“There are places,” says Camus, “where reason dies so that the truth of its negation may be born.”

Let me pause for a moment, dear reader, to let you notice that this thought was not written by a Bulgarian. And then I’ll take one more brief pause to add: what was said could, indeed should, strike you as distinctly Bulgarian. Just like most of the other outrageously beautiful, blistering, unironic, and passionately beating reflections found in his essay collection Summer, published at a time when Bulgaria – still shielded beneath the homogenising veil of real socialism – could afford to delude itself that it belonged to the “cooler” Europe. A rather distant time, no doubt.

Then again – it depends.

It depends on one’s vantage point, of course, since the prejudices woven into that glorious era – prejudices born of people who sincerely believed in the immeasurable supremacy of the social over the geographical and the national – quickly lost their persuasive power and now seem so fresh and unripe that they almost tempt us to feel older and wiser than all the bearded thinkers who once prophesied the imminent unification and all-embracing harmony of the nations...

But let us stifle that haughty impulse while we still can. What we believe in today (incidentally – what is it?), will surely appear just as callow and green to those who come after us, as the old sermons on world government sound to us now.

So let us return to summer and Camus. Just listen to this:

“...a man, certain that tomorrow will be like today, and after that, all the days to come.”

Who do you think he’s talking about, would you say? And another:

“For to be aware that you exist means to expect nothing.”

Tell me honestly – isn’t everything this Frenchman (or perhaps Algerian?) says as if drawn straight from the most hidden, most carefully buried, and at the same time most truthful corners of the Bulgarian soul – dried out, parched even, by the gusts of so many winds, all of them more scorching than scorching, whether they come from the East or from the West?

I realise my question is quite rhetorical – more than that, I wouldn’t have started writing this essay if I didn’t already believe I’d found the answer in advance – but I ask it all the same, filled with the secret malicious pleasure of a man preparing to reveal to the broad public yet another case of copyright infringement.

Yes, dear reader, it turns out that even something as inseparable from the Bulgarian self-image as quiet despair has already been discovered and beautifully described by someone else before us. Yes, that’s how it is – we’ve been beaten to it once again. More than that – we’ve been beaten to it not only in this one respect, since an astonishing number of phenomena we regard here as purely Bulgarian – beginning with perpetually worried expressions and the constant complaining, all the way to the unfeigned lack of hope or the gradual disappearance of the future tense from the respectable forms of thought – it turns out, have already been familiar to others before us.

I want to add right away that I write all these slightly ironic outpourings driven above all by the hope that at this very moment you will shrug and push aside the text I am offering you, with words like: “Ha! Yet another clever fellow trying to convince us we’re further behind than we thought. Thanks – may it return to you!”

This, dear reader, is the only reaction I would accept with joy and respect, for it would support my illusion (shall I say “faith,” and thus bare myself before you in all my naïveté?) that there is still something left, in Bulgaria and in the Bulgarians, of that sourly mocking stubbornness that allowed countless generations to pass through hardships and sufferings, in comparison with which our present looks like a rose garden. And which, if you ask me, is the first thing I accept whenever I touch on the topic “What is the Bulgarian?” – that is, “What am I?”

(Don’t be quick to accuse me of superficiality, dear reader – reaching this apparent tautology took me more than ten years and countless efforts. It wasn’t easy to heal the ulcer from which many Bulgarian intellectuals have suffered and continue to suffer – seeing their people and country as something worthy only of contempt, which inevitably forces them either to renounce them or to admit that they themselves deserve nothing but contempt.)

So. I’d like to talk here about what I call “the prejudices of our time” — or at least those among them that I believe I’ve managed to glimpse, pardon the arrogant words. No doubt most of them are constantly being reshaped, reworked, replaced by new, more acceptable prejudices — but whether we’re really dealing here with any actual, new values, or more likely with a half-conscious attempt at compensation, compensation, compensation… That, dear reader, I leave to you to decide.

And so, here is the first of those prejudices:

Bulgaria is an “old” country, and the Bulgarian people are an “old” people.

The time when we, with great pathos and much chest-thumping, celebrated the thirteen-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Bulgarian state is still not so far in the past that I need to explain at length what I mean. I don’t know whether the boastfulness surrounding that much-vaunted event was solely the result of the natural tendency of one-party systems to present themselves as the culmination of something especially grand, or whether more serious reasons lay behind it — such as the (again natural) tendency of any nation fallen into historical disfavour to seek every possible occasion to shove under the world’s nose its cherished idea of ancient lineage…

I don’t know, I repeat. But it seems to me a fact that in this regard we are, at the very least, typically blind (and continuing to blind ourselves). Looking at our history, I find above all that the greater part of it passed under foreign rule, and as for the free exchange of ideas, its duration is literally ahistorical — even if we include the last ten or twelve years, which, following the logic of every local beginning, are marked more by Balkan fervour, chaos, and uncompromisingness than by good taste, depth, or even our otherwise not lacking wit.

Bulgaria — an old country? Or, in other words: Bulgaria — a mature country? I don’t know what you think, but when I hear such words, I’m inclined to laugh. Isn’t it in fact true that all the countries of the Balkans are outrageously young, regardless of how ancient a lineage they might flaunt (forgive me, Greek neighbours, but I include you too in this count)? All of us face the task of outliving the not-so-pleasant reality of a historical development linked to cultures and traditions that differ sharply from those shaping the present of the continent we belong to geographically — and to which we strive with all our might to be counted, stubbornly ignoring its disdainfully wrinkled nose.

I don’t know how acceptable this statement will seem to you, but if you allow me to develop the thesis a little further, I’ll arrive at the point where Bulgaria’s youth might not be entirely a disadvantage. And a disadvantage, in this situation, clearly exists, but in my view it does not stem from the fact that we are what we are, but only from our efforts to present ourselves as something different — especially in our own eyes. It’s well known that every attempt to distort and adapt reality to fit one’s own notions leads to psychological problems — and in that regard, I think, nations are no less an exception than individuals. And Bulgaria, striving to see in itself an old, mature European country (a nation, a culture), is by definition condemned to continuous torment — just as much as the other Bulgaria, the one that rejects every attempt at comparison with Europe, preferring to listen to its chalga.

Is it not already time for a national psychotherapy?

Another rhetorical question, another presupposed answer. And yet, let’s suppose you grant me a bit of intellectual credit and are willing to follow me in considering the implications of this rather unflattering assumption: Bulgaria and the Bulgarians – a young people, an immature culture?

“Well, what of it?” my fellow liberal intellectuals might say. “Even children know this! Is that all you see from over there in Germany?”

Fine, here’s what I see: above all, a place so saturated with the expectation of the next miracle that its impatience – a natural companion of all youth – has already begun to turn into some kind of absurd negation of itself, a complete rejection of concepts like “a better future” or simply “later,” and where, consequently, the present has become the only meaningful form of existence – an insatiable Chronos, gnawing his children down to the bone before they are even born, before they are even conceived. If you want to lose the trust of a Bulgarian, talk to him about “later.”

Schooled by what he (probably rightly) considers the only possible experience, our compatriot will give you a sideways look and, depending on the situation, will either ask you to pay in cash or suggest that you take your leave before something unpleasant happens to you. (With one small exception – if you come from some “European” country, he may agree to treat your promises as a kind of deposit – but even in that case, his patience will have run out long before eight hundred days have passed, so don’t try building projects that stretch even a little into the future: your credit will certainly not suffice.)

The natural idea of development and progress has already completely lost, in the eyes of Bulgarians, any measurable connection with human life. Tell someone that things will improve, and if you get a response at all, it will likely be: “Maybe, but we won’t be alive to see it.” And in this I once again see an indication of our nation’s infancy: first, in the ease with which it discards all the lessons of its seemingly long history, and second, because the voluntary renunciation of the idea of any future (which inevitably entails a rejection of things like spiritual growth, wisdom, and experience) in practice amounts to an embrace of the idea of eternal youth – for only youth, with its overflowing carefree energy, can survive in a world where there is no room for anything other than reverence for the power of fate.

So, Bulgaria is young and immature. Perhaps. And who cares? Exactly, exactly. The refusal to learn from old age, however temporary it may be by its very nature, is nonetheless something real, something one can begin with. Youth, as we know, is not only naïve. If you’ll allow me to quote Camus once more: “A young man looks the world in the eye. It is not yet time for him to form an idea of death or nonexistence, though he already senses their horror. Perhaps that is youth: an unbearable ‘alone’ with death, the atavistic fear of an animal in love with the sun.”

It sounds not only beautiful but, at least to me, hopeful. Sooner or later Bulgaria and the Bulgarians will have to recall the apostolic “I am alone, there is no one else” and realise that they are in a world far too absorbed in its own worries and problems to offer them anything more than fleeting attention or, as the currently fashionable Bulgarian-American affair leads them to hope, even preference. In other words, they will have to open their eyes, however blinding the glare of the Balkan sun may be.

At which point – so my naïve hope goes – perhaps the other advantages of youth will come to the fore: the absence of illusions, or at least those of the previous era, tied to the ceaseless expectation of some strong, liberating, and guiding hand; the eternal readiness for a new beginning (hopefully supported by a little more patience and endurance); and the energy, the eager pursuit of new, ever more daunting trials, in the name of that which (the forgotten and contemptuously dismissed) old age long ago achieved: a completed self, the calm and confidence that can come only from a job well done, the maturity and independence of judgement, and finally – an equality that is earned, not bestowed.

I hope you now see what my simple credo consists of: before we begin to grow, we must first recognise that we are still green – without shame. It sounds elementary, but even so, I would ask whether we are truly willing to accept this claim seriously, with all its consequences? I, for one, have my doubts. Just look at whom we try to compare ourselves to, at whom our eyes are constantly directed! Once again – that old Europe, once again – that culture and those traditions, the connection to which we lost many centuries ago, if we ever truly had it. Or America, which, though not quite so old, has inherited those same (missing) European traditions, and thus differs from us as vinegar from oil.

Recently, while riding in a taxi in Sofia, I listened to the angry words of the driver, who was complaining about the filth and disorder. “Is there another capital in Europe that looks like ours?” And when I cautiously tried to suggest that perhaps we should be looking towards the Near East if we really wanted to compare ourselves to someone, he looked at me with offence and said: “Is that what it’s come to – that we compare ourselves to them?”

Typical, isn’t it? On the one hand, we’d like to be honest with ourselves, and on the other, we turn our gaze away whenever we brush up against something that strikes us as un-European, un-Western.

Which brings us to the second prejudice I’d like to touch on here:

Bulgaria is inextricably linked to the European cultural tradition – it is part of Europe not only geographically, but historically and culturally as well.

Hmm – but is that in fact self-evident? Any glance at the humanly neglected, battered form of Bulgaria, slowly disappearing beneath mountains of industrial waste, ought to give us pause before we begin speaking aloud about culture and tradition. Frankly, if I had to compare dusty, inhospitable, smoke-stained Sofia with any of the European capitals I know, the only fitting examples would come from our closest neighbours (whose notions of cleanliness and hygiene, for whatever reason, seem rather similar to ours). I remember how, about ten years ago, I watched a young and handsome Turk in Istanbul flirting with two Russian girls and, passionately – even a bit angrily – trying to explain to them that the proper place for ice cream wrappers was... the ground. Tell me – don’t you already feel that creeping sense of déjà vu? If not, just take a look around.

My ex-wife, afflicted with the all-too-typical German lack of flexibility, still cannot understand what makes people here so irresponsible towards the world around them. And since she rightly sees no need for elaborate arguments in defence of cleanliness, she claims that the opposite “just isn’t nice.” Tell me – how am I to explain to her that, before people can reach the idea of what is “nice,” they need senses unburdened by the pressure of a life in which survival – not peaceful existence – is task number one? And is what Bulgaria is dragging itself through at present not simply Europe’s past? Simple truths, no doubt. Simple – but, for some reason, strangely difficult to absorb, both for a well-fed Europe and for a hungry Bulgaria.

But is that all that separates us from Europe? Ha! Go to the beach and look around! You’ll see, of course, mostly bodies – stripped of the protective covering of clothes. Naked – or nearly naked – bodies. Part of the truth, in other words. And if, like me, you’re arriving from afar and looking with eyes no longer accustomed to the local scene, you’ll immediately notice that the beautiful, well-kept, and pleasing-to-look-at bodies mostly belong to women. The men, by contrast, appear rather bloated, and as a rule they call to mind Grandpa Karavelov and his two watermelons... Why is that, you ask? Well, it’s very simple: women are forced to pass daily through the quality control of male approval and (clever things!) they’ve somehow managed to extract the best for themselves from this otherwise unbearable burden. Men, by contrast, are free from control – they live in the Balkans.

So much for gender equality – the great achievement of Europe over the last fifty or sixty years. But is that all? What about the constant scheming – the ultimate Balkan specialty? What about time, which here, unlike elsewhere, has no monetary value? What about the beating of children (and their mothers, to come back to that old tune)? What about the constant displays of force and spite, especially behind the wheel? Should I go on – I, the guest in my own homeland? Or are these elementary truths already beginning to bore you?

Alright then, but what would happen if, just for a moment, we tried to be brutally honest with ourselves and utter the words that make us jump in our sleep: We are not Europeans! I mean saying them without defiance, not to insult or provoke ourselves, but simply as part of a thought experiment – to see what happens if we dig deeper into this unpleasant assumption.

“So what?” you might say. “Do you think you’re helping us in any way? It’s easy to talk about what we are not. But that doesn’t change much – at least not before we understand what we are. Can you tell us something about that, fellow countryman?”

I admit, it’s a difficult question. But if we are to speak of what I personally find defining, we must immediately return to the title of this text: the heat, dear reader. The scorching heat, mother of stark contrasts and stepmother to half-tones. That same heat that sharpens the senses to the point of pain, whose unbridled generosity often borders on wastefulness. The nature of Bulgaria, like its people, offers beauty in an abundance that the more temperate souls of the North would likely call “extravagant.” Here, scales do not measure precisely by definition (because what is the point of precision in a place where reckless wastefulness is the usual companion of poverty?), and the intensity of life sometimes reaches dimensions barely compatible with notions of “tradition” or “history.”

Bulgaria – a peculiar weave of splendour and destitution, superlatives and complexes, sensual pleasures and shattered hopes, brazen self-display and provincial shyness, an eternal beginning and a perpetual sobering end… In Europe, there are so many ways to shield oneself from the truth of one’s inevitable fate – ranging from the thick walls of monasteries to the round sums of social security payments. In Bulgaria, on the contrary, everything demands youthful strength and endurance, a constant influx of fresh, bold blood. And so, deprived of the softening buffer of illusions, we have made our highest virtue out of directness – the ability to stare the inevitable straight in the eye.

In Germany – a country taught by painful experience – the place of this highest virtue is taken by caution. Nothing of the sort in Bulgaria – where half-tones do not exist, the difference between caution and cowardice is so negligible that it is hardly worth one’s time to dwell on it.

I try to understand that accepting such a people and such a worldview is not easy – not even for themselves. Their geographic position, along with the all-too-frequent shifts in cultural influences and dominations, has led them to a state in which their normal way of life has become something like the endless swing of a pendulum – constantly touching but never settling on any extreme, turning their very existence into a peculiar, home-grown form of contradictio in adjecto. Naturally, this makes defining the Bulgarian character quite difficult – hence our tendency to revere, almost to the point of servility, nations and cultures we do not actually understand.

Being infinitely hospitable, we simultaneously harbour a solid dose of xenophobia (how else, if not with the phrase utepay go! – “take him down!” – can one describe the way foreign tourists are treated in Bulgaria whenever they stray from the safe paths of tourist zones, whether they encounter taxi drivers, waiters, or police?). Not foreign to reason, the Bulgarian nonetheless delights in opposing it with his own version of paradox – what I would call Bulgaria’s peculiar shy passion. Entirely devoted to the present, he cares little for the formative, refining influence of myths and religion – yet he has, time and again, sacrificed his life for faith, simply because its removal would somehow be incompatible with his deeply ingrained, provincial stubbornness.

Revering education and knowledge almost to the point of fetishism, he is at the same time capable of watching with complete indifference as his national cultural heritage melts like March snow (just look at the state of our most historically important cultural institutions – schools and libraries!). In short, in some strange, almost indescribable way, the Bulgarian has managed to answer both sides of Hamlet’s question – to be and not to be, simultaneously.

Which, it seems to me, brings me to the third, final prejudice – this time one that comes from outside, from the eyes of those who observe us from afar:

Bulgarians are a people with an undefined character, swaying with the gusts of the moment’s cultural or political wind – a par excellence ally for anyone who would like to lose a war, whether planned or already begun.

When, at the beginning of this year, the well-known American journalist Maureen Dowd published in The New York Times an article whose content could more or less be conveyed through the few lines above, I was outraged – at least at first – to the depths of my soul. Bulgarians – lackeys? What is this lady thinking? Unheard of, unheard of!

Then, once my irritation began to settle, a familiar saying from back home started knocking in my head – you probably know it: “Well, if they start saying a dog eats shit...” (Like it or not, I have to admit – if you ask me, the little dog must have done something to deserve the name.) And so it is with Bulgaria’s international reputation. The facts, however tendentiously selected by Mrs Dowd, remain facts. Bulgaria – the eternal satellite: first to the Germans, then to the Russians, now to the Americans. Bulgaria – the model student, always ready to give everything to win the approval of the next teacher. Bulgaria – this, Bulgaria – that. Always some petty search for advantage, always first in line to wag its tail before the powerful of the day...

It’s hard to offer any decent answer to such accusations – it doesn’t really work, it either sounds empty or simply shameless. And, as is well known, accusations that cannot be answered decently usually turn into self-accusations...

And could it be that I am the only one ready to admit that Bulgaria and the Bulgarians have given quite a few reasons to be seen as lacking in character? For that matter, do we ourselves consider that we are people of character? Before you answer that question, please look a little more deeply into the eyes of the first passer-by you meet on the street. Ugh, alas, my sorrow!

But no, that can’t be! After all, isn’t this the same people who – setting everything else aside – managed to preserve themselves through five hundred years of foreign rule? Isn’t this the same people who, in their recent history, have done something no one else has – the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews during the Second World War, the bold and wholly unexpected defiance of an otherwise obedient student against the teacher; the pigheadedness that drove mighty Germany and its Führer into fury, to foaming at the mouth.

How do these things fit together, how to separate wheat from chaff, how to tell what is real and what false? Or are we simply encountering yet another example of that Bulgarian contradictoriness we’ve already spoken about at length?

Ah, no! This time I refuse to accept the convenient logic of dialectical contradiction – this time I insist on “either – or!” In the end, this is about the Bulgarian character – my own character, damn it! I can’t leave things halfway; I need something unambiguous, even if it’s nothing but shame. Full stop.

And here, amid the mini-lightning flashes of my impotent rage, something suddenly flashes before my eyes – something endlessly simple and clear.

Of course!

The Bulgarians show their true character only in negation.

Once again, the heat, my dear ones. Once again, the logic of the short, unambiguous blow, of total indifference to safety and to the future, of a temperament that, with childlike ease, smashes every dam of reason.

It’s true that we don’t do this very often. To show our horns, we first have to be driven to a dead end, to a frenzy, to a complete inability to save our honour by any means less drastic than silently laying our necks on the chopping block. But if it comes to that – oh, if it only comes to that! Then, my dear ones, we simply do it. Quietly. Without the usual cunning, boasting, or dodging. Then we are simply ourselves.

***

My father – my favourite Bulgarian – passed away a few months ago, standing. In this way, he gave his sons the last – and perhaps most important – example of his life, but that’s not what I want to speak about here. Bai Mitko Enev died while trying to climb the steps at the top of which an ambulance was waiting, promising salvation or at least hope against the noose of a heart attack, which, as you surely understand, had already fatally ensnared him. He didn’t manage to climb them, but before that he refused the help of the medics and neighbours who insisted on placing his heavy body onto a stretcher. I hope you’ll forgive my proud words, but I see in this a beautiful act of free will, a truly Bulgarian stubbornness, one that would rather show death the middle finger a hundred times over than bow its head before the inevitable. And perhaps somewhere in that lies the seed of what allows me to live in Germany without feeling uneasy every time I have to explain that I’m Bulgarian. “Be whoever you want to be, but keep doing it until the end” – something like that runs through my head when I think about my father’s death. That, and the hope that my children, even if they don’t speak Bulgarian, still carry within them something of their grandfather’s hard-headedness. And of his big-hearted soul, which always insisted on looking the other way when it came to life’s troubles. For his whole life.

On the other hand, my family is currently occupied with another, foreseen death. My wife’s grandfather – dry and tough as a piece of dried fish, a German from the Baltic edges of Germany – lies on his deathbed, surrounded by the care and attention of relatives filled with love and respect. May his bed be light, good Erwin has earned everything he receives. He’s been through all the circles of war’s hell – on the Eastern Front, no less – then through the command-ridden times of German socialism, he raised four children, and until just a few months ago was still downing half a schnapps a week, washing it down with a beer or two. I say this only to clarify that I respect this man deeply – people like him, tough and time-resistant as beech planks, are the reason Germany and its people have become a myth for Bulgarians (well, mostly for those who don’t know them well – but we’ve already spoken about that).

I repeat – I have great respect for Grandpa Erwin. I say it, and I hurry to add that something inside me resists and cannot accept without reserve the way in which he is dying. I wonder whether these words hide nothing more than the arrogance of youth, even if I no longer count myself as particularly young. I don’t know, of course, but still I find this death somehow too reasonable and impartial, too German – let me spit the stone out. My long immersion in philosophical texts has taught me to understand that the acceptance of death may be one of the core achievements of our civilisation – but my atavistic Bulgarian instincts rebel against this foreign wisdom and make me shudder every time I try to imagine the reality of such a slow goodbye. To lie endlessly on a special mattress, paid for through an expensive insurance policy, to feel the last sparks of life draining from your body along with the warm trickle between your legs, to feel fear slowly but surely turning you from a person into an animal... brrr, may God spare me the wisdom of such acceptance!

“The horror, the horror,” whisper the whitened lips of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now – and that’s the only image that flickers before my eyes when I think of death in its civilised version.

***

I began with Camus, I’d like to end with him again:

“The surest sign of youth may be the beautiful tendency toward simple happiness. And above all, the eagerness to live faster, even to the point of wastefulness.” Perhaps with such words, dear friends, one could express another side of the Bulgarian character. Or the Bulgarian fate – who knows? In any case, when I think of my homeland, I often close my eyes and dream like this:

“What would happen if suddenly all of us – but truly all of us, all, all, all – suddenly forgot the howls of television, newspapers, radio, and for a moment wished for the impossible (which in our confused time seems to mean simply: to be Bulgarians)?”

And then I remember that “maybe, but we won’t be alive to see it,” and I return to reality again.

But then again, who can say?

The impossible, they say, is simply a form of the possible stretched over a span of time beyond what our eyes can grasp. Which – and here lies my hope – sometimes flows slowly, and other times faster, much faster than we can imagine.

So then, dear Bulgarians, let us be realists and think more often about the impossible. Who knows – perhaps precisely in that – and only in that – lies our chance at last to make ourselves into what we already are.

Who can say?

Sozopol, August 2003