Postmodern or post-totalitarian: The reality of the crisis of the Bulgarian intellectual

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This article was downloaded by: [Uppsala universitetsbibliotek] On: 07 October 2014, At: 09:47 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20 Postmodern or posttotalitarian: The reality of the crisis of the Bulgarian intellectual Yanna Popova a a Doctoral student at Hertford College , Oxford Published online: 04 Jun 2008. To cite this article: Yanna Popova (1997) Postmodern or posttotalitarian: The reality of the crisis of the Bulgarian intellectual , Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2:3, 67-74 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697259708571945 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Transcript of Postmodern or post-totalitarian: The reality of the crisis of the Bulgarian intellectual

Page 1: Postmodern or post-totalitarian: The reality of the crisis of the Bulgarian intellectual

This article was downloaded by: [Uppsala universitetsbibliotek]On: 07 October 2014, At: 09:47Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical HumanitiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

Postmodern or post‐totalitarian: The reality of thecrisis of the Bulgarian intellectualYanna Popova aa Doctoral student at Hertford College , OxfordPublished online: 04 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Yanna Popova (1997) Postmodern or post‐totalitarian: The reality of the crisis of the Bulgarianintellectual , Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2:3, 67-74

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697259708571945

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in thepublications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representationsor warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Anyopinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoevercaused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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The celebrated death of communism hasgiven contemporary currency to the

notional "crisis" of philosophy initiated bymodernity. As the West is rejoicing in the"official passing away of its own past," so theargument goes,l the new post-totalitariansocieties have begun the painful exercise ofcoming to terms with the freshly inherited,highly specialized and fragmented systems ofarticulation of the postmodern world. Thecritical perspective informing the choicesthat intellectuals of so-called "EasternEurope" now face is torn between the ago-nizing necessity of what Bauman has called"the final retreat from the dreams and ambi-tions of modernity,"2 and the "joyousimmersion in postmodern fluidity."3

Contemporary Bulgarian society is thuspresently pulled apart by the momentum ofthese two opposite tendencies tinted, ofcourse, with the local particularity ofBulgaria's own history. In what is to follow,the global problems arising from the appar-ent collision between the totalitarian Eastand the postindustrial West that havemarked political and ideological changes inrecent years will be observed through thesociopolitical prism of Bulgarian society.

The global question of the intelligentsia,its origins and sociocultural role, has been apoint of contention in both historical and inmore recent critical debates. The appearanceof the term "intelligentsia" in the critical lit-erature dates back to the mid-nineteenth cen-tury and roughly coincides with the libera-tion of Bulgaria from five hundred years ofruthless Ottoman occupation. From its birthmore than thirteen centuries ago as one ofthe first ethnic states in Europe, this preco-cious Balkan civilization had created by theninth century the third oldest written lan-guage in the European cultural heritage4 andwas blossoming into a fourteenth-centuryRenaissance when the Turks invaded. For

yanna popova

POSTMODERNOR POST-TOTALITARIANthe reality of thecrisis of the bulgarianintellectual

almost five centuries Bulgaria remained ashadowy province in the northwesternOttoman Empire, its social and culturalachievement effaced, its Christian societyruthlessly crushed by the Turks. At the timeof the conquest, Europe, utterly intrigued bythe rumours of the New World, remainedstrangely unperturbed by the Ottomanthreat advancing from the East. For somecontemporary historians the fateful outset ofthis five-hundred-year-old Bulgarian depar-ture from the mainstream of European his-tory not only permanently scarred the futureof Bulgaria as a state, but was the first man-ifestation of the Old World's uncontrollablefascination with the new continent across theAtlantic. The choice made by the Old Worldtowards the end of the fifteenth century thuspreconditioned the withdrawal of theEuropean West away from the EuropeanEast and towards the New World.5

Ironically, as we approach the end of the sec-

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ond Christian millennium that fateful deci-sion is coming back to haunt Europe andraise the ghosts of the past on the battlefieldsof that furthest province of the greatOccident, the Balkans.

Despite its great historical misfortune,Bulgaria did not abandon its fierce strugglefor political and cultural independence. Morethan a hundred years before its political lib-eration from the Ottoman yoke in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century, Bulgaria wasalready actively participating in a process ofestablishing continuity in its cultural history.The late eighteenth and the nineteenth cen-tury were for Bulgaria the age of NationalRevival, the era of a belated BulgarianRenaissance when every field of national life,from commerce to letters, from art to poli-tics, blossomed with the tenacity of a spiri-tual yearning suppressed for centuries. TheBulgarian Renaissance had its roots in theeconomic changes in the Ottoman Empirethat led to a boom in trade and handicrafts,and to a shift of the Bulgarian populationfrom the countryside to the towns. As MerciaMacDennott points out,

the Turks had long been more interested inconsuming than producing and their propen-sity for degenerate idleness was becomingmore marked as the years went by. Thus, inthis period of economic expansion most ofthe crafts were in the hands of theBulgarians, who were well known through-out the Empire for their enterprise, indus-triousness and thrift.6

The newly found economic independence ofthe Bulgarians led to a revived Bulgariannational consciousness, the first signs ofwhich were directed not against the Turksbut the Greeks, who, through the Patriarchof Constantinople, continued to control theonce independent and powerful BulgarianOrthodox Church.

The first phase of the struggle for cultur-al and national identity was a campaign to setup modem Bulgarian schools offering pri-mary and secondary education, where themajority of Bulgarians, both teachers andpupils alike, took great pride in the redis-covery of Bulgaria's past and particularly ofits medieval importance as the centre ofSlavonic written culture. As historical mem-ory was playing its important part in theresurgence of national consciousness, thepursuit of learning, provided free to allBulgarians and greatly facilitated by thereturn to their homeland of the first genera-tion of young men and women who hadreceived their education in the famous uni-versities of nineteenth-century Europe, wasfurther consolidating an already strong senseof national unity. Wider public literacy wasalso the aim behind the introduction, on alarger scale, of printing and book publishingwith the effect that "between 1844 and 1878no fewer than 90 Bulgarian periodicals ornewspapers were published."7 Ecclesiasticalindependence was sought next, which result-ed in the re-establishment in churches of theBulgarian liturgy instead of its Greek ver-sion. All this was taking place at a time whenBulgarian society was lacking the unifyinginstitutional power of a state.

The peculiarity of the Bulgarian NationalRevival is therefore characterized by thismomentous determination to recreate thenation's cultural identity and bridge themissing centuries of spiritual poverty — dur-ing which Europe had already climbed thesteep ridges of its Enlightenment - throughthe collective effort and patriarchal patrio-tism of all educated and enterprising mem-bers of Bulgarian society, and this before thecountry's political independence. It wasexactly this massive effort and determinationthat produced the first modern Bulgarianintellectuals, many of whom were revolu-

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tionaries, but also monks, teachers, artistsand architects, all involved in the strugglefor the cultural, religious or political sover-eignty of their country. It also marked theireternal strife between what Boyan Penev,one of the most prominent Bulgarian cultur-al and literary historians of the beginning ofthe twentieth century, has called "the aspira-tion for individuality and the fatal destiny toserve the higher cause of a national and his-toric mission."8

That peculiar ambiguity between a some-what populistic understanding of the intel-lectual's social engagement and responsibili-ty as a basis for intellectual activity, and themore relative, provisional and subjective rolein society claimed by creative artists of allages, has characterized Bulgarian intellectualUfe with a persistency not decreased by thecourse of history. Whereas, however, thedilemma between social commitment andcontingency has been more or less a univer-sal one for intellectuals, in Bulgaria it wasand still is accompanied by the related issueof choice between particular nationalistic andpatriotic ideals and more universal spiritualvalues, between the interaction, in otherwords, of what Edward Said has called "uni-versality and locality."9

The age of the National Revival was forBulgaria also the time of the formation of amodern national consciousness, of a redis-covery of national history and rewriting ofcultural narratives. The collective identifica-tion with the nation was taking place throughan inevitable mythologization and evensacralization of historical memory and, grad-ually, thus established a modern national ide-ology. The critical predicament for the mod-ern Bulgarian intellectual was, therefore, aninherent conflict between an essentially mod-ern autonomous individualism and a moreholistic, almost mythical, traditionalism. Toput it another way, it is the conflict between

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the intellectual perception provided by amelancholic premodern and ethnocentricworld, and the enlightened proselytism ofthe modern anthropocentric age. Somewhatironically, the present time for the contem-porary East European intellectual is offeringa no less daunting dilemma between the rigidand univocal "truths" of totalitarianism, andthe aimless multiplications of postmodernhyperreality. To this I will come later.

Intellectually and culturally the period ofthe modern Bulgarian independent state (i.e.the time between the liberation of Bulgariafrom the Turks in 1878 and the Soviet inva-sion in 1944) was dominated by the interac-tion of introspective nationalistic and collec-tivist attitudes on the one hand and, on theother, the modern European individualismof the time. The first generation of modernBulgarian writers and. essayists (ZahariStoyanov, Ivan Vazov, Stoyan Mihailovsky)had celebrated the liberation of Bulgaria asthe greatest historic event of their lives and,through postulating the new liberal democ-ratic order for the young Bulgarian constitu-tional monarchy, were necessarily carryingthe banner of romantic patriotism in then-works. During the 1870s and 1880s thesepeople were also under the influence of cer-tain Russian populist ideas about the role ofthe intelligentsia in a democratic society.Populism was the fertile soil upon which,both in Russia and in Bulgaria, the seeds ofUtopian socialism would later germinate. It isimportant to note that contrary to long-standing totalitarian propaganda, enthusias-tic as they were for the Utopian socialist ideasof Herzen, Ogorev and Chernishevsky, theBulgarian intellectuals of the time werenever attracted by pure Marxist doctrinesdue to their total unsuitability to Bulgaria inthe first few decades after its liberation.

The next generation of intellectuals, forwhom a free Bulgaria was a fact of life rather

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than a long-desired dream, dedicated theirefforts not to the resurrection of national con-sciousness but to the celebratory liberation ofthe mind, and made the questions of thenation's spiritual weUbeing their own. Theirwish was to bring Bulgaria closer to the greatspiritual development of the West and, as themajority of the writers, critics, historians,artists and philosophers of the beginning ofthe twentieth century had studied inGermany and Austria, it was the German crit-ical, juridical and philosophical influence thatwas felt most strongly in Bulgaria. Neo-Kantian and particularly Nietzschean individ-ualism in some way or another touched thework of all important intellectuals in Bulgariain the first twenty or thirty years of this cen-tury. It would not be incorrect to suggest thatthis second generation of modern Bulgarianthinkers comes very close to Julien Benda'sdefinition of the intellectuals as a peculiarbreed whose uncompromising disregard forpractical aims and activities is matched onlyby their unyielding principles of eternal truthand justice.10 The defiant and peremptoryintellectual consciousness of Dr KrustyuKrustev, philosopher, critic and editor of theinfluential Missul (Thought), of PenchoSlaveykov (one of Bulgaria's greatest poetswhose tragic, untimely death deprived thecountry of a Nobel Prize for literature in1912), of Petko Todorov and Peyo Yavorov,required the fresh, seductive and somewhatimpious spell of the writings ofSchopenhauer, Nietzsche and Spengler. Thestrong aspirations to seek European stan-dards of intellectual and poetic excellencebeyond Bulgarian national terms of referencemet, in Slaveykov and the individualist writ-ers and critics around Missul, with unremit-ting criticism of these same aesthetic andmoral criteria. To become European withoutever ceasing to be Bulgarian, in a well-sus-tained homeostasis between native and for-

eign, would remain a constitutive feature ofthe Bulgarian cultural ideology for manyyears to come. Today, more than ever,revived by various critical discourses, theidea of marginality, of spiritual and historicalinsignificance, is very much amongst the pri-orities of contemporary intellectual debatesin Bulgaria and in the rest of the countries ofEastern Europe. As the most completeexpression of spiritual individualism, theBulgarian Symbolist movement crowned thenation's rapid intellectual and spiritual meta-morphosis from the past realms of a medievaleminence to the loud flourishes of moderni-ty. Nikolay Raynov, the poet and art histori-an whose complex and compelling style rec-onciled French Symbolism with a profession-al interest in the Bible and the Apocrypha,Teodor Trayanov, the laureate of BulgarianSymbolism, Lyudmil Stoyanov, NikolayIiliev and many others produced works of artacutely attentive to the patterns of Westernaestheticism, yet always faithful to the greattradition of national poetry.

At the time of the start of the SecondWorld War, Bulgaria had achieved the goalsset out to the nation by its first modem intel-lectuals more than a hundred years before:both politically and culturally it had becomean integral part of Europe. Until, in 1944, bya tragic repetition of history, Europe was lostagain not only as a geopolitical but also as aspiritual entity. For more than forty yearsBulgaria endured the political hegemony ofthe Soviet Empire and, more importantly,the dramatic politicization of the nation'scultural and ideological consciousness. Sincethe fall of the Berlin Wall, in recurrent wavesof public optimism and disillusionment,Bulgaria's political and ideological develop-ment (and in this instance it represents nodeparture from the rest of the former com-munist countries in Eastern Europe) offersthe spectacle of a situation reminiscent of a

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particular moment in its modern history. Inthis sense, apart from its obvious purpose toacquaint the reader with certain facts fromBulgaria's intellectual evolution, the abovehistoric diversion aims to point out the strik-ing similarities (and some of the differences)between the seventies and the eighties of thelast century when Bulgaria took its first stepsover the threshold of modernity, and thenineties of the twentieth century when itlingers at the grave of communism.

Whether or not we agree with Baumanthat communism's main task was to fulfil theprecepts of "the Enlightenment project"("the grand designs, unlimited social engi-neering, huge and bulky technology, totaltransformation of nature,")!1 we can never-theless concede it was at that very projectthat it most lamentably failed. What kept itgoing was the communist propagandamachine, whose all-embracing ideologicalpower rested on a self-same political deter-mination and shaped cultural mythology.Much as, for some contemporary critics, thesocial reality of postindustrial societies in theWest is today entirely subjected to the enor-mous power of signifying systems, i.e. of rep-resentation, the totalitarian countries ofEastern Europe were ruled by an ideologythat existed exclusively on symbolic mean-ings. It is certainly true to say with VladislavTodorov that "the Red doctrine was charac-terized by a surplus-production of words andvisions, not a production of commodities. ...Magic words manufactured communism."12

Totalitarian ideology of any kind has alwaysrested on rhetorical strategies the self-per-petuating re-enactment of which has invari-ably engaged the intellectuals of a nation.This was very much the case with Bulgarialacked the strong dissident movement ofPoland, Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union.The multifarious attempts to explain thisabsence of open resistance range from the

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religious (the Eastern Orthodox ethic of sac-rifice and martyrdom), through the socio-political (the lack of continuity in the nation-al consciousness), to the purely psychological(the absence of purpose, initiated by thehundreds of years of Turkish domination).

The grain of truth in such stereotypicaland essentialist approaches makes little dif-ference to the relevance of two indisputablecircumstances. Firstly, the truly oppositionalpolitical and intellectual elite had been com-pletely eliminated in Bulgaria by 1953.1'Secondly, lacking the support of a powerfulCatholic (Poland) or emigre (the SovietUnion or Czechoslovakia) culture, aBulgarian dissident movement, even if exis-tent, would have had little chance of sur-vival. There were important intellectualswriting and publishing abroad (Stefan Popovin Germany and Petur Uvaliev in GreatBritain to name but two), yet their work veryrarely reached the Bulgarian public. Againstthe ideologically dominated Bulgarian cul-tural space these writers, echoing their fore-runners from the Bulgarian NationalRevival, worked for an ideal of "resistancethrough memory"14 which encapsulates thequintessential task of an intellectual in exile.The official propaganda machine had eraseddates and facts from history books andnational calendars, had neglected anddestroyed the old monuments of Bulgarianhistory, and replaced them with the memen-toes of international Marxism. For Bulgariathe intellectual narrative of memory thusexisted as the only reference point of truthagainst the state-orchestrated narratives offorgetting. As Milan Kundera has succinctlyput it, "the struggle of man against power isthe struggle of memory against forgetting."1^

Within Bulgaria the cultural space broughtabout by an aggressive and inflexible ideolo-gy had its curious and implicit ways of facil-itating or, at least, not completely quashing

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intellectual activities. The overpowering pres-ence of censorship gave rise to the ingeniouselaboration of a particular stylistic idiom, anAesopian language of allusions, subtexts andambiguities. Between the official and unoffi-cial discourses, even within the realm of insti-tutionalized mythology itself, the room wascreated for a forceful and sophisticated oth-erness, written by poets and intellectuals andknowingly deciphered by their diligent read-ership. Poetry, the form most susceptible tothis intellectual "doublespeak", was thereforevoraciously consumed by a public alwayslooking for clues, scanning for ambiguitiesand typographical devices such as the align-ment of letters at the beginning of lineswhich, when read vertically, often made outan explicitly political message. The exigencyof culture in Bulgaria and in all the totalitar-ian countries of Eastern Europe was thereforesimple: poems represented the allegoricalinstruments of survival. Within the self-reproducing semiosphere of totalitarian dis-cursive practices, the possibility and reality oftransgression was tempting and dramaticbecause it was conspiratorial. As AndreiPlesu has noted, "the phenomenon indicates... a certain fetishization of books and culturein general, an intellectual emulation pro-voked by the allure of clandestinity."!6

For the intellectual functioning within theconfines of totalitarian ideology, this roman-tic "allure" of conspiracy was inevitablydiluted with a strong sense of guilt. InBulgaria, where the Havelian intellectualethos of "living in truth"17 was virtuallyunknown (with a few notable exceptions likethe poet Konstantin Pavlov whose uncom-promising refusal to co-operate with theregime led to an official ban on his works formore than twenty years), the essence ofbeing an intellectual presupposed an almostdialectical juxtaposition of implication andrejection, of commitment and resignation.

According to the cultural critic AlexanderKiossev, it was "the principle of double sim-ulation"18 that most accurately described theprecepts of intellectual survival in Bulgaria.The praxis of the totalitarian rule to politi-cize through the aesthetic resulted in thesubordination of cultural space to the variousmeans (literature, film, music, philosophy,science) through which official ideologycould be reproduced. At this level ideologysimulated culture. In their own turn howev-er, the agents of culture themselves (thepoets, musicians, philosophers) moulded theinstitutionalized discourses and simulatedideological verisimilitude in order to create"real" culture in their chosen fields. By themid-1980s there were in Bulgaria some intel-'lectual formations existing on the brinkbetween legitimacy and transgression. Onesuch was the intellectual group Synthesis, asemioppositional circle of young critics,established at the University of Sofia in 1987.The circle's idiosyncratic dialogue of gen-res19 somewhat playfully and hedonisticallyfed on important texts by Derrida, Foucaultor Lyotard, and almost unwittingly partici-pated in this "Art of Simulation."

Five years after the circle's disintegrationin 1990, one of its former members looksback on such a playful immersion in her-metic intertextual games with a sense of guiltand disconcertion.2^ Such general intellectu-al malaise can be said to be symptomatic ofthe present position of many EasternEuropean intellectuals. After years of moralstandstill, issues of political and moral con-cern have become inseparable from discus-sions of history, continuity and tradition.Repentance is made harder by the fact thatin a totalitarian society no pure innocencewas allowed to survive, human lives incorpo-rated only various shades of guilt. At a timewhen the teleology of a cultural and intellec-tual evolution has to be reconsidered, the

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Bulgarian intellectual is understandably tornbetween a radical narrative of memory (ofreproach, guilt and collaboration, but also ofpretotalitarian history), and the present-daynontotalitarian narrative of forgetting andmediation. The former represents the choiceof the new Right nationalistic parties andmovements, while the latter is the stance ofthe new reformed Left. Division along thesetwo lines has polarized society at every levelof its political, social and cultural restructur-ing, and has further problematized the unre-solved questions of tradition, cultural her-itage and the canon. The coercive policy ofisolation and marginality imposed by thecommunist dictatorship and the accompany-ing distortion of tradition have necessarilycalled for a reinterpretation and restorationof the classics to their pre-communist status.

The moral and intellectual distancing fromthe totalitarian past presupposes a rediscov-ery and rewriting of history before 1944. Insuch circumstances the degree of intellectualcommitment is measured by the proselytiz-ing zeal with which the past cultural narra-tives are recreated and reintroduced into thepresent intellectual debates. The critics ofsuch tendencies stress the urgency felt by allpost-totalitarian societies to re-enter the cul-tural context of the West, to "return toEurope." The road to a Westernized "nor-mality" in all its political, social and eco-nomic significance is sought not through thearduous confrontation with a totalitarianlegacy but through an intellectual amnesia ofsorts, through a nonliteral interpretation ofnational memory. In a very different cultur-al and historical context to the one thatshaped the modem Bulgarian nation, a simi-lar conflict between restoration and suppres-sion of memory again frames the nationalideology. The critical acceptance of radicalpostmodern practices of problematizing suchcategories as nation, tradition and the canon

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takes for granted the very existence and rel-ative stability of these categories. The fact isthat at present Bulgaria lacks both the cul-tural and political context (destroyed bytotalitarianism) and the necessary degree ofself-reflexivity which would allow for the rad-ical rethinking of values suggested by post-modern cultural and critical theory. Beforebeing deconstructed modernity's project,suspended in Bulgaria and the rest of the ex-communist countries of Eastern and CentralEurope by the practice of state socialism, hasyet to be completed. This is what makes theposition of the intellectual in a post-totalitar-ian society so inherently ambivalent andcomplex. The cultural relativism that charac-terizes postmodernist thought conflicts withthe demands of universality (of moral oblig-ation and political responsibility) made onthe new Eastern European intellectual.Localized in its specificity (for Foucault)21 orsimply extinct (for Bernard-Henry Levy),22the Western intellectual's position of scepti-cism and dissent cannot be reproduced as anexclusive form of intellectual activity inEastern Europe in general and in Bulgaria inparticular. The very tangible need at thismoment in history for a certain amount ofloyalty to the re-emerging symbols of tradi-tion, history, national memory and identity isa prerequisite for the institutionalization, inBulgaria and in other ex-communist coun-tries, of a democracy whose similarity to theWestern model is far from certain. To saythis is not to reinstate Eastern Europe andthe Balkans to their arguably accepted posi-tion of "marginality" or "abnormality" withrespect to "Western civilization" and itsinterpretive strategies.23 Indeed, if we acceptwith Bauman that the intellectual's changingsocial position and function in society can betaken to constitute the very basis for the dis-tinction between "modernity" and "post-modernity,"24 the contemporary Bulgarian

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and Eastern European intellectual inhabits aworld whose complex social and historicalreality lies beyond the interpretive powers ofthis particular binary descriptivism.Assuming that the price of Westernized "nor-mality" is that distinctly post-modern dose of disaffectiongranted to intellectual hon-esty, patriotic consensus andpolitical involvement, then itis certainly not worth paying.

notes

1 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity(London: Routledge, 1992) 180.

2 Bauman 178.

3 Bauman 180.

4 I am referring here to the creation in 855, by thetwo brothers Constantine Cyril, The Philosopher,and Methodious, of the Bulgarian language which istraditionally known in linguistic literature as "OldBulgarian" and sometimes as "Old ChurchSlavonic" For a brief historic overview on the sub-ject see P. Dinekov and D. Likhachev. Zhrttiia Kirilla iMefodiia (Sofia: Nauka i Izkoustvo & Moscow: Kniga,1986) 12-17.

5 See Stefan Popov, Bulgarskata Idea: istoricheskiochertsi (Munich: Bethesda, 1981), particularly thechapter "Bulgaria and Europe" 41 -86.

6 Mercia MacDermott, The Apostle of Freedom: APortrait of Vasil Levsky Against a Background ofNineteenth Century Bulgaria (Sofia: Sofia Press, 1979)14.

7 R.J. Crampton, A Short History of Bulgaria(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 13.

8 Boyan Penev, "Posoki i tseli pri proutchvaneto nanovata ni literature," Missul 2 (1910) 268.

9 Edward W . Said, Representations of the Intellectual

(New York Pantheon, 1994) xiii.

10 Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectual, trans.Richard Aldington (New York: Norton, 1969) 43.

11 Bauman 179.

12 Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square:Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (Albany. StateU of New York P. 1995) 178-179.

13 See Tzvetan Todorov, "Communist Camps andTheir Aftermath," Representations 49 (winter 1995)120-132.

14 Richard S. Esbenshade, "Remembering to Forget:

Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-

Central Europe," Representations 49, 74.

15 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and

Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London:

Faber, 1982) 3.

16 Andrei Plesu, "Intellectual Life Under

Dictatorship," Representations 49, 63.

17 Vaclav Havel, "Power of the Powerless," trans.Paul Wilson, in Vaclav Havel, Open Letters: SelectedProse, 1965-1990, ed. Paul Wilson (London: Faber,1991) 127-240.

18 Alexander Kiossev, "The Tender Wings of

Bulgarian Samizdat," Kuttura 39/40 (September 1991).

19 A collection of the circle's work has recently beenpublished under the title Post-Theory, Games; andDiscursive Resistance: The Bulgarian Case, ed. AlexanderKiossev (Albany: State U of New York P. 1995).

20 Kiossev 156.

21 See Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," TheFoucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1984) 68.

22 See Bernard-Henry Levy, Éloge des intellectuels

(Paris: Grasset, 1987).

23 See Maria Todorova, "The Balkans: FromDiscovery to Invention," Slavic Review 53.2 (summer1994) 453-482.

24 Bauman 23-24.

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