Yordan Radichkov: the improbable Bulgarian
Interview by Jasmina Sopova and Eric Naulleau, publisher
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Bulgaria Area: 111,000 km2 Historical landmarks |
People are like insects. They are capable of looking in different directions at the same time, keeping one eye on the outside, the other on the inside.
“Didn’t you know that
all Bulgarians are heroes?”
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A prolific writer Yordan Radichkov was born in 1929 at Kalimanitsi, a village
in northeastern Bulgaria which is today submerged beneath the waters behind a dam. |
Pain is the same for everyone and doesn’t discriminate between races and peoples.
It makes everyone equal
“I am convinced that humanity is bored.”
You like to say that life is a beautiful sentence full of spelling mistakes.
Human lives are sentences written with lots of love and inspiration but plenty of mistakes, and mine is no exception. However old and wise they are, people still make mistakes.
You have said that people are the rough draft of God. Would you compare God to a writer who crosses a lot of things out?
I would be wary of comparing God to anyone, especially a writer. God doesn’t make mistakes, and I can’t imagine myself playing the fool who would try and find them. I don’t know whether God exists. If he does, so much the better. If he doesn’t, it’s not a tragedy.
As for people. . . . The other day, as I was drinking my coffee and listening to the radio, I looked through my window and saw a magpie looking after her babies in her nest. And I said to myself, people are like insects. They are capable of looking in different directions at the same time, keeping one eye on the outside, the other on the inside.
How do you see the world?
I’m convinced that disorder is the world’s natural state. We’re the ones who make the mistake of trying to set things straight. People want to organize the universe while they have enough trouble putting order into their own lives.
Do you take the world seriously?
The world already takes itself seriously enough without my putting my oar in. Everything is extremely serious down here—the committees, foundations, international organizations, political regimes—not to mention the people who give themselves airs and believe in their own greatness. But when they ride on their high horse wearing a bowler hat, they forget that all it takes is a gust of wind to blow the hat away and all their greatness with it. I hate anything that is deadly serious.
You have a marked taste for the absurd and for paradox, which are the basis of your approach to literature.
That is the only sensible approach in this boring world. At the risk of shocking you, I am convinced that humanity is bored. It is ready to be entertained at the drop of a hat. The mechanism is quite simple: just look at the Monica Lewinsky affair in the United States! People all over the world feel concerned, have got involved, have had a good laugh. I tell myself that my readers are bored and need to be entertained. So I write for them what interests and amuses me. Don’t worry, my interests go beyond Lewinsky and other affairs. I am fascinated by the peasant wisdom hidden behind the apparent naivety of simple folk. It’s an undercurrent in all my stories.
What do you think about current events?
News is like the fresh water that rivers pour endlessly into the ocean. It doesn’t make the sea any less salty.
I have a strong feeling that the world today is heading towards a provincialization of mentalities, which are not developing at the same pace as technology. I would even say that things are moving backwards. Take the Americans again. They went to the moon, much to their credit. But they have made such a fuss over their president’s high jinks that you can’t help wondering whether the United States, despite all its modern technology, is not somehow becoming one of the world’s remote provinces.
The remote province is one of your favourite settings. Cherkaski, for example, is a half-real, half-imaginary Bulgarian village in the middle of nowhere. Where did you get the idea for your series of books set in this village?
That was in the sixties. Bulgaria was going through a complex period, to say the least. I’ve always had a penchant for the grotesque. The Cherkaski that appears in my stories is the result of this combination of the complex and the grotesque. But the village really does exist. It’s near my birthplace. I know it well. Many of my classmates came from there. They are incredible people. They haven’t changed. In 1968 the local authorities arrested me when I went back to Cherkaski to make a movie based on my short story “The Captive Balloon”.
Why were you arrested?
Because I was doing something that didn’t fit in with communist party ideals. My short story was banned almost as soon as it was published, and the movie, which we managed to finish after all sorts of trials and tribulations, was banned after the first screening. The censors deemed my work a serious attack on the dignity of the Bulgarian people. At the time literature either glorified the system or it was censored. My work had to be “heroic” in order to be recognized.
It’s not easy to find “irreproachable heroes” in the middle of Bulgaria—or anywhere else, for that matter.
In Bulgaria, it’s not easy to survive unless you’re a hero. Didn’t you know that all Bulgarians are heroes? Didn’t you know that we’re the best? We’ve left all the vices to our neighbours and kept all the virtues for ourselves. We’re very proud of that. But to tell the truth, I’ve noticed the same thing just about everywhere in the world.
You’ve been criticized for creating characters impervious to ideology.
At the time the authorities were incapable of such subtle analysis. One of my politically committed short stories is about a man named Gotsa Geraskov, who makes an imaginary trip to Paris and arrives there on a public holiday. Disappointed to find a city completely asleep, he turns around and heads back home almost immediately. The censors noticed neither the political dimension nor the criticism of the regime that could be read between the lines. Had I written the same short story with Moscow as the setting, there would have been a harsh reaction. Fortunately, the censors took my work literally.
Your work is steeped in the supernatural. Is that because it was necessary to use coded language under the Zhivkov regime or was it a form of aesthetic experimentation? Would you have written the same way in a democracy?
I don’t like to express myself directly. Granted, I have worked a bit like Aesop or La Fontaine, but I would have written the same thing in the same way under any political system. Some critics have said that I have drawn a great deal of inspiration from Bulgarian folklore. It’s true that all my writing bears the imprint of the region where I was born. But it’s also true that in the past what I wrote wasn’t always understood in Bulgaria. Sometimes the critics were hard on me. My work didn’t meet with full acceptance until Gabriel García Márquez’s books were translated.
Your work has often been compared with his. Are you flattered or annoyed by that?
I’m not the least bit bothered by it. Critics often compare writers when they don’t know what else to say.
But García Márquez’s fiction is not peopled with the same kind of supernatural beings as the tenets and verbludes that appear in your work. Did you invent these creatures or did you borrow them from Bulgarian folklore?
The verblude came straight out of my imagination, but the tenets is a creature that appears in Bulgarian folk tales. The name may derive from the Russian word tem, which means shadow. An old belief has it that if a cat hops over a corpse, the soul of the deceased will never go to heaven. It will remain earthbound and become a kind of vampire. But vampires are a Romanian speciality. Our tenets are much nicer. Not only do they not drink blood, but they can actually make themselves quite useful. They play a positive role. One tenets is said to have finished weaving the rug of a woman who had fallen ill. Another typed a short story on my typewriter.
Maybe you don’t believe in them, but the people who live in my region do. One day, in the village where my mother was born, I asked an old woman if she had seen a tenets lately. She answered, “Oh no, we haven’t seen any around here for ages, but the other day they were talking about them on the radio.” In fact, she was referring to a broadcast of one of my stories!
The inhabitants of Cherkaski are totally cut off from the outside
world. For them, nothing is more exotic than Romania, on the opposite bank of the Danube, where they have never been. Have
their lives changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Very much so. Television has arrived in the remotest corners of the province. It has broadened horizons, stirred new interests and kindled new desires. A while ago I visited my cousins in a small town near Cherkaski. Their house was empty. As usual, neighbours appeared to tell me they weren’t there. “Where’ve they gone?” I asked. I was surprised because my cousins are getting on in years and usually at least one old grandma was always home. “They all went off to the municipal reading room,” was the answer, “to see a strip show.”
You couldn’t say the change has not been drastic! But that’s not all. Modernity has totally transformed my village. It’s been swallowed up and wiped off the map by a dam! It’s as if it was intended to give me ideas for my stories. The march Westward continues, as you might imagine: the names of towns were changed almost as soon as Zhivkov fell because, as everyone knows, changes of that kind are essential. For example, the regional capital, Mihaïlovgrad, has become Montana, just like the American state. The town’s name has been changed so often no one knows what to call it any more. Once it was called Kutlovitsa. You have to admit, the name has a “barbarian” ring to it. One day at the turn of the century, a bearded man drove through the town in a car. The rumour immediately spread that he was King Ferdinand of Bulgaria in person. The village worthies called a meeting and wrote a petition requesting the National Assembly to change the name of the village to “Ferdinand’s Kutlovitsa”. It sounded much more stylish!
How has Bulgaria changed? Where do you think the country is heading?
For a very long time I saw Bulgaria as a white bear floating on an iceberg, all alone in the middle of the ocean. We haven’t come down off the iceberg in the past few years, but at least we pass other bears and wave to each other. Soon we won’t be alone any more. I think we’re on the right track. We’re no longer cut off and the world looks at us in a different way. I have high hopes for the future.
But Bulgaria still has problems, especially economic ones. What is life like there?
I’m going to paraphrase a line from a short story by Maupassant which goes something like this, “How lucky we are to die surrounded by doctors in white coats!”
Your political commitment came late and seems paradoxical.
You were invited to the “dissidents’ breakfast” with French President François Mitterrand in 1989, but were elected to the National Assembly as a socialist deputy during the first free elections two years later.
At that time Ceausescu had just been killed and Bulgaria was on the same track as Romania. It looked as if it might drown in a bloodbath. I belonged to a group of intellectuals who thought that if we rallied around the socialist party, we might be able to channel the tension rising in the streets. The French socialists had something to do with that decision. I don’t regret the experience, but I do consider it a mistake. That said, I never set foot in parliament and resigned.
Have these historic changes influenced your work?
No, but they have certainly influenced literature in general. First of all they rid Bulgarian literature of the burden of “glorification” I mentioned earlier. Authors can express themselves more freely. Has the quality of literature improved? I’m not sure.
Has opening up to the world given rise to new literary trends in Bulgaria?
Yes, especially with young authors. But again, permit me to voice some doubts on the quality of the results. I’m not against influences that could be fruitful but, as Maupassant said, the best belly-dancing is done in the Orient. I don’t like pseudo-innovations. Call me old-fashioned, but I miss the days when 80,000 copies of a novel by Victor Hugo were published in Bulgaria and all of them sold out! That’s saying a lot for a country with a population of eight million. There was a tradition of reading which is dying out nowadays. As I said, Bulgaria’s famous reading rooms, which have been around since the nineteenth century, are being turned into nightclubs.
Many young Bulgarians have emigrated or are thinking of doing so because of the country’s severe economic and moral crisis. Do you have a message for them?
I would be tempted to advise them to stay at home. There’s no place like home. But I am wary of persuading or dissuading anyone. I can only speak for myself. In my view, people must draw water from their own wells. The French have their wells, the Germans have theirs, even if they draw beer from them. . . . And I think everyone should do the same. Look at wild animals. Wherever they roam, they always go back to their lairs. Salmon swim to the Sargasso Sea to die. Birds return home no matter how far they may have migrated. Can you imagine that a little bird can be wiser than a human being?
In view of the tragedies afflicting the Balkans, do you think Balkan writers have a special role to play?
Writers can decide to defend a cause through their work, or they can do the opposite. It’s a personal choice. I don’t have any advice to give on that because, as we say back home, “if you want to do somebody harm, then give them advice.” In the end, everything depends on the context of space and time. There might be places in the world where writers may not feel the need to become involved. I think that’s impossible in the Balkans. In Bulgaria, writers have always been associated with every social, political, religious and, of course, cultural movement.
Is it possible to imagine Balkan writers getting together to re-establish the long-severed links between their countries?
Writers in the Balkans are divided by tradition. The peoples of the region have more or less conflictual relationships. Each writer stays in his or her camp. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain intellectual solidarity. For example, one of my plays banned in Bulgaria was first performed in the Republic of Macedonia in 1988. With few exceptions, writers have done nothing to aggravate conflicts but they haven’t done anything to alleviate them either. Macedonian and Greek intellectuals have drawn closer together in the past few years—which to me seems like the most sensible thing to do—but I don’t know of any other similar initiatives. I have taken part in a grand total of two meetings between Balkan writers, and I don’t remember them as being particularly cordial.
In a way, that reflects the situation in Europe. I understand Americans who wonder how so many different peoples and languages can exist in such a small space. The fragmentation of Europe is even more marked in the Balkans.
But the trend in Europe is towards unification. . . . The Portuguese writer Miguel Torga said, “Universality is locality without walls.” What do you think of that?
I would say the same thing myself. You see, Sofia is located on the London-Calcutta axis. Once, it was on the Silk Route. This geographic location has given the city a sense of openness, even though Bulgaria has often been isolated since the fifteenth century. Another route that crosses Sofia—and to me it’s just as important as routes taken by people—is the route taken by migrating birds. It’s known as “the grand route of Aristotle”. The universal core of Bulgaria is to be found at the crossroads of these two routes.
If you had to define universality in one word, what would you say?
I would say: pain. As a writer, I am very sensitive to human pain. It makes people equal. Pain is the same for everyone and doesn’t discriminate between races and peoples. It makes everyone equal. The English have a highly developed sense of humour, but that doesn’t mean they feel less pain than anyone else when they have their teeth extracted.