic (her existence in the West with its language and law to refer to Lacan’s attributes of the symbolic). The pain the two authors exhibit when revisiting their countries or the memories of them, albeit caused by the legacies of failed socialism in Kassabova’s case and by destructive nationalisms and the ruthless war in Yugoslavia in Ugrešić’s, not only fails to discourage them from seeking their memories, but rather drives their open engagement with the Western attitudes of the “invisible” and “undesirable” place of their origins: the Balkans. Kassabova calls this pain, “the pain of obscure suffering— when your story, your experience, your loss, and the place you come from, are not known elsewhere, not validated or recorded in films or books.”20 Problematizing the e/ im/migrant experience, which defines not only the individual but her artistic creation, Ugrešić notes: At this moment I possess a passport with a red cover again, Dutch. I continue to wear the label of a literary representative of a country to which I am not connected, even by a passport. Will my new passport make me a Dutch writer? I doubt it …

192

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

And why am I so sensitive to labels? Because in practice it turns out that identifying baggage weighs down a literary text … Because I come from the periphery.21

Kassabova confirms that the place one comes from does matter and it matters even more that one is from the “periphery,” from Bulgaria, because “[i]n the Western mind Bulgaria is a country without a face … Or [as] an appendix, a kind of afterthought.”22 While Kassabova’s frustration is born out of the Western disinterest in her country, Ugrešić’s pain is caused by both the disinterest of the West and the self-destruction of her own country. Unable to truly describe it, for the trauma evades depiction, in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Ugrešić circumvents the point of pain, the loss of country, and the war through replacement or metonymy as she writes about something else and curates a museum. Kassabova, too, employs the aesthetic device of replacement but differently from Ugrešić. At particular moments in Street without a Name, instead of expressing directly the complex and burning feelings, Kassabova discusses her own past in Bulgaria and present Bulgaria, the conflicting emotions of “borrowed identities” and “fractured psyches” through one of her characters. She utilizes the voice of her best friend from childhood, Rado, an émigré in France, with whom she reunites in Sofia, to express her traumatic existence and identity of inbetween-and-beyond. Unlike Ugrešić, who avoids writing explicitly about her trauma, Kassabova attempts to describe her trauma in an effort to heal herself: “And yet. All this.” He points at the building sites. All this means so much more to me than France. All that’s happened here, all the emotions this place contains. First love that never dies. First dreams. First car. First car-crash. First shag. First job. Not in that order. All of me is contained here, in these panels, in this mountain. I’m not a poet, poetry is your thing. But you know what I mean … “Yes,” I say. Yes, here we are, the top crop export of Socialism. With several passports, foreign spouses and ex-spouses, dynamic careers, borrowed identities. And fractured psyches. Here we are trying to heal ourselves.23

The literary devices of replacement or metonymy, “borrowed identities,” and “fractured psyches” remind the reader of a psychoanalytic reflection on migration. Examining various aspects of migration, from the void created by leaving relatives and friends behind to the integration in a new community and culture and numerous identity problems, Leon Grinberg and Rebecca Grinberg compare the migration process to mourning due to the lost parts of the self and the difficult work of recovery. The texts of all three authors (Kristeva, Kassabova, and Ugrešić) discussed above all to a lesser or greater degree reveal the trauma and challenges of migration and the feelings associated with mourning, feelings of nostalgia (Ugrešić’s attempts to reconstruct a family museum), anxieties and manic sense (Kassabova and her “slightly manic energy” trying to forget about her country), and “over-adaptation” (Kristeva’s “rapidly becoming identified with the habits and practices of the people of the new country”).24 The identity recovery process or the search for the meaning and essence of the “hybrid

Diaspora Writers and Readers

193

monster” cannot and should not be generalized, for each migrant writer seeks and defines her own uniquely. Both Kassabova and Ugrešić engage with the dynamics of center and periphery, the relationship between Western Europe and Eastern Europe and, more precisely, the imagined perceptions of Westerners and Easterners of themselves and the other.25 In her 2007 collection of essays, Nobody’s Home, Ugrešić mocks the perceived superiority of Westerners as bearers of “western civilization,” for whom “Eastern Europe is a mental empty space.”26 Disparagingly, Kassabova briefly narrates one of her first exchanges with a schoolmate when she and her family lived in the UK in the 1990. A bully in her English school looked at her Bulgarian-made canvas shoes and asked: “‘Are these made in Russia? They look like shit.’ To which I said, the tears already welling up in my eyes, ‘I’m not from Russia. I’m from Bulgaria.’ ‘Same thing,’ he said. This was in 1990. Some British perceptions have changed since then, others have remained surprisingly the same.”27 This openly professed assessment of British arrogance, opinion that does not attempt to mask the bewilderment caused by the limited knowledge of the world some Brits have, does not prevent Kassabova from being critical, negative, and dark about aspects of her own Bulgarian culture. Unlike Ugrešić, who does not engage in much ideological critique of socialism, with pessimistic reflections and sharp humor Kassabova denounces the Bulgarian socialist realities. Her engagement with West and East, center and periphery upsets Bulgarian readers. In the chapter, “East and West, The Poor Cousin Syndrome,” (as in many other parts of the book), she seemingly reaffirms stereotypes about the prosperous and shiny West with its friendly and liberated people and about the East with its sad inhabitants, empty stores, gray life, and absurd reality. In separate studies, Tomislav Longinović and Roumiana Deltcheva address this intriguing response of East European artists who, in a cultural production, answer to stereotypical Western constructions of the Balkans with “an internalized culture of ‘self-Balkanization’” (Longinović) or by perpetuating the “misperceptions” themselves (Deltcheva). If Kassabova uses negative exaggerations in her depiction of socialist realities (like the note “about Bulgarian shops in the seventies and eighties: they weren’t actually shops […]. They were unheated ground-floor rooms with shelves on which something may—or may not, depending on the day—be displayed …”28), and her descriptions are hyperboles, what is the purpose of using such a literary device? If these are her true memories, one can really question the memories of someone born in the early 1970s about the conditions of the stores at that time. But has she really lost the distinctiveness of her points of reference or does she try to play with tropes? People living in Bulgaria during these two decades, described by Kassabova, realize that her depictions are gross exaggerations. Some become incensed by them and some do not. In a letter to the patriotic (or even nationalist) online venue Нова Зора (New Dawn), a family expressed their deep disappointment and anger at what they see in Street without a Name as only a very poor literary attempt aiming at success in the West and personal gain.29 The blogger of “Дневникът на Бриджит Джоунс” (“The Diary of Bridget Jones”) admits the socialist time shortages and lack of everyday-life conveniences but does not share the same dark memories about that time.30 While the varied responses in Bulgaria likely reflect the political and cultural backgrounds

194

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

of readers, Western readers mostly accept the hyperbolic presentation of Bulgaria as a realistic description of socialism, e.g., they consume the stereotypes. The subtitle of “East and West,” namely, “The Poor Cousin Syndrome” hints at the aesthetic distance the author attempts to introduce between her memories and the actual reality, for syndrome clearly indicates self-awareness of the position some accepted during the socialist period. Her perception of her experience in Bulgaria and her views of the West at the time were a syndrome of isolation and resulting fantasies, that is, imagined Western freedoms and affluence. While describing her first year in Britain, Kassabova does not shy away from correcting her fantasies (or realizing that the world she fantasized about and the one she left behind are much more complex realities than imagined from one side of the divide only), or traversing her fantasies (to evoke Lacan and Slavoj Žižek).31 It does not take her long, while socializing with her high school classmates, to note that “material possessions and political freedom only brought you so much happiness. That, in fact, they can bring you unhappiness, too.”32 But what interests do the perceived stereotypes of Bulgarian socialist realities serve? I contend that even though Western readers mostly accept these portrayals as (fantasy) reassurance of their superior social and cultural positions, the author uncovers the flaws of Western societies as well and does not spare her critique. Some Bulgarian diaspora readers, like me, shaped by our in-between-and-beyond national and cultural identities, see through the hyperboles of Bulgarian realities and recognize the many problems of Western societies exposed in Kassabova’s work. Similar is the recognition of Ludmila Kostova, who concludes her analysis of Street without a Name thus: “Her book embodies some of the ethico-political ambiguities of a genre that is moving away from its imperialist legacy towards rearticulations of cosmopolitanism and wider recognition of the claims of the other.”33 The departure from the imperialist legacies resurfaces in Kassabova’s description of the destructive effects of Western affluence, for example. Shocked, she writes about a well-off classmate who speaks of “that bitch his absent mother, of that bastard his absent father” and reflects that she had “never heard anybody [in Bulgaria] speak of their parents that way.”34 Kassabova’s latest book Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (not a subject of this discussion) further advances her preoccupation with the legacies of postcolonialism and postsocialism, as well as Western Europe’s recent regressions to populist and separatist nationalisms. Such critique of both East and West that can be observed in Balkan and East European émigré writings was triggered in part by the moving subjects from East to West, subjects who attempted to traverse the fantasy of the West but ended up circling around a void. Through a less pessimistic (Lacanian) lens, these moving writers and readers are the “hybrid monsters,” who deal with their grief of lost parts of the self and recover in unique and individual ways, who accept uncritically neither their home countries nor their new societies, who live in two, three, and more languages, and who embrace the richness and perhaps melancholy of their in-between-and-beyond identities.35 These are the “hybrid monsters” who, due to their life experiences and (traumatic) migrations, exhibit fluid identities and demonstrate more complex (and contradictory) views of the societies they know and have lived in. In the opening paragraph of this essay, I mentioned that I still relate to Bulgaria as my home country and my feelings are

Diaspora Writers and Readers

195

steeped in excitement and melancholy, feelings that mirror (but for different reasons) my relationship with my adopted country. As suggested here, Kassabova’s writing relates in various ways to other migrant authors’ works, such as Kristeva’s and Ugrešić’s. Engaging with traumatic identity searches, departures from and returns to the (un) familiar, Western and Eastern cultural constructs and imaginaries, and traversing (identity) fantasies, Kassabova’s writings resonate with diaspora readers in similar ways to other émigré writings (particularly these of Balkan and Central European such as Miroslav Penkov, Anca Vlasopolos, Slavenka Drakulić and Aleksandar Hemon, Susan Suleiman, Eva Hoffman, and Milan Kundera), which invite migrants to delight in reflections about the complexities and contradictions of their experiences with their attendant exaltation and sorrow.

Notes   1 The distilled petals of Rosa damascene yield a very concentrated oil, the production of which became a major industry in nineteenth-century Bulgaria (at that time part of the Ottoman Empire). Bulgaria continues to be one of the world’s largest exporters of rose oil.   2 Nikolay Aretov, “Bulgarian Émigrés and Their Literature: A Gaze from Home,” Balkanistica 24 (2011): 22–3.   3 Julia Kristeva, “Bulgaria, My Suffering!,” in The Crisis of the European Subject (New York: Other Press, 2000), 227–8. For more on the application of Boym’s “diasporic intimacy” to Kassabova’s writing, see Ioana Luca, “Communism: Intimate Publics,” Biography 34, no. 1 (2011): 70–82. In her article, Luca argues that “Vlasopolos [Romanian writer and professor of English in the United States who left Romania in the early 1960s] and Kassabova create a language of communist memory of everyday life, of the banal, of sheer ordinariness, which resonates well beyond their own experiences” (78). Brackets mine.   4 Kristeva, “Bulgaria My Suffering!,” 170.   5 Ibid., 169.   6 Ibid., 166.   7 Ibid., 167.   8 Ibid., 177.  9 Ibid. 10 Although matters are more complex than that, it suffices to say here that Kristeva and Kassabova had different experiences while living in Bulgaria and have different relations to it as expatriates, although neither writes in her mother tongue. It took Kristeva over twenty years to engage with Bulgaria’s history and present in her writings. 11 Kapka Kassabova, Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Portobello, 2008), 2. 12 For a comparative analysis of Kassabova’s first novel Reconnaissance (1999) and Kristeva’s novel The Old Man and the Wolves (1991), written twenty years after she left Bulgaria, see Anna Smith’s “Nationalist without a Nation: Kapka Kassabova” in

196

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Toward a Transcultural Future, eds. Geoffrey V. Davis, Peter H. Marsden, Bénédicte Ledent and Marc Delrez (Cross/Cultures 77, ASNEL Papers 9.1, Brill, 2004), 106–18. Although I find Smith’s argument about Kassabova’s and Kristeva’s different nationalisms questionable, her chapter sheds light on the aforementioned two titles, which have been overlooked in scholarship. 13 Kassabova, Street without a Name, 16. 14 Kristeva, “Bulgaria My Suffering!,” 168. 15 Dubravka Ugrešić, Europe in Sepia, trans. D. Williams (Rochester: Open Letter, 2014), 222. 16 Jessica Wienhold-Brokish, “Dubravka Ugrešić’s War Museum: Approaching the ‘Point of Pain,’” in Embracing Arms: Cultural Representation of Slavic and Balkan Women in War, eds. Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2012), 253. 17 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), 179–226. 18 For my reading and application of Lacan’s concepts of the imaginary and the symbolic, as well as jouissance (mentioned below), see Charles Batson and Yana Hashamova, “Imaginer l’identité sexualle: Salvador Dali et l’autre sexe,” Gradiva 9, no. 2 (2006): 87–104. 19 Although the reference to Lacan’s orders of the imaginary and the symbolic is a playful allusion, it is helpful to add here that the imaginary is the realm of the mother, based on sense evidence, generally understood, and the symbolic, the realm of the father, the law, and the language. 20 Kassabova, “From Bulgaria with Love and Hate,” 75. 21 Dubravka Ugrešić, Thank You for Not Reading, trans. Celia Hawkesworth (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003). 22 Kassabova, Street without a Name, 3. 23 Ibid., 332. 24 Leon Grinberg and Rebeca Grinberg, “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration,” in Psychoanalysis and Culture: A Kleinian Perspective, ed. David Bell (London: Duckworth, 2018), 162. 25 Dubravka Ugrešić, Nobody’s Home: Essays, trans. E. Elias-Bursac (London: Telegram, 2007), 239. Many scholars have explored such imaginary constructs. See Yana Hashamova, Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film (Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2007); Stephen Hutchings, Russia and its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997); Iver Neumann, Uses of the Other:“The East” in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994), among others. 26 For more on this topic in Ugrešić’s writing, see Eva Karpinski’s “Postcards from Europe: Dubravka Ugrešic´ as a Transnational Public Intellectual, or Life Writing in Fragments,” The European Journal of Life Writing V. II (2013): 42–60. She contends: “Among recurrent motifs in Ugrešić’s prose is a dialogic and contrapuntal articulation of the historic (and contemporary) relationship within Europe between the West and the East, which allows her to probe constantly the meaning of Europeanness as she ruthlessly deals with national fantasies and stereotypes on both sides” (47).

Diaspora Writers and Readers

197

27 Kassabova, Street without a Name, 125–6. 28 Ibid., 72. 29 Marinovi, “Letter,” Нова Зора (New Dawn) 31, September 2, 2008, www.novazora. net/2008/issue31/story_11.html. 30 “Обаче, като чета книгата, имам чувството, че сме расли в различни светове. Признавам че, докато чета, често се просълзявам, но това не е защото истината се стоварва върху мен с цялата си тежест. Тъжно ми е. За Капка.” (“But when I’m reading the book, I feel that we grew up in different worlds. Admittedly, my eyes often water up while reading, but this is not because the truth crashes over me with all its gravity. I am sad for Kapka.”) 31 Traversing the fantasy constitutes a move from desire (constantly seeking the object of desire) to drive (circling around a void). 32 Kassabova, Street without a Name, 127. 33 Ludmilla Kostova, “Writing across the Native/Foreign Divide: The Case of Kapka Kassabova’s Street without a Name,” in Travel and Ethics: Theory and Practice, ed. Corinne Fowler, Charles Forsdick, and Ludmilla Kostova (New York: Routledge, 2014), 178. 34 Kassabova, Street without a Name, 128. 35 For more on the complexities of diaspora identities, see Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); and Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identities and Diaspora,” Framework 36 (1994): 222–37.

16

Factotum and Fakir: The Translator of Bulgarian Literature into English Angela Rodel

Thanks to Bukowski, we all have an immediate mental image of a “factotum”— the jack-of-all-trades, the perennial handyman, the scut worker. I imagine most translators from smaller languages and literatures could immediately see themselves in this role—albeit, perhaps, with less booze and fewer sexual shenanigans involved. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “fakir” as a “a religious ascetic who lives solely on alms,” most likely borrowed by the British in colonial India. I believe many translators can immediately identify with this archetype as well— literary monastics of sorts, we tend to be idealistic, almost fanatical in our dedication to our craft, and certainly none of us are in this business to get rich. As the Mexican writer and translator from Bulgarian Reynol Vazquez so eloquently puts it: “There are many sophisticated ways of starving yourself to death and being a translator from Bulgarian is one of them.” However, as part of the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, the Bulgarians have also borrowed the Arabic term faqir meaning “poor” via Turkish—along with plenty of other colorful Turkisms that have likewise undergone some interesting semantic shifts. In Bulgarian, a “fakir” means someone very good at something, almost like a magician or wonder-worker, an illusionist skilled in sleight-of-hand. I would argue that translators are also “fakirs” in the Bulgarian sense: if we are truly skillful, we are able to pull literary works out of one culture into another like a coin from behind an ear—and hopefully we are good enough that you won’t even notice our doing it. This essay examines the challenges of bringing a small literature, such as Bulgarian, into the English-language market, noting the pivotal role of the translator, who acts both as factotum and fakir in this process. Due to its size and influence, the English language, and particularly the US market, often disregards translated literature, yet over the past ten years we have seen Bulgarian authors slip in through the cracks in this citadel, using the new opportunities the digital and decentering literary industry has provided and enjoying a “cluster effect” as more works and authors become visible.

200

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Translator as Dominus Factotum Chad Post, the editor-in-chief at Open Letter Press, one of the few presses in the United States focusing exclusively on literature in translation, has vehemently called attention to what he terms “the three percent problem,” namely the fact that only three percent of all books published in the United States are in translation. Post lays out the complicated reasons for this in his book, summing up the dismal situation succinctly: “Translators definitely aren’t valued by the marketplace, and if they aren’t protected in universities, they’re pretty much screwed.”1 Against this generally discouraging backdrop, the Bulgarian case looks exceedingly grim: according to the Three Percent online translation database that contains data for 2008–2018, only seventeen Bulgarian-language books have been published in English, accounting for 0.34 percent of all translated works of fiction. If we add the thirty-eight Bulgarian translations into English from 1989–2010 identified in the Bulgarian study Превод и преход (Translation and Transition), this means that slightly more than fifty Bulgarian books have been translated into English since 1989.2 So Bulgarian literature does not have a three percent problem, but a point-three percent problem. The takeaway from Post’s work for the purposes of this chapter is that it is a buyer’s market: publishers hold the power, thus, translators, especially from small languages, must woo them with all their fakiresque skill in order to see a book to publication.

Translator as Scout Smaller languages like Bulgarian (which has seven million speakers and falling) cannot impress publishers with best-seller figures in a book’s native language, since a “best seller” in Bulgaria means a few thousand copies; suffice it to say that English-language publishers are not beating down translators’ doors looking for titles to scoop up. In this buyer’s market, the translator must keep a finger on the pulse of Bulgarian literature, looking for authors whom the translator both admires as writers and who could have commercial potential on the US or UK markets—which do not necessarily have the same demands and aesthetic preferences as the Bulgarian market. Once the translator has found a work she feels passionate about translating and that might have a chance at publication, it often can take quite some time to find a willing publisher. For example, I fell in love with the novel Хайка за вълци (Wolf Hunt) by Ivaylo Petrov eight years before finding a publisher, namely the New York-based boutique press for literature in translation, Archipelago Books.3 This novel about a small village in north-eastern Bulgaria and the variety of reactions to forced collectivization in the 1940s and 50s, was written in the 1980s under strange perestroika-influenced circumstances, and, to me, is hands-down the best classic Bulgarian novel. However, since the author had passed away in 2005, it was difficult to find a publisher, partly because, in my experience, many publishers in the United States prefer “live” authors who can be trotted out to book fairs and readings, and who could produce follow-up works, etc. Thus, the translator,

The Translator of Bulgarian Literature

201

when scouting, must make a careful calculation, balancing between their own passion and the work’s saleability. The translator-as-scout must also be cognizant of dominant genre trends in both the source and target language literary markets, keeping in mind that they might not always overlap. A scout of small languages needs to be aware also of disconnects between literary trends, while keeping in mind alternative strategies for placing quality works in less popular genres or stylistic approaches. While the novel has long been the most desirable genre for literary translation, in the Bulgarian literary tradition of the twentieth century good novels were certainly written, but the dominant genres were, arguably, short stories and poetry; novels only took center stage in the new millennium in response to more cosmopolitan literary tastes. For various socio-cultural and historical reasons that I have discussed in more detail in Poets and Writers,4 as has writer and journalist Dimiter Kenarov in the Boston Review,5 Bulgaria, until the mid2000s, remained “the last terra incognita of ‘East European’ literature.”

Translator as Grant Writer To restate the obvious: literary translation is not a lucrative business. The vast majority of fellow translators I have met over the years are idealists, zealots almost, working for the love of literature itself. My own biography in this sense is not atypical—I became interested in Bulgarian culture as an undergraduate linguistics major at Yale University, where I joined the Slavic Chorus and fell in love with Bulgarian folk music. After coming to Bulgaria in 1996 on a Fulbright grant to study the language and music, I also discovered the local literature and tumbled rather unexpectedly into literary translation. My linguistics background combined with the fact that at that time there were very few native speakers of English interested in studying Bulgarian landed me in an unexpected role as cultural ambassador—a role richly rewarding on the spiritual, if not always on the monetary plane!6 Since most published translations (Paulo Coelho and Stieg Larson aside) cannot be expected to cover their costs through sales, the vast majority of translations are made possible by grants, either from governmental institutions or private foundations.7 Although sometimes publishing houses apply for such support, in my experience it is almost always the job of the translator to seek out grant opportunities, to write the grant, and to coordinate the application procedure between the author/rights holder, the publisher, and the grant-giving institution. This is a rather natural division of labor in some sense, since the translator has the linguistic skills to access such grants if they are given in the source language country, and also because the translator is the primary beneficiary. Such grants not only buoy the project purely financially, but if they are from prestigious sources (NEA, PEN, etc.), they can raise the profile of the project and help in subsequent marketing efforts. However, identifying and applying for such support is crucial labor that the translator-as-factotum performs, usually without specific remuneration for it.

202

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Translator as Editor Bulgarian has no “Anglo-Saxon style” editing tradition. Although many Bulgarian works of fiction do have “editors” listed on the title page, this role is often more akin to copy editing or collegial coaching and nowhere near the all-encompassing work of a professional editor at a publishing house in the United States. In fact, my experience suggests that some Bulgarian books reach the market more or less as the author submitted them, with little intervention on the part of the publisher. At a public roundtable in Sofia, the Bulgarian writer Miroslav Penkov, who moved to the United States and began writing in English, humorously recalled his encounter with American professional editing, when his editor at FSG made her first pass at his short stories, describing it as a сеч (bloodbath). However, there seems to be a growing awareness of the importance of editing in Bulgarian literary circles, although it still seems to happen outside of the publishing house in many cases. In recent years, organizations such as the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation have hosted American-style writers’ workshops and tried to introduce the idea of writing as a craft as well as how to give and receive feedback on one’s writing. Sofia University and other educational and cultural institutions now also offer creative writing courses, employing a variety of approaches. Yet, I have observed that some Bulgarian writers (whether consciously or unconsciously) cling to a nineteenth-century romantic idea of genius, according to which a work jumps out of the author’s head fully formed, and do not necessarily recognize the needs or benefits of a professional editing process. This cultural understanding combined with a dearth of constructive local literary criticism (for reasons that go far beyond the scope of this paper), means that the translator is often the first person to stick their fingers into the “guts” of the work, to really weigh every word, to ask the author about his/her choices and intentions. Writers react to this in different ways—some feel rather protective of the work, but, in my experience, many are ecstatic to have such a close reader and offer the translator more insight into the text than he/she could ever need (perhaps a “translator as psychotherapist” subheading should also be added here, but that is fodder for another article entirely). This is where the translator must also be a fakir: just as audiences watching a magician must suspend their disbelief, the translator must charm the author into enjoying the switches and the sleight-of-hand, to see it as a work of art and a skillful performance, and not as a vivisection of their creative work. A great deal of such “editing” is necessary due to the inevitable fault lines between language pairs. Roman Jakobson, in his seminal article “On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” notes that every language pair has its “mismatches,” purely grammatical categories that one language has and even in some cases insists upon, which another lacks—for example the dual form for nouns or the perfective/imperfective verb system in Russian that has no equivalent in English.8 Bulgarian, too, has its own grammatical categories and linguistic particularities that differ quite considerably from English. One major example is the way tenses are used: in English, switching between past and present tense is quite marked; it catches the reader’s attention and is generally used deliberately by well-trained writers to heighten the emotional intensity of the

The Translator of Bulgarian Literature

203

plot. However, in Bulgarian, what I like to call in my translation seminars the “flipflopping of tenses” is something of a literary tradition—shifting between tenses from one sentence to the next does not appear to distract the reader, but is seen rather as a mark of mastery. I do not mean this as a criticism or judgment; it is simply an aesthetic difference that has arisen from different traditions. One of my favorite examples is from Petko Slaveykov’s famous Revival Era poem “The Fountain of the Lily White Legs”: Гергана вода налива, бели си крака измива, везир пред чадър седеше, гледал Гергана, чудил се – чудил се хубост таквази, де се е зела на село.

[present tense] [present tense] [past imperfect] [past evidential form] [past evidential form] [past indefinite form]

Gergana poured out the water, she washed her lily white legs. The Vizier sat before the parasol, watched Gergana in wonder – wonder how such a beauty, could come out of a village.9 [Translation by Christopher Buxton]

Lest you think this is merely an old-fashioned trend, I assure you it continues in contemporary literature—my students are generally quite surprised when I call this to their attention. Joseph Benatov’s translation of Vladislav Todorov’s novel Zift is a prime example; the translation is generally quite excellent and highly literary, yet the tenses switch from past to present between one sentence and the next, which, as an English reader, I find very distracting.10 Indeed, the entire system of past tenses in Bulgarian is quite different from that in English. In addition to simple past and past perfect tenses (additionally complicated by those pesky Slavic perfective and imperfective forms), Bulgarian has a special witness or evidential form (преизказно наклонение) used for past events to which the speaker was not a witness, almost a fairy tale-like “once-upon-a-time form.” For depictions of historical events, however, Bulgarian often uses the fictional historical present (сегашно историческо време). Radoslav Mutafchiev discusses the different uses of past tenses in Bulgarian, arguing that they have distinct stylistic-semantic meanings. He differentiates the “memory view,” which uses past perfective verb tenses, from the “visual view,” which uses the historical present in combination with past imperfective, present, and future verb forms.11 Kalina Todorova notes the difficulty this presents for translators working from Bulgarian to English when establishing the temporal frame of a story, given the difference in the use of tenses between the two languages.12 These cases show that translating Bulgarian tense into English one-to-one is almost always a recipe for disaster, thus the translator-as-editor must work with the author to shift the story into a temporal framework that will sound natural

204

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

and non-distracting to English readers, while remaining true to the spirit of the Bulgarian original. This different use of tenses between Bulgarian and English is one example of such “grammatical category mismatches” a la Jakobson, but it is certainly not the only one. Uses of articles, honorifics, diminutives, and many other categories also stymie the Bulgarian-to-English translator-as-editor. Of course, one could argue that it is not necessary to “iron out” the differences, to kowtow to native English, that the translator should celebrate the “foreignness” of the text. Berman’s “trial of the foreign”13 or what more recently has been called the linguistic hegemony of English14 is an important one and should be debated more openly in translation circles. Of course, in any literary work, differences that must be translated are not found only on the linguistic level but also on the cultural level: the translator from Bulgarian to English faces this again and again—how to make the empty tropes of Socialist-speak, which largely are meaningful in their meaninglessness, sound “sensically nonsensical” to the English reader and not just like a bad translation? How to portray what Russian or Serbian or Turkish or even English sounds like to a Bulgarian speaker, to say nothing of the myriad historical and cultural associations each language carries in its wake? There are also more contemporary concerns the author-as-editor must take into account, which I have not seen written about, but which nevertheless affect what translators translate and how. Given that most English-language publishing houses and publishers/editors subscribe to a decidedly progressive, liberal, leftist worldview (which makes sense—otherwise why would they be willing to lose money publishing literature in translation?), I have found myself grappling with how to translate passages, scenes, and dialogue that might be offensive or unacceptable to such readers in an otherwise strong work. I have had to hold long and delicate discussions with a Bulgarian male author explaining why I felt his portrayal of a lesbian woman and her sexual experiences might not be palatable, as written, to western publishers. I have also had to explain to Bulgarian writers for whom Christian themes are an important part of their work how differently those texts will be interpreted by American readers: since religion was strongly discouraged in Bulgaria under socialism (although the Orthodox Church was never outright banned), Christian themes that might sound fresh and even have a flavor of cultural dissidence in Bulgarian will resonate very differently in an American cultural space, riven by Christian fundamentalism. This brings us again to the question of cultural hegemony and to what extent translators should “de-foreignize” the text to make it palatable to English-speaking publishers and readers; but since the gatekeepers of the publishing industry have their own cultural and ideological preferences, if a foreign writer and her translator wish to join the dance of the English-language publishing world, then we need to ask ourselves how far we are willing to edit a text culturally to sell the work to those who call the tunes. Or is such “content editing” a negative sleight-of-hand, with the fakir overstepping her bounds and somehow abusing her audience’s trust?

The Translator of Bulgarian Literature

205

Translator as Collaborator/Consultant Today most artists and intellectuals, including writers, have at least a working grasp of English, the current lingua franca. Many even have a strong mastery of English; yet, for various reasons, they do not wish to engage in solo self-translation. For the translator working from Bulgarian into English, interacting with such authors opens deep possibilities for collaboration and consultation that can greatly enrich the translation process. This also opens up the question: to what extent is the translator still an “author” of the translation—is the role now more akin to collaborator or consultant? It also raises other questions: When does the translator have the right to insist on an interpretation, or does the author’s opinion always take precedence? To what extent should editors, critics, and other outside readers be involved as arbiters? Roland Barthes, in his classic work “Death of the Author,” pooh-poohs authorial intentionalism and insists that readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to “liberate the text from interpretive tyranny.”15 Of course, the translator can be seen as a very particular sort of reader, perhaps the closest reader of a work, so is he/she also liberated from “interpretive tyranny?” In the workaday world of literary translation, far from the towering heights of French theory, I can confirm that authorial intentionalism is firmly entrenched; here it is indeed assumed (ala actual intentionalism) that the author’s intentions should determine the proper interpretation of a literary work.16 In my own translation work, however, I do not hew to either extreme—the death of the author or the primacy of authorial intention—but rather take a path that veers toward the latter. The author, if living and knowledgeable about the target language, is an incredibly rich resource for the translator, and it would be strange and perhaps even unethical to completely discount their interpretations. However, the translator, as a native speaker/consultant, should nevertheless have a voice in the key translation decisions.

Translator as Agent As a small language, Bulgarian has only a few professional literary agents—from my own experience and discussions with fellow translators working in a variety of languages, deals between Bulgarian writers and publishers usually come about through personal connections or unsolicited submissions. While I have written numerous query letters on behalf of my authors, I have found that international literary agents working in the English-language market have very little interest in Bulgarian authors, even those writing genre fiction, given the perceived small commercial potential. Indeed, I am aware of only one Bulgarian writer who has secured an international literary agent for the English-language market, but this relationship has not as-of-yet resulted in the sale of a work to a major US or UK publisher. Thus, the translator usually plays the role of the agent as well, cultivating relationships with publishers, submitting samples of work, acting as a liaison with the writer if the publisher expresses interest in the writer’s work.

206

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

The translator-as-agent also sometimes splits the investment risk with a Bulgarian author, translating a twenty- or thirty-page sample for free or for a greatly reduced price, if the Bulgarian publisher is not willing to finance it. It is often awkward for translators to take money directly from writers, knowing the economic difficulties they face in Bulgaria, the poorest country in the European Union; yet there are limited opportunities for government subsidies or other grants supporting precisely the translation of excerpts, which are so crucial in getting a foot in a publisher’s door. I have been extremely lucky as a translator-as-agent that the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF) began its work just as I was beginning my career in literary translation. Founded in 2007 by the American best-selling author Elizabeth Kostova, the organization has played a crucial role in the past decade in bringing US and UK editors, publishers, and writers to Bulgaria, mainly via their annual Sozopol seminars (week-long, collaborative seminars for English-speaking and Bulgarian writers). Since its founding, the EKF has acted as an informal literary agent in Bulgaria, directly and indirectly “brokering” many of my translations—directly, through their translation competitions and the coordination of dedicated issues of Bulgarian literature in US literary journals, and indirectly, in that through EKF programs I made most of the contacts that resulted in publications that I pursued independently of their formal programs. For example, my translations of the following Bulgarian novels were all published by Open Letter Press through the EKF novel in translation competition: Thrown into Nature by Milen Ruskov (2011), A Short Tale of Shame by Angel Igov (2013), 18% Gray by Zachary Karabashliev (2013), and Party Headquarters by Georgi Tenev (2015). Thanks to connections made via EKF seminars, I have also managed to place translations by Bulgarian authors in prestigious literary journals such as Ploughshares, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. More importantly, working with EKF has also taught me the ropes of the literary industry and how to advocate for my authors, a valuable arts management skill that I, like many of my fellow translators, had no prior experience with and would have been hard-pressed to develop while being based in Sofia and not having physical access to literary networks in the United States. Translators who have not been blessed with such a powerful mentoring institution would have to be incredible fakirs indeed to break into the English-language publishing system.

Translator as Marketer When it comes to marketing high-end, non-genre literature in translation, translators are often seen as assets almost as valuable as the authors themselves. Especially when an author does not speak English, the translator takes on many tasks including promoting the book, taking part in book tours and interviews, and working closely with the publisher to plan publicity events. Of course, in the case of a deceased author, such as Ivaylo Petrov, the translator is the primary “spokesperson” for the book, a heady responsibility, especially given the intricate Bulgarian historical and cultural nuances in the book. I am facing a similar situation with my current translation project, a set

The Translator of Bulgarian Literature

207

of four novellas by Georgi Markov (Penguin Random House, expected publication 2020), a Bulgarian author more famous for his death than his writing—he was the victim of the infamous “Umbrella Murder” on the Waterloo Bridge in London in 1978. Knowing that I have a responsibility to a live audience beyond the readership of the book inspired me to take extra care with my research into the author’s life and the context of the work.

Translator as Cultural Ambassador Even though Paul Auster called us translators “the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another,”17 I have found that our heroism does not always remain in the shade, which is a very good thing that perhaps reflects a growing recognition of the importance of our work. Besides official tours immediately following the release of the translated book, in my role as translator-as-marketer I continuously make the rounds of various Bulgarian communities in the United States, visiting Bulgarian schools and cultural institutions to talk about the books and my translation work. Bulgarian TV, radio, and print media rather regularly seek out my opinion on cultural issues or on the occasion of national holidays. In this sense, it is rewarding for the fakir to be invited out of the small circus tent of literary activity and onto the larger stage of cultural discussions about the place of literature and language in contemporary society.

Conclusion: The Cluster Effect So, if we combine the hustle of a factotum and the magic of a fakir, is there a chance to position Bulgarian literature prominently on the world stage? One of the obstacles that the authors of Превод и преход note is that, to date, unlike many of its neighboring literatures, Bulgarian literature has no “cornerstone” writer, no Nobel laureate with whom new or other writers can be related/juxtaposed; no Ivo Andrich or Ismail Kadare to signal to the literary world that this country is on the literary map, that world-class literature can be found here. This leads to what they call the stutter-start syndrome, in which every Bulgarian author who manages to break into the foreign market is “first”; they must essentially reinvent the wheel—or at least the literary context—for their readership.18 Georgi Gospodinov, with the notable success of both his Natural Novel (translated by Zornitsa Hristova and published by Dalkey Archive in 2005) and The Physics of Sorrow, is perhaps the closest Bulgaria has yet come to such a cornerstone writer, and, as he is still actively writing, he may very well come to play this role in the future. My translation of The Physics of Sorrow received perhaps the best reception yet, as far as Bulgarian books on the English-language market are concerned, winning the 2016 AATSEEL Prize for Literary Translation and being shortlisted for ALTA’s 2016 National Translation Award and the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, where it was the only work from a “small language” on the short list, alongside literary “superstars” such as

208

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Dostoyevsky and Clarice Lispector. Of course, most of this success is due to the innate beauty of the work and Gospodinov’s brilliant style, which manages to be haunting and humorous at the same time. Yet the book may have benefited also from a literary “cluster effect” of sorts that has increased the visibility of Bulgarian literature in recent years. The idea of a “cluster effect” was first posited by Harvard economist Michael Porter in The Competitive Advantage of Nations, but we, as consumers, are already familiar with the basic idea: when we want to shop for shoes, we most often go to that street in our town that is lined with shoe stores (or at least we did before the advent of malls).19 Although this may seem disadvantageous to any one shoe shop there, as it must compete with dozens of competitors on the same street, Porter notes: “Clusters promote both competition and cooperation … A cluster frequently enhances the reputation of a location in a particular field, making it more likely that buyers will turn to a vendor based there.”20 He also notes that, ironically, clusters make nations even more—rather than less—important in today’s globalized economy. Of course, writers and books are very different from shoe stores, but the “clustering” of Bulgarian authors in literary spaces can nevertheless raise the visibility of the country as a source of quality writing. Once again, I would point to the activity of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation as a prime example of the successful application of such a strategy. EKF executive director Milena Deleva has lobbied various literary journals over the past decade to feature multiple Bulgarian authors: Granta Online’s “Bulgaria Week” in August 2011; Absinthe 17 (2012); Words Without Borders May 2015 and March 2017 editions; and Drunken Boat 23, to name but a few. The series of eight Bulgarian novels published to date by Open Letter Press in cooperation with EKF is another example of the “cluster effect” that helps mitigate the stutter-start syndrome and creates a context: having heard of Bulgarian authors here and there and everywhere in the English-language literary space creates a point of reference and hopefully interest and buzz around the country’s literary scene. I also argue that this approach is a good counterpoint to the “scarcity narrative” I have heard propagated by many Bulgarian writers, who see the success or publication of a single author has somehow “taking away from” or “limiting” their own success; in my opinion, EKF’s experiment proves the opposite. It may be that Bulgaria hasn’t yet produced a Man Booker International prize winner, but it is becoming known as a go-to place for a quirky novel or a damn good short story. And with the help of factotum-fakirs in the form of a new generation of Bulgarian-to-English translators, hopefully we can keep this momentum going.

Notes 1 2

Chad Post, The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation and the Future of Reading (New York: Open Letter, 2011). Ани Бурова et al., Превод и преход – Българската литература в превод (1989– 2010): статистика, коментари, препоръки (София: Фондация „Следваща страница,” 2011).

The Translator of Bulgarian Literature

209

  3 Ivaylo Petov, Wolf Hunt, trans. Angela Rodel (New York: Archipelago Books, 2017).   4 Angela Rodel, “What Is Written for You: From Starvation to Salvation in Bulgaria,” Poets and Writers Magazine, November/December (2015).   5 Dimiter Kenarov, “Out of Exile: Notes on Bulgarian Literature,” Boston Review, January (2008).   6 For more on how I became a literary translator from Bulgarian, see my essay “Hearing Voices” in The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation (National Endowment for the Arts, 2014), www.arts.gov/publications/art-empathy-celebratingliterature-translation.  7 Post, The Three Percent Problem.   8 Roman Jakobsen, “On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 113–18.   9 Christopher Buxton, Petko Slaveikov, personal website, https://christopherbuxton. com/index.php/writing/translations/petko-slaveikov/. 10 Vladislav Todorov, Zift: Socialist Noir, trans. Joseph Benatov (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010). 11 Radoslav Mutafchiev (Радослав Мутафчиев), “Система на глаголните времена в разказ за минали събития,” in Помагало по българска морфология. Глагол (София: Наука и изкуство, 1976). 12 Kalina Todorova (Калина Тодорова), “Практически проблеми при превода на избрани разкази от Йорданка Белева от български на английски език,” (магистърска теза, Софийски Университет, София, 2018), 5–10. 13 Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 284–97. 14 Stuart Campbell, “English Translation and Linguistic Hegemony in the Global Era,” in In and Out of English: For Better, For Worse?, eds. Gunilla M. Anderman and Margaret Rogers (Clevedon, Buffalo and Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 2005), 27–38. 15 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–8. 16 Andrew Huddleston, “The Conversation Argument for Actual Intentionalism,” British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 3 (2012): 241–56. 17 Post, The Three Percent Problem. 18 Burova et al., Превод и превход, 10–12. 19 Michael Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (New York: Free Press, 1990). 20 Michael Porter, “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition,” Harvard Business Review, November/December 1998, https://hbr.org/1998/11/clusters-and-the-neweconomics-of-competition.

Part IV

Genetics: Bulgarian Literature’s Heredities, Affinities, and Prospects

17

Bulgarian Literature’s Localism and (Im)mobility Darin Tenev

In the conclusion to his What is World Literature? David Damrosch famously claims that world literature can be defined in a trifold manner: world literature is an “elliptical refraction of national literatures”; it is writing that “gains in translation”; and finally, it is a mode of reading, and not a set of texts.1 This definition takes into account respectively the context, the object, and the reception aspect of literature. At the same time, it discloses a problem inherent to the study of world literature, namely that the “worldly” part of a literary work should be regarded both as a feature of the work and as something that is not and could not be an immanent part of it. On the one hand, there must be something in the work itself that allows for its subsumption under the rubric of world literature. It may be its easily translatable language (whatever this means and if such a thing exists at all)2 or its thematics, its narrative or prosodic techniques, etc.3 On the other hand, world literature, as constituted by a specific mode of reading, will always be something that transcends the individual work, something outside of the work. Thus, to perceive a work as representative of world literature requires a mode of reading that relies on context, attitude, and more, but it can never be purely a product of a reader’s mind or of social and cultural conditions, for in this last case the work itself would turn out to be completely irrelevant. The enigma of world literature is then that it is simultaneously something outside of the literary works and yet something that transforms them immanently. It is perhaps this enigma that makes it so difficult to tackle concrete literary works when dealing with world literature. If one conceives of literary forms, techniques, devices, themes, genres, etc. as transmissible and hereditary, one can perhaps build a model of world literature on the basis of contemporary epigenetics. In that case, one could claim that, due to their hereditary nature, literature’s formal features function as a kind of literary DNA,4 which makes world literature act as a kind of epigenome that translates the influence of the environment and other external stimuli and controls in this way the expression of the literary genome. Genetics deals with the DNA sequence, its self-propagation through replication, the way the genetic code generates a messenger RNA and how this RNA commands the production of proteins. Epigenetics, on the other hand, investigates the work of histone proteins (spools around which the DNA is wrapped), its modifications (histone methylation, phosphorylation, and others), the DNA methylation, and the

214

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

role of non-coding RNA, in order to understand how all these regulate and control the gene expression, that is, the way the genotype gives rise to the phenotype. In terms of functions, it can be said that, while genetics examines the structuration, the conservation, and the reproduction of genetic information, epigenetics studies  the manner in which external factors not only influence but also control and guide the mentioned processes from the inside. David Allis, Thomas Jenuwein, and Danny Reinberg compare genetic information to a library with different sets of books and describe the epigenome as the agent that dictates which books are to be read, when, and in what order.5 This control is exerted through activation, deactivation, silencing, and other mechanisms. Philosophically speaking, epigenetics provides a model for the inscription of exteriority onto interiority to the point where the very distinction exterior/interior becomes problematic. When speaking of world literature in terms of epigenome, the epigenome should not be understood as a metaphor but as a theoretical model that facilitates the observation of the way external circumstances exert internal control over literary production.6 The literary DNA can be conceived as a hereditary code made immanent to literature. It can be easily seen that not all the coded information is activated. For example, in his sonnets, Baudelaire employed some aspects of the European sonnet tradition while leaving other aspects inactive. Or, to give another example, when Japanese authors introduced naturalism to Japan in the beginning of the twentieth century, they took up some features of French naturalism and left out others. The argument of the present chapter is that it is not the literary codes and the coded information that decide which aspect or feature will be expressed in a given work but exterior factors such as context, culture, society, politics, religion, science—factors that came to be inscribed in the texture of the literary texts, forming their epigenome. And this is valid even in the case of what would be the literary correlative of epigenetic errors or malfunctions. As one of the places of the crosstalk between literary works and outside factors, “world literature” has formed the epigenome of literature, or at least of what has been called “literature” since the end of the eighteenth century. The particular case I focus on concerns a seemingly minor redaction in a poem written by Pencho Slaveykov, one of the most important Bulgarian modernist authors. I argue that the change in the poem came as a reaction to another Bulgarian poet, Ivan Vazov.7 I aim to show that the ending, changed by Slaveykov himself, silenced some aspects of the poem for the sake of others by inscribing its aesthetic ideology onto the very texture of the work, demonstrating, paradoxically, both the localism and the universalism of Bulgarian literature during that period. Due to the limited space, the reading I will propose is bound to oversimplify the complexity both of the topic and of the original context. Nevertheless, I believe that the main point about Slaveykov’s ideology functioning as epigenome is valid and can be further demonstrated through other works of his. In the pages that follow I will use the terms local and universal not as universal denominators but as they were employed or implied by Slaveykov in progressive synonymization with other terms such as transient and eternal, crowd and individual, politics and art, etc.

Localism and (Im)mobility

215

Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912), son of Petko Slaveykov, a journalist and a poet who played an important role in the Bulgarian National Revival, was a founding member of the Мисъл (Thought) circle, formed around the eponymous literary journal, published between 1892 and 1907. The Мисъл circle introduced modernism and individualism to Bulgaria at the end of the nineteenth century as well as symbolism and other European literary trends later on. Even though initially the journal worked with authors from previous generations, gradually the circle became very critical of the artistic conceptions of their predecessors and, around 1905, started a feud that came to be called the Young and the Old controversy, after the title of а book by Krastyo Krastev who was the leading literary critic of the circle. The main object of attack was their former friend Ivan Vazov (1850–1921), who, since the 1880s, was widely recognized as Bulgaria’s most influential writer and poet. According to Krastev, Vazov’s aesthetic views were obsolete as he did not take into account the difference between the reality outside literature and the aesthetic reality created by the works. The Мисъл circle described Vazov as a poet who was writing for the crowd and whose taste was not elevated—as it should have been—above the tastes of the crowd. That was the reason, they claimed, why he wrote about the national struggles and did not focus on the modern problems of the artist’s individual soul.8 That was the reason why he confused the field of literature with that of politics. His literary production was too local, too homegrown, and, therefore, blind to the European context and to universal aesthetic values. The topic of Vazov’s works and his writing style belonged to the past, Vazov himself was “but a shadow of the past.”9 Today it is generally acknowledged that, in his own poetic works, Pencho Slaveykov— whether he was writing about great artists such as Michelangelo, Beethoven, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, or reworking Bulgarian folklore motifs with local rustic characters such as the ones he described in his poems “Ралица” (Ralitsa) and “Бойко” (Boiko)—always insisted on strong individuals who follow their ideals even at the cost of suffering and death. Slaveykov’s individualism was associated with values and ideals he claimed to be universal, and he attempted to perform in his writing what his characters did in the poems. Influenced by Nietzsche, Slaveykov often wrote philosophical poetry on artistic creation and artistic struggles, thus turning his own writing into a theme of his writing. His poem dedicated to Michelangelo is among the most celebrated of his philosophical poems and for decades it was a part of the Bulgarian high school curriculum. It tells the story of Michelangelo’s problems in the course of his work on the statue of Moses and ends with an interpretation of the legend, according to which, after having finished the statue, the artist struck it with his hammer and ordered it to speak. In the last and most comprehensive edition of Slaveykov’s collected works from the end of the 1950s, the date under the poem reads “Dec. 19, 1896,”10 but the first publication is actually earlier; the poem was included in an issue of the journal Мисъл from 1895. The editor’s explanatory note makes it clear that Slaveykov had already started working on it in 1890.11 “1896” is the year indicated for the first time by Slaveykov in the 1907 edition of his poetry collection Епически песни (Epic songs). There is a difference in direction, however, between the 1907 edition and all the publications that preceded it. The ending of the 1907 version, which has become canonical, reads

216

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

“Carry the idea of time/into eternity … Speak, Moses!”12 The earlier version is “Born in a battle, you should lead them into battle—speak, Moses!”13 Usually this redaction is explained away with a reference to what Slaveykov himself said about the poem in an article from 1906. There, he stressed the fact that Michelangelo refused to participate in political battles in order to follow his artistic ideal, which transcends time and everyday struggles.14 The critics’ interpretation states that while, at first, Slaveykov had the artist turn into a leader of the people, later he abandoned this version, seeing such battles—that is, the struggles of the people, the battles of the here and now, the political and social conflicts—as belonging to everyday life and therefore transient, and the idea as the only thing that lasts because it is a bearer of eternity.15 However, both the text of the poem and that of the article from 1906 do not, in fact, suggest an abandonment of every type of struggle. The article states that the artist, who was once a socially engaged man (обществен борец, a fighter for social causes), refuses to participate in the everyday struggles (преките борби на деня)—but the fight as such is still an ideal of his; only now he understands better that there are different fights and different ends to achieve.16 The main difference between the two understandings, according to the article, is that, before, Michelangelo was following someone else’s orders and now he follows his own will, and he chooses his own fights, turning the struggles into material for his art. It is in this manner that artists learn how to depict the eternal that transcends everything temporal. Slaveykov’s argument is complex but the difference of direction is clearly visible. The first ending suggests that the artist who has discovered the eternal should go back to the people, that is, to the transitory world of the here and now, and lead the people in their struggles. Тhe second ending stresses only the first part of this movement, the one that leads from here to eternity (implying perhaps that this is in itself already sufficient for the leader). Things get more interesting if one accounts for the fact that the legend of Michelangelo and his Moses was already familiar to the Bulgarian readers because of a short poem by Ivan Vazov called “The Statue of Moses” and included in his collection Italy from 1884.17 In just twelve lines, Vazov tells the story of the proud artist who wanted to bring his creation to life and ordered it to speak. Not only the general topic, but the very choice of words in Slaveykov’s poem corresponds with and refers to Vazov’s version. At the beginning, Vazov writes “The great artist,” and Slaveykov says “The great master”;18 Vazov writes how “in a magical way the dead marble came to life,”19 and Slaveykov speaks of “marble images” frozen “in a deadly stillness”20 in order to slowly reach the point where the artist will bring life to the statue at the end of the poem.21 What is surprising in the case of the poems on Michelangelo is the position Slaveykov took. And it is surprising precisely in the light of his later criticism of Vazov. Vazov’s poem presented the problem of the relationship between a creator and his creation. Slaveykov added the background to this relationship that refuses to be just a background and incessantly comes to the fore. The exterior background to Michelangelo’s relationship with his statues is the local socio-political context. At first, it may seem as if this context belongs to the transitory and obstructs the artistic work’s path toward eternity. What Slaveykov’s poem stresses, however, is that the exterior political and social context becomes an obstacle the moment one withdraws from

Localism and (Im)mobility

217

it and turns it into an object of pure contemplation, nothing more than a source of artistic creation. This is expressed through the inner voice of Michelangelo: Miserable son of feckless times! What evil demon veiled your glance So, watching, you don’t see a thing around you? Decay swarms around you Victims are killed around you On the bloody alter of your homeland, Their bodies piling … You contemplate The horrors for your own enjoyment – You use them as an inspiration22

The artist creates but lifeless statues, dead and still, precisely because he no longer fights with the people. In other words, the transient struggles obstruct the path to eternity as long as one is not engaged with them. The paradox here is that if one engages with socio-political questions one cannot be fully dedicated to art. The other side of the same paradox is expressed by Slaveykov’s phrase, describing Michelangelo as “an obedient slave of proud Art.”23 The artist is seen, much in the tradition of Romanticism dear to Slaveykov, as a “Creator,” a god, and this is why art should serve him and obey his biddings. However, when artists care only about art, they become obedient slaves and, therefore, cannot be Creators any longer. In Vazov’s poem, there is only the couple of the artist and his work. Slaveykov adds a third element, the transient element of the socio-political struggles that radically puts into question the relationship between the artist and what he creates. In the poem, this putting into question is operated through the appearance of the demonic inner voice, mentioned above, that blames Michelangelo for being indifferent to what happens outside his studio. The transient reality external to art has its counterpart within the artist himself as a sort of repenting conscience that makes Michelangelo go mad. Michelangelo’s madness is mentioned already in Vazov’s version but there it is not commented upon and seems to be due to the desire of the artist for his creation to come to life. In Slaveykov’s version, the madness is caused by the demonic voice that accuses him: “Where is the fighter? Where is the brave leader? He has become a slave above all slaves.”24 To the words of his inner demon, words of exteriority turned into interiority, Michelangelo answers: Wretched is the life of those who think In this world we live only in the transitory. Ascended above it Live others—they reject the transient burden And make their way into the idea that is beneath it. Some ardently express it with words Others spill their own blood to protect it, Yet others cut it with chisel out of the marble And send it from this day to eternity!25

218

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

At first glance, the transitory, which includes what I called the “socio-political,” is rejected. Yet it should be noted that, in order to be sent to eternity, the idea, lying under the transient burden, must be something different from eternity. To reject the transitory does not mean to suspend or to cancel it but rather to keep something essential from temporality and, in this way, to open the possibility of turning something temporal into something eternal. Thus, it is in the conservation of the transitory within the idea, sending it to eternity, that Michelangelo finds a way both to accept what his inner demon is saying and simultaneously to object to it. (Michelangelo says: “Your alluring words are deceiving, o somber genius.”26) And here, it seems, at least two possible solutions emerge, associated with what I called earlier a difference of direction. On the one hand, the incarnation of the idea within the work of art can lead back to the transitory, so that the crowd and its transitoriness are guided toward eternal values. On the other hand, the incarnation of the idea can separate the artist and the work from everything ephemeral and temporary, and then the idea will be divorced from the transitory, under which it lies, and will be associated only with the eternal. It is here, on this crossroad of the solution to the paradox, that the end of the poem plays an important part. The first version says: “Born in a battle, you should lead them into battle—speak, Moses!”27 and thus implies the first solution. The artist must go back to the here and now, to the crowd, and lead it with his works to the eternal. After having reached the idea beneath the ephemeral, he must return to the transient and introduce the idea to the people. This ending actually develops the preceding lines concerning the ascension above the transitory and shows the next step, the step after the ascension—a step back to the transitory. The figure of Moses turns out to be quite exemplary in this context as it represents both the ascension and the movement back to the people. Michelangelo repeats Moses’ own movement and, with the striking of his hammer that is to make Moses speak, it is no longer Moses but the Renaissance artist himself who will lead the crowd (“them”) with the statue he created. This first version forms an implicit criticism of Vazov. Vazov had missed not only the socio-political dimension of the transitory when treating the creative process, but also, and most importantly, the need for the artist to reach back to the common people and lead them. The edited version of 1907, however, follows the second solution. It says “You must carry the idea of time/into eternity … Speak, Moses!”28 and thus practically repeats the preceding lines (“send it from this day to eternity”) and does not develop them. This implies that there is only one direction, the direction from the transitory to the eternal. The words “the idea of time” make clear that the idea should be thought on the side of the temporal and on that of the eternal. What happened between 1895 and 1907 that made Slaveykov change the ending of the poem? The answer to this is not hard to find and, in a way, it was already suggested. The controversy between Young and Old started around 1906. Krastev’s book, referred to above and containing texts written for the most part between 1905 and 1906, was published in 1907, the same year Slaveykov published the edited version. What is striking is that the image of Vazov that Krastev and Slaveykov were criticizing was hardly compatible with the implied author of “The Statue of Moses.” Even though both Krastev and Slaveykov said that Vazov’s poetry collection Italy was better than most of

Localism and (Im)mobility

219

his writings, they preferred to ignore it in their criticism and, in this way, to construct a one-dimensional stereotypical representation of their predecessor. The first stereotype of Vazov, however, was the stereotype of an artist who cannot transcend the local context, an author, who writes for the crowd and whose works are ardently engaged with the socio-political situation of his day. It seems as if in order to distinguish himself from this stereotype, Slaveykov had no other option but to change the ending and thus affirm his own aesthetic principle as different from Vazov’s. But different from which Vazov—from the one engaged with the here and now, with the transitory, with the political conflicts, or from the one in Italy, addressing the question of artistic creation? It could be claimed that Vazov cared to enlighten the people and at the same time saw the eternal in the transitory. The ending that read “you should lead them into battle”29 turned out to belong to what Slaveykov himself criticized as belonging to the shadow of the past, that is, to the conception that the poet must go back to the people and the local context. Yet, in editing the ending the way he did, Slaveykov came closer to Vazov’s version of the story in “The Statue of Moses” where the crowd is excluded and everything is decided between the artist and his work. If this reading of the redaction is valid, there is at least one more corollary to it. By insisting on the association of the idea and the eternal (the idea of time being what transcends time and leads to the eternal), Slaveykov participated in one of the most crucial paradigm shifts in the history of Bulgarian literature. The shift itself, however, since a shift cannot be but something temporal and temporary, is a part of the sociopolitical struggles, for example the struggle for symbolic power in the field of literature at the beginning of the twentieth century in Bulgaria. The redaction, it can be said, is itself political, as it distributes values in a particular society and in a particular field and is part of a struggle for power. In this sense, the gesture of redaction contradicts, to an extent, the content of the redaction; the redaction contradicts itself. It says something different than what it does. Its performative success, however, can be deduced from the fact that it is Slaveykov’s poem that was included in the high school curriculum for decades and Vazov’s “The Statue of Moses” remains, to this day, unknown to the wider audience. If one steps back from the close reading of the two poems, one can see a more general pattern that reveals the work of world literature as an epigenome. Both Vazov and Slaveykov wrote about Michelangelo’s Moses and the very choice of the topic implies the consciousness of a common cultural space, shared not only with all of Europe but with all the artists around the world who have a sense that the statue of Moses and the story of its creation embody eternal aesthetic values. At the end of the nineteenth century, Slaveykov, trying to introduce to Bulgarian literature what he found during his studies abroad,30 wrote his philosophical poems, with “Michelangelo” among them, where he discussed at length the relationship between the ephemeral and the eternal, a question that was posed over and over again by European literature but with a particular intensity after the Weimar classicism. Michelangelo in Slevikov’s interpretation repeats Moses in his double movement—transcendence and descent back to the transitory to become a leader. The poem suggests strongly that Slaveykov himself, speaking of Michelangelo, repeats the gesture of Michelangelo. Not unlike

220

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

Zarathustra, Slaveykov had to come down from his mountain, i.e., his stay in Germany (1892–1898), and then lead Bulgarian literature to new horizons of art. This corresponds to the first version. After that, it seems Slaveykov was willing to create an image of himself as being above the crowd and the local quarrels, and he changed the ending of the poem.31 The aesthetic situation of the time, the struggles in the literary field in Bulgaria, the rising role of Nietzsche for the European artistic production, the expansion of modernism—one can qualify all these phenomena as pertaining to the increasing part played by world literature in Bulgaria. It made Slaveykov read Vazov from a certain perspective and then reread him from another. The criticism against Vazov was always about his manner of refracting national literature—in the first version of “Michelangelo” the problem was that there was not enough engagement with the political situation (on the parts of Michelangelo and of Vazov); in the second, the problem was that Vazov was all about transient national problems, that Vazov was too local and, therefore, a shadow of the past. This mode of reading that permanently had to compare Bulgarian writers, Young and Old, with what was modern and what was dominant, gave birth not only to critical texts such as Krastyo Krastev’s Young and Old, but also to literary works that reflected it in themselves and were, to a certain degree, self-reflexive about this. “Michelangelo” is a poem about the role of what is outside of art in art itself. Paradoxically, precisely when this role came to be seen as not that important with the second version, it played its most important part, provoking Slaveykov to change the ending. Could this have been the blindspot of “Michelangelo” and Slaveykov’s self-reflexivity? In trying to move beyond the pretended localism of the “Old,” Slaveykov fell back into the localism he was criticizing by engaging in a controversy that had only local significance. And yet, it was perhaps this localism that helped him get nominated for the Nobel prize later on, as it was a localism that strived to open up the Bulgarian literary field to the world. By immobilizing Vazov in a stereotype, Slaveykov immobilized his own work in the very narrow context of homegrown quarrels and, at the same time, succeeded in transcending this context. More importantly, Slaveykov’s own disavowed localism testified to the function of world literature as it reflected the work of exterior factors as immanent to a work, to its form and its theme. The epigenome of world literature deactivated one set of possibilities in the first version of “Michelangelo” and another in the second version. The expression of what was coded in the poem’s DNA led to two different versions, betraying the impossibility of drawing a clear-cut line between mobility and immobility, locality and universality. Contemporary epigenetic studies have demonstrated that not only the DNA but also the epigenome itself can be inherited (even if the existence of an epigenetic code is doubted). “World literature,” the notion and the “thing” itself, changes. But one might ask if, in a way, the epigenome from the time of Slaveykov’s redaction of his poem has not been transmitted and inherited by the subsequent Bulgarian literary production destined to repeat a disavowed localism that reveals precisely its openness to the world.

Localism and (Im)mobility

221

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8

9

David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 282. On the relationship between translatability and world literature, see Emily Apter, Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013). Franco Moretti has demonstrated the role of the interference of native and foreign literary forms in the way world literature works. See Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). I want to express my gratitude to Mariko Noami who first proposed to me this idea of literary DNA. See David Allis, Thomas Jenuwein, and Danny Reinberg, Epigenetics (New York: Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory Press, 2007). It should be noted that the very term “metaphor” could be rather misleading in this context, for it presupposes that one can tell the difference between the literal and the metaphorical when speaking of genetics and epigenetics, that is, when speaking precisely of the transcription and translation of information. And what if the literal stratum of genetics were already metaphorically constituted? Jacques Derrida implies as much in his seminar on “Life Death” from 1975 to 1976, where he discusses genetics and the work of Francois Jacob. See Jacques Derrida, La vie la mort. Séminaire (1975–1976) (Paris: Seuil, 2019). Derrida claims that “what has been discovered [with modern genetics] is the text, the fact that reproduction, an essential structure of the living being, functions as a text. The text is the model. Or rather the model of models.” (La vie la mort, 112). The model I will build here, in this sense, will repeat inevitably the very operation I will trace. Considering the limits of the present chapter, I cannot pursue further the corollaries of this problem. On Derrida’s relation to biology, see Francesco Vitale, Biodeconstruction. Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Mauro Senatore (New York: SUNY Press, 2018). It is perhaps worth noting that Pencho Slaveykov and Ivan Vazov are two of the three Bulgarian authors who were proposed for a Nobel prize in literature between 1880 and 1930 (the third one is Ivan Grozev). See Елена Азманова-Рударска, “Пенчо Славейков, Иван Вазов, Иван Грозев и Нобеловите предложения от България,” in Пенчо Славейков: 150 години от рождението му, eds. Александра Антонова et al. (София: Боян Пенев, 2017), 503–26. Of course, just like Vazov, Slaveykov also wrote about the national struggles and about his motherland. I will say proleptically that the criticism toward Vazov after 1905 concerns not so much what Vazov wrote about but rather the way he wrote about it. Slaveykov famously claimed that he wanted to find the human in the Bulgarian. See Pencho Slaveykov (Пенчо Славейков), “Българската поезия” (1906), in Събрани съчинения, vol. 5 (София: Български писател, 1959), 177, 184. See Krastyo Krastev (Кръстьо Кръстев), Млади и стари (Тутракан: Мавродинов, 1907) www.slovo.bg/showwork.php3?AuID=308&WorkID=11389&Level=2; Pencho Slaveykov (Пенчо Славейков), “Българската поезия.” On the Мисъл circle’s attitude toward Vazov, see Galin Tihanov (Галин Тиханов), “Вазов и европеизирането на българската литература,” Нова христоматия, Literature forum, 18/May 1, 1992; Galin Tihanov (Галин Тиханов), Жанровото съзнание на кръга “Мисъл,” (София: Симолини, 1998).

222

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

10 Pencho Slaveykov (Пенчо Славейков), “Микел Анжело,” Събрани съчинения, vol. 1 (София: Български писател, 1958), 283–7. 11 Ibid., 410. 12 Ibid., 287. All translations are mine. 13 Ibid., 412. 14 Slaveykov, “Българската поезия,” 182–3. 15 See the editor’s note in Pencho Slaveykov, “Микел Анжело [Michelangelo],” 412. See Ангел Тодоров, “Pencho Slaveykov,” in Пенчо Славейков, Събрани съчинения, vol.1, 33; Стоян Каролев, Жрецът войн, vol. 1, 91; Михаил Неделчев, “Пенчо Славейковият монументализъм,” in Пенчо Славейков: 150 години от рождението му, 20; Нина Панталеева, В поетичния свят на Пенчо Славейков, 71–4; Стоян Каролев, Преображенията на поета, 71. 16 Slaveykov, “Българската поезия,” 182. 17 See Ivan Vazov (Иван Вазов), Събрани съчинения, vol. 2 (София: Български писател, 1975), 291–2. 18 Slaveykov, “Микел Анжело,” 283. 19 Vazov, Събрани съчинения, 291. 20 Slaveykov, “Микел Анжело,” 283. 21 Ibid., 287. 22 Ibid., 284. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 287. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 412. 30 Slaveykov studied in Leipzig from the fall of 1892 to the summer of 1898. See Тодоров, “Пенчо Славейков,” 21; Каролев, Жрецът войн, vol. 1, 82–8. 31 Karolev’s study demonstrates convincingly that, in fact, Slaveykov was truly engaged with various political, social, and cultural problems and conflicts throughout his life and, in this sense, the image he created of himself was not entirely true (See Каролев, Жрецът войн, vol. 1, 97–145.).

18

1963, 2016: Two Perspectives on Blaga Dimitrova Julia Kristeva Translated from French by Lubomir Terziev

1963: Blaga Dimitrova’s Singular Commitment1 I have heard people say that Blaga Dimitrova is a misfit—a woman, a poet at that, and so contemplative on top of it. Critics, who often accuse her of dealing with “abstractions,” reproach her for “thinking up things.” This recalls the reproaches by French men of letters addressed to French women writers: when they create, they allegedly “make themselves up as men.” It is true that Blaga Dimitrova does not write for women only—her work reaches toward everyone. However, it appears to me that her detractors should at least make themselves up as women, more specifically women from the 1960s: this would probably help them sense the “reflective” stirrings of the world. In fact, this poet’s lyrical persona is, grandiloquent though this may sound, the contemporary woman, who has just emerged from her lethargy to embark, eagerly, upon a quest for the unknown, venturing into the virgin territories of science, the virgin spots on the maps, the virgin roads of the heart. Hence the blend of sense and sensibility; of a palpitating urge to “be one with the world” and a feverish probing into the self; of rigorous moderation and discernment animated by tenderness; of impetuous love that transforms the heart into a radar and a sudden withdrawal into momentary reflection that asserts its presence without destroying the magic. This results in a striking amplitude between emotion and rationality. The poetic pulsations of her temperament and the historical necessity for women’s emancipation underpin this duality. It informs each of Blaga Dimitrova’s books regardless of the concrete incarnations, the trials of celebrity, and the unbearable mortalities projected onto her lyrical persona.

Seeing the River, Hearing the Water The marriage of reason and emotion, of intellect and femininity, lends a striking tenderness, fragility, and nobility to the singular universe of this committed poet. These qualities permeate the entire palette of her imagery. Look at the threads with which she weaves her world. From the first step, a dazzling light overwhelms us. Ethereal and yet dense, free and clear-eyed, this is not the suffocatingly hot blaze of summer; it is the cool glimmer of spring, the glimmer of sunrise or sunset. There is also this serenity that

224

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

seizes us: a light puff of air, a mountain breeze. This poet may not be a virtuoso in terms of sound imagery, and her verses may sometimes limp phonetically. However, we can hear the generation of sounds: fluttering wings, muted whispers. We can see the river; we can hear the water. The writer is hypnotized, as it were, by the playfulness of the flowing fluid. And yet, this liquid flesh that throbs, rolls, shimmers, and dissolves into light—the flesh that inhabits most of her poems—is not an arbitrary or abstract pattern. Its sparkling mobility embodies the writer’s cool temperament and anxious spirit; it embodies her aspiration, which, to her, is also a duty to run, to overflow, and to splash around. Beware the magic of this enchantment! Anyone who succumbs to it will fail to detect the tide of “cherished” and “dearest” anguish—to be felt in the alchemy—which “washes the shores of the world” and which a poet like Antokolski2 dramatically reveres. Each of us prefers certain words: far from suggesting a poor command of language, they probe into the secrets buried in the author’s inner experience. In modulating her voice, Blaga often refers to the imprint of her “steps”: a gentle vertigo of acute fears that the heroine experiences, a furtive trace of her vulnerability. “The Curve of the Hand” has accommodated the desire for a safe haven, for tranquil happiness, for intimacy. The “step,” the “curve of the hand,” and the forever insatiable “gulps” that seek to quench the thirst for space and action. This pool of water, light, cool breeze, and lost steps adds an ethereal, fluid, and subtle quality to Blaga Dimitrova’s poetry. Measure and moderation. No blazing colors, no loud sensations. Her coldness is not chilling, since it is enlivened by spring. Voracious eyes marvel at the world and gaze at us from every nook, seeking rhythmical harmony. In the well-thought-out ordering of this world, accurately weighed to the gram and culled with precision, we discover our own selves. And we feel the presence of its creator, who has touched all essential things, accessing the most furious elements without unleashing or disturbing them, but ennobling them instead. This is the case because the poet’s impetus for elevation is mixed with her appeal for more compassion, friendship, and love. That is what she enchants us with. Actually, this explains the paradox of Blaga Dimitrova: a poet who conveys a sense of civic duty without any heroism (all heroic overtones ring hollow in her voice); a poet building up intellectual patterns without speculation (she has no taste for systems and generalizations); a poet of amorous transport without all-consuming passion (she always succeeds in appeasing both the others and herself). The words said about another woman poet apply to her: “In her hands she holds the sun like a flower.”

Intimacy at the Risk of Commitment One finds throughout Dimitrova’s oeuvre her principal theme, which could be described as a lyrical yearning for harmony. What concerns her is reconnecting with the inner space of humans and reconnecting them with the world. It is about refining the wealth we have within the self; it is about elevating it and making it palpable by weaving it into the ethics and the beauty of this world down here. Would the reconciliation between the ethical and the aesthetic make humans better? This query is perceptible in all of Blaga

Two Perspectives on Blaga Dimitrova

225

Dimitrova’s works: these are the works of a moralist. Their fundamental motif remains the quest for harmony between the individual and other people, between the private and the communal, between happiness and duty, between the hearth and the world, between the fold into the intimate and the leap into immeasurable latitudes. She believes that these correspondences are possible and reaffirms their existence. The absence of equilibrium, in all its guises, hurts her and fills her verses with a melancholy peculiar to her: as light as summer dew, it makes her watercolor poetry similar to a sunlit morning. Her creative poetic mind seeks integration rather than conflict. She sets different elements in opposition only to highlight the affinities between them. Wary of ruptures and open to communion, Dimitrova is on the brink of failure when she tries to preach, with antithetical pathos, her moral principles (“Envoy,” “Painter,” “Construction Worker”). And yet, she makes a success of it when she reveals the same principles through a story of fusion, intimacy, and warmth (“The Volunteer Worker’s Mother”). Just as the flesh of her words feeds on keen sensibility and astute contemplation, it is the epic rather than the dramatic or the lyrical quality that prevails in Blaga Dimitrova’s poetry. Importantly, the epic scent that traverses the poet’s oeuvre seems to represent women’s desire for autonomy and fulfilment. The pathos of women’s liberation and Dimitrova’s penchant for meditation make her probe some of modernity’s major figures, such as the Reichstag hero Georgi Dimitrov3 (her namesake) and the antifascist militant Liliana Dimitrova4 (another namesake).

An Epic Meditation “Not under a wing but winged.” In the same vein: “Don’t let yourself be taken under anyone’s wing, spread your wings.” Here is more: “Not shrouded but rather with my spirit unsheathed / Not sheltered behind someone’s back / but next to someone’s shoulder braving the wind” (“Longing”—See You Tomorrow). For a woman with this kind of longing, not only is love endless but it could never be an end in itself. Rather than being focused on the beloved, love is what makes living and fulfilling oneself possible. A desired closeness and the ultimate bond, love absorbs those beings for whom and in whom the writer lives. Dimitrova projects this conception of the amorous bond onto the explorer of the stars, who symbolizes the future of the human race and its aspiration toward moral elevation […]. Is it possible? […] If she emerges from her own self, the poet risks losing the authenticity of her perspective. If she confines herself within the self, she feels lonely, and abandoning herself to absence, she craves vast expanses. Acute pain, the drama of liberty, the paradox of creation: “Have we discovered / such a speed in this world / tell me / that could for a fleeting moment at least / tear me out of solitude / and exile me away from myself?” (“Takeoff ”). Blaga Dimitrova has transformed this existential angst into a poetic passion that will push her relentlessly toward “heights as yet unscaled.” Sofia, 1963

226

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

2016: A Peasant of the Danube Aragon, as the “Peasant of Paris,” turns every image into an astonishing provocation. Blaga, my “peasant of the Danube,” squeezes out of the harshness of the Bulgarian language a pacified murmur, the unfathomable lightness of lucid minds. There is no common ground between the two alchemists of the word, except for their fascination with communism and the disenchantment that still floats over the eddies of the celebrated river. I am a “peasant of the Danube”: no one has ever spared me, surreptitiously or overtly, this pejorative expression that you will find on the web, in spite of the fact that, half a century ago, history and my passion for France made the Bulgarian student into a French citizen. Today, the peasant (male or female) of the Danube is no longer (or not only) the articulate rustic praised by La Fontaine, nor the down-to-earth animal—credulous, wise, or cunning—of Molière, nor, for that matter, that Candide whose naïve simplicity used to throw into relief bourgeois hypocrisy in the time of the Romantics. Whether appreciated or rejected, the “Bulgarian poetess” chosen by Updike has entrusted me with the solitude of those who are “on the road.” An implacable estrangement which starts with estrangement from the self, then reemerges in two selves, and never lets go of us, the “women peasants of the Danube”: brushing against and crossing the shores of those settled-in, relentlessly resuming our “foolhardy departures without experience / and without luggage,” “condemned / to always make our debut / up to the end.” This perfidious exclusion is not confined to the Danube, and it is common knowledge that the imposing grandeur of the European continent has been constructed as much by waves of migrants and invaders as by the art of ridiculing the intruders, “its” own intruders, before it all culminates into genocide or before they take shelter, to this day, behind the walls of shame. No doubt about that. And yet, by urging us to pack up and go, exclusion, which is consubstantial with communities, has taught us here—in Europe and beyond its crimes—that there is no enchanted shore. There is no final goal, nor is there an absolute end. So much so that “death will also be a beginning / Of what, though?” Listen to the openness of the question that my gentle “peasant of the Danube” inscribes on the horizon of the empty sky. It epitomizes Danubian liberty: the only possible one, the extreme one. Unique in the world, probably. Blaga Dimitrova, whose verses my father had made me learn by heart, became my symbolic mother. Without my mother taking umbrage at this. They belonged to the same generation and their destinies were diametrically opposed. My mother gave up teaching biology to commit herself to her daughters’ education; Blaga, completely devoted to writing, took her time before she became the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese girl, whom she saved from American napalm. Both of them, without consulting each other, kept repeating the same dictum, which, playing with the music of the Bulgarian language, succinctly expressed their philosophy as women: Ne zakriljana da si, a okrilena (“Be not under a wing but winged”). In short, “Don’t take shelter, spread your wings and fly.”

Two Perspectives on Blaga Dimitrova

227

In January, 1989, I saw her again after a long time, when during François Mitterand’s visit to Sofia, Blaga was one of the dissidents with whom our French delegation met. In September, Blaga cried with my sister, my mother, and me, when my father was killed in a Bulgarian hospital, where experiments with senior citizens were being conducted a few months before the fall of the wall. Our angry friends accompanied us to the cemetery, before the regime imposed the cremation that my father, being an Orthodox Christian, had refused. The “girl with eyes of gold,” beloved by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the girl who, as John Updike recalls in his novella The Bulgarian Poetess, mysteriously gave him a true liftoff during a short public presentation on literature—this girl was nominated as vice-president of the new democratic republic after the fall of the wall. She did not abandon the ideal of “socialism with a human face”; her vital impetus drove her irresistibly toward a new beginning. But disappointment did not take long to appear; the writer was not cut out for the compromises of power. Blaga quit her post, and without complaining or criticizing, in our rare phone conversations, she would only share thoughts on the pleasures and torments of writing and maternity. That same gentleness (blaga means “gentle” in my mother tongue) in a voice that follows the curvatures of water. Anger and depression, so uncontrollable on the banks of the Danube, dissolved into appeased intimacy, in the curve of the hand and the heart—an orgasm of words, intelligence, and modesty. The poems that I had admired in my youth motivated me to devote one of my few essays published in Bulgarian to this woman “condemned to always make a debut.” Paris, 2016

Notes 1

2 3

4

An extended version of the first part of Julia Kristeva’s article appeared in Septemvri— the literary journal of the Union of Bulgarian Writers—in 1963, vol. 7, 216–24. The present version, “1961, 2016: deux regards sur Blaga Dimitrova,” published in La revue de belles-lettres 2 (2016). Pavel Antokolsky (1896–1978) was a Russian poet and theatre director in the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow and in Tomsk. His poem, “All we who in his name …” was written in 1956 and widely circulated among student groups in the 1950s. Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949) was a member of the Komintern. Accused of setting fire to the Reichstag in 1933, he retaliated by accusing his accusers. The Reichstag trial, which was the first vehement reaction against Nazism, won Dimitrov a worldwide reputation. As the saying went, “There is only one man in Germany, and it is Dimitrov.” He became the first prime minister of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and established a Stalinist regime. Liliana Dimitrova (1918–1944) was a communist militant, a member of the antifascist Resistance movement. She committed suicide to avoid falling in the hands of Bulgaria’s police during the German occupation.

19

Bulgarian Women’s Literature: Plots and Stories Miglena Nikolchina

Women’s Time If we recall the famous distinction between story (фабула) as the narrative in its chronological sequence and plot (сюжет) as the rearrangement of this sequence in the actual unfolding of what is narrated,1 we will have to acknowledge from the outset that the history of Bulgarian women’s literature functions more like a plot than a story. In it, the simple temporal continuity is systematically and, in a certain sense, necessarily warped. This is because Bulgarian women’s literature (I say “literature,” but my focus will be on poetry) unfolds simultaneously in two histories (if we can call them both “history”). Firstly, there is the history of schools, styles, aesthetic and conceptual experiments, Oedipal struggles and various employments of femininity—the “masculine” history of literary events, presented in accordance with their traditional (self)arrangements. In this history, the poetesses visit certain cafes, while never setting foot in certain others, converse with certain poets, while ignoring certain others, gravitate around certain “circles,” and offer their own versions of Who’s Who in Bulgarian literature: sometimes with grave consequences as in the feud which resulted from Dora Gabe’s omission of Kiril Hristov’s name in a pen-club paper she read in Prague.2 Secondly, Bulgarian women’s poetry is inscribed in the “history” of “monumental” women’s time (in Julia Kristeva’s terms).3 It is the time of grand cycles, of slow changes, of stylistic conservatism, of ironic distance from political fuss (Hegel’s “eternal irony of the community”), of “eternal femininity”—a circular, paradoxical chronology, marked by cadences and vortices. The intersection of these two temporal orders is shaped into a specific history of Bulgarian women’s literature through the writing but also through the biographies of the two “first” women-poets Dora Gabe (1886–1983) and Elisaveta Bagryana (1893–1991). Due to their longevity, Gabe and Bagryana comprise a sort of compendium of almost a century of poetic fashions and idioms. As Dora Gabe puts it in one of her poems, “I became peer / to all the generations.”4 Both poets, however, blend literary mutability (and the political upheavals and ideological pressures which were part of this mutability in Bulgaria) with a liberating mechanism which legitimizes their right to personal freedom and unique artistic expression and which Kristeva has described, apropos French writer Colette, as mère-version. Mère-version, turning

230

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

towards the mother, is a term deduced from Lacan’s interpretation of perversion as père-version, turning toward the father. According to Kristeva, Colette convinced herself that “her continuous, hypersensitive jouissance, both organic and formulaic, shared something inhuman, cosmic, and … monstrous,” and thus she was able to “install herself in the oblatory sensuality of henceforth fateful writing” by transmuting perversion—père-version—into mère-version.5 Gabe and Bagryana, for all their differences,6 but also through the poetic exchanges of a life-long friendship,7 partake of the oblatory and cosmic dimensions of mèreversion, anchoring it in the myth of the Ur-mother (frequently invoked in Bulgarian folklore lyrics much like the Muse used to be in Ancient Greek poetry) as well as the poets’ own highly idealized biographical mothers. “I may be sinful and cunning,” declares the young Bagryana, “but I am your faithful daughter, blood mother-earth.”8 In her old age, Gabe reiterates the fateful bond, “Only the mother is truly faithful.”9 The zone of feminine “bi-temporality” imposed by these poets as the conduit of women’s literary history produces certain risks. One concerns their imitators who forgo the cosmic and transgressive dimensions of mère-version in an endless repetition of “sweet, humble, innocent … a bit sad, a bit enamored, a bit nostalgic”10 manipulation of lyrical seductiveness that never stops revolving around die-hard feminine stereotypes. The other risk is falling out of one’s own and consequent epochs due to uncompromising anachronism. Dora Gabe’s book Лунатичка (Sleepwalker), which was never reprinted in full, bears witness to the second risk. Aesthetically, stylistically, but also and perhaps most of all ideologically and politically, this book continues to be out of joint with whatever times come to pass.11 Аhistorical multiplication of duplicates and solitary, singular radicalism—between these extremes, what temporality does the overlapping of historical time and monumental time produce?

Generations in Women’s Literature An inevitable result is the problematic use of the concept “literary generation.” If we nonetheless choose to employ it, we will have to renounce the strictly chronological meaning of the term “generation.” The “generations” in Bulgarian women’s literature in fact co-exist and differentiate themselves along the line of their various manipulations and employments of feminine identity. Generation is therefore a space, or a “monumental” concept, i.e. the daughter could turn out to be the mother of her own mother. The first generation is the generation of mythic femininity, of amorous lavishness, of homoerotic identification with the mother, of happy and generous sensuality. In Bulgarian literature, it was imposed by the publication of Elisaveta Bagryana’s Вечната и святата (The Eternal and the Holy) (1927).12 While depending on the concept of eternal femininity, the firstness of this generation, producing both past and future, is far from chronological. Its lucky deployment seems to fall into a very precise historical constellation. Kristeva’s study of Colette not only provides a parallel but might also serve as a reminder of the 1920s and 1930s European framework for Bagryana’s, to use her own terms, “sinful” and “cunning”

Bulgarian Women’s Literature

231

holiness. Could the reading of Colette by Kristeva be inflected by an early imprint of the poetic universe of Bagryana who, like Kristeva, was born in the city of Sliven? In any case, Kristeva’s discussion of Colette’s mère-version as “reversal of perversion into sublimation, in such a way that the perversion itself is swallowed up by it and, without disappearing, collects there, but as a purity”13 is fully applicable to Bagryana who envisions her sinful “gift of nectar” rejected, perhaps, by a paternal God but “swallowed up” and made holy by the all-loving recesses of the Matrix.14 We are thus dealing with femininity as the “secret of all writing,”15 “mère-versed” into a source of women’s creative inspiration and existential daring. Thanks to this, Bagryana—not without the help of her poetic and biographical redoubling with Gabe—succeeds in inaugurating the history of Bulgarian women’s literature. I will return to this later on. The second generation is the generation of tomboys.16 They write through masculine identifications, and femininity is experienced in an ego-dystonic and dramatic way. The so-called non-feminine intellectuality of this generation’s writing is perceived by the poets and most of their critics as a self-denying burden, a personal Calvary. Blaga Dimitrova, the generation’s iconic representative, repeatedly returns to the theme of missing out on (a woman’s) life because of writing. She is envious of those drowning in the sea while she is “drowning/ in dry words”; she sympathizes with deserts asking them, “What gardens were you born for?”17 In Забранено море (Forbidden Sea), she explicitly intertwines writing, sickness, and transgression, describing herself as “Promethea / who dared to steal / from the Gods / not fire / but the Word.”18 In a brilliant analysis included in this volume, the very young Kristeva identifies Blaga Dimitrova’s stance as incarnating the historical urgencies of emancipation in the 1960s, which underlie the “tenderness, fragility, and nobleness of this engaged poet’s singular universe.”19 Indeed, with the tomboy generation, passionate perspicacity is often combined with intense political engagement: Blaga Dimitrova became VicePresident of post-communist Bulgaria, the first Bulgarian woman to achieve this position. Perhaps logically, this generation is full of pious veneration for the mythic femininity generation, for a femininity, that is, of which it feels deprived. Thus the biography of Bagryana, which Blaga Dimitrova wrote together with her husband, greatly contributed to the counterfactual affirmation of Bagryana’s standing as the first woman-poet.20 The third generation is the generation of “superwomen.” Heterogeneous as to literary epoch and artistic orientation (which, as already agreed, is true of all said “generations”), this generation, prevailing today, has not yet been discussed as a specific phenomenon. This is partly due to its own refusal to take any stand regarding femininity, femaleness, or, indeed women in so far as the craft of writing is concerned. In fact, no one belonging to this generation voices a claim to being a superwoman, since reticence about their heroic ambition is one of the essential traits of this ambition. Although the superwoman designation might trigger associations with American comics, its true roots are in the initial communist project for resolving gender inequality: “‘Work, build and don’t whine!”21 True to this lineage of which she is no longer aware, the superwoman believes that doing her job as “a good girl,” and not complaining, will make matters take care of themselves. The point is never to even

232

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

mention some womanly “lot”—this generation aims at cancelling their sexual identity as a reality worth discussing. Ekaterina Yosifova, the grande dame of this generation, probably had other things in mind in writing the following poem, yet it sums up the point I want to make: You have an ax and an island. The island has a tree. Just enough to carve out a canoe. You enter the canoe. You push away from the shore with the strongest branch of the former tree. A suitable current picks up the canoe and stops it on the shore of the continent. You start living there, no, not on the shore—in the city. The boat has rotted long ago. You don’t know the name—you don’t ask—of that island. Nor of that tree.22

Or, to put it in the terms of Kristin Dimitrova, who sort of felt forced to talk about an issue she would rather not tackle, “anatomy is fate” but “the soul has no sex.”23 The advantage of this position is that it saves itself the trouble of working through the problem of femininity in its eternal return as secondary, marginal, and deviant. It thus avoids the lures of feminine clichés; it also rejects outright the risks of unique incommunicability. The third generation thus entertains naïve theories about the ways literary values are produced, which is not the case with the historical cunning of the first generation, or the political stamina of the second. The third generation’s stance relies on the idea of time as a machine of poetic justice. However, close examination of this machine (the machine that produces tradition, the canon, the great books) leaves no room for such optimism. The ruse of this machine is its retroactive functioning. The masculine principle of its selectivity is manifested not synchronically (where monumental temporality does not cease to repeat its enchanted cycles and seduce the priests and warriors of historical battles), but diachronically and retroactively along the axis of historical time.24 It should be pointed out, however, that confining poets to one generation or other cannot lay claim to conclusiveness. Each of these stances is like a shoe that does not fit and urges one to go for a stroll barefoot. For example, Kristin Dimitrova, who reviles those concerned with anatomy, has a book, Тринадесетото дете на Яков (Jacob’s Thirteenth Child) (1992), in which she hauntingly scolds Jacob’s twelve sons by assuming the position of the muffled, ignored, and forgotten thirteenth voice, the daughter’s voice. She has, therefore, yielded to the temptation of joining the fourth generation. The fourth generation exemplified by this essay is the one that does not accept the superwoman’s optimism whereby problems are solved best by letting sleeping dogs lie. Once again, it brings up the vexed issue of women’s voices in literature. For brevity, we could call this generation feminist.25

Bulgarian Women’s Literature

233

Eternal, Holy and … First. An Attempt at an Explanation The conception of bi-temporality as the time of Bulgarian women’s literature tries to answer a question which arises from the following mystery. When Elisaveta Bagryana’s first book of poems, The Eternal and the Holy, appeared in 1927, it was hailed as the first truly woman’s book in Bulgarian literature.26 This is rather late even in terms of the belated beginnings of new Bulgarian literature, but it is especially puzzling because at least three women-poets with well-established literary reputations precede Bagryana, while also being contemporaneous with her. There is Dora Gabe who has, at least, successfully kept the status of contender. Her first book of poems Теменуги (Violets)—hailed by numerous reviews27—appeared in 1908, i.e. twenty years earlier. Gabe’s friend, Ekaterina Nencheva (1885–1920), quickly followed with Снежинки (Snowflakes) (1909).28 And then there came На прага стъпки (Steps at the Door) (1918)29 by Mara Belcheva (1868–1937). There is a structural dimension to the repetitive discontinuity of beginnings in women’s history.30 The counterfactual prominence of Bagryana as “first” could be explained as yet another example of such discontinuity. Thus, an influential 1925 anthology of Bulgarian poetry did not include a single woman.31 The ground was cleared, so to speak, for Ivan Meshekov’s booklet Греховната и свята песен на Багряна (The Sinful and Holy Song of Bagryana) (1928), which set the ecstatic tone of Bagryana scholarship for decades. It opens with a long enumeration of what Bagryana’s book is not.32 For anybody familiar with the reception of Bagryana’s female precursors it would be obvious that Meshekov’s summarily opposes Bagryana as poet and woman to them. This would be fine if they had not lost their names in the process: Meshekov never mentions them; instead, he connects Bagryana’s work via certain male geniuses directly to anonymous folklore roots. The mystery, however, does not concern so much the erasure of Bagryana’s predecessors, which would fall into the foreseeable cycle of discontinuities. The mystery is her success in instituting Bulgarian women’s literary history while retroactively reinstating her predecessors without losing her status as “first.” Resolving this mystery would have to assume that the anachronism granting Bagryana her status is the product of certain immanent characteristics of her writing: not this writing’s being the best and only, etc. (which would amount to resuming the cycles of erasure), but, rather, something else, something that has to do with this writing’s handling of, precisely, temporality. To go back to the beginning of this essay, out of the chronological deployment of the story of Bulgarian women’s literature, Bagryana fashions a “plot” that favours her firstness but that simultaneously opens time for her-story, continuity, “sisters.”

Descendant of Her Own Blood To make a long story short, Bagryana’s “plot” blends monumental time with history and amalgamates cyclic and linear temporality, myth, and an open-ended future, so that each of them conditions the other in the miraculous birth of a female literary

234

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

continuity. The dead mother wakes up days, years, centuries later on the lips of unspecified gender, fused in the whispering of her name, no matter which (Вечната [The Eternal]).33 The lack of ancestors’ portraits and family books, the lack of any memory of progenitors does not preclude the poetic materialization of an anonymous great-grandmother, complete with her silk trousers and transgressive love story. The ancestress springs directly from the “rebellious, wanderer’s blood” of her descendent; the descendent gives birth to her (anonymous) grandmother. In fact, precisely the erasure of all nameable traces by the wind allows the grandmother to escape the riders persecuting her and thus makes possible the descendant’s love for vast horizons and “horses under a cracking whip,” which, in its turn, will usher the grandmother into being (“Потомка” [Descendent]).34 No problem about the past, then: it is reborn today, and it will be reborn centuries from now. But who will follow? Who will step into the sparkling traces of this horse, the solitary Amazon’s winged horse? On Mount Helicon, the horse strikes with its hoof a fresh new spring which will inspire the Amazon’s sisters coming after her (“Амазонка” [An Amazon])35 One of the amazing features of Bagryana’s first book is its triumphant self-confidence. An unwavering certainty that “the wager is with us” (“An Amazon”) subtends The Eternal and the Holy in its creation of an immanent centre that moves simultaneously backwards and forwards in time producing grandmothers and future sisters. Many decades later, Bagryana returns in a poem to a youthful dream in which she glides with winged skates on a sky of ice delineating all the signs of the Zodiac (“Сънища от разни времена” [Dreams from various times]).36 She is equally audacious in communicating with Halley’s Comet which came really close to Earth in 1910: to the rest of the world, the comet foreboded disasters and wars but to the teenaged Bagryana, it sent a personal message about a calling that would take her “beyond the visible horizon” and that, so many years later, she regards as a promise fulfilled.37 Even a quick glance at the poetry of Mara Belcheva and Ekaterina Nencheva reveals the difference. Temporality in Belcheva’s poetry is quietly cyclic, idyllic, and seasonal; Nencheva’s is frozen in melancholic stasis: none of them is concerned with the victorious incision of the “eternal and holy” femininity in history, which Bagryana’s poetry effects. With Dora Gabe, things are more complicated. On the one hand, she shares Bagryana’s mère-version; in fact, she takes it much further in the direction of “feminine jouissance, perceived as a cosmic solitude, an objectless relationship saturated with elements, a dissemination of self.”38 On the other hand, Gabe cannot complain or boast of a shortage of family books or portraits. “The fate of homeless ancestors” weighs heavily upon her.39 Her father on his deathbed reminds her that she is the “granddaughter of king David”40 and a fiery young man (not named in the poem but identifiable through her memoirs as Ernst Toller41) invokes her as “Ruth, the queen of centuries.”42 The lost land is redoubled and trebled in Gabe’s biography: her Jewish parents moved to newly independent Bulgaria from Russia and became successful landowners in the region of Dobrudja which, however, was annexed to Romania after the First World War; thus, a homeland was lost again … Unlike Bagryana, so certain as to what she is destined to do, Gabe cannot produce happy grandmothers and a stable stance for herself out of these losses. “My soul is restless, murky, mute … Why does my

Bulgarian Women’s Literature

235

troubled spirit call me far away from here? … I do not know what I am, nor do I know what I were.”43 More prone to poetic experimentation than Bagryana, in her late years, Gabe shifted to a serene minimalism, which is the true progenitor of “third generation” Ekaterina Yosifova and much of present-day Bulgarian poetry. Although her writing actually precedes Bagryana’s, the paths that Gabe follows unsettle and questions plots and stories, myths and certainties. She could never be the “first” poet because she is always to come.

Notes   1 See Victor Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee Lemon and Marion Ries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 25–60.   2 Kiril Hristov (1875–1944): Bulgarian poet, novelist, and playwright. For a bibliography of the controversy between him and Dora Gabe, in which Hristov employed a broad spectrum of antisemitic and misogynist rhetoric, see Aneta Doncheva and Siya Atanasova, Дора Габе 1886–1983: Био-библиографски указател (София: Народна библиотека, 1985), 132–4.   3 See Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Signs 7, no.1 (1981): 13–35.   4 Dora Gabe (Дора Габе), “Занесеност,” Светът е тайна. Поезия и проза (София: Софийски университет “Св. Климент Охридски,” 1994), 215. Unless stated otherwise, translations are mine.   5 Julia Kristeva, Colette, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 12–13.   6 See Miglena Nikolchina (Миглена Николчина), Родена от главата. Фабули и сюжети в женската литературна история (София: Семарш, 2002).   7 This friendship, somewhat of a mystery, especially to male critics, survived many turbulences beginning with Bagryana’s affair with Gabe’s husband, literary critic and historian Boyan Penev (1882–1927). After Penev’s early death, snatching Gabe’s lovers turned into a sort of obsession with Bagryana. Somehow their friendship endured with men, mostly long-dead Penev, treated as an object of poetic competition and as the glue to their shared mère-version. See Nikolchina, Родена, 77.   8 Elisaveta Bagryana (Елисавета Багряна), “Потомка.” The poem appeared in Bagryana’s first book Вечната и святата (София, 1927), 40. For Bagryana’s centennial, a book containing twenty translations of this poem was issued, including two in English. See Elisaveta Bagryana, Потомка (София: Нов златорог, 1993).   9 Snezhina Kraleva (Снежина Кралева), Докосване до Дора Габе (София: ОФ, 1987), 140. 10 Milena Kirova (Милена Кирова), “Как (да) четем женската поезия,” Литературен Вестник no. 4, 28.01–03.02, 1998. 11 Dora Gabe (Дора Габе), Лунатичка (София: Филип Чипев, 1932). Understanding why this book keeps being ignored will have to take into account Gabe’s complex and unorthodox approach to her Jewishness; the “not party-line” treatment of social inequality and suffering; the abrupt stylistic change which makes the book closer, perhaps, to the Prague surrealist circle than to Bulgarian tendencies at the time.

236

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

In short, no one was happy. See Gabe’s own account in Ivan Sarandev, Дора Габе, Литературни анкети (София: Наука и изкуство, 1986), 122–4. 12 Bagryana, Вечната. 13 Kristeva, Colette, 168. 14 Bagryana, “Вечерня” (Evening Prayer), Вечната, 61. 15 Kristeva, Colette, 169. 16 Translating мъжко момиче, “a men’s girl” or a “manly girl” is quite a challenge. Completely devoid of erotic (or transgender) overtones, this designation is full of admiration for a woman who is capable, efficient, professional, reliable, rational … well, a man, really. 17 Blaga Dimitrova, Because the Sea is Black, trans. Niko Boris and Heather McHugh (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1989), 11, 17. 18 Blaga Dimitrova, Forbidden Sea, trans. Ludmila G. Popova-Wightman and Elizabeth Anne Socolow (Princeton, NJ: Ivy Press, 2002), 167. 19 Julia Kristeva, “1963, 2016: deux regards sur Blaga Dimitrova,” La revue de belleslettres, 2016: 2, 242. 20 Blaga Dimitrova and Yordan Vasilev (Йордан Василев), Младостта на Багряна и нейните спътници (Пловдив: Христо Г. Данов, 1975); Дни черни и бели (София: Наука и изкуство, 1975). 21 This lineage has surfaced in an exhibition, a few years ago, at London’s GRAD Gallery. The exhibition presented images of women in Soviet propaganda, from the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the end of perestroika in 1991. Cf. Alexandra Guzeva, “The Soviet superwoman’s motto: ‘Work, build and don’t whine,’” https:// www.rbth.com/arts/history/2016/06/20/the-soviet-superwomans-motto-work-buildand-dont-whine_604507 22 Ekaterina Yosifova, “Givens,” in The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry, trans. Katerina Stoykova-Klemer (Lexington, KY: Accents Publishing, 2014). 23 See Kristin Dimitrova (Кристин Димитрова), “Време беше и аз да кажа нещо,” Литературен Вестник 10, 11–17.03 1998. Alas, both of Kristin Dimitrova’s formulations evoke, most likely unconsciously, a long and dramatic history of their rhetorical abuse to the detriment of women, a history that recurs ad nauseum and that we need not conjure up here. We could summarize the situation with the paraphrase of a well-known quote: All souls are sexless, but some are more sexless than others. 24 The phenomenon of the retroactive erasure of women’s contributions to culture is examined in Miglena Nikolchina, Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf (New York: Other Press, 2004). 25 The effects of both communism and its aftermath had a complicated impact on the women’s movements and feminism in Eastern Europe. For a discussion of the Bulgarian case, see Krassimira Daskalova, “Bulgarian women’s history and socialist myths,” Russian and East European Institute (Indiana University), http://www. iub. edu/~ reeiweb/events/2005/Daskalova% 20paper. 26 I will return to the origins of the cliché. 27 Dora Gabe (Дора Габе), Теменуги (София: Придворна печатница, 1908). Among the reviews which keep appearing between 1908–1920 there is one published in Женски глас (Women’s Voice) under the title “Наши писателки. Литературни бележки“ (Our Women Writers: Literary Notes).” Женски глас (1899–1944) was a bimonthly periodical, an organ of the Bulgarian Women’s Union. So much about

Bulgarian Women’s Literature

237

Gabe’s or Bagryana’s firstness. For a detailed bibliography, see Aneta Doncheva and Siya Atanasova (Анета Дончева и Сия Атанасова), Дора Габе 1886–1983: Биобиблиографски указател (София, 1985), 117–18. 28 Ekaterina Nencheva (Екатерина Ненчева), Снежинки (София: Придворна печатница, 1909). 29 Mara Belcheva (Мара Белчева), На прага стъпки (Leipzig: C.G.Röder, 1918). 30 Nikolchina, Matricide. 31 On the “strategies of exclusion” in anthologies of Bulgarian literature see Bilyana Kourtasheva (Биляна Курташева), Антологии и канон: антологийни модели на българската литература (София: Просвета, 2012). 32 Ivan Meshekov (Иван Мешеков), Греховната и свята песен на Багряна (София: Художник, 1928), 3. 33 Bagryana, Вечната, 39. 34 Ibid., 40. 35 Ibid., 21. 36 Elisaveta Bagryana, Контрапункти (София: Български писател, 1971), 41. 37 Bagryana, “Комета,” Контрапункти, 26. 38 Kristeva, Colette, 105. In connection with Gabe, see Nikolchina, Rodena, 70–108. 39 Gabe, “Прокоба,” Светът е тайна, 92. 40 Gabe, “Друговерка,” Лунатичка, 36. (Друговерка means “infidel,” literally, “someone of a different faith.”) 41 Sarandev, Дора Габе, 78–9. Ernst Toller (1893–1939) was a German-Jewish Expressionist playwright. 42 “Друговерка,” Лунатичка, 37. The invocation should be regarded as imagined: according to Gabe’s recollections (Sarandev, ibid.), which frequently blur reality, fiction, and sheer forgetfulness, she was never formally introduced to Toller but was profoundly shaken by his powerful presence. She saw him for the first time at a writers’ congress in Budapest (and the next year in Dubrovnik) and was totally spellbound (“you were frightened by your own emotions,” was Bagryana’s characteristic comment, according to Gabe). The encounter took place during the fateful series of travels in the course of which Gabe triggered the conflict with Kiril Hristov in Prague, had a love affair with Czech surrealist poet Vítězslav Nezval (1900–1958) and sort of became part of his surrealist circle, and, perhaps, realized for the first time the full scope of the rising wave of Nazi antisemitism. 43 Gabe, “Прокоба,” Светът, 92.

20

Writing from the Saddest Place in the World Georgi Gospodinov Translated by Traci Speed

If you turn to the back pages of the European newspaper you’re reading, there, on the weather forecast map, you’ll see an empty space—between Istanbul, Vienna, and Budapest. This is the saddest place in the world, as The Economist called it in 2010 (I clipped the article), as if there truly is a geography of happiness.1 In December of 2010, in The Economist, a short article really did appear that presented in brief the results of their latest survey, a “happiness index” by country with corresponding rankings. The “saddest place in the world” was precisely Bulgaria. Hardly anyone would expect Bulgaria to be the happiest country in the world, but in this case, it was the world champion of sadness. If we look at it from the other side, though, at least we were finally first in something. (I remember all of the international competitions lost by Bulgaria that I watched with my father as a child, the eternal disappointment, the small hope that only exacerbated the bitterness of the loss afterwards; I clenched my teeth like my father, but he, at least, could swear.) The headline of The Economist article, with a cinematic allusion, states: “The rich, the poor and Bulgaria.”2 Bulgaria and its sadness—unclear, irreducible, and incalculable. Inexplicable even for the economists from The Economist. Happy literatures are all alike; every unhappy literature is unhappy in its own way, if we paraphrase a famous opening line. It is from this point of sadness—from this empty space between Istanbul, Vienna, and Budapest—that we are writing our books. When we try to speak about Bulgarian literature, there’s no way for us to bypass the sadness. This is why I feel like saying a few things, leaving a few notes in the margins of an unwritten story. If there were a literary history of sadness or a history of sadness in Bulgarian literature, it seems to me that it should begin precisely with the scribblings of anonymous scribes in the margins of canonical books from the late Middle Ages and the Early Revival—the self-pity and lamentation in these lines that have been

240

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

preserved. From the tormented “My tooth was hurting and I couldn’t stand it …” to “Tell me, my sinful soul, what you want: for us to see the end of this little book, as the sailor also wants to see the end of the sea, and like the sick person—health, and like the poor person—clothing and food.” That corporeal, human sorrow of frozen hands, a body stiff from sitting, the solitude over the book. Uncanonical sadness. First person sadness. And here, to the preliminary sources of this unwritten literary history, I would add the priest Stoyko Vladislavov, with his “Life and Sufferings of Sophronius the Sinful,” from 1804, because of this early (early for Bulgarian literature) first-person confession of a “tightness of the heart.”3 Toward the end of this same nineteenth century, a very thick first-person book appeared in Bulgarian literature, in a genre difficult to define: Zahari Stoyanov’s Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings (1884). From margin notes to memoir notes, written by the hand not merely of a witness of and participant in the events but of one of its organizers, this book narrates an unsuccessful uprising with embarrassment, through sorrow and self-irony.4 It does this not in the key of the pathetic-heroic, or rather not only in this key, but also through the personal drama and hardship of the ordinary people who suddenly found themselves face to face with grand history. The irony and self-irony in this book are, for me, the true (yet overlooked) beginning of the new Bulgarian literature. The history of our literature from the last century can be studied through the way in which this book and the self-irony in it emerge or are submerged for entire periods in our native literary-historical canon (not to say canyon). It nevertheless seems to me that the book initiates a practice that can be traced through the works of writers who are not chroniclers in the sense of Zahari Stoyanov, but who use similar ironic optics toward history and humankind—from Yordan Yovkov to Ivaylo Petrov and Yordan Radichkov. And I would allow myself to point out Father Stoyko Vladislavov (Sophronius of Vratsa), just cited above, as a forerunner of the writing of Zahari Stoyanov. But there is no literary history of sadness; it has not yet come about, and so we close the parentheses on this initial digression toward an unwritten literary history of sorrow (misery loves digressions) and we move ahead, toward the second half of the twentieth century and to our present day. After the Liberation of 1878 and the building of the Bulgarian state, which was on the cusp of turning into the economic lion of the Balkans, two national catastrophes followed in rapid succession, along with alliances with the losing side in both world wars.5 Next came the Soviet Army and a long period of totalitarian rule, from 1944 to 1989. A period that is still in search of its proper name—socialist or communist.

Un-Eventful Socialism, or How to Narrate What Never Happened Let us say a few words about this period and its Bulgarian a-narrativity. Why a-narrativity? Maybe because socialism (especially in its Bulgarian form) is actually un-eventful, void of real events. At first glance, this assertion sounds paradoxical. Can a system that

The Saddest Place in the World

241

so radically overturns the organization of life in a society be called un-eventful? But it is only an apparent paradox. The main event has already happened—a revolution, a coup, a people’s uprising … And from here on out, what follows is an “ascending,” a goal-oriented development under control, without shocks. Actually, in such a chain of controlled occurrences and a future made foreseeable by the (five-year) plan, every real event is a wrench in the system. The real, unforeseen events undermine and threaten it. And these events occurred in almost every country in Eastern Europe—1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1980 in Poland. The Bulgarian case is a sad exception. There was no such case actually. There were no “Bulgarian events,” as opposed to the “Hungarian events,” or the “Czech events,” and so on. “Events” is exactly the name these occurrences were given by historians. My contention is that the events that did not happen, whether it is in the life of a person or in the life of a society, are to some degree more important than what actually did happen. The unrealized continues to radiate the consequences of its non-realization. The unrealized, absent event is important precisely because of its absence, important in a negative way. Quite a few years ago, I wrote a text dedicated to the unrealized Bulgarian 1968, a text that provoked surprisingly strong reactions and resistance. No one likes to have their life driven into non-realization. I myself was born exactly in the unfulfilled Bulgarian 1968. The official event in Bulgaria during that famous year was the World Youth Festival in Sofia from July 28 to August 6. In the style of the times, the event was orchestrated—there were long rehearsed slogans and parades in which many uniformed and plain-clothes state security officers participated. While the students in Central and Western Europe came out against the system, in Sofia, quite to the contrary, the system organized student manifestations. Actually, the real unofficial and strictly secret event in this same carefree end of July was the emergency redeployment of two Bulgarian regiments in the USSR so they could then be transferred to Prague. There is no doubt that those living in Prague in 1968 remember in detail, to the day and the hour, what happened to them. And these events are a part of their personal histories. And a part of their literature. In this sense, the un-eventfulness of Bulgarian socialism is a part of the problem, of the difficulty in narrating it. How do you narrate an absence? What do you center the story around when the pivotal point is missing? How do you recount what didn’t happen?

My Mother Made Wonderful Fried Zucchini, Baked Lamb, Banitsa out of Her Own Silence … That which never happened, this silence, and the sadness are actually directly connected. He who increases silence increases sorrow. And there is one peculiar silence in the Bulgarian family, a kind of a culture of suppression that developed between the Scylla of patriarchy and the Charybdis of socialism. Patriarch-socialist silence, not to

242

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

say reticence. Children should only be kissed when they’re sleeping so as not to spoil them. What is said in the kitchen stays in the kitchen. The idea of sharing your feelings or your personal story publicly is unthinkable. This is something that continued after the fall of the wall in 1989. Some kind of residual fear and reluctance to personally relate the minor traumas of that daily routine. Sold on the book market were mainly the memoirs of former members of the ruling power; far fewer were the ragged little books of people who survived the communist camps—they were published far more modestly in both format and quantity, and with dwindling publicity. Sandwiched between the stories of the repressors and the repressed is the silence of the everyday people and their story. To a certain extent, Bulgarian literature itself was silent about this period, unable to determine where to pick up the story. In 2004, three of my colleagues, coevals, and I decided to make a small, private attempt to collect personal stories from the time of socialism. What we wanted was to hear the voices of those who were on the dark side of Bulgarian public life, on the dark side of the Bulgarian moon. The stories of those who had been neither in the prison camp in Belene nor in the Politburo. The stories of our generation, of our parents, of that perennial 99.9 percent who voted in the elections during those years. We had and we still have rare cases in which a person outlives a system. The system is gone, but the person is alive and still retains the warm, living memory. This is how the project was born, and later also the book, I Lived Socialism. 171 Personal Stories.6 We very much insisted on this “I” in the title, because socialism taught us to tell our stories primarily in the first-person plural, in one collective “we.” In this sense, socialism, like all totalitarian regimes, tries to deprive the person of a personal story. The personal story itself is always dangerous or, in the mildest case, incompatible with the ideological framework, suspicious— susceptible to doubts, complicated feelings, and nuances that the regime never knew how to deal with. Something important was achieved, I believe: a rehabilitation of the personal story. The feeling that everyone has the right to a biography, the right to a story about their own life. Even if it is a story about this sadness and the “tightness of the heart” of Sophronius, perhaps even more so if that’s what the story is about. In the book we published, and on the website itself, things came out that had long been kept in silence. Stories of those ostensibly invisible traumas of the everyday that slowly crush the normalcy of living. Stories about fears, shortages, shame, and sadness. The important thing was the telling of the story, because without it, there is no reflection. It seems to me that modern Bulgarian literature is slowly beginning to turn toward this memory that is yet to be spoken. The very genre of personal story, the concept of “personal story” in the Bulgarian context, it seems to me, was fleshed out during those years; literature turned toward it once again. I called my first short story collection И други истории, i.e. And Other Stories.7 Because these stories are uncertain and still warm, still remembering the mouth that uttered them, unfortified and not yet settled into the genre; it was also important to me that these were just “and other” stories. The stories of those who do

The Saddest Place in the World

243

not tell stories, whose voices, in one way or another, are not heard. Not necessarily because they were against the system, but because no one had respected their right to a story. After the long immersion in the monumentality of an ideologically normative literature,8 the desire for anti-monumentality came to us somehow naturally. A desire for paying attention to everyday life and to what had been ignored and kept silent.

The World Withheld We first listened to Carmen and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik at the front door of one of our classmates, played by an electric doorbell that her father, an international truck driver, had brought from “abroad.” We were in elementary school and terribly envious of her father. “Abroad” was a separate country to us, like France and Italy, but way more attractive. Only there could one find such electric doorbells, chewing gum cigarettes, and foot-long chocolate bars. Our parents would explain that the people abroad didn’t have our beautiful nature and our yogurt. But nature and yogurt weren’t delicious to us. We first saw the Eiffel Tower as a small souvenir containing an indoor thermometer, so the anecdote about the Bulgarian who walked around the real Eiffel Tower looking for the thermometer didn’t seem funny at the time. To us, Venetian gondolas were desk lamps playing tunes, and the Acropolis was a china ashtray for special guests. Everybody had a Mona Lisa in the bedroom, a Last Supper in the living room, and still life with fruit and watermelon slices in the kitchen. It was a Golden Age for our general knowledge. That’s why later on we embraced Baudrillard and “the precession of simulacra” with such zeal. We now had no reason to visit the Eiffel Tower—just another copy without a thermometer. What was so special for us about the souvenirs? When German tourists go to France or Italy, they also buy a souvenir, some keepsake trinket. This object would preserve the memory of a place visited, of a certain experience. But for East Europeans during communism, the souvenir most often was a memento of a place where they had never been and would never go. The souvenir was a negative piece of evidence of an impossible experience. They say that 80 percent of Bulgarians never left the country during the socialist regime. It’s no coincidence that every language has its own specific word for sorrow. Turkish hüzün, Portugese saudade … It appears that these are the sorrows of former empires who had everything and lost everything. The Bulgarian тъга (sorrow) is a bit different. To have this sorrow about something you have never had, to yearn for something in a world that has never been yours and that you have, nevertheless, lost. My mother’s sorrow about a Paris that she had never seen and would never see. My father’s sorrow about a 1968 that never happened in Bulgaria and never would happen. The sorrow

244

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

over an entire world that has been denied to you. This is what I would call sorrow to the second degree. How did the writers manage this world withheld? Did this become a direct theme in the writing of that time? Of course not. Bulgarian literature from that period did not have great works written by émigrés (with one exception to some extent), nor did it succeed in pulling books out of the drawer. All of this is part of the Bulgarian uneventfulness. And yet, how then did Bulgarian writers grapple with the world withheld from them? In various ways. Some, by shutting themselves in and delving deeper into the local, into their roots, into the native, into what in the 1960s would be called “closed valley literature.” Other writers traveled on the wings of communist internationalism, metaphorically and literally, mainly to “brother” socialist countries. Those higher up in the “nomenklatura” (the party establishment) did not miss out on countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain, naturally, for the purpose of getting to know the enemy up close and then unmask and dismantle it from within—see the spy novels of Bogomil Raynov or his book Against Imperialist Art (1953). We also have examples of writers who, through Aesopian language and irony, through the naïve-folkloric-absurd, interpret or domesticate this impossibility about the world. Yordan Radichkov’s texts are a magnificent example: a play like An Attempt at Flying or the story “Paris Takes a Holiday,” in which Gotsa Geraskov gets up one winter morning, puts his knife in his sash, ties on his leather gaiters, and apparently sets off for Paris, crossing all of Europe only to find out that Paris is taking a day off. In this uncompiled anthology of the world withheld we also have to mention the major contemporary poet Boris Hristov, who chose, on the other hand, the strategy of renunciation and a conscious withdrawal from poetry—by the way, one of the few who literally followed through with this abstention. If someone sat down at some point to write an Introduction to the Provincial Sadness of Late Socialism, the poetry of Boris Hristov would provide one of the most important testimonies. The impossible departure, the anchoring into an unleavable world, is especially strong in poems like “The Airplane is Delayed”: … we should have flown away from here and left long, long ago … the airplane is still delayed, the airplane’s delayed. If they had shown up in the blazing air its shiny wings at least—so we would know that it was there.9

There is, however, one Bulgarian writer who succeeded in leaving, literally, who reached the Bulgarian section of the BBC in London and stayed there forever. His murder in 1978 went down in history under the label “the Bulgarian umbrella.” But even the death of the author was no longer an event, particularly when he was Bulgarian. Although the writer Georgi Markov—he is the one in question, and it’s worth dedicating a few more lines to him—was in the European and primarily the British media, it was for a short time, posthumously and for the criminal rather than the literary. But even a cold-blooded murder like this, at the height of the Cold War, did not awaken the curiosity of the British literary and publishing milieu.

The Saddest Place in the World

245

I want to mention two of his works here on the topic of “the world withheld”—the short novel The Women of Warsaw (1971) and the essays from In Absentia Reports about Bulgaria (1975–78), (published later under the title The Truth that Killed) most of which were read on Radio Free Europe.10 In The Women of Warsaw, in brief, we have the meeting of Pavel, a young geologist who has studied abroad, in Warsaw, and Yorgo, a centenarian old shepherd who has never in his life left the place where he was born. They meet on a remote mountain, on Dzhendem (i.e., Hell) Hill, far from every kind of world. And through the long nights, Pavel begins to tell about the women of Warsaw, about another possible life. The otherwise hardened old man becomes addicted to these stories, something breaks in him, and one morning Pavel finds him hanged from the tree they had sat under. The seductive stories of love, the world, and the city, of the different possible and impossible life, infuse their sweet poison and cause the protagonist to put an end to his own life. The stories of that withheld elsewhere turned out to be life-saving for the narrator and fatal for the listener. It is incredible that this novel passed the censors during that same 1968 when it came out. To hang a positive hero, the decorated old man Yorgo, to make him feel the heavy senselessness of his joyless life tossed into the pit of geography, was truly a brave narrative approach at that time. In Absentia Reports about Bulgaria contains an essay by Georgi Markov on The Women of Warsaw, according to which the novel tells a true story in an almost documentary manner. But central to the “world withheld” are also essays like “Traveling Abroad” and “The Passport Terror” … They present this sense of isolation, turning the very possibility of traveling abroad into an idée fixe. In “The Passport Terror,” Markov cites Montaigne, who said that he had never had any intention of traveling to India, but if he learned that his access to India were forbidden, his life would become unbearably difficult as a result. Just this realization that life would pass or has already passed under the impossibility of experiencing that geographical and existential elsewhere is humanly unbearable. And this is what lies at the center of this book. A year after The Women of Warsaw, Georgi Markov himself chose to step beyond, into the forbidden world, beyond Warsaw. The stories that he never stopped telling on the air of a free Europe, contrary to those in the novel, turned out to be life-saving for the listeners and deadly for the narrator himself.

And What Happened Next. The Wall Fell, the World Opened, and … Once I had a reading in Berlin. After the reading, a woman from the audience told me, a bit disappointed: “Well, I expected another kind of story from you, as a Balkan writer, but your stories are like ours.” I realized that she had expected something about fighting, blood, knives or maybe about our Bulgarian yogurt, rose oil, and folk songs … I explained quietly and guiltily that even in the Balkans, people fall in love, get divorced, and sometimes die not by a knife to the chest.

246

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

There is a stereotype. When you come from a periphery, you are expected to tell local, regional stories. Big, universal themes are for the major, central literatures … And can a person from the Balkans even have a personal story that is not absolutely Bulgarian, Balkan? It’s not a question of shame and withdrawing from the national history—on the contrary. What I am trying to create through my novels and stories is a possibility for us to tell our personal and Bulgarian sorrow and suffering as a part of the European sadness, as a part of the sadnesses of the world. How might I narrate my private sorrow (call it Bulgarian or Eastern European) and, through it, the sorrows of Europe? That is what I am interested in. I think literature could be a good instrument against stereotypes, but only if it doesn’t sell the stereotypes that some publishers and audiences expect. Several years ago, the manuscript of the novel The Physics of Sorrow sat on a desk at a large German publishing house that was interested and was printing a series focusing on the countries east of Berlin. I had lunch with the editor, who had read the novel carefully and, judging by her words, had even enjoyed it. In the end, a little before we ordered coffee and after a short pause, she casually uttered a sentence encompassing everything I’m attempting to say in this essay. This sentence simply stated, “The novel is very good, but it’s not Eastern European enough.” Is there really such a thing as East European literature today? Does this not lead to a new ghetto, a new ghettoization of those coming from this part of the world? Is that label, used in the early 1990s, still in effect? Does the fact that you are from Eastern Europe automatically make you an East European writer, defining the field in which you will be (and should be) interested? When I sit down to write, I do not start with the idea that I am an East European writer and that I will tell East European stories. Sometimes writers (even in Eastern Europe) write novels that do not fit our preconceived notions. When I was six, I had a nightmare that meticulously recurred three times, night after night. My whole family was at the bottom of a well, I stood alone outside, safe but scared to death. The fear was double, once for my mother, father, and brother doomed at the dark bottom, and a second time for myself—saved but left alone forever. I lived with my grandmother at the time I had this dream, and she was the only person I could tell about it. But she stopped me at the first word. Bad dreams shouldn’t be told or they would come to life—“they will fill with blood,” she said. The next night I had the nightmare again. I couldn’t tell it, yet I couldn’t be silent about it anymore. Then I had the ingenious idea of writing it down. I would be free without telling anyone. The untold nightmare was the first thing I ever wrote. Was that really a clever move? Yes and no. I didn’t have the nightmare anymore. But I couldn’t forget it either, and I had created a record of it, an archive. I’ve come to realize that the motive of that six-year-old boy and my motive today, after everything I’ve written, are one and the same. I write because I am afraid. Sadness and fear are reasonable motives for writing. And what I think literature can do today, Bulgarian literature included, is to have the courage to stand on the losing side. I find this to be an important feature of European literature, one that we inherited from Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf … Let’s remember that

The Saddest Place in the World

247

the best part about literature is that it avoids easy explanations of the world. Literature is not afraid to speak of life’s weak points, of sin, sorrow, guilt, and transience. Literature gives us a few important rights. The right to hesitate. The right to be weak. The right to fail. The right to sympathize with others. The right to be someone else, somewhere else, at least while reading. The right to feel sorrow, one of the most human conditions. The right to have a personal story with all of its fears and nightmares. In times of radical reduction of meaning, in times of populism and hardening, these rights seem more and more important to me. Maybe if you are a Bulgarian writer, your fears (and sorrows) are one or two more than they are for others, in places that are less sad. But this would also turn into literature sooner or later. Which is not a bad end.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6 7 8

Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow, trans. Angela Rodel (Rochester: Open Letters, 2015), 211. I will speak from my personal experience as a literary scholar and as the author of a novel that deals with sorrows. Because of that, let me also state here and be forgiven that I will make several references to my books. “The Rich and poor and Bulgaria,” The Economist, December 16, 2010, www. economist.com/christmas-specials/2010/12/16/the-rich-the-poor-and-bulgaria. “And when some time passed, I fell ill. But not an illness to lie in bed, but a tightness of the heart gripped me. And I could not sit still in one place for the time one could count to the number ten, but I walked like a madman along the water and cried.” Sofronius of Vratsa (Софроний Врачански), Житие и страдания (Велико Търново: Малка ученическа библиотека, 1999). Originally written in 1804, it was first published in seven consequent issues of the newspaper Дунавски лебед (Danube Swan) edited by Georgi Rakovski, 1861, www.slovo.bg/showwork.php3?AuID=167& WorkID=4641&Level=1. Bulgarian uprisings are traditionally unsuccessful, and heavily unsuccessful at that, hopelessly unsuccessful, most often crushed before they even erupt, before reaching any kind of key point from which some light would be visible. And here it is not just a question of the April Uprising of 1876. The First National Catastrophe was in 1913 after the Balkan Wars. The victories of the Bulgarian army on the fronts against the Ottoman Empire were followed by weak diplomacy and finally Bulgaria was defeated by its former Balkan allies and lost considerable territories with Bulgarian population. Bulgaria entered the First World War on the side of the Axis Powers and the Second National Catastrophe followed with the Treaty of Neuilly in 1919. Georgi Gospodinov (Георги Господинов), ed., Аз живях социализма. 171 лични истории (Пловдив: Жанет 45, 2006). Georgi Gospodinov, And Other Stories (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). Let me note right away that in this literature there were wonderful exceptions and books circumventing the normative aesthetic by authors like Ivaylo Petrov, Vera Mutafchieva, Georgi Markov, Konstantin Pavlov, Yordan Radichkov, the early Viktor Paskov, and others.

248

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

9 Boris Hristov (Борис Христов), “Самолетът закъснява,” in Честен кръст (Варна: Г. Бакалов, 1982), https://liternet.bg/publish5/bhristov/poezia/chesten/samoletyt.htm. 10 Many of us have a clear recollection of how our fathers would shut themselves in the kitchen in the evenings to listen to the forbidden Radio Free Europe (what an oxymoron) and Georgi Markov’s reports in absentia. I stood on the other side of the locked door, and I remember only the whooshing as if from an ocean, from whence among the waves emerged the fragmentary words that were saved from being jammed.

21

Bulgarian Liveliness Jean-Luc Nancy Translated by Cory Stockwell

Don’t delay—read The Physics of Sorrow, the most recent of Georgi Gospodinov’s books to be translated into French. Read it, because it brings us an abundance of good news. First of all, that of the literary vitality of a country and a language perfectly poised to set the Mediterranean region in motion. Next, that of a memory that, rather than remembering, puts into play a synchrony of the ancient, the contemporary, and the future. That of a tale that slips into myth and manages to place the Minotaur in the midst of quanta, DNA, and Lolita. Finally, that of a bounding, agile, joyful, rich language, whose vivacity Marie Vrinat-Nikolov is able to reproduce for us. This is an event that carries with it a Euro-Slavo-Mediterranean echo of what usually arrives to us from the Hispano-Lusitanian world: literature as the phrased palpitation of life itself, as a real possibility for life—our life—to feel itself live; but also philosophy, in addition to literature—yes, they are indiscernible here, for it is a very wise exercise to think of the Minotaur as a child unjustly banned from a lineage that is perhaps our own. A philosophy of the gay saber in the style of Nietzsche (who pops up furtively in the novel, in the company of Socrates, Seneca, Hölderlin, and of course Gaustine). This is what is so rare: to read a book from today, for today, for tomorrow and beyond—that doesn’t seek to announce or to reveal anything, that simply speaks, This article was first published in April of 2015 in the French daily Libération, with the title “Entrain bulgare.” My translation of the title requires a brief explanatory note. The French noun entrain offers a range of choices to the translator, such as enthusiasm, vigor, energy, spirit, and other words in this vein. The problem with all of these words is that they miss entrain’s resonance with the very common French locution être en train de, which means to be in the process of doing something, and which the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française gives as one of the possible origins of entrain. The problem is compounded by the fact that the word “entrain” exists in English: the OED defines it as “Enthusiasm, liveliness; an instance of this,” but also notes that it is now rare; its near obsolescence is the reason I chose not to use it. In the end, the word “liveliness” seemed best, in part because of all the references to life that Nancy makes in the article—he employs the words vitalité, vivacité, and vie, and his second paragraph deals at length with what he calls “life itself ” (see my contribution to this volume for a commentary on this)—and in part because, like entrain, it carries with it much less conceptual baggage than terms such as vitality, spirit, and drive. The reader should be aware, however, that the original title does not make as direct a reference to life as my translation.

250

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

that speaks to us without being mired in any sort of “autofiction,” “life writing,” or “documentation,” or any of the smug or vapid postures of the day. Goodness,1 how this fresh air wakes you up!

Note 1

The original here is “Bougre!”, which could also be translated as “Man!” or “Damn!”, but which I have chosen to translate as “Goodness” because it is somewhat dated. Nancy’s use of the term is probably tongue in cheek, since, per the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, it derives from the Latin bulgarus or Bulgarian.

22

Haide: On a Life that Feels Itself Live (A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Bulgarian Liveliness”) Cory Stockwell

These conservative columnists. Why is it that, in a decidedly “liberal” or centrist newspaper like the New York Times, it is the conservative columnists who always seem to have their fingers on the pulse of the moment, the issues that really seem to give a sense of where we are and where we’re going? I’m speaking first of all of David Brooks, who, in a recent column, “It’s Not the Economy, Stupid” (published a few days before I write these words), speaks of a malaise deeply entrenched in the United States (though it is hardly limited to a single country) at the very moment its economy is booming. Brooks puts forth several reasons for this, among them what he terms a “crisis of connection,” and notes what he calls “an absolutely stunning trend”: “life expectancy in the United States declined for the third straight year,” which leads him to label the moment of economic buoyancy a “straight-up social catastrophe.”1 How, then, to understand this malaise better, in order to combat it? Brooks doesn’t really go into detail about this in the article, though he does elsewhere (the issue is one of the abiding concerns of his semiweekly columns); here, he limits himself to several references to recent books that seek to take on this problem, before ending with a flourish: “It’s not jobs, jobs, jobs anymore. It’s relationships, relationships, relationships.”2 I’m far less sanguine about the economy than Brooks (to my mind, a profound change in economic course is urgently needed), but my interest is in the particular way the article highlights the decline in life expectancy: what Brooks argues, if implicitly, is that the social catastrophe in question should not be posed as an afterthought to the economy, as though it were a kind of superstructure, but rather as material in its nature; the malaise of which he speaks is a question, to put it simply, of life and death. The problem here seems resolutely “biopolitical,” since what is at stake appears to be a politics or a power that works at the very level of life—of individuals, of populations—producing a sort of living death at the very moment one would expect the opposite to happen. Yet, as soon as one really begins to deal with the problem on which Brooks touches, one gets a sense of the limitations of this term: in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, who has undertaken what one might think of as a tangential but sustained engagement with what, since Foucault, has come to be known as biopolitics,

252

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

one of the term’s limitations is to suggest that a “form of life” that has been captured by the biopolitical machine should aim to engineer “an elegant withdrawal” from this machine in the form of a figure that, through an act of “common auto-production or auto-creation,” would effectuate “the negation of political separation.”3 The term suggests this because, at a deeper level, it implies the possibility of anchoring meaning in its constituent components (life, politics)—the possibility of knowing what these terms mean once and for all. As Nancy puts it in a later work, what is necessary is not to oppose life to power, but rather “to think ‘existence’ rather than ‘life’ or to think ‘life’ completely otherwise,” to “think life itself on the other side of ‘life’ and politics itself on the other side of ‘politics.’”4 To think a life-as-existence, in other words, that wouldn’t seek to locate a figure in which to fix itself, that wouldn’t be content with any already constituted meaning, but would rather be something like a pure creation, a dynamism always already underway—what he calls, in the book from which I have just cited, “fervor.”5 This fervor—a fervor of the present (but how could fervor be anything but?)— is the reason, to my mind, for Nancy’s recent injunction to read Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow.6 Before turning to Nancy, however, I want to say a few words, for reasons that will become clear below, about an excellent recent article on Gospodinov by Garth Greenwell. Greenwell surmises that one of the reasons for the novel’s success in Bulgaria—“its first printing sold out in a day, and it went on to become the country’s best selling book of 2012,”7 he notes—is its unique treatment of the sorrow referred to in its title. The Bulgarian here is tuga, and Greenwell notes that Bulgarians often take this term as defining of the national character: “As Gospodinov conceives it, the Bulgarian word tuga … is, like Pamuk’s hüzün or Nabokov’s toska, a word for which there’s no real equivalent in English,”8 or any other language, one might add. Greenwell’s words echo those of Gospodinov’s narrator, who, in a series of passages about his young daughter, writes: “While I’m writing about the world’s sorrows, Portuguese saudade, Turkish hüzün, about the Swiss illness—nostalgia … she comes to me, at two and a half, and suddenly snatches away my pen.”9 Tuga, toska, hüzün, saudade: a veritable dictionary of untranslatables, which leads Greenwell to make, in a parenthesis, a paradoxical observation: “(Maybe everyone imagines their sorrow to be untranslatable; maybe they’re right).”10 In Greenwell’s brilliant formulation, a paradox whose force lies precisely in its unresolvability, there is nothing specifically Bulgarian about tuga, just as there is nothing specifically Portuguese about saudade, etc.—and yet there is: the word at once conveys something that belongs to a single language or people, and to all languages and all peoples, universal precisely insofar as it is national, available to all only to the extent that it belongs solely to one. To borrow a term from Nancy, the word is resolutely singular plural,11 and so it should be unsurprising that this novel that deals with a Bulgarian disposition has also attained success outside of its country, for (in Greenwell’s reading) the novel is not simply “about” tuga, but rather—again, paradoxically—employs the latter as an antidote to malaise. Greenwell notes several strategies that have recently taken hold in Bulgaria to combat a seeming vacuum of meaning in a country taking its first steps into a globalized world: there is, on the one hand, the “retreat to an imagined past: to the nostalgic décor of socialist-themed night

Haide: On a Life that Feels Itself Live

253

clubs and bars” that seek to “sell nostalgia”; on the other hand (yet the relation is clear), there is “what Gospodinov calls the ‘kitsch’ of nationalism, the fantasies of Bulgaria’s past greatness invoked by the far-right Ataka party.”12 Greenwell characterizes both examples as “attempts to flee from or deny the sorrow of the present,” and here he comes to the crux of his argument about Gospodinov: insofar as nostalgia and nationalism are both attempts to flee from the sorrow of the present, resistance to them lies in embracing that sorrow, and Georgi’s real quest in The Physics of Sorrow is to find a way to live with sadness, to allow it to be a source of empathy and salutary hesitation—the antidote to aggressive politics and “market exhortations”—and not a cause of “savage fear.”13 A way to live with sadness (a sadness without malaise), or, alternatively, sadness as a way of life: something that holds within it the elements of a form of common existence. This leads me to Nancy’s article on Gospodinov, because it seems to me that Nancy complements Greenwell nicely in saying something at once very similar and very different. Similar, because, after all, Nancy, in speaking of the novel, is speaking of the same sorrow, mélancolie, tuga. Yet what immediately strikes the reader of Nancy’s article is just how “non-sad” its tone is,14 beginning with the title, “Entrain bulgare,” the first word of which appears almost as untranslatable as tuga—the terms usually employed to translate it into English, such as spirit, enthusiasm, animation, etc., all miss something essential—until one realizes that “entrain” is also an English word, if a rare one: the OED defines it as “Enthusiasm, liveliness; an instance of this,” and notes that it derives from two possible French sources: the verb entraîner, “in its specific sense ‘to make (a person) enthusiastic,’” or the phrasal verb être en train de, which denotes an action that is underway. The reason one should read the novel sans délai, as Nancy puts it, is that it attains a kind of movement, a rhythm of the contemporary, something about it is plugged into the experience of the now: something about it is alive. For life is the very language of Nancy’s article. He begins by noting that the novel brings with it “a bundle of wonderful tidings,” but gerbe de belles nouvelles could also be rendered “sheaf of beautiful stories,” as if the stories that comprised the novel (it is, after all, made up of sections that at times seem only loosely related) were as closely related to life as the wheat or corn brought together in a sheaf. The first of these tidings—the first stalk of which the sheaf is composed—is “the literary vitality of a country and a language perfectly poised to set the Mediterranean region in motion”; another is the narration that “manages to place the Minotaur in the midst of quantas, DNA, and Lolita”; yet another is the book’s “bounding, agile, joyful, rich language, whose vivacity Marie Vrinat-Nikolov [the novel’s French translator] is able to reproduce for us.”15 Literary vitality, DNA, vivacity: are all indices of life, and, thus, it is no wonder that Nancy, in what is perhaps the article’s most telling passage, characterizes the novel as nothing less than an “event” of “literature as the phrased palpitation of life itself, as a true possibility for life—our life—to feel itself live.”16 Surely the palpitation of such a life would indicate a way beyond the malaise I discussed above; what Nancy seems to locate in this novel ostensibly about sorrow is a life force beyond any dialectic of happy and sad, or melancholy and its overcoming

254

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

or sublation, thus comprising (to cite the last words of the article) a “fresh air that wakes you up.”17 This sounds very much like the language of immediacy—how else to conceive of a life that feels itself live?—and this brings me to the second conservative columnist I want to discuss, Bret Stephens (also of the Times), who recently devoted a column to the film Free Solo, about Alex Honnold, an American rock climber known for scaling vertical rock faces alone and without a rope (a style of climbing to which the film’s title refers). Stephens admits to writing the article in a euphoric state (“The film is a drug,” he states), and the euphoria is that of life: Honnold and other free soloists defy death at every moment of their exploits, and hence, Stephens suggests, raise the question of whether the aim of life should be excellence, rather than (as if often assumed) happiness or longevity; the film “makes life so much more vivid and significant” than usual because it bears “a kind of radical truthfulness”: Honnold is either “going to get it exactly right, or he’s going to die.”18 This is certainly a life that feels itself live (if only because of its close proximity to death), and while in some ways Stephens works within a classic ideological framework—that of the individual hero struggling against or showing a way out of society’s ills—he also seeks to combat the “deadening” happiness that to my mind is one of the main productions of contemporary power.19 But the main difference between the life Stephens locates in the film, and the one Nancy finds in Gospodinov’s novel, concerns immediacy: if the life that palpitates throughout The Physics of Sorrow is indeed immediate, what is key is that there is also a distance inherent to it; the narrator locates it, time and again, not through any aspiration to greatness, not by seeking to transcend the everyday and indeed, at times, banal qualities of life, but rather by doubling down on them—by combing the most everyday moments, the most unremarkable occurrences, everything we usually overlook, for an opening, something that doesn’t quite fit, a sort of strangeness of the banal that, in diverging ever so slightly from the common course of events, invites the reader to take part in something unprecedented, a juxtaposition of the multiple, an ephemeral gathering of elements (as though in a sheaf) that becomes an act of creation. Near the middle of The Physics of Sorrow, one reads the following brief paragraph: “Come on, let’s play dust motes. You’re the daddy dust mote, and I’m the baby dust mote”;20 while this is not clear from the words cited in isolation—no speaker is indicated, there are no quotation marks—the context indicates that they are spoken by the narrator’s daughter. These are the final words of the novel’s fifth chapter, and as such, I want to pose the question: how exactly does the narrator arrive here? There are many ways to answer this question—many means of arrival, in other words. First, this is the final of several passages in which the narrator speaks of his daughter: he notes that “[f]or the eye of every newborn—rat, fly, or turtle—each time the world is created anew”; he remarks that babies speak “the language of all living creatures, cooing like a dove, gurgling like a dolphin, meowing, squawking, bawling … The linguistic primordial soup”; he then writes out some of these sounds as words: “Dgish, anguh, pneya, eeeh, deeeya, bunya-bunya-bunyaba, batyabuuu”;21 he compares her wobbling to that of a penguin. As is clear from these passages, the narrator also arrives at the chapter’s final words via a series of observations

Haide: On a Life that Feels Itself Live

255

about animals, and in fact one of the main themes of the book is the relationship between animals and humans, a relationship that Gospodinov often characterizes as one of domination (hence the “melancholy Minotaur”22 who returns time and again, unjustly mistreated because of his bull’s head); this chapter in particular has much to say about the mistreatment of animals, beginning with a newspaper report about a bullfight, and passing through an ordinance about “reducing to a minimum animals’ suffering during slaughter”23 and diagrams showing where exactly to place a stun gun on a cow’s head. Another means by way of which the narrator arrives at the chapter’s end is sorrow, such as the passage concerning “the world’s sorrows, Portuguese saudade, Turkish hüzün” that I cited above, and even the ephemeral observations of his daughter are tinged with melancholy, the sadness of every parent at moments that happen once and will never return (time and again, one senses the narrator’s desire to write his observations down before they flit away); indeed, his daughter ages several years in the space of only a few paragraphs, reflecting the speed at which such precious moments recede into the past. Yet another means is chance: one of the first things the reader of this novel notices is that, far from constructing the narrative through a process of accumulation (one insight adding to another, each element of the story building on those that came before), the narrator often seems simply to write down what he is thinking at a given moment, perhaps a distant memory jarred by the previous passage, perhaps (as with the passage with which I began this paragraph) an interruption by his daughter or someone else; it is in part because of this method that the labyrinth is such an important figure throughout the novel. To demonstrate these workings of chance, it may be instructive to transcribe the chapter’s final four paragraphs: Her first steps, she’s wobbling like a royal penguin. As if walking on the moon. She reaches out to grab onto the air. So concentrated and smiling to herself, so fragile. When you look at her, she falls. While I’m writing about the world’s sorrows, Portuguese saudade, Turkish hüzün, about the Swiss illness—nostalgia … she comes to me, at two and a half, and suddenly snatches away my pen. Sit here and open your mouth up wide, she says. Then she gets up on tiptoe and looks inside. Wow, it’s really dark inside you, I can’t see a thing … Come on, let’s play dust motes. You’re the daddy dust mote, and I’m the baby dust mote.24

While on the one hand, the final paragraph follows logically from the others (they are after all a series of recollections about the narrator’s daughter), their connection is at the same time entirely arbitrary: nothing really brings them together other than the fact that they come to the narrator’s mind in a certain order; something about each particular recollection (something specific to him, to the flow of his thoughts)

256

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

flows from the previous one and brings about the next. As such, the paragraphs recall what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write, in a very different context, about fragmentary works: in such a work, each fragment stands utterly alone, yet in so doing is inextricably related to all the other fragments; each fragment, in other words, finds its own meaning “lessened” by the totality in which it participates, and at the same time, in standing alone, undoes or de-totalizes this totality.25 This comparison, while not quite exact, highlights the extent to which several narratives take place in the novel at any one time, threads that come together momentarily before fraying apart once more: any given passage speaks with several voices, or tells several stories, simultaneously. This is all the more true of the chapter’s final paragraph, in which, as I note above, a multitude of strands come together or “arrive”; yet as such, the paragraph is every bit as much an origin as a destination, bringing these strands together not by fusing them, but in such a way that they continue to speak with a degree of autonomy, in a kind of co-resonance; the paragraph is thus as much an opening as a closure, setting the voices that lead into it in a relation of echo: putting everything that comes before into play. For the final paragraph concerns a game, one invented on the spot by the narrator’s daughter, a game about dust motes, perhaps the smallest thing the little girl can observe or imagine (another link to the fragment: a privileging of diminution over accumulation). The game has not yet begun, as the girl first has to invite or summon her father to play, which she does with the first words of the paragraph, “come on,” which translate the Bulgarian хайде or haide—a translation that is entirely accurate, but far from straightforward or direct. For where the English words that come together in the phrasal verb “come on” each have meanings independent of it, the Bulgarian locution only really signifies in a situation such as that of the passage: one says haide to beckon another to follow, to come along, to hurry up, to make more of an effort, etc.; it is ephemeral in its very nature, its sense evaporating the moment the situation changes. Its situational nature would not prevent any Bulgarian from understanding it, yet it is not, strictly speaking, Bulgarian: while its origin is disputed, it certainly came to Bulgarian via Turkish, specifically Ottoman Turkish, just as it did to every other Balkan language (variants of it are used in all of them).26 This most informal of terms (one uses it only among those with whom one is close) thus opens the chapter at the same time as it closes it, putting its entire contents into play, and this leads me back to the life of the novel, its fervor, its entrain. Certainly, it is immediate—one feels its palpitation throughout. Yet at the same time, it attains a distance of sorts, a distance in and from itself—this is the very means by which it feels itself live. It feels itself live in an act of constant creation, for, in a sense, it utters haide with every passage, every sentence, every paragraph, however brief, however long: at each turn, it refuses to utter a single meaning, to choose a single thread, to chart a single passage, instead choosing them all, at each instant, all at once. Each instant thereby expresses the novel’s totality, yet at the same time undoes it, in a manner of speaking, by expressing it, each time, in a singular way. By convoking it: summoning the novel’s various threads to echo one another in ways that shift from page to page, attaining, by this very means, a strange coherence. An openness, by way of which any meaning—any given sense—may come about at any given time, on the condition that it not repeat the already constituted, on

Haide: On a Life that Feels Itself Live

257

the condition that it create itself anew, not in any grand or heroic gesture, but in the most commonplace of ways (in the simplest possible game): a constant invitation for sense to feel itself live. Haide.

Notes   1 David Brooks, “It’s Not the Economy, Stupid,” New York Times, November 29, 2018.  2 Ibid.   3 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 95.   4 Jean-Luc Nancy, Que faire? (Paris: Galilée, 2016), 52, my translation.   5 Irving Goh, “The Risk of Existing: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Prepositional Existence, Knocks Included,” Diacritics 43, no.4 (2015): 8–26, is one of the few writers to deal with Nancy’s engagement with biopolitics. I largely agree with Goh’s ingenious claim that it is difficult for biopolitical discourse to conceive of chance, which for Nancy is constitutive of being—and that therefore, “what essentially escapes the grasp of biopolitics … is the very fact of existence” (18). I nonetheless have two reservations regarding his article. First, it is often unclear to me (in the passage I have just cited, for instance) whether Goh is referring to theorizations of biopolitics, or actually existing biopolitical regimes—it seems to me that there is a slippage between the two throughout this essay. Second, I don’t entirely agree with his understanding of    “the biopolitical condition” as the “reduction” of the various systems within which we exist “to the sole system of politics” (17)—to my mind, this describes totalitarianism but not necessarily biopolitics, as it is not linked to the question of life in any essential way. Philip Armstrong, in his Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), also deals with the question of biopolitics, but surprisingly only as it concerns Hardt and Negri, not Nancy; see especially the fourth chapter of this book, “Being Communist.” See also Michael Turnheim’s compelling remarks, in his “Autisme, biopolitique et déconstruction,” L’En-je lacanien 4 (2005): 113–30, about Nancy’s preference of the term (of his own creation) “ecotechnics” to biopolitics because it resists the hypothesis of a life that is “‘pure’ or ‘nude’” (124, my translation).   6 Originally published as “Entrain bulgare” in the French daily Libération, April 15, 2015; my translation, “Bulgarian Liveliness,” appears in this volume.   7 Garth Greenwell, “The Bulgarian Sadness of Georgi Gospodinov,” The New Yorker, April 17, 2015.  8 Ibid.   9 Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow, trans. Angela Rodel (Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2015), 177. 10 Greenwell, “Bulgarian Sadness.” 11 The key text here is of course Nancy’s Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). The thinking of the singular plural allows one to avoid one of the more puerile tendencies of contemporary literary studies, which seeks to divide works (mostly from “minor” languages) into those that “speak to” their own languages and countries, and those

258

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

that, in their universal or global appeal, lose all links to (and indeed betray, according to the implication) their origins. For an interesting, if implicit, treatment of this issue, see Wai-Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 173–88, specifically her comments on Mandelstam’s reading of Dante, 179. 12 Greenwell, “Bulgarian Sadness.” 13 Ibid. 14 To my mind, one of the most interesting aspects of Nancy’s work is its refusal to adopt a melancholy tone—its relentless optimism, one might say, with the caveat that the optimism is not for something to come, but for what is already present—even when dealing with the most agony-inducing themes. This optimism for the present is part of what animates his work, in the literal sense of giving it life. 15 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Bulgarian Liveliness,” trans. Cory Stockwell, in Bulgarian Literature as World Literature, eds. Mihaela P. Harper and Dimitar Kambourov (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020) 249–50, 249. 16 Ibid, 249. 17 Ibid, 250. 18 Bret Stephens, “Alex Honnold, A Soul Freed in ‘Free Solo,’” New York Times, October 25, 2018. 19 There is a great deal of recent theoretical work on this theme. See, for instance, Slavoj Žižek’s “Happiness? No, Thanks!” The Philosophical Salon, April 2, 2018, which links happiness and social control, and ends with the question: “do we want to be happily manipulated or expose ourselves to the risk of authentic creativity?” From a very different perspective, David Brooks has recently argued: “if we orient our lives toward joy and not individual happiness, we’ll be pointing in the right direction”; see “David Brooks Closing Keynote / Knight Media Forum 2019,” February 27, 2019, video, 36:24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLEmQ6ZuiYg. 20 Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow, 177. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 14. 23 Ibid., 155. 24 Ibid., 177. 25 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 39–58. 26 As such, this paragraph echoes one of my favorite passages in the novel, in which the narrator describes how his father, while visiting the narrator in Berlin, regularly visits the Turkish market to combat his homesickness: “There he could always exchange a few ‘Bulgarian’ words like arkadaş (friend), çok selam (many greetings), aferim (bravo), mashallah (bravo), evallah (bravo again) … and to buy himself some ‘Bulgarian’ cheese and a roll.” Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow, 214.

Afterword Beyond “Minor Literatures”: Reflections on World Literature (and on Bulgarian) Galin Tihanov

For some time now, I have been rather skeptical about the appellation “minor literatures.”1 In my view, the idea of “minor literatures” is a historical construct with a specific (limited) life-span. The notion of “minor literatures” is deeply ambiguous, poised as it has lately been between an understanding of “minor” as an example of potential social and political energy that originates in the writing of a minority within a dominant majority (“minoritäre Literatur”), and an evaluative notion that sees “minor literatures” as small (“kleine Literatur”), derivative, deprived of originality when measured by the yardstick of “mainstream literatures.” The first of these two perspectives is sustained in Deleuze and Guattari’s classic book Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature and amplified and radicalized in their later A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari make it abundantly clear that the major and minor modes are two different treatments of the (same) language of the majority (e.g., German in Germany, Hungarian in Hungary, French in France, and not necessarily German in Bohemia, or French in Russia). One of these treatments “consists in extracting constants from it, the other in placing it in continuous variation”; in other words, the “minor” is the force that questions and varies the major from within.2 The second perspective—“minor” as “small” and “derivative”—has a longer pedigree that goes back to the intricate history of Eurocentrism since the eighteenth century. Bulgarian literature does not seem to be particularly amenable to a study grounded in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialization of language as the hallmark of a “minor literature”; Deleuze and Guattari assume a linguistic framework that presupposes already institutionally stable national languages, and thus also a provisional canon to which a “minor” writer relates his or her own writing. This approach would end up bracketing out the arguably most interesting century of Bulgarian literary culture, the time from the 1760s to the 1870s when the literature of the so-called National Revival displayed the linguistically unregulated existence of a body of writing in becoming, without a firm canon and without prescriptive expectations of regularity and beauty. If anything, this is the time when it is still possible for writers to create works in other languages, which are then nonetheless adopted as part of the Bulgarian literary corpus: Liuben Karavelov and Grigor Parlichev spring to mind. The “long century” of

260

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

the National Revival, paradoxically, is the most intense period of truly multilingual writing in the history of modern Bulgarian literature; as Raymond Detrez and Marie Vrinat-Nikolov correctly observe in their essays for this volume, Bulgarian literary plurilingualism, both before and after 1878, is yet to be properly studied. But let me now move to the other, better established and still widely resonant, meaning of “minor literature”—that of “small, derivative, deprived of originality, benighted, lagging behind,” a literature that is worth reading only in order to corroborate or amplify already available superior examples of (European) civilization. The roots of this evaluative paradigm lie back in the Enlightenment philosophy of history. At the same time as the French philosophes discovered progress as the supposedly uncontested trajectory of humanity, they also discovered that different communities would arrive at that implied pinnacle of history at different times. Apparently, the direction was only one, but the circumstances and the speed were calling for a more pluralistic picture. The very concept of civilization was invented as a tool of locating the provisional point occupied by any one community on the axis of progress. (This line of reasoning culminates in Hegel’s aesthetics which “measures” the literatures of the world by their ability to pass through a number of aesthetic currents and by the presence or absence in them of a compulsory repertoire of genres; Chinese literature, for example, is found wanting by Hegel in that it does not have a proper epic. We know by now how absurd such claims are, but for a very long time the Hegelian paradigm of mandatory progression through a number of compulsory aesthetic formations and genres was deeply entrenched in literary studies in the West, in Russia, and in Eastern Europe. A closer look into the history of literatures customarily perceived as mainstream would confirm that this anxiety of progression besets even them: Russian culture has long been trying to deal with the “trauma” of an absent [Western] Renaissance, while in Spain, as E. R. Curtius points out, during the 1920s one could hear concerns that the transition to vernacular literature had occurred much later than in France.) It is far from accidental that the Bulgarians made their first prominent appearance on the large stage of world literature precisely in the book of a French Enlightenment philosophe, in Voltaire’s Candide (but then, again, only as a substitute designation for the Prussians); all this took place in 1759,3 three years before Paisius of Hilendar professed his pride of belonging to the glorious tribe of the Bulgarians. The anthropological curiosity that flourished during the Enlightenment was lifting entire ethnic communities from the obscurity of mere exoticism to that of benign cultural insignificance within the emerging framework of European identity. If we trace the history of the entrance of Bulgarian culture into Europe, we notice that it begins with the translation of folklore. This is true of translations into the Slavonic languages (the earliest example being an 1823 translation of a Bulgarian folksong into Czech), as well as translations into English, French, and German.4 Folklore, however, is all about an asynchronic adoption, where cultural forms long gone are domesticated once again as a manifestation of quaintness stemming from a stage of cultural evolution that could no longer be sustained, or indeed recommended, in the West. The true history of “minor literatures,” in the sense of small and poor relatives of the mainstream European literatures, commences only with the end of the “exotic phase”

Afterword: Beyond “Minor Literatures”

261

and the arrival of the more or less synchronized literary movements of the fin-dusiècle and, later, the avant-garde: the many isms (symbolism being one of the most recognizable such phenomena) which begin to coordinate the map of literary Europe and entangle the smaller literatures of the Balkans (and of East-Central Europe) into a larger landscape of shared conventions and styles. For South-East Europe this synchronization first occurs around the 1890s and is safely consolidated by the end of World War One; in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian literature this is the point when what is being practiced in Paris, Berlin, or Rome is also practiced, virtually without delay, in Sofia, Belgrade, or Bucharest. Teodor Trayanov, Nikolai Liliev, and a whole string of other Bulgarian modernists, just as Hristo Smirnenski, Geo Milev, Chavdar Mutafov, and other representatives of Bulgarian post-symbolism and the avant-garde, are—from this epistemologically more rigorous perspective—the only conceivable exponents of “minor literature” Bulgarian culture has furnished before 1945. In a similar position, one could venture, were also dozens of writers after 1945, who were participants in the national version of a concomitant socialist-realist literature produced in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. In this regard (as in many others), socialist realism was only an extension of modernity and of its various coordinated isms which bound together the literary space of Europe (and the world beyond) through their compulsory conventions and through an experience of aesthetic (and political) solidarity. With the demise of the mandatory isms—these smaller contributory narratives that made up the great European narrative of literary succession and progression— the very foundation of the axiological juxtaposition between minor and major has become much more problematic. We live through a time when the only possible distinction that could still render such a juxtaposition meaningful is the distinction based on the mode of existence and functioning of language. On the one hand, one can identify the few great languages that have spread across continents, nurturing not just their own diasporic writing but also writing—in those same languages— embraced, negotiated and enriched by writers coming from other, often recognizably different, linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds (in India, in the Caribbean, in Latin America, Brazil, etc.); on the other hand, there are the countless small, or “minor” languages, whose literatures have largely remained trapped in the physical body of the respective nation-state, or have—at best—inhabited, sometimes even legitimized, its (often hotly) disputed territorial extensions (e.g., Hungarian in Transylvania and Slovakia). When I say “great languages” (and therefore “great literatures”) I do not mean, of course, the number of speakers or writers of any one particular language; Indonesian is a numerically “large” language, but the national pull is still overwhelming, to the extent that literature written in Indonesian would be very difficult, nay impossible, to conceive of as a “great literature” in the way in which it may have been, had it been supported by a language that had journeyed and exfoliated, to a significant degree, beyond the nation-state. I think that even Russian is in a precarious position in this regard. It has indeed travelled, but the patterns of Russian colonization have historically been such that Russian abroad has remained, with few, relatively short-lived exceptions, most of all the language of the Russian diaspora; it has thus left the nation-state, without being able to jump over its extended and irremovable

262

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

shadow. English, French, to some extent also Spanish and Portuguese, have been not just diasporic: they have operated not just beyond the nation-state (which Russian has also done), but also beyond its extension (the diaspora), engaging and enabling over the last couple of centuries (in some cases longer) many writers of an originally different linguistic and cultural inheritance. If someone were to say that Bulgarian literature (or German, Italian, Romanian, Czech, Hungarian, or countless others, in Europe and beyond) is a literature written in a minor language (in the sense I have articulated here), then Bulgarian literature will be in very good company: minor languages, as I described them above, are historically the rule, not the exception. “Minor literatures” is thus a construct of literary history; it experiences today significant difficulties conditioned by changes in the way we understand and write that history. The most consequential amongst these changes is the arrival and consolidation of transnationalism, an epistemic paradigm that has always professed a value-neutral approach to the phenomena it seeks to explain. Transnationalism drew on a twofold discontent: with the undifferentiated, blanket concept of globalization and with what social scientists termed in the 1990s “methodological nationalism.” “World literature” as a paradigm for literary studies responds to similar discontents. It takes away the right of national cultures to determine the value of their literary production, which now becomes the subject of intense, multilateral, and never quite transparent bargaining in the process of circulation. Circulation is, of course, a concept helpful and problematic in equal measure. It has widened immensely the geography of world literature and has sharpened our sense of what happens to literary works as they cross the historically mobile borders of different cultural and literary zones (zonality is the specific mode of existence of world literature, both before and during globalization).5 But deploying the concept of circulation comes with an opportunity cost: like most great concepts, it conceals while it reveals. What it conceals is the fact that world literature is not just a complex assemblage of ready artifacts that circulate around the globe. It is above all a process that has temporal depth to it. Our current notion of world literature, certainly in the Anglo-Saxon mainstream, emphasizes and studies predominantly the circulation of these ready artifacts; in fact, what circulates, along with these artifacts, are powerful discursive energies, verbal masses at different stages of formation, debris of older and now reconstituted genres, building blocks for poetic and linguistic conventions yet to take shape. These are much more difficult to identify and capture, but thinking about them is imperative if we are to treat world literature in a way that circumvents the static and acknowledges its nature as an asymmetric process of interaction between different cultural and literary zones. Without this, we are in danger of reifying cultural difference; this would be, historically speaking, a secondary reification, much along the lines of what the Enlightenment passion for safely cataloguing and marveling at samples of writing from different corners of the world would do 250 years ago. Paradoxically (another dialectic of the Enlightenment?), we are spiraling towards a reproduction of this mosaic, deeply static model: our anthologies of world literature accommodate with panchronic sanguinity new, bolder samples of writing from around the world, but we are still less prepared to ask the question: how has

Afterword: Beyond “Minor Literatures”

263

world literature been produced in time, in the past and now, what are the foundations of this process of asymmetric interaction, what is world literature the outcome and articulation of in different moments in history? The cabinet of curiosities, this beloved piece of eighteenth-century furniture, is probably still a suitable metaphor for our overwhelmingly static approach to world literature: one pulls the drawer, admires lovingly the sample, and then the drawer is safely pushed back; the sample does not come into contact with other samples, the mosaic is yet to be broken up, giving way to an arrangement that seeks to do justice to the dynamics of interaction. Asymmetry is a key notion here, as different literary zones enter into dialogue with other zones at different times, and a significant time-lag is often what marks this process. (One example instead of many: Europe begins to translate and study Chinese literature in earnest in the sixteenth century, whereas in China Western European literatures begin to be noticed and translated only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; needless to say, the question is how to explain this asymmetry away from the ultimately West-centered framework that world-systems theory provides.) What is more, literatures often enter into dialogue with other literatures not on their own but through the facilitation of the larger literary and cultural zones in which they participate and whose interlocutors change over time. From this perspective, the whole question of how Bulgarian literature enters larger literary spaces (Byzantine; Ottoman; EastEuropean; West-European; etc.) deserves a fresh look that takes into account Bulgarian literature’s integration, over time, into the Balkan literary zone. (A literary zone is defined, above all, by heterogeneity, not by homogeneity: it is made up of languages that belong to different language families, and is underwritten by the intersection of different religions and ethnicities; it is this underlying heterogeneity that propels literary zones into interaction with other zones, and the participants in this dialogue change over time. From this perspective, I insist there is a Balkan literary zone, whereas Slavic literatures, of which Bulgarian literature is also a part, are perhaps best referred to as an “interliterary community,” a term coined by the Slovak comparatist Dionýz Ďurišin who stresses homogeneity as the constitutive feature of any such formation.)6 Local differences of intensity and pace aside, after World War One and throughout the Soviet age, to some extent even during the transition to a market economy (in this respect, political caesurae did not necessarily amount to paradigmatic shifts) showcasing the literatures of Eastern Europe became at times an exercise in asserting their belonging to world literature by projecting them as suspiciously “unique”— which, in fact, was often little else than the other side of “minor,” “derivative,” “obscure,” “small.” Claiming a stake in world literature thus sometimes meant claiming a well-guarded corner, a little patch of exclusive, unmatched, and unmatchable cultural experience. We can still see this notion of “exclusivity” at work in reference to Bulgarian literature. The negative version is particularly endearing: “we” don’t have a Nobel laureate; “we” don’t have a great dissident writer of European standing; “we” don’t have an émigré writer associated with veritable aesthetic innovation on the world stage; “we” are somehow unnoticed—but all this marks “us” as unique in “our” dispossession; one wonders to what extent this resilient national logic ex negativo is a critical response to (or perhaps a manifestation of) a society governed by populism

264

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

and still in the grip of largely patriarchal social structures dominated by life within the family and its surrogate extensions (closely-knit networks of relatives, former schoolmates, etc.). But in doing so East-European literatures were responding, in a sense, to the operational logic of “world literature” that tends to suspend evaluative judgments in order to maximize the market value which managed inclusivity generates in the process of recapturing (sometimes even fetishizing) cultural difference. “World literature” is no longer a list of masterpieces; it is a gallery of mirrors in which we are supposed to catch a glimpse of somebody else’s cultural environment. In the age of global information flows literature no longer has a fixed abode or audience (in Ottmar Ette’s words, literature has lost its “permanent address”7), nor does it any longer come with secure value markers attached to it. As the global economy undergoes a painful readjustment and, more importantly, a slow but seemingly unstoppable rebalancing towards the new power-houses of growth in the Far East and on the Indian subcontinent, the very idea of a binding Euro-North-American literary canon, within which established notions of center and periphery, of “minor” and “major” remain meaningful, grows weaker and less tenable. As a matter of fact, this very distinction, as I essayed to demonstrate, is itself a historical product with—as any other time-bound product—a limited life-span: the distinction between “major” and “minor” literatures was the outcome of an era of thriving national traditions and strong nation-states, but also—equally important—of a complacent Eurocentric framework populated and propped by the contributory narratives of various artistic isms and compulsory repertoires of genres, which, in their totality, constituted the coordinated space of the world [read: largely European] “republic of letters” (to borrow a part of Casanova’s well-known title), apparently homogenous but, below the surface, built on cultural hierarchies and ridden by conflicts, revolts, and struggles for international domination and significance. To describe its map, the categories of center and periphery, canon and deviation, focus and margin were meaningfully employed. This conceptual apparatus now looks increasingly challenged and enfeebled by the encounter with a newly constituted transnational cultural process, in which evaluative discriminations are ever more difficult to uphold. Instead, we are entering the regime of a complex (and constant) marginocentricity,8 in which center and periphery become fluid, mobile, and provisional, prone to swapping places and exchanging cultural valences. This is not to say that inequalities disappear; as a matter of fact, globalization does create and reveal new sets of inequalities. But we need to begin to acknowledge that, in the same breath, it renders the opposition between center and periphery less meaningful, as it moves away from the idea of a shared (Western) canon that underpins this distinction in the first place. Rather, we are witnessing a new regime of relevance where difference—drawn not least from what we used to see as zones of cultural marginality—is commodified and homogenized into a single, globally marketable cultural product;9 the defiant spirit of marginality is processed away, leaving us with a new stock of goods that change hands smoothly—novels read and abandoned at airports or, virtually, in a myriad of chat-rooms. We might be well-advised to admit that one of the most unpalatable effects of globalization has indeed been to confront

Afterword: Beyond “Minor Literatures”

265

us with the reality of the “minor” now functioning as a fixed feature, a reterritorialized appellation, a commodity label. Alas, this new, static condition of ready-to-consume “minority” has very little to do with the productive and challenging “becoming” that extracts “continuous variation,” to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s imperative. Instead, we are in the grip of “a new constant,”10 in which major and minor, canonical and marginal are at the mercy of the market, fueling its insatiable appetite for domesticated novelty and controllable originality.11

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

7 8

In this text I elaborate further on ideas first advanced in my article “Do ‘minor literatures’ still exist?”, published in 2014 in a volume edited by Vladimir Biti. These ideas are now nuanced and enriched by some methodological reflections on world literature. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 106. For earlier mentions of Bulgaria in the literatures of Western Europe, cf. Emilia Staitscheva, “Zur bulgarischen Motivik in der deutschen Literatur. Eine Randerscheinung bezüglich Interkulturalität,” in Interkulturalität und Nationalkultur in der deutschsprachigen Literatur, eds. Maja Razboynikova-Frateva and Hans-Gerd Winter (Dresden: Thelem, 2006), 393–401. Further details can be found in Veselin Traikov (Веселин Трайков), Българска художествена литература на чужди езици. Библиографски указател 1823-1962 (София: Наука и изкуство, 1964). For more on the dynamics and ideology of translating Bulgarian literature in the West, see Galin Tihanov, “Appropriations of Bulgarian Literature in the West: From Pencho Slaveikov to Iordan Iovkov,” in Bulgaria and Europe: Shifting Identities, ed. Stefanos Katsikas (London: Anthem Press, 2010), 33–42. This is a point I have argued, while also introducing the term “zonality,” in a recent keynote address at the annual conference of the Italian Comparative Literature Association in December 2019. Ďurišin’s work in the last years of his life evolved towards a recognition of what he started calling an “interliterary network,” a concept in which the idea of heterogeneity begins to be given some credit (see his posthumously published co-edited volume, with Armando Gnisci, Il Mediterraneo: Una rete interlitteraria [Rome: Bulzoni, 2000]). Cf. the argument in Ottmar Ette, Literature on the Move (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003); the German original was published in 2001 under the title Literatur in Bewegung. Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika. I extend and radicalize here the notion of marginocentricity applied by Marcel Cornis-Pope to what he calls the “marginocentric cities” of Eastern Europe; he defines “marginocentric cities” as peripheral cities which display a “tendency to challenge the hegemony of the metropolitan centers, offering an alternative to their national pull” (Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Introduction: Representing East-Central Europe’s Marginocentric Cities,” in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, Vol. 2 [Amsterdam and Philadelphia:

266

Bulgarian Literature as World Literature

John Benjamins, 2006], 8); from a different perspective, cf. Marko Juvan, “Peripherocentrism: Geopolitics of Comparative Literatures between Ethnocentrism and Cosmopolitanism,” in Histoire de la littérature et jeux d´échange entre centres et périphéries, ed. Jean Bessière and Judit Maár (Paris: Harmattan, 2010), 53–63.   9 On the process I term “commodification of difference,” cf. also Galin Tihanov, “Cosmopolitanism in the Discursive Landscape of Moderntiy: Two Enlightenment Articulations,” in Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism, eds. David Adams and Galin Tihanov (London: Legenda, 2011), 133–52. 10 The words quoted in this and the previous sentence are from Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 104. 11 A state of affairs brilliantly captured by Rachel Cusk in the final part of her novelistic trilogy, Kudos.

Select Bibliography Theory Agoston-Nikolova, E., ed. Shoreless Bridges: South East European Writing in Diaspora. Amsterdam and New York: Sage, 2010. Beecroft, A. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Brooklyn: Verso, 2015. Damrosch, D. How to Read World Literature. Maldan: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Damrosch, D. What Is World Literature? Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. D’haen, T., C. Domínguez and M. R. Thomsen, eds. World Literature: A Reader. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013. Fang, W. ed. Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Glavanakova, A. Transcultural Imaginings. Sofia: Critique and Humanism Publishing House, 2016. Guentcheva, R. “Images of the West in Bulgarian Travel Writing during Socialism (1945– 1989).” In Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, edited by W. Bracewell and A. Drace-Francis, 355–78. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2008. Kabakchieva, P. “Temporary Migrants: Beyond Roles, Across Identities.” In Rules and Roles: Fluid Institutions, Hybrid Roles and Identities in East European Transformation Processes (1989 – 2005), edited by A. Kiossev and P. Kabakchieva. Freiburg: LitVerlag, 2009. Kiossev, A. “Notes on the Self-Colonizing Cultures.” In Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, edited by B. Pejic and D. Elliott, 114–18. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999. Kiossev, A. “The Dark Intimacy: Maps, Identities and Acts of Identification.” In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, edited by D. I. Bjelic and O. Savic, 165–90. Cambridge: MIT, 2002. Kiossev, A. Post-Theory, Games, and Discursive Resistance: The Bulgarian Case. SUNY series, The Margins of Literature. Albany: SUNY, 1995. Kristeva, J. Crisis of the European Subject. New York: Other Press, 2000. Moretti, F. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Nikolchina, M. Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf. New York: Other Press, 2004. Sampimon, J. Becoming Bulgarian: The Articulation of Bulgarian Identity in the Nineteenth Century in Its International Context: An Intellectual History. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus, 2006. Seymour-Smith, M. Guide to Modern World Literature. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975. Tihanov, G. “The Location of World Literature.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 44, no. 3 (2017): 468–81.

268

Select Bibliography

Todorova, M. Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Wachtel, A. B. Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Works in English Basevski, D. Temporal Stay: Poems. Translated by B. Walker. London: Forest Books, 1998. Bereanu, V. et al. The Umbrella Murder. Translated by V. Bereanu and K. Todorov. Cambridge: Pendragon, 1994. Bozhkoff, A. Boris Hristov: An Authorized Biography. Translated by J. Woodward. London: Robson Books, 1991. Dimitrova, B. Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova. Translated by N. Boris and H. McHugh. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Dimitrova, B. Forbidden Sea. Translated by L. G. Popova-Wightman and E. Socolow. Princeton: Ivy Press, 2000. Dimitrova, B. Scars. Bilingual edition. Translated by L. G. Popova-Wightman. Princeton: Ivy Press, 2002. Dimitrova, B. The Last Rock Eagle: Selected Poems. Translated by B. Walker, V. Levchev, and B. Tonchev. London: Forest Books, 1992. Dimitrova, K. A Visit to the Clockmaker. Translated by G. O’Donoghue. Cork: Southword Editions, 2005. Dimitrova, K. My Life in Squares. Translated by K. Dimitrova. Grewelthorpe: Smokestack, 2010. Dvoryanova, E. Concerto for a Sentence: An Exploration of the Musico-Erotic. Translated by E. Kotzeva. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2016. Elenkova, Ts. Crookedness. Translated by J. Dunne. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2019. Elenkova, Ts. The Seventh Gesture. Translated by J. Dunne. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2010. Enev, D. Circus Bulgaria. Translated by K. Kassabova. London: Portobello, 2010. Evtimova, Z. Bitter sky. Translated by Z. Evtimova. Cardigan: Skrev Press, 2003. Evtimova, Z. God of Traitors. Translated by Z. Evtimova. Dallas: Books For A Buck, 2008. Evtimova, Z. Good Figure. Beautiful Voice. Georgetown: Astemari Publishers, 2008. Evtimova, Z. Miss Daniella. Cardigan: Skrev Press, 2007. Evtimova, Z. Pale and Other Bulgarian Stories. Kfar Saba: Vox Humana Publishers, 2010. Evtimova, Z. Somebody Else. San Diego: MAG Press, 2004. Gospodinov, G. And Other Stories. Translated by A. Levitin and M. Levy. Evanstone: Northwestern, 2007. Gospodinov, G. Natural Novel. Translated by Z. Hristova. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005. Gospodinov, G. The Physics of Sorrow. Translated by A. Rodel. Rochester: Open Letter Books, 2015. Gospodinov, G. The Story Smuggler. Translated by D. Gunn and K. Kovacheva. London: Cahier series, Sylph Editions, 2019. Grozni, N. Wunderkind: A Novel. New York: Free Press, 2011. Gruev, S. Crown of Thorns: The Reign of King Boris III of Bulgaria, 1918–1943. Lanham: Madison Books, 1998. Gruev, S. My Odyssey. New York: Writers Advantage, 2003.

Select Bibliography

269

Haitov, N. Wild Tales. Translated by M. Holmes. London: Peter Owen, 1979. Igov, A. A Short Tale of Shame. Translated by A. Rodel. Rochester: Open Letter Books, 2013. Jovkov, J. The Inn at Antimovo: Legends of Stara Planina. Translated by J. Burnip. Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1990. Karabashliev, Z. 18% Gray. Translated by A. Rodel. Rochester: Open Letter Books, 2013. Karastoyanov, H. The Same Night Awaits Us All. Translated by I. Angel. Rochester: Open Letter Books, 2018. Kassabova, K. Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. London: Granta, 2017. Kassabova, K. Geography of the Lost. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2007. Kassabova, K. Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. London: Portobello, 2008. Konstantinov, A. Bai Ganyo: Incredible Tales of a Modern Bulgarian, edited by V. A. Friedman. Translated by V. A. Friedman, Ch. E. Kramer, G. E. Fielder, and C. Rudin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. Kostova, E. The Shadow Land. New York: Penguin Random House, 2017. Levchev, L. And Here I Am. Translated by J. Harte. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2003. Levchev, L. Ashes of Light. Translated by V. Krustev. Willimantic: Curbstone Press, 2006. Levchev, L. Sky Break. New London: Griffis Art Center, 1995. Levchev, L. You Are Next. Poughkeepsie: Vivisphere Publishing, 2001. Levčev, L. and P. Bond. Sky Break. Bilingual edition. Translated by Ch. HalatchevaRousseva. Pueblo: Passeggiata Press, 1997. Levchev, V. Black Book of the Endangered Species. Translated by H. Taylor et al. Washington: Word Works, 1999. Lewitscharoff, S. Apostoloff. London: Seagull Books, 2013. Manova, J. The Age of Satan. London: Artnik Media, 2002. Markov, T. Black PR and Other Acts. Translated by T. Nikolaeva. Dublin: Scotus Press, 2007. Nenova, N. The Capital of Latecomers. Translated by V. Poleganov. Seattle: Amazon Crossing, 2015. Nikolov, L. Unreal Estate. Translated by M. Nikolov. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Press, 2009. Paskov, V. A Ballad for Georg Henig. Translated by R. Sturm. London: Owen, 1990. Pavlov, K. Capriccio for Goya. Translated by L. G. Popova-Wightman. Princeton: Ivy Press, 2003. Pavlov, K. Cry of a Former Dog. Translated by L. G. Popova-Wightman. Princeton: Ivy Press, 2000. Penkov, M. East of the West: A Country in Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Penkov, M. Stork Mountain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Petrov, I. Wolf Hunt. Translated by A. Rodel. New York: Archipelago, 2017. Popov, A. Black Box. Translated by C. de Lupe. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2015. Popov, A. Mission London. Translated by D. and C. Gill de Mayol de Lupe. London: Istros, 2014. Rusev, B. Come to Me. Translated by E. Petrova. McLean: Dalkey Archive Press, 2019. Ruskov, M. Thrown into Nature. Translated by A. Rodel. Rochester: Open Letter Books, 2011. Shurbanov, A. Frost-flowers. Translated by L. G. Popova-Wightman. Princeton: Ivy Press, 2001. Shpatov, A. #LiveFromSofia. Translated by A. Rodel. Sofia: Colibri Publishers, 2014. Stambolova, A. Everything Happens as It Does. Translated by O. Nikolova. Rochester: Open Letter Books, 2013. Stoyanova, D. Memory of a Dream. Translated by L. G. Popova-Wightman. Princeton: Ivy Press, 2003.

270

Select Bibliography

Sugarev, E. Secret Senses. Translated by L. G. Popova-Wightman. Princeton: Ivy Press, 2005. Tenev, G. Party Headquarters. Translated by A. Rodel. Rochester: Open Letter Books, 2016. Terziyski, K. Is There Anybody to Love You? Translated by D. Mossop. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018. Todorov, V. Zift: A Socialist Noir. Translated by J. Benatov. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010. Trojanow, I. Lamentations of Zeno. Translated by P. Boehm. London and New York: Verso, 2016. Troyanov, I. Collector of Worlds. Translated by W. Hobson. New York: Ecco, 2009. Vaptsarov, N. Kino: The poetry of Nikola Vaptsarov. Translated by K. Filipova et al. Middlesbrough: Smokestack, 2007. Vazov, I. Epic of the Forgotten. 1884. Translated by M. J. Ripkowsky. Bletchly: JiaHu Books, 2017. Vazov, I. Under the Yoke. Translated by I. E. Geshov. Edited by E. Gosse. London: William Heinemann, 1893. Wagenstein, A. Farewell, Shanghai. Translated by E. Frank and D. Simeonova. New York: Handsel Books, 2008. Wagenstein, A. Isaac’s Torah. Translated by E. Frank and D. Simeonova. New York: Other Press, 2008. Yovkov, Y. The White Swallow and Other Short Stories. Translated by M. Cholakova and M. Minkov. Sofia: Ministry of Information and Arts, 1947. Yovkov, Y. Short Stories. Translated by M. Minkov and M. Alexieva. Edited by Mercia MacDermott. New York: Vanous, 1965. Yovkov, Y. The Inn at Antimovo and Legends of Stara Planina. Translated by J. Burnip. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1990. Yovkov, Y. Tribute to Yordan Yovkov. Almere: Baldersmastrahuyzen, 2003. Zaharieva, V. Nine Rabbits. Translated by A. Rodel. New York: Black Balloon, 2014.

Anthologies Elenkova, Ts., ed. At the End of the World, Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria. Translated by J. Dunne. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2012. Herbert, W. N., ed. and trans. Balkan Exchange: Eight Poets from Bulgaria and Britain. Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2007. Johnson, A., Z. Nezic, and K. Kassabova et al. Voices from the Faultline: A Balkan Anthology. Hampton: ZayuPress, 2002. Jones, R., ed. and trans. Poetry East: Vol. 21. Chicago: DePaul, 1990. Karageorge, Y. V., ed. and trans. Voices of Sibyls: Three Bulgarian Poets. Kearney: Morris, 1996. Merredith, W., ed. Poets of Bulgaria. 1985. London: Forest Book, 1988. Rollberg, P., ed. and trans. And Meaning for a Life Entire: Festschrift for Charles A. Moser on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. Columbus: Slavica, 1997. Sapinkof, L. and G. Belev, eds. and trans. Clay and Star: Contemporary Bulgarian Poets. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1992. Stoykova-Klemer, K., ed. and trans. The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry. Lexington: Accents Publishing, 2014.

Select Bibliography

271

Tonchev, B., ed. and trans. Young Poets of a New Bulgaria. London: Forest Books, 1990. Wilson, D. D. and S. Kostova, eds. and trans. Daydreams and Nightmares. Canton: Ct Singular Speech, 1995.

Works in German Dinev, D. Engelszungen. Wien: Deuticke Verlag, 2003. Gospodinov, G. Gaustín oder Der Mensch mit den vielen Namen. Translated by A. Sitzmann. Klagenfurt: Wieser, 2004. Gospodinov, G. Kleines morgendliches Verbrechen. Translated by V. Jäger. Graz: Droschl, 2010. Gospodinov, G. Lapidarium. Translated by H. Schmidt. Berlin: eta, 2017. Gospodinov, G. Minuten und 19 Sekunden. Translated by A. Sitzmann. Graz: Droschl, 2016. Gospodinov, G. Natürlicher Roman. Translated by A. Sitzmann. Graz: Droschl, 2007. Gospodinov, G. Physik der Schwermut. Translated by A. Sitzmann, Graz: Droschl, 2014. Jäger, V. and A. Sitzmann, eds. and trans. Bulgarien Prosa. Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 2005. Popov, A. Die Hunde fliegen tief. Translated by A. Sitzman. Vienna: Rezidenz Verlag, 2008; Munich: DTV, 2010. Popov, A. Für Fortgeschrittene. Translated by A. Sitzman. 2009. Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 2012. Popov, A. Mission London. Translated by A. Sitzman. Vienna: Rezidenz Verlag, 2006; Munich: DTV, 2008. Popov, A. Schneeweisschen und Partisanenrot. Translated by A. Sitzman. Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 2014. Racusa, I. and M. Toss, eds. Hotel Europe. Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2012. Randow, N., ed. and trans. Bulgarische Erzählungen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996. Shpatov, A. Fussnotengeschichten. Translated by I. Sebesta. Vienna: Wieser Verlag, 2010. Todorov, V. Die Motte. Translated by I. Sebesta and R. M. Evert. Edition Balkan. Berlin: Dittrich Verlag, 2011. Vidinski, E., ed. and trans. Ein Fremder Freund (Sammlung von Kurzgeschichten zeitgenössischer bulgarischer Autoren). Berlin: eta, 2017. Zarev, V. Familienbrand. Translated by T. Frahm. Munich: DTV, 2013. Zarev, V. Feuerköpfe. Translated by T. Frahm. Vienna: Deuticke, 2011. Zarev, V. Seelenasche. Translated by T. Frahm. Vienna: Deuticke, 2012. Zarev, V. Verfall. Translated by T. Frahm. Cologne: KiWi Bibliothek Verlag, 2017.

Works in French Alexieva, A. Le prix Nobel. Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov. Arles: Actes sud, 2015. Dvorianova, E. Chaconne. Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov. Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2015.

272

Select Bibliography

Dvorianova, E. Les Jardins interdits. Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov. Paris: Éditions Aden, 2010. Dvorianova, E. Passion ou la mort d’Alissa. Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov. Gardonne: Fédérop, 2006. Gospodinov, G. L’alphabet des femmes. Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov. 2003. Paris: Arlea, 2013. Gospodinov, G. Physique de la mélancolie. Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov. Paris: Éditions Intervalles (Jan Michalski Prize), 2015. Gospodinov, G. Un roman naturel. Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov. 2002. Paris: Éditions Intervalles, 2016. Karabashliev, Z. 18% gris. Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov. Paris: Editions Intervalles, 2011. Les Belles Etrangeres: 14 ecrivains bulgares (Hristo Boytchev, Blaga Dimitrova, Anton Dontchev, et al.). Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov and K. Kavaldjiev et al. Paris: L’Esprit des Peninsules, 2001. Popov, A. Mission Londres. Translated by M. Vrinat-Nikolov. Paris: Editions Alvik, 2006. Vrinat-Nikolov, M., ed. Concerto pour phrase: 17 récits bulgares contemporains traduits sous la direction de Marie Vrinat. Paris: HB Editions, 2008.

Works in Italian Gospodinov, G. … e altre storie. Translated by G. Dell’Agata. Rome: Voland Edizioni, 2008. Gospodinov, G. E tutto divenne luna. Translated by G. Dell’Agata. Rome: Voland Edizioni, 2018. Gospodinov, G. Fisica della Malinconia. Translated by G. Dell’Agata. Rome: Voland Edizioni, 2013. Gospodinov, G. Romanzo naturale. Translated by I. Stoilova. 2007. Rome: Voland Edizioni, 2016. Popov., A. I Cani Volani Baso. Translated by S. Kirchbach. Rovereto: Keller Edizioni, 2013. Popov., A. Misione Londra. Translated by G. Dell’Agata. Rome: Voland Edizioni, 2008. Popov., A. Mitologia del Tempo che Cambia. Translated by G. Dell’Agata. Palermo: Duepunti Edizioni, 2013. Radickov, J. Bisce. Translated by G. Dell’Agata. Rome: Voland, 2000. Radickov, J. L’anatra da richiamo. Translated by G. Dell’Agata. Rome: Voland, 2002. Dell’Agata, G., ed. Antilogia del Racconto Bulgaro. Padova: Associazione Bulgaria-Italia, 2006.

Works in Spanish Dimitrova, K. Sabacio. Translated by R. Pérez Vásquez. Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2016. Gospodinov, G. Física de la tristeza. Translated by M. Vutova. Madrid: Fulgencio Pimentel, 2018. Gospodinov, G. Novela natural. Translated by M. Vutova. Madrid: Fulgencio Pimentel, 2018.

Contributors Diana Atanassova is Associate Professor in medieval Bulgarian literature at Sofia University. Her research interests focus on the history and theory of medieval literature and culture, literary genres, and pragmatics of reading in the Middle Ages. Her most recent monograph is Реторика на историчното (The Rhetoric of Historicity) (2015). Ani Burova is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Literatures at Sofia University. Her interests are in comparative literature and contemporary literature. She is the author of a number of publications, including the monograph Literature and the Fragmented World (2014), dedicated to the typology of processes in post-socialist literatures. Raymond Detrez is Emeritus Professor of East European history and cultural studies at Ghent University. Currently his research focuses on pre-national collective identities and early nationalism in the Balkans. He is the author of several articles and books dealing with nation-building and ethnic conflicts in Southeastern Europe. Emiliya Dvoryanova is a writer and Associate Professor of creative writing at New Bulgarian University, Sofia. Among her many books, her novel The Earthly Gardens of Our Lady (2006) received the Hristo G. Danov Award and At the Entrance to the Sea (2014) earned the 13 Centuries Bulgaria Award. Georgi Gospodinov is the most translated and awarded Bulgarian poet and writer. His Natural Novel (1999) was rendered in over 20 languages and The Physics of Sorrow (2012) received the European Angelus Award and the Jan Michalski Prize, and was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Mihaela P. Harper is Assistant Professor in the Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas Program at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Her research appears in journals and edited volumes, including Symplokē and the Slavonic and East European Review, Simulation in Media and Culture (2011) and Crime Fiction as World Literature (2017). Yana Hashamova is Professor of Slavic and film studies and chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. In her work, she examines national, ethnic, and gender representations and their intersection with ideology in Russian and Balkan film, media, and literature.

274

Contributors

Todor Hristov teaches literary theory, critical theory, and biopolitics at the University of Sofia. His research on late capitalist governmentality and pragmatics of conspiracy theories has been published in several journals and a book, Impossible Knowledge: Conspiracy Theories, Power and Truth (2019). Maria Kalinova is Assistant Professor of literary theory at Sofia University and editor  of  Литературен вестник (Literary Journal Weekly). She is the author of Детство и интелектуална история у възрожденските автори (Childhood and Intellectual History in the Works of Bulgarian National Revival Writers) (2012). Dimitar Kambourov is Associate Professor of literary theory at Sofia University, Lector of Bulgarian Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, and author of Явори и клони (Sycamores and Branches) (2003) and Българска поетическа класика (Bulgarian Poetic Classics) (2004). He co-edited Men in the Global World (2003) and Pro Art/Арт Про (2007). Alexander Kiossev is Professor of the history of modern culture, Director of the Cultural Center of Sofia University, editor-in-chief of Piron, and recipient of the Book Knight and the Hristo G. Danov awards. His books include Post-Theory, Games and Discursive Resistance (1995), Goethe’s Indigo (2008), and Quarrels around Reading (2013). Milena Kirova is Chair of the Department of Bulgarian Literature at Sofia University. Besides Bulgarian literature, her fields of research and teaching include gender studies and masculinity studies of the Hebrew Bible. She has authored fifteen books, including a three-volume History of Bulgarian Literature until the First World War. Bilyana Kourtasheva is Assistant Professor of theory and history of literature at New Bulgarian University, Sofia. Her research fields include canon formation, literary anthologies, comparative literature, and translation studies. Her recently published book is On the Edge of Comparison: Yavorov and Rolling Stones, and Other Im/Possible Intertexts (2018). Julia Kristeva is Emeritus Professor of linguistics at Université de Paris VII. She is a Bulgarian-born psychoanalyst, philosopher, literary critic, and author of over 30 books, including Desire in Language (1969), Powers of Horror (1980), Black Sun (1987), Strangers to Ourselves (1991), The Samurai (1983) and Passions of Our Time (2019). Amelia Licheva is a poet, literary critic, and professor of literary theory at Sofia University. She is Editor-in-Chief of Literaturen Vestnik, Knight of the Book of the Bulgarian Book Association, and recipient of the Hristo G. Danov Award for presenting Bulgarian literature.

Contributors

275

Miglena Nikolchina is Professor in the Theory of Literature Department at Sofia University and former Director of the Gender and Culture Program at CEU, Budapest. Her books include Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf (2004) and Lost Unicorns of the Velvet Revolutions: Heterotopias of the Seminar (2013). Boyko Penchev is Associate Professor of Bulgarian literature at the University of Sofia. He is the author of The Sorrows of Fin de Siecle: Studies in Literary History and Criticism (1998), Bulgarian Modernism: The Modeling of the Self (2003), September ’23: The Ideology of Memory (2006), and Contested Legacies (2017). Angela Rodel is a literary translator, a recipient of NEA and PEN grants, and the executive director of the Bulgarian-American Fulbright Commission. Her translations have appeared in McSweeney’s, Two Lines, Ploughshares, and Words Without Borders, among others. Her translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s Physics of Sorrow won the 2016 AATSEEL Prize. Kamelia Spassova is Assistant Professor of comparative literature at Sofia University and the author of Събитие и пример у Платон и Аристотел (Event and Example in Plato and Aristotle) (2012). At present, she is completing a monograph on the transformations of the concept of mimesis in the twentieth century. Cory Stockwell is Assistant Professor in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas, Bilkent University. His research focuses on contemporary literature’s engagement with politics. He is currently completing a book on the production of meaning in the work of W. G. Sebald and Jean-Luc Nancy. Darin Tenev is Associate Professor of literary theory and cultural studies at Sofia University and at the University of Plovdiv. He is the author of Fiction and Image: Models (2012) and Digressions: Essays on Jacques Derrida (2013). Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of comparative literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on literary theory, member of Academia Europaea, and the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is Regimes of Relevance (2019). Maria Todorova is Gutgsell Professor of history and Center for Advanced Study Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author and editor of seminal books, including Imagining the Balkans (1997), Bones of Contention (2009), and Remembering Communism (2010). Vassil Vidinsky is Associate Professor of philosophy at Sofia University, head of the “History of Philosophy and Contemporary Philosophy” MA program, and a member of the EENPS. His research fields include philosophy of culture and philosophy of science.

276

Contributors

His most recent book is Случайности. Историческа типология (Contingencies. A Historical Typology) (2017). Marie Vrinat-Nikolov is Professor of Bulgarian language and literature at INALCO, Paris and a translator of Bulgarian literature in French. Among her many publications on the history of Bulgarian literature and the theory of literary translation is her cowritten Histoire de la traduction littéraire en Europe médiane (2019).

Index a-historicity 103 a-narrativity 240 Angel Tongues 171–2, 175, 183 n.6, n.17 anomaly 100–2, 104–7 anthology After the Shadows of the Clouds 95 Anthology of Bulgarian Poetry 96 Bulgarian Anthology: Our Poetry from Vazov on 94–7, 98 n.8 Bulgarian Chrestomathy 92 dream 91–4 German Poets 95 Greek works by Bulgarian authors 40 n.38 Monumenta Bulgarica 24 n.15 On the Isle of the Blessed 90, 94–5 The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry 236 n.22 Slavic Anthology 94–5 and “strategies of exclusion” 233, 237 n.31 threshold 93, 97 aporia 124, 126–31 Apostoloff 176–7, 183 n.17, 185 n.37, 269 autonomy and literature 82, 86–7, 108 n.1, 113, 256 and nation 29, 42, 57 women’s 225 avant-garde 91, 96, 99, 100, 103–4, 108 n.2, 206, 261 and Crescendo 101, 103, 105, 107, 109 n.20 and Yambol 102 Bagryana, Elisaveta 5, 97, 229–31, 233–4, 235 n.7, n.8, 236 n.12, n.14, 237 n.27 Balkanism 38, 134 n.58, 151, 181

Balkans 28–30, 35, 37–9, 43–4, 49, 51 n.2, 53 n.31, 65 n.1, 106, 158 n.16, 164, 189, 191, 193, 196 n.25, 240, 245–6, 261, 268, 275 Bay Ganyo 150–2, 154, 157 n.10 Before I Was Born and After My Death 10, 12 Belcheva, Mara 64, 97, 233–4, 237 n.29 belonging (see also national identity) desire for 57 ethnic and national 22, 34, 36, 44, 84, 123, 125, 127 to everyday life 216 and identity 21, 189–90, 231, 260 and literary works 37, 50, 62, 176–8, 182, 263 and non-belonging 11, 182 to the past 130, 219 biopolitics 251, 257 n.5 border 2, 11, 42, 125, 262 -crossing 176–7 national 68, 83, 128, 130, 174, 177, 187 Border: A Journey to the End of Europe 171, 177, 179, 188, 194 borderline (see also marginal, periphery) 100, 107, 108 n.2, 151 Bourdieu, Pierre 85, 88 n.7, 159, 163, 169, 170 n.1 Brooks, David 251, 257 n.1, 258 n.19 Bulgarian aeroplane 105, 106 Bulgarianness 50, 81, 124, 169 Bulgarians writing abroad 116, 172, 176–8, 180–2 canon 61, 232, 259 alternative 87, 99, 106, 168, 171 Bulgarian 4, 8, 11, 41–2, 45, 58, 62, 64–5, 97, 99, 104–5, 152, 172, 240 Euro/North-American/Western 7, 46, 67, 70, 86, 264

278

Index

History of New Bulgarian Literature 50 poetry 96 in translation 172 world literature 68–9, 83 capitalism 9, 71, 126, 153, 175, 179–80 Christian culture 17, 21–2, 28 ideology 15–16, 20, 84 languages 16–18, 24 n.17, 47 Long Vita of Cyril 17 medieval literature 20 national (Bulgarian) history 21, 49 “new martyrs” 30–1 Occident 11 Orthodox 3, 23 n.7, 28–9, 31–7, 38 n.5, 38 n.13, 43, 49, 189, 227 saints 22, 23 themes 74, 117, 204 tradition 70 Clement of Ohrid 16, 18, 22, 24 n.10 communism fall of 50, 73 fascination with 226 ideology 85, 153 as literary setting 71, 73, 76, 172–5, 178, 180, 184 n.24 monsterization of 176–7, 179, 182 post- 113 for sale 172 trauma 179, 243 contemporary Bulgarian literature 10, 68, 73–4, 99, 114, 120 n.4, n.10, 162 Cyril and Methodius 15–16, 22–3, 26 n.54, 40 Dada 100–2, 105, 107, 108 n.5, n.6, 109 n.22, 110 n.31 Dalchev, Atanas 11, 91 Damascenus Stoudites 32–3, 35 damaskinar 32–6, 39 n.25 Damrosch, David 3, 5 n.2, 6 nn.7–10, 68–70, 77 n.4, 110 n.34, 124, 133 n.12, 185 n.44, 213, 221 n.1, 267 Danube 28, 226–7 Debelyanov, Dimcho 63, 65, 90, 92, 94–5, 97–8 delayed development 55, 63, 83, 101, 108 n.8, 244

Derrida, Jacques 128, 134 n.41, 221 n.6, 275 Detrez, Raymond 27, 38 n.11, 51 n.7, 52 n.19, 53 n.31, 260, 273 diaspora 2, 126, 194–5, 261–2 diasporic consciousness 126, 128, 131 identities 197 n.35 intimacies 4, 188, 195 n.3 writing 4, 261 diglossia 32–4, 46, 51 n.10 Dimitrova, Blaga 5, 223–7, 231, 236 n.17, nn.18–20, n.23 Dimitrova, Kristin 74, 232, 236 n.23 Dinev, Dimitré 172, 175–9, 183 n.5, n.6, n.17, 188, 271 distext 103, 107, 109 n.16 Dvoryanova, Emiliya 74, 133 n.24, 137, 168, 268, 272 dystopia 69–70, 74–5, 117, 165, 167 East of the West 4, 116, 121 n.27, 123–4, 127–9, 133 n.16, n.33, 134 n.45, n.48, n. 52, 171, 176, 183 n.10, n.17, 269 “East of the West” 123, 125, 127, 129, 130–1 Eastern Europe 3, 109, 125, 193, 241, 246, 260 literature 111, 119 writers 71–2 Eastern Rumelia 43–4, 46, 51 n.8, 57, 65 n.1 Elin Pelin 59–60 Elizabeth Kostova Foundation 67, 202, 206, 208, émigré writing (see also diasporic and immigrant writing) 2, 124, 188, 194–5, 244, 263 Epic of the Forgotten 58, 93 exile 184 n.35 and literature 156, 174, 179, 180–1, 190 exoticism (exotizing) 77 n.3, 123–4, 132 n.8, 177, 182, 260 export 11, 97, 171, 192 expressionism (expressionist) 96, 107, 237 n.41

Index

279

family “Family Museum” 191–2 The Gerak Family 60 myth 180–1 patriarchal 56, 176–7, 181 relations 114, 131, 152, 175, 178–9, 264 and silence 241 values 56, 60, 173, 182, 190, 234 fluid selves, identities 126, 194 freedom artistic 102 human 176 national 55, 58 personal 100, 229 political 47, 175, 194 Western 194 futurism (futurist) 11, 101, 104–7, 108 n.7, 110 n.39

Greenwell, Garth 252–3, 257 n.7, n.10, 258 n.12, n.13 Grozni, Nikolai 171–2, 177–9, 183 n.11

Gabe, Dora 64, 97, 229–31, 233–4, 235 n.2, n.4, n.9, n.11, 236 n.2, n.4, n.7, n.11, n.27, 237 n.27, n.38, n.39, nn.41–43 global book market 10, 124, 169, 264 economy 208, 264 the global 130–1, 165 invisibility 152, 157 n.7 issues 70, 73–4 languages 75 literature 68, 74, 132 n.8, 141, 143, 166–7 and local 124–9 success 7, 8, 72, 162–3, 164 and world 69, 138, 142, 144, 187, 252 globalization 70, 110 n.34, 127, 153, 157, 161, 262, 264 glocal (see also glocalization) 124, 126, 129, 130 sensibility 127–8, 131 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 37, 40, 69, 86, 107–8, 110, 125, 170 n.11, 274 Gospodinov, Georgi 1, 2, 4–5, 5 n.1, 12, 67–8, 71, 75, 110 n.35, 114, 115, 118, 121, 166–8, 173, 177, 181–2, 184, 185, 207–8, 239, 247, 249, 252–5, 257 n.7, n.9, nn.20–24, n.26, 268, 271–2, 273

Kafka, Franz 141–2, 146 n.2, 246, 259, 265 Kaloyanov, Ancho 113, 120 n.7 Kanchev, Nikolay 10, 11 Karabashliev, Zahari 72–3, 206, 269, 272 Karima, Ana 64 Kassabova, Kapka 4, 12, 116–17, 121 n.25, n.29, 171–4, 177–9, 183 n.7, n.8, n.15, n.17, 184 nn.26–29, n.31., n.34, 187–95, 195 nn.3–12, 196 n.12, n.13, n.20, n.22, n.23, 197 n.27, n.28, nn.32–34, 268–70 Kiossev, Alexander 50, 53 n.33, 81, 87 n.1, 110 n.31, 120 n.10, 150, 170 n.7, n.8, n.10, n.12, 267, 274 Kirova, Milena 42, 51 n.4, 55, 76, 77 n.10, 121 n.28, 163, 166, 172–3, 183 n.16, 184 n.24, 235 n.10, 274 Kofman, Sarah 128–31, 134 n.40, 43–4, 47, 50, 54 Konstantinov, Aleko 4, 149–51, 156, 157 n.1, n.4., n.5, n.8, 158, n.12, n.28, n.30, 269 Kostova, Elizabeth (Foundation) 67, 177, 185 n.40, n.41, 202, 206, 208 Krastev, Dr. Krastyo 4, 83, 85, 100, 215, 218, 220, 221 n.9 Krastev, Kiril 99, 100–7, 108 n.3, n.5, n.6, n.10, 109 nn.12–22, n.25, 110 n.29, nn.36–39

Hristov, Kiril 60–1, 95, 229, 235 n.2, 237 n.42 “Ideal of ‘World Literature,’ The” 106 Igov, Angel 71, 120, 132 n.9, 163, 206, 269 Igov, Svetlozar 44, 50, 52 n.16, 151, 166 Ilkov, Ani 168 immigrant writing (see also émigré writing) 116–17, 121 n.28, 152, 171–2, 189 individualism 60, 82, 87, 181, 215 intertextuality 3, 87, 165, 167–8, 176 Jakobson, Roman 25, 202, 204 Josif Bradati 33, 35, 38 n.15

280 Kratochvil, Jiří 112, 117, 119 n.2, 122 n.31 Kristeva, Julia 4, 5, 69, 188–90, 192, 195 n.3–10, 12, 198 n.12, 14, 223, 227, 229–31, 235 n.3, 5, 236 n.13, n.15, n.19, n.24, 237 n.38, 267, 274, 275 Krištúfek, Peter 114, 120 n.12 Lacan, Jacques 157, 191, 194, 196 nn.17– 19, 230, 257 Ladino 44–5, 47 Lazarova, Rouja 12, 76, 116, 121 n.26, 171–9, 183 n.9, n.12, 184 n.34 Levi-Strauss, Claude 178, 180, 185 n.45 Lewitscharoff, Sibylle 12, 176, 183 n.17, n.18, 185 n.37, 269 liberation 55–9, 63–5, 102, 104, 240 as a theme 28, 72, 102–4, 143 life criminal 73 cultural 57 and literature 142, 247, 249 spiritual 83 after socialism 112, 114 under socialism 71, 115–16, 152, 174–5, 180, 193, 241–2, 245 that feels itself live 252–6 traditional 56, 58–60 Liliev, Nikolai 63, 65, 261 literary archetypes 117–18, 152, 199 autonomization 82, 85, 87 canon 4, 8, 11, 41, 45–6, 58, 62, 65, 67, 96–7, 99, 149, 152, 215, 232, 240, 259 alternative 42, 87, 104–6, 168, 171–2 Euro-North-American 7, 86, 264 History of New Bulgarian Literature 50 and women’s absence 50, 64 and world literature 68–70, 83 circulation 41–2, 51, 171, 262 field 92, 95, 219–20 and fragmentation 104–5, 159, 161–3, 165–6, 169 trends 3, 84, 86, 105 generations 5, 62–3, 72, 82–4, 114, 117–18, 215, 230–2, 235

Index genre 20, 41, 49, 58–9, 64, 66 n.4, 82, 114, 163, 166, 201, 240, 260 aeropoetics 109 n.23 anthology 89 autobiography 73 dystopian 74 epic 93 fantasy 11, 75, 118, 164–5 feuilleton 150, 152 historical thriller 164 idyll 62 medieval 15–16, 20, 22, 23 n.8, 27, 35, 43, 58, 64, 159 memoir 57, 103–4, 107, 116, 173, 234, 240, 242 novel 93, 112–14, 116, 167, 176–7, 194 novella 66 personal story (history) 5, 115, 121, 241–2, 246–7 revival 92 short stories 11, 47–8, 59, 60, 123, 126, 172, 201, 202 travelogue 153 histories 5, 38 n.11, 53 n.31, 125, 229, 241 historiography 41, 49, 53 n.36, 57 interpretation 8, 68, 76, 90, 111–15, 117–18, 120 n.3, n.10, 205 market 9, 10, 45, 85, 119, 124, 132 n.8, 162–3, 169, 199, 200–2, 205, 207, 242, 264–5 trends 2, 3, 4, 70, 72, 75, 87, 111, 201, 215 local, the 68, 72, 75, 87, 124–9, 131, 182, 214, 219, 220, 244 localism 1, 5, 214, 220 Löffler, Sigrid 126, 131, 133 n.21 “Lutte contre les Poètes” (or Manifesto of the fellowship fighting against poets) 101, 103 major (language and literature) 2, 48, 67, 69, 246, 259, 261, 264–5 marginal 42, 67, 83, 87, 90, 100, 108 n.2, 124, 160, 232 Marinetti, Tommaso 105–7, 108 n.7, 109 n.24, n.26

Index Markov, Georgi 10, 188, 207, 244, 245, 247 n.8, 248 n.10 Mausoleum 116, 171, 173–4, 177, 183 n.9 memory collective 57–8, 112, 114–15, 188 cultural 118, 165, 167–9 maternal 189, 191 mère-version 229, 230–1, 234 Milev, Geo 83–8, 91, 96–7, 107, 110 n.35, 261 minor (language and literature) 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 65, 67, 75, 89, 129, 141, 160, 257 n.11, 259, 260–5 Minotaur 114, 118, 181, 249, 253, 255 modern 41 Bulgarian culture 160 Bulgarian history 12, 166 Bulgarian language 43, 45, 142–3 Bulgarian literature 11, 62, 71, 74, 117, 149, 159, 163, 214, 220, 242, 260–1 drama 63–4 literary consciousness 90, 100 mentality 59–60 soul 11, 83–4 state 55, 65 pre- 3, 15, 110 n.34 world 16, 69, 73, 190 modernism 12, 82, 86–7, 100, 156 early (Bulgarian) 61–2, 89, 90 European 63, 88 n.10 and poetry 85 and symbolism 62, 83–4 Moretti, Franco 10, 45, 221 n.3 multilingualism 42, 47 Muslim 30–1, 44, 49, 106, 152 Mussolini, Benito 107, 110 nn.33–37, n.39, n.42 Mutafchieva, Vera 11, 247 n.8 myth ancient 114, 118 and femininity 230–1, 233, 235, 236 n.25 and language 117 and mythologizing 8, 28, 55, 58 national 41, 56–7, 104, 169, 180 Oedipus 74, 178, 181 and rewriting 73–4 universal 11, 182 mystification (de-) 61, 76, 89, 90, 173, 176

281

Мисъл (Thought), modernist circle 12, 60–4, 66 n.6, 99, 100, 108 n.1, n.4, 158 n.14, 215, 221 n.9 Nancy, Jean-Luc 2, 5, 68, 77, 249, 250 n.1, 251–4, 256, 257 n.2, n.3, n.5, 258 nn.14–17, n.25, 275 Narodnichestvo movement 56, 59, 65 n.2 national cause 45, 50, 72 (self-)consciousness 3, 44, 81, 85, 134 n.58 fate 82, 84 history 57, 60, 102, 240, 246, 247 n.5 identity 4, 20–1, 28, 34, 42, 49, 57–8, 83, 100, 127, 129, 131, 152, 177, 194, 252 language 259 literature 1, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 27–8, 36–7, 41, 50, 61, 65, 67, 72, 74, 76, 87, 89, 91–3, 159, 160, 213, 220, 261 question 57 state 55, 130 nationalism 49, 81, 84–5, 106, 160–1, 178, 191, 194, 195–6 n.12, 253, 262 nativist/Nativist 82, 85–7, 160 Natural Novel 5 n.1, 115, 121 n.17, 177, 185 n.42, 207, 268, 273 Nietzsche, Friedrich 60–64, 84, 91, 93, 170 n.11, 215, 220, 249 Nikolchina, Miglena 97, 98 n.16, 168, 229, 235 n.6, 236 n.24, 237 n.30, n.38, 267, 275 Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings 58, 240 Old Bulgarian 15–17, 19, 23 n.2, 28, 142–3, 169 Old Church Slavonic 142 On the Isle of the Blessed 61, 89, 90–1, 94–7 Orientalism 134 n.58, 150, 190 otherness 3, 8, 153, 155–6, 180–1 Ottoman Empire 3, 28–9, 32, 37, 41–3, 46, 48, 53, 57, 199 literary space 36, 263 period 2, 30, 35, 45, 47, 49–50, 82, 91, 124

282

Index

rule 32, 35, 55, 72, 82, 91–2 Turkish 44, 256 Paisius of Hilendar 22, 44, 49, 170 n.5, 260 Paskov, Victor 152, 158 n.19, 177, 185 n.38, 247 n.8, 269 Patriarchate of Constantinople 30–1 Pavlov, Konstantin 10, 247 n.8, 269 Penchev, Boyko 66, 81, 120 n.10, 168, 275 Penev, Boyan 37 n.4, 50, 86, 235 n.7 Penkov, Miroslav 4, 12, 68, 76, 116, 121 n.27, 123–7, 129, 132, 133 n.16, n.33, 134 n.45, n.46, n.48, n.49, n.52, n.53, nn.56–69, 171–1, 176–9, 183 n.10, n.14, n.17, 188, 195, 202, 269 periphery 81, 99, 100, 107, 108 n.2, 125–6, 160, 192–3, 246, 264, 265 n.8 Petrov, Ivaylo 10–11, 12 n.3, 200, 206, 240, 247 n.8 Physics of Sorrow, The 71, 114–15, 118, 177, 181, 207, 246, 249, 252–4 Plovdiv 29, 44, 47–9, 57, 166 Popov, Alek 119, 122, 166–7, 175–6 postmodern/ism 2, 11, 61, 87, 90, 105, 112, 181 post-totalitarian 111–13, 115, 120 n.3 Principality of Bulgaria 43, 46–7, 50, 57, 65 n.1 propaganda 9, 12, 48, 236 n.21 Raabe, Katharina 111–13, 120 n.1, n.6 Radichkov, Yordan 167, 240, 244, 247 n.8 realism (realist) 12, 86, 99, 102, 104, 112 socialist 86, 261 surrealism (surrealist) 108, 235, 237 n.42 resistance against ideologies 81, 127, 131, 179 and literature 60, 107, 168–9, 177, 179, 182, 253 women’s 174 Revival (Bulgarian National) 28, 36, 39 n.34, 44, 49, 55–8, 63, 72, 91–4, 104, 203, 215, 239, 259 revolution (revolutionary) 11, 56–8, 62, 65–6, 83, 93, 103, 109 n.22, 116, 236 n.21, 241, 275 Romaic diglossia 33–4

Romaic literature 28, 32, 36–7 Romantic (Romanticism) 28, 58, 61–2, 82, 85, 89, 91, 104, 202, 117, 226 Ruskov, Milen 71, 206, 269 sadness 188, 239, 240–2, 244, 246, 253, 255 Schiller, Friedrich 85, 100, 105, 108 n.1 self-colonization 3, 4, 160–1 sentimental (sentimentality, sentimentalism) 59, 60, 100, 104–6, 115, 141, 167, 184 n.24 shame 49, 151, 173–4, 179, 189, 226, 242, 246 Slaveykov, Pencho 5, 11–12, 61–2, 82–91, 93–100, 151, 158, 203, 214–20, 221 nn.7–9, 222 nn.10–16, nn.18–31 socialism 9, 11, 12 n.1, 56, 65 n.2, 71–2, 84, 112, 114–16, 118, 120 n.9, 121 n.16, n.28, 153–4, 173–4, 188, 191, 193–4, 204, 227, 240, 241–2 Sofia 31, 43, 47–9, 57, 64, 71, 94–5, 107, 118, 192, 202, 206, 227, 241, 261 Sophronius of Vratsa 33, 240, 242 Stoyanov, Tzvetan 87, 106, 107 Street Without a Name 116–17, 121, 171, 173–4, 183 n.8, n.17, 184 n.26, n.27, n.31, 188–94, 195 n.11, 196 n.13, n.22, n.23, 197 n.27, nn.32–34, 269 supranational/ism 15–16, 22 symbolism (post-) 11, 62–3, 83, 96, 215, 261 Teodorov-Balan, Aleksandar 50 Tihanov, Galin 100, 108 n.1, 110 n.34, 221 n.9, 259, 265 n.4, 266 n.9, 267, 275 Todorov, Vladislav 109 n.22, 118, 122 n.35, 166, 177, 185 n.35, 203, 209 n.10 Tokarczuk, Olga 114, 121 n.14 Topol, Jáchym 113, 117–18, 120 n.5, 122 n.33 transition 10, 73, 87, 112–14, 120 n.10, 165, 173, 188, 191, 263 trans-language 178, 180 translatability (see also untranslatability) 2, 8, 10, 180–1, 221 n.2

Index translation 4, 8, 9, 10, 19, 35, 44, 46, 62, 67–8, 70, 74–5, 81, 94–5, 101, 119, 132 n.8, 140, 142, 169, 171–2, 174, 177–8, 180, 200, 201, 203–7, 213, 260 Trojanow, Ilija 12, 116, 121 n.24, 171, 175, 177–9, 183 n.4, n.13, n.17, n.18, 188, 270 Turkish 11, 30, 33, 39–40 n.34, 42–50, 57, 72, 82, 91, 106, 129, 150, 199, 204, 227, 243, 252, 255–6 Ugrešić, Dubravka 4, 72, 74, 181–2, 190–3, 195, 196 n.15, n.16, n.21, n.25, n.26 universal 8, 11, 15, 18, 20–1, 57, 68, 73–4, 81–4, 87, 101, 106, 112, 115, 117–18, 144, 160, 173, 180–2, 190, 214–15, 246, 252, 257–8 n.11 universality 3, 15, 68, 76, 83, 88, 112, 125, 182, 220 untranslatability (see also translatability) 2, 8, 10, 11, 180–2, 252–3 Vazov, Ivan 5, 11, 47, 52 n.15, 25, 57–9, 62, 82, 84–90, 92–5, 99, 100, 104, 167–8, 170, 217–20, 221 nn.7–9, 222 n.17, n.19, 270 Viewegh, Michal 116, 121 n.22

283

Weltliteratur 107, 110 n.34, 125 West, the 3, 4, 9, 10, 12 n.1, 16, 30, 41, 81, 88 n.2, 111, 124–5, 127, 129, 130–1, 134 n.58, 150, 155–6, 160–1, 169, 175–6, 188, 189, 191–4, 196 n.26, 260, 263, 265 n.4 Wolf Hunt 10, 12, 68, 200 women’s literature 229–33, 236 n.24, n.25 movement 64, 223, 225 writing 2, 97 Words without Borders 206, 208 World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner, The 116, 175 Wunderkind 171, 177–8, 183 n.11, 172, 175 Yambol 101–2, 105, 107 Yavorov, Peyo 11, 12 n.2, 61–3, 65, 66 n.7, 89, 95, 97 n.4, 108 n.4, 274 Yosifova, Ekaterina 232, 235, 236 n.22 Young and Old 90, 99–100, 102, 110 n.32, 215, 218, 220 Yovkov, Yordan 11, 140, 167, 240, 270 Zarev, Vladimir 113, 120 n.8, 271 Žižek, Slavoj 194, 258 n.19