Sozopol Fiction Seminars Lectures

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

HANDBOOK IN PROGRESS

[2008 – 2017]

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES Handbook in Progress [2008 – 2017]

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

Handbook in Progress

[2008 – 2017]

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

PREFACE

This handbook is an ongoing collection of the lectures held within the framework of the annual Elizabeth Kostova Foundation's Sozopol Fiction Seminars since their launch in 2008. An advanced discussion among writers of fiction in Bulgarian and English, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars host fiction writers from Bulgaria and English-speaking countries. In addition to the writing workshops, the program also includes distinguished guest lectures conducted by the seminars’ faculty. This handbook gives you an opportunity to read all the lectures delivered to date. Some of them were originally written in English, others have been translated from Bulgarian. Each year the collection is enriched with two new lectures. They are presented in chronological order.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

KATE MOSSE 6

THEODORA DIMOVA 11

GEORGI GOSPODINOV 17

JOSIP NOVAKOVICH 23

ALEX MILLER 36

KRISTIN DIMITROVA 41

ILIYA TROYANOV 47

RANA DASGUPTA 53

BARRY LOPEZ 57

DEYAN ENEV 64

RICHARD RUSSO 70

VLADISLAV TODOROV 79

MATTHEW KNEALE 89

VLADIMIR ZAREV 97

CLAIRE MESSUD 110

HRISTO KARASTOYANOV 122

ELENA ALEXIEVA 130

JOSH WEIL 135

DIMITER KENAROV 142

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

KATE MOSSE

PLACE AS INSPIRATION FOR FICTION Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 21-24 May, 2008

Eighteen years ago, my husband and I bought a tiny, biscuit- coloured house in Carcassonne. It nestles in the deep shadow of the battlements of the medieval Cité. We knew nothing about the place. It was one of those random, haphazard decisions that have unexpected and far-reaching consequences. I’d never even been to southwest France. I had vague memories of school history lessons and a medieval Crusade that had destroyed the independence of the Midi in Labyrinth is a time-slip adventure

Biography novel, set part in 13th century Carcassonne and Chartres, and partly in the modern day. Reworking Grail legend, it tells the Kate is the author of the bestsellers Labyrinth and story of a young girl, Alaïs, swept up in the brutal Crusade Sepulchre. She read English at New College, Oxford. She launched against a group of peaceable Christians, the Cathars, is co-founder of the Orange who lived in the southwest of France. Sepulchre, also set in two Prize for Fiction and currently presents Radio 4's different time periods – the 1890s and the present day – is a 'A Good Read'. ghost story, a Tarot tale. The novels, although similar in A Fellow of the Royal Society structure and for the strong female heroines, are very different of Arts, Kate was named European Woman of in tone and scope and intention. Labyrinth is very much an epic Achievement for Contribution to the Arts in novel, a story told against the broad backdrop of history. 2000. Sepulchre, on the other hand, is more claustrophobic, more domestic, a tale of haunting and mysticism set against the stifling backdrop of fin-de-siècle French society. What they have in common is that they both grew out of my love for the region and the history of my adopted home. Labyrinth is a love letter, if you like, to Carcassonne itself. Sepulchre, a little more ambivalent, is a homage to the ancient forests, lakes and mountains surrounding the antique spa town of Rennes-les-Bains, about 30 kilometres to the south of Carcassonne.

But, I am running ahead of myself. Back in 1989 I had no intention of writing a novel about Carcassonne or the Cathars or Tarot cards and ghosts and ruined tombs. Then, I just wanted to be more than a visitor passing through. In the long, hot summers that followed – in between the usual summer pursuits and caring for our two young children - I read everything about the

Languedoc I could get my hands on – the Romans in the 1st century BC, the Visigoths in the 5th, Charlemagne and Dame Carcas, the 8th century Saracen queen after whom the city is named, the

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Albigensians in the 13th, the Nazi Occupation in the 20th. I collected guidebooks, history books, theology, even Occitan poetry and proverbs. I hunted down traditional festivals, such as the extraordinary – and enduring – medieval fertility rite of the Fête de l’Âne in Ladern-sur-Lauquet. I graduated from English to French histories, more subtle, more complicated, more hidden.

So what of the place itself? Looking around the beautiful city of Sozopol, I think Carcassonne is a place where this audience would feel immediately at home. To the north lies the Montagne Noire, purple at dawn; to the east are the vineyards of the Minervois and, beyond the Narbonnais plains, the Mediterranean Sea; to the south lies the wild, rocky landscape of the gulleys and mountains of the Ariège.

Carcassonne itself is a town divided. The medieval Cité was restored (controversially) by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the second half of the 19th century – the scandal about which I make reference to in Sepulchre. The old town sits high on a hill on the right bank of the Aude. On the other side of the river is the Bastide Saint-Louis. First built in 14th century, it underwent a period of massive expansion and prosperity during the 19th century and was rebuilt on a gird of narrow cobbled streets. For over 600 years, the two halves have been linked by the perfect medieval stone-arched bridge, the Pont Vieux. A battered Jesus on a metal cross half way across marks the point at which the old and new towns meet.

From the moment they learnt to climb, our two children – now 18 and 15 years old! - treated the medieval Cité’s 3 km of ramparts as their playground. Every summer in the lists – the space between the outer and inner walls known as the lices – hosts a medieval joust. The sound of metal on metal, the thud of the quintain and splinter of wood, rings out much as it would have done eight hundred years ago.

The Cité has 52 defensive towers and was considered impregnable – imprenable. Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration didn’t always respect their medieval antecedents – grey slate rather than red tile, for example. But in the oldest surviving sections of walls on the northern side – the Charpentière, the Manuquière or the Moulin d’Avar – you can imagine the stonemasons cutting the original foundations.

My medieval heroine of Labyrinth, Alaïs, lives in the Château Comtal. Constructed on Roman and Visigoth foundations, the castle was built as part of the western fortifications in the middle of the 11th century by the Trencavel dynasty. Although many of the oldest buildings are gone – their stones scavenged to build the Bastide Saint-Louis – the main courtyard, the Cour d’Honneur, the smaller Cour du Midi and the distinctive watchtower, the Tour Pinte, remain. On the eastern walls of the Château, replica wooden hourds have been constructed, just as they were during the

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES siege of Carcassonne in August 1209, to allow the defenders to hurl missiles down on the besieging army beneath.

Unlike the Bastide, the Cité’s network of tiny cobbled alleyways and streets is more spider’s web than grid. The conflicts of history live on in the place names – rue Raymond-Roger Trencavel, rue Saint-Louis, impasse Agnès de Montpellier. There are houses and schools – one bilingual Oc / French – tucked away behind the shops, bars and restaurants. Many of the older inhabitants have lived within the walls for generations. Head for place Marcou, a small square in the heart of the Cité, or, for belle époque splendour and a beautiful ivy-covered façade, try the luxurious Hôtel de la Cité on the site of the old Episcopal Palace beside the Basilica Saint-Nazaire.

In 1989 there were few English tourists. Carcassonne had not yet been designated a Unesco World Heritage Site. Ryanair didn’t yet serve the tiny airport – now there are two flights a day from London alone. There was an air of loving neglect surrounding many of the monuments, despite the fact that, in the early 20th century, Carcassonne had actively set out to market itself as a tourist destination. The 19th century heroine of Sepulchre, Léonie, visits the Cité at the point in 1891 when tourism is just beginning to take hold. The first fixed tourist office opened in 1902, one of the first in France, repackaging medieval history as an alternative to the fashionable but idle resorts of Cannes or Nice. Postcards reproducing a line from Gustave Nadaud’s famous 1863 song – ‘Il ne faut pas mourir sans avoir vu Carcassonne’ – were mass produced. The campaign worked. More than 10 000 visitors arrived on the new railway line between July and October 1905. One hundred years later, a staggering 3 million visitors come to Carcassonne every year. It is the second most-visited site in France outside Paris (not to mention where the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves staring Kevin Costner was filmed.) Now, I admit, there are one or two tourists also holding paperback copies of Labyrinth and Sepulchre.

Read LABYRINTH extract (attached)

Moving on from the spirit of place - which is my first inspiration – to the thorny question of genre. All authors resist the idea of being categorised into one genre or another. After all, what we seek, are readers who will enjoy our work, that’s all. But publishers, agents, publicists, journalists need often to put books in one box or another.

I, like all novelists, am therefore often asked what ‘type’ of books I write. I grew up reading some of the great adventure novels of the late nineteenth century from Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and She to Jules Verne. What I enjoyed was the combination of action, landscape (extreme cold, to extreme heat!), mixed with a healthy dollop of cliff-hanging (literally, often) adventure, mystery and the sense that, whatever the trials and tribulations along the way, it would all end happily in the end. The spirit of place is all important, a clearly defined and

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES described landscape. There is a clear sense of right and wrong, usually a quest or sacrifice at the heart of things, and the promise that the story will resolve. There will be no loose ends.

As a novelist, I was attracted by the challenge of writing ‘old fashioned’ adventure, as it were, but replacing the traditional male hero with a female one! But the genre label – adventure – seemed to be invisible on the bookshelves. Did this mean that readers no longer wanted traditional adventures? Or was it just a question of categorisation? Of expectation? Of literary tradition? Both male and female writers are constrained by literary expectations of what publishers believe readers want and always have been. Ever since Daniel Defoe created the confessional narrative with Moll Flanders, women have struggled to escape from the suffocating expectation of romantic intrigues, unrequited panting, passive forbearance as le repos du soldat and tragic purity. Further back in the canon, precedents were set in the myths and legends retold by Shakespeare and brilliantly laid bare by Lisa Jardine’s 1983 critique Still Harping on Daughters. While Brutus, Octavius, Mark Antony and her husband Cassius go to war centre stage, Portia kills herself – the supreme self-abnegation – off stage by swallowing fire.

Literature needs strong, positive female characters – as well as gentle, reflective male characters - to emerge without being sublimated into, for example, the pantomime self-righteous blue stockings of Molière’s L’Ecole des femmes. And they have. But when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote the epic horror tale Frankenstein, was she continuing her mother’s battle for the rights of women in another medium, or falling back on an older pattern of gender roles? When women in fiction began to come of age and speak for themselves – think of Eliza Bennett and Becky Sharp – what was their goal, their dénouement? Was it authority and command, the desire for wider importance in a wider world? And when George Eliot’s Middlemarch was first serialised in 1871 and 1872, why was it considered scandalous for Dorothea to prefer the idealistic young doctor to the emotionless older academic Casaubon. In Coventry Patmore’s notorious early 20th century poem The Angel in the House, the 19th century domestic ideal was still lionised.Children’s writers such as Frances Hodgson Burnett gave their dreams of liberation to children precisely because those roles were not available to women. Even if the antecedents of the modern adventure heroine lie in the Victorian past, this still doesn’t make the novels they inhabit adventure stories in the classic sense.

Read Sepulchre extract.

So, when I asked what I write, I reply that I consider Labyrinth and Sepulchre to be adventure novels. The narrative rests squarely on the shoulders of two female protagonists: they have romantic and sexual adventures, have homes and domestic lives, but their role within the novel is to lead not follow. My heroines are not traditional adventure heroines, waiting on the mountain top waiting to be rescued, but instead masters (sorry!) of their own lives and, by

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES extension, the lives of others. For me, it this intention – the decision to put the action centre stage – that separates straightforward historical fiction from traditional adventure writing.

So, to return to where we began, with the landscape of southwest France that inspired Labyrinth and Sepulchre. Readers, visitors from all countries, are drawn to the Languedoc for the same reason I was. They come for adventure in the mountains and hills around Carcassonne, too. They come to hear the whispered folklore and tragic history of the region. They come for the gaunt silhouettes of ruined castles– Lastours, Quéribus, Peyrepertuse – which pepper the landscape. And then there is Montségur, the spiritual centre of the Cathar Church in the Languedoc from 1204 until its final defeat at the hands of the French Crusaders. The ‘safe mountain’ citadel perches perilously on the top of the mountain looking out over the Pic de St-Bartélémy and the hidden caves beneath the Pic de Soularac, where Labyrinth both begins and ends. Half a day’s ride to the east, are the wooded hills around the spa town of Rennes-les-Bains where Sepulchre is set, where a quite different sequence of mythologies, of legends, of folklore hold sway.

When Montségur fell in March 1244, after ten months of siege, more than two hundred Cathars were burned alive in a pyre constructed on the lower slopes. Now, a small stone stèle stands in the Prats dels Cremats to mark the spot. Flowers, scraps of poetry and fragments of material are left at the foot of the cross in tribute. In the tiny square of Rennes-les-Bains, where once 19th century ladies and gentlemen walked arm in arm, now modern day tourists sit in the shade under the plane trees and listen to the voices of the villagers speaking still in the language of their childhoods, Occitan. This is the nature of narrative, the personal and tiny remainders, every day, of the way in which the land tells its story.

Despite the stream of visitors across the Prat dels Cremats, despite the overcrowded August streets of the Cité, the spirit of place is strong. The real Carcassonne – or Carcassona, to use its older Occitan name – can still be felt. Beyond the ice creams and plastic swords, it’s there in the hills, in the brilliant Midi light, in the violent summer storms and flash floods, the dry, evening wind from the north, the Cers, that blows down from the mountains, just as it did 800 years ago. It is a land of secrets still. It is this I have attempted to capture in Labyrinth and Sepulchre.

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THEODORA DIMOVA Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 21-24 May, 2008

Before I begin, I would like to express my gratitude to Elizabeth Kostova for what she is doing for Bulgarian literature. Establishing a foundation to support creative writing is unprecedented in our country’s recent history. With this gesture of respect toward literature, Elizabeth honors the country as a whole and especially Bulgarian writers. Elizabeth reminds us that despite a country’s size and the size of its language, literature is a reality of a different kind, a country of the spirit with no borders and with a completely

different set of rules. Biography As writers, we inhabit this hyperreality and live according to its Theodora Dimova is an award winning writer and laws. Now isn't the time to discuss whether a life in literature is a playwright. She graduated in English Language Studies comfortable experience or not, what it gives and takes from us, from Sofia University and what sacrifices it demands, whether it makes us happier or more has studied at the Royal Court Theatre in London. miserable, or whether we can enter and exit it as we choose. These are questions we can each answer according to our own She is winner of the Razvitie Prize in 2004 and the worldviews. I personally believe that there are more cheerful ways Austrian Grand Prize for East European Literature in of spending your life than being a writer, because in the end our job 2006. is to look at the darker, more sinful side of the world. Perhaps we will have a chance to discuss these questions informally later today and tomorrow; in fact, I have no doubt that we will. However, for the time being, I would like to concentrate on writing itself and specifically on the questions of how a book comes to be, what the writing process entails and what nourishes us as writers.

Coming up with rules about writing is not an easy task. Personally, I don’t believe that you can learn creative writing from anyone else or teach it. But I do believe that talking and listening to others talk about the writing process and the pitfalls, breakdowns, depression and despair that necessarily accompany it can provide young writers with the courage, strength and resilience that the profession demands.

I’ll begin by saying that each of my novels and plays have come into being in a completely different way. Even for the same writer, it’s difficult to say what generates the desire to create a work. I often compare writing to love, a sort of love at first sight. If we are able to discover the source of our feelings for someone, we will be able to analyze the source of our desire to write

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES something, even if we have no idea what it will turn out to be. You know you want to write it, but you don't know what it is.

It's like falling in love – on the one hand, you know nothing about the person, yet on the other, you feel like you know everything, as if you've known him forever. It is on this very thin and delicate ice – which could crack at any moment – that the imperative to write is born. The urge to write is so intense and overwhelming that you sometimes feel you could reach out and touch it. We all are familiar with this absolute necessity to write! If it's not there, I never sit down to write. If the impulse is less than fierce and unquenchable, writing becomes a chore, a burden. Yes, the desire to write! You follow it like a blind man, not knowing where you're headed, sensing it only by smell, by sound, by a voice, a word, a phrase, a situation. You feel your way around, and you wake up at night… from the pressure that's building up inside you, pushing you down an unfamiliar, unseen path. You could fall into a trap or an abyss at any moment, anything could happen, but you walk on, you give in, you surrender to the desire. It is a mystery, a secret, we shouldn’t try to analyze it too much lest it push us away. That’s what conceiving a novel is like – the darkest, most dangerous and intuitive stage of the writing process.

I started out writing plays. My first novel, Emine, came out eight years ago. Until then, I’d never thought I would write novels. Fiction had seemed beyond reach. I can now confidently say that that plays are the most difficult genre to write, but I didn’t know that then. Emine’s story was a simple, clear, chronological and – in my opinion – theatrical idea and I wanted to make a play out of it.

The most important thing for any genre, whether play or novel, is being able to find a structure, a skeleton for your story, the principle of the narrative. Once grasped, if only intuitively, the structure or skeleton will begin working of its own accord, as if propelled by an internal engine. The structure itself will sort through the material, deciding what to keep and what to get rid of; in some paradoxical way it works in place of the author, taking priority over the author in the writing process. The structure becomes the master and you the apprentice, whose role is to tirelessly serve your master, constantly providing him with the necessary material. For this reason, I can never start writing if I don’t have at least a rough, intuitive idea of the structure.

So I had Emine’s story – a striking story – and I felt the absolute necessity to tell it. I also had a vague idea about the structure of my play. So I began. I felt that this time everything would run smoothly and there wouldn’t be much to agonize over, to search for, to discover. In a year and a half of almost daily writing, I’d completed a mere three scenes, a total of no more than 10 pages. And the three scenes didn’t even fit together, not even with the most creative sequencing. They didn’t even have the same characters. It was painfully clear that I wasn’t going to be able to write this play, that I couldn't find the structure. I told myself not to worry; obviously, not everything

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES works out the way we want it to. Just relax – so you won't write Emine’s story, but you'll write some other play, some other story. Just put it aside and move on. I walked around Sofia for days and kept repeating these things to myself, until I realized I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t depression, but a very clear feeling that some of the wiring inside me was about to blow. The truth was that I could not write Emine’s story. It had possessed me, it was inside me, living some parallel life that I couldn't help but surrender to, yet I couldn't write it. The feeling that you're going crazy. That you don’t know when your fuses will blow. That was the first time I realized that writing is a dangerous thing, a very dangerous thing. A thing that should be approached very cautiously. To be a writer, you must have something strong and resilient inside you to withstand the stories that enter you, to help you work them out. If you don’t, the stories will consume you, they will rework you.

This state, which lasted about a month, was difficult for me. It was even harder to explain to the people around me, to my family and friends. To a certain extent, it’s unsharable – it was a life-or- death battle with an invisible enemy. I knew by then it would be very difficult to free myself from Emine’s story. The truth was I had accepted defeat. Defeat was everywhere.

Then one morning I sat down at my desk again and said to myself: I'll just write down everything inside me, without worrying about a structure, chronology, dialogue and scenes. I'll do it for myself, once and for all, so that I can be free of Emine and her story. I began writing 15 to 20 pages a day. I sat and began writing in long breaths, without believing in or understanding what was happening. I wrote the novel in less than a month – followed by a substantial amount of editing, of course. I didn’t know whether it was a short story or a novella or what; I had no idea where the novel's structure – that I had been hopelessly searching for in the form of a play for a year and a half – came from. When I finished the novel in a month, I was as happy as I had been miserable before I started it. How it happened is still a mystery to me. Many years have passed since then and I still don’t have an explanation as to what blocked my energy in play form (which I knew so well) and what had unleashed the energy in novel form. Not only had I never attempted to write a novel before – I’d been downright scared to do so.

I’ve told you the story of writing Emine in detail as a way for us to reflect on the force that exists inside us even before the moment we start writing, a force that gives birth to the writing process and drives the words out of us.

I will now describe how I wrote my second novel, Mothers, to encourage reflection on what nourishes literature, what supports it, grounds it. I wrote this novel in a fundamentally different way and for very different reasons, which I will try to explain.

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Bulgarian society is going through a cataclysmic period – it is a very sick society. I believe that during such periods writers cannot ignore socially important topics. For me, child aggression, child crime and the general state of children are the scariest and most serious social problems Bulgaria faces. In these difficult times, I believe that it is a writer's duty to be the link between society and the individual. When someone spends ten leva to buy a book or a theater ticket, the book or the play should help him – in one way or another. They ought to be able to do something specific for the individual: to make him feel less lonely or confused or devoid of values and direction, to fill him with compassion and a sense of community. It’s precisely this lack of compassion and communal feeling in our society that nudged me towards writing Mothers.

I started writing it after a horrible murder in the spring of 2004, when two fourteen-year-old girls in Plovdiv killed one of their classmates. Other murders committed by teenagers followed in the fall in Pernik, Blagoevgrad and Stara Zagora. These were not ordinary crimes like the ones we are now used to seeing in Hollywood films or in the newspapers. They are a sign that something unprecedented is happening in our society. That we’ve crossed borders that we shouldn’t have crossed. Like the orphanage for abandoned children in the village of Mogilino and the BBC documentary about it. Incidentally, our politicians claimed that Bulgaria has no problems with its orphanages and labeled the film “an aggressive anti-Bulgarian campaign.” It is exactly the extreme cynicism of those in power that is ruining the moral fabric of our society. We keep repeating ad nauseum – our society is sick. Societies are living organisms and they can be sick. And this disease affects all of us, no matter how much we try to emigrate into ourselves.

I began writing Mothers simply because I wanted to figure out for myself what was going on. I didn’t know that my explanation would grow into a novel. And I didn’t know that an explosion of child crime was still ahead.

I tried to find the roots of this brutality. I don’t know whether I succeeded. However, I am sure of one thing – the kids are not to blame.

The two fourteen-year-old child murderers were born in 1990 – the year we really gained our freedom from communism. They are the children of the Transition. They grew up while their parents waited all night in lines for milk, cheered at political rallies, protested in demonstrations, tried to live on twenty dollars a month or lost their jobs, emigrated to America and then returned. They had parents who went under, got back on their feet, got rich or got drunk, who lost themselves amidst their money or the lack of it. These kids grew up with parents who felt like condemned sinners who had to pay for who knows whose crimes. These kids grew up around feverish restless red-eyed adults with meaningless lives who never took their eyes off the TV and were quick to pick a fight over politics as soon as they got home from work. If they didn’t pick fights about politics, they cursed at it. These kids, the children of the Transition, grew

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES up in the company of adults who grew quieter, gloomier and more sullen by the day. In a few years’ time, they didn’t even want to look at the TV and they didn’t bother to curse. Then the kids went to school, where they saw their teachers with their shabby clothes and shattered confidence. And they saw their classmates with mobile phones worth their teacher’s entire annual salary. The kids saw the rich – their houses, their insolence and their self-destruction. And they saw the poor – their wide-open eyes, their helplessness, their suffocation…

I happened to overhear a conversation. “I don’t know what else to do for these kids!” a well-off mother of two was complaining to a friend. “They have absolutely no gratitude! I give them ten leva every single day, I take them to the sea during the summer and skiing during the winter… I don’t understand what else they could want!” Indeed, what else could a child need but money, skiing and the seaside?!

I heard another woman in an ill-fitting faded overcoat exclaim: “If I can’t even take care of myself, how can I take care of my children!”

We abandoned our children. We forgot about them, swept up in our own nonsense. We took away the cocoon of love they are supposed to grow up in. And without this protective layer of love and concern, children are exposed like bare nerves.

They soak up our energies. Our energies build up in them. Our discontent. Our dissatisfaction. Our sullenness. Our Balkan bitterness. The aggression we somehow manage to live with.

But they can’t. Our kids are not built to cope with this enormous lack – a lack of joy, love, friendship, laughter, goodness and celebration. They don't have the defense mechanisms to compensate. Their isolation is greater than ours. Their ignorance of good and bad is greater. And their silence is scarier.

The truth is that although they were born in the year of freedom, we did not nourish them with freedom. Because communism didn't disappear then. It is still around now – in our inability to love. In our godlessness. In our lack of fire, energy and enthusiasm. Communism lives on in our malice, suspicion and envy. In the poisonous energy that the children of the Transition soaked up from their mothers, fathers, teachers, classmates, computers, TVs and big brothers. Our children are who we are. They are our achievement over the past fifteen years.

Mothers has received numerous awards in Bulgaria and abroad. It has been published in four languages and is being translated into another three. Its Bulgarian sales are unprecedented for a contemporary Bulgarian novel. Yet its success has made me realize how little influence literature has on society. Child crime in Bulgaria not only still exists – it increases with every passing day. The social atmosphere and energy surrounding our children is the same.

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Perhaps our only hope – as my colleague Deyan Enev says – is that although literature cannot influence society, it can influence the individual. And that hope is reason enough for us to continue writing.

I will end my lecture with an excerpt from Mothers about a writer who is the father of one of my protagonists. Unlike this lecture, it was written spontaneously and thus will give you a clearer idea of my understanding of writing.

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GEORGI GOSPODINOV

WHAT ARE OUR BOOKS MADE OF? Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 4 –9 June, 2009

The honest way to start a lecture like this is to deflate expectations. Unlike in a classical detective novel, by the end of the lecture, and even by the end of the workshop, you won’t know all about the “literary crime” – how it is committed and who the perpetrator is. The secret will remain a secret, and there is something good in this.

I will begin with a few points that don’t ordinarily get discussed, at least not at the beginning. I am here to talk about how books are

Biography made. And the presumption is that I have experience. So here I am talking to you, standing on the uncertain and crumbly ground of Georgi Gospodinov is author of seven books of this experience. And it is fair to admit, before I go any further, that I poetry, fiction, and literary and cultural am in more and more doubt about the advantages of experience. It studies. His novel, is simply the alibi of an older age. And like all alibis – it is somewhat Natural Novel, has been issued six times in dubious. Bulgaria and published in ten languages, So here it is: I’ve written poetry and prose, plays and short scripts, including English, French, German, and literary criticism and history, a doctoral dissertation, columns and Italian. articles, and I’ve written copy for the advertising industry; for 17 years now I’ve been editor of Literaturen vestnik – the literary weekly, which since the 1990s has effectively been the workshop for new Bulgarian literature. I sometimes think I’ve read more manuscripts than I’ve read books; I’ve been to international creative writing courses and I’ve been taught to teach; I’ve taught myself. And let me tell you – from experience – that it never gets any easier. You always start from scratch, and the fears and anxiety and a good deal of uncertainty are always with you.

And that’s what I’d like to discuss first – uncertainty. That’s where it all starts for me.

We live in a culture that doesn’t tolerate uncertainty. You learn in self-help manuals that you must be confident, you must know what you want and you must follow it with dogged determination. There are many writers who say that once they set their hands to work, they know all they need to know about their characters; they know the beginning and the end of their books. They even know the first and the last sentences. That all sounds quite depressing to writers like me who belong to the opposite school.

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If I could come up with any advice for you, it is this: don’t avoid uncertainty, don’t be afraid of it; examine your doubts and make use of them to develop your work and hypotheses. Try to tame your fears, but don’t chase them away. In my view, uncertainty is the natural state of man (and writer) and the sure sign of the most important thing in our common craft – sentience. Hence this praise of uncertainty. I don’t have much faith in people who know all the answers, who are always on the right course, who never hesitate. Certainty, at least in my view, is suspicious. We work, after all, with the most delicate, elusive and ambiguous material – language. Incidentally, one of the epigraphs in my Natural Novel goes like this:

“I wish somebody would say: This novel’s good, because everything in it is uncertain.”

Speaking of language, let us dip a toe into its stream for a moment. I am certain that everyone in this room has had the happy experience of letting themselves be carried away by language. The sensation of its push and pull, its sweeping force, its energies. The only thing you have to do is keep afloat and follow it. It can be like rafting through dangerous rapids and whirlpools. Or slow and calming, penetrating far and wide.

There are those who say that language only matters in poetry, and that it is an instrument in prose, in mere service of the plot. That is not my experience. I come from poetry, and, in fact, I’ve never abandoned it. Before I wrote my Natural Novel, I’d already written two books of poetry. Both were, I dare say, widely read and well-loved. Both are still in print, so I cannot complain. Clearly, the writing of a poem and a novel are two separate and distinct disciplines. Poetry, in the language of sports, is a short-distance event. I can compare it to the 100 or 200 m sprint: there is an explosive start, loads of muscle and tendon work, movement at high speed, and intensity until the very end. Prose, on the other hand, is a long-distance event: you’ve got to distribute your energy evenly; there can be long and dull stretches, a lack of focus; but the most important thing is to keep a steady rhythm. And breathe. I used to do both events – literally, not metaphorically – and in the end I gave up both when I had to choose.

But in writing my Natural Novel I chose the strategy of poetry. I made sure I listened to the language and paid close attention to every word. I kept up the rhythm – which, in my view, is a very important aspect of prose. There are novels made from building blocks (like chapters and paragraphs) and novels made from sentences. I prefer the latter. I always notice the difference: the sentences, the phrases, the images.

I knew that my novel would not be a classical narrative. I had vague ideas of “wanting to make a novel out of all the things that don’t usually go into a novel”. And I was absolutely free. It was my first attempt, so it was OK to fail. Let me take a brief detour here. Make bold use of your right to

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES fail while you are still starting out. It is a liberating experience. And remember that a literary career is just that: walking on the edge of failure.

When I sat down to write my novel one summer ten years ago, I knew that it would be about disintegration, private and public – the breakup of a marriage against the breakdown of society in the 90s, in Bulgaria. Without being a political book, Natural Novel is rooted in the events of that decade. It also contains flashbacks to the communist period seen through the eyes of the protagonist as a child. I’d collected notes, thoughts and ideas in notebooks over several years and the “anarchism of the novel”, which was pointed out by the New Yorker, probably has something to do with the anarchic nature of my notes. I wrote the novel in three months of daily work, but the notes which gave birth to it were gathered over seven or eight years. I didn’t make use of everything, but what was included certainly provided much of the book’s substance.

A happy discovery came through readings in botany and natural history. I was lead to this by Michel Foucault’s discussion of the natural histories from the 17 c. whose vision of the world was still one of unity and magic. Anything could go into those histories – legends, personal stories, rumors, scientific descriptions, recipes. And that’s how I chose the genre of my book. Natural Novel is as much the title as it is its genre.

It’s a book about a personal childhood and the childhood of the world – the blessed 17th, 18th and even 19th centuries; about Carolus Linnaeus and the natural historians who so passionately sought to classify and label the world. I included excerpts from Linnaeus’ scientific manuscripts, which today sound like a work of fiction. I found botanical magazines with translations of his works from a century ago. Here are two of his titles: “Introduction to the Mating of Plants” and “The Sleep of Plants”. Excellent for a natural novel. So that’s where the strange and naïve gardener in my book came from – the botanist who tries to bring reality and words back together by looking at analogies between botany and philology. He looks at words and weighs them; he studies their pollination and dissemination.

If we unpack my novel or tear it up in the middle the way we tore up old toys when I was a child, these are the things that will come out of its belly: a natural history of the flush toilet with all sorts of facts, stories and examples; lists of the pleasures of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (the latter is the shortest); a bum who owns a rocking chair; a natural history of flies plus a bible of flies; an old Irish contraceptive recipe; overheard stories of marital infidelity; the notes of a naturalist; a novel made from the first paragraphs of famous classical novels, and so on.

So what could glue these assorted trinkets together? There is one straight answer: the personal narrative. Regardless of its subject – love, separation, death … There aren’t that many subjects to choose from. In my case, it was a story about the inability to tell your story. Stuttering in the

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES narration of his own life, my protagonist seeks salvation in various lists and other people’s stories. He painfully needs to hear the material that novels and movies usually avoid.

“How can a novel be possible these days, when we no longer have a sense of the tragic? How can even the idea of a novel be possible when the sublime is gone and all we have is everyday life – in all its predictability, or worse, in the unbearable mystery of destructive chance?”

A few words about the meta-fictionality of Natural Novel. From the beginning to the end, the book constantly questions its making. “Yet this Novel of Beginnings will describe nothing. It will only give the initial impetus and will subtly move into the shadow of the next opening, leaving the characters to connect as they may. That’s what I would call a Natural Novel.”

So in that sense, this is a novel with a lot of space, with many silences and pauses, with areas of uncertainty.

It contains several different projects for novels, “a series of spontaneous abortions,” as the Village Voice calls them. The first such project is for a novel made from the beginnings of other novels:

“My immodest desire is to mold a novel of beginnings, a novel that keeps starting, promising something, reaching page 17 and then starting again.”

More often than not, the characters of most novels are happy until at least page 17, there are no failures. What my protagonist does is collect such happy beginnings, almost like a true natural historian.

He also attempts a novel made exclusively with verbs: “No explanations, no descriptions. Only the verb is honest, accurate and aloof.” The hitch here is that he is unable to think of even the first verb.

Then there is the project for a novel written from the point of view of a housefly – a fragmented, multi-faceted narrative resulting from the complex structure of the fly’s eyes. A novel full of detail, as mundane as the fly itself. “What kind of novel would we get if a fly could write a story…” “In the ideal novel, individual episodes will be held together by the trajectory of a fly.”

In addition to these three aborted novels, there is also the Bible of Flies, which I mentioned earlier, and two Socratic dialogues, where Socrates himself is a fly engaged in a serious discussion on the 1960s.

There are also numerous other short stories and inserts. A French critic called my book “a machine for stories.” Between us, I now regret peopling it with so many unresolved beginnings. But such is the genre of this unidentifiable literary object, the natural novel.

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Of course, no novel is natural, and the expression “natural novel” is an oxymoron. I’d say that this novel is nostalgic for the 19th c. novel, or what we perceive it to be – a slow, dense development, with a clear beginning, middle and end, and unambiguous causal relationships. Stendhal described it as a mirror you take on a journey to help reflect the world. According to my Natural Novel, the mirror has been broken and novels can no longer be anything but multi- faceted. We see the world reflected in this broken mirror and we never get a complete and consistent story. Our own stories are stories of fragmentation and failure, they are made from silences. And so the theme and plot of Natural Novel, its trauma, revolves around the question of what we do with the stories we can’t tell. How we find a way to speak through recurring fracture and fragmentation. Our stories cannot stay the same. They’ve been truncated. Their point of view is made of various facets.

Reception and Translatability

Natural Novel has had a good and, perhaps, inexplicable fate. In Bulgaria it was published at the very end of the 90s and has since been reprinted six times, with a readership that spans generations. It has been published in 12 languages, including English, and I am happy that my American publishers – Dalkey Archive Press – are here with us today. What matters even more to me is that the book seems to have found its readers. It was reviewed in the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Times of London, the Village Voice and by other publications, and it’s been included in the course syllabi of several European and American universities. A collection of short stories, which I wrote after the novel, has met with similar interest. It was a source of worry to me, especially before the first translations, whether my stories are universal enough to be understood by people other that those with whom I share the same history. Will they appeal equally to American, German, French, Danish and Italian ears? How do I properly convey the sense of timelessness of the 1980s in Bulgaria, for example? How do I provide the necessary background – the visible and invisible barriers, the prohibitions, the rules that had become part of us, of our lives and language?

I now know that our personal stories are universal. It’s a reassuring thing, especially for writers working in smaller languages. The act of telling a story is universal – it’s translatable and comprehensible for the minds and hearts of readers across the world. And that’s because all stories, in the end, are stories against death, even if they are not about death. Each story earns us another night, like in Scheherazade. And we add meaning to the world – a much-needed thing, as global resources of meaning are drying up fast, perhaps irrevocably. Literature is a slow medium, slower than radio, TV, the Internet, the movies and everything with a visual element in it. But the meaning it generates lasts longer and takes time to be depleted.

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I’ve heard various answers to the question “Why do you write?”. One of the most sincere ones was: “I want to be loved”. And that’s a good enough reason. It was the driving force for me between the ages of 15 and 25. It is Gunter Grass, I think, who said that he writes against the passing time. One of my short story characters, Gaustin, says something to the same effect: “We’ve lost the game strategically,” he says, “but the empty moves of our story-telling will keep delaying the end”.

Thirty-three years ago I had a nightmare. It recurred for several nights. In it my mother, my father and my brother had all fallen into a well and couldn’t get out. I was outside, “safe.” I still remember that mixture of fear – the feeling that I was cosmically alone, separated from everyone close to me – and of guilt, the guilt that I’d survived. I tried telling my nightmare to my grandmother, with whom I was staying for the summer, but she told me that nightmares shouldn’t be retold, lest they come true. And so what I did in this dead-end situation was the only possible thing – I wrote the dream down in a notebook. It was my way of tricking fortune – I never told anybody about the nightmare but I managed to get rid of it. That nightmare was the first thing I wrote. And I can say that today, 33 years later, my reasons for writing are not very different.

There are many things I had to leave out of this lecture. I didn’t say anything about editing and self-editing. Chekhov said that one should be one’s own fiercest editor, to the point of tears. And I am not one to argue with Chekhov. I didn’t say anything about irony and self-irony. Or about reading. Or about the importance of a writer’s curiosity about the world and people, which is the basis of all literature. Every writer is one big curious ear. A hearing voyeur. And the world is full of untold stories, if only we have ears to hear them.

And yet, if had to conclude and say one thing that I think a writer couldn’t do without, it would be this: an infinite awareness of everything that incurs pain, that wounds and brings joy. And not just on your own body, but on the body of the world. That, plus a devilish way with words, with the wonder of language. Nothing more, nothing less.

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JOSIP NOVAKOVICH

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER* Lecture held at the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 4 –9 June, 2009

Biography

Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He has published a novel, April Fool’s Day, three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA Program at Penn State University.

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______* The current chapter is included in the handbook with the author's permission. Please see: Josip Novakovich, Putting It All Together, in: Writing Fiction Step by Step. Story Press 1998.

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______** Read Sheepskin here.

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ALEX MILLER

WRITING & THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 27 May – 1 June, 2010

I don’t have the time today for a thorough expression of my views on the imagination and its place in the work of writers, but I do hope there are some ideas here that you will consider worth thinking about. I’m extremely grateful to Boris Deliradev for offering to translate this talk into Bulgarian. While the need for translation might be seen as a difficulty, it is to my mind also an exciting difficulty and I welcome this unique opportunity to speak through Boris’s voice in your own beautiful and, to me, utterly mysterious language. Biography With a terrain as vast and tracked over as the creative imagination Alex Miller is one of Australia's best loved it’s not so much a matter of being right or wrong in our thinking, writers. as of being invited to join the conversation. I would like to thank He is twice winner of the the organisers of this conference for doing me the very great prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's honour of inviting me to join the conversation here in Sozopol. premier literary prize, the first occasion in 1993 for The In his novel, Invitation to a Beheading, the great Ancestor Game, and again in 2003 for Journey to the Russian/American writer Vladimir Nabokov – who spent happy Stone Country. Conditions of childhood summers on the Black Sea coast - has the following Faith, his fifth novel, was published in 2000 and won exchange between the executioner and the condemned man. 'This the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the 2001 NSW is curious,' said M'sieur Pierre [the executioner] 'What are these Premiers Literary Awards. It hopes [that you speak of], and who is this saviour?' The was also nominated for the Dublin IMPAC International condemned man, Cincinnatus, replies simply, ‘Imagination.’ There Literature Award, shortlisted for the Colin could scarcely be a greater claim for the imagination than this. Roderick Award in 2000, the Age Book of the Year Award Imagination is not the preserve of the few. We are all born with an and the Miles Franklin imagination. The muse and mentor of the most famous of Award in 2001. He is also an overall winner of the Australia’s artists, Sidney Nolan, reminded him that "Childhood Commonwealth Writers Prize, for The Ancestor means creativity."1 And it was Coleridge - in T. S. Eliot's view the Game, in 1993. greatest critic of the imagination - who said in his Ode on

Dejection, "What nature gave me at my birth/My shaping spirit of

1 Janine Burke, The Heart Garden, Sunday Reed and Heide. Vintage 2004.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES imagination". The image of children in a kindergarten sitting on the floor surrounded by their creations is not new. "Behold the child among his new-born blisses," Wordsworth wrote, " . . . See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies."2

What happens to the imagination in adulthood - the degree to which we are unable or unwilling to forget our childhood liberties - is crucial to our mature creativity. For most adults imagination is no match for the onslaught of the demands of daily life and it tends to wither as these demands accumulate. The imagination of the writer or artist, however, persists in adulthood to demand the major share of the individual's attention and energies. It's not surprising therefore that we often recognise something rather childlike in the petulant self-centred world of the artist, the poet, and the novelist. Creative people are compelled to strive to become their own universe, even though they know such a state is not achievable. They have an idealised inner world that demands expression. It is as if their childhood imagination grew up with their body to have large adult ambitions, to become the dominant mode of their existence. The artist's attempts at a modest conventional life often fail in the face of these demands when they are combined with ambition and ego.

Imagination springs its surprises not in the crowded workshop of planning, but in the idle meander. The word meander, the dictionary tells us, has its meaning from the name of a river in ancient Phrygia, now part of modern day Turkey and not so very far from where we are today. The river was noted by the Greeks for its winding course. Many of the most suggestive and fruitful ideas that strike our imagination, and which have a durable currency in our cultural reference, are based on such observations of nature. In referencing nature there is a feeling that we are touching on truth. In his Letters to a Young Poet,3 the German poet Rilke eschews advice and criticism but offers the encouraging observation, "If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable." The human imagination, even in a digital post-modern world, finds sustenance in the assurance of nature's reality. In even the most fanciful of the imagination’s work it seems there must be a bedrock of reality from which it takes its flight.

There is, it seems, a close kinship between nature and the human imagination, and this kinship is deep, enduring and real. Is this kinship not an aspect of our humanity which not only withstands but deeply permeates the facts of human history and our urban cultures? The novelist may be said to activate the ambiguous space between history and myth.4 This is almost always what serious novelists attempt. To see the familiar face of their life and times as unfamiliar. And in

2 William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality. 3 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans Joan Burnham. P. 33. New World 2000. 4 Ibid. p.5

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES this the response of the creative person is necessarily inward. For the artist and the writer address themselves finally in the act of creation.

To meander is seen as close to delirium, to be in a waking dream, to be led without apparent purpose or linkage of cause and effect from one thing to another. In meandering it is not the end of the journey but the going that is important. The joy of the meander is the hope of happy accidents and chance encounters, where connections previously unsuspected may be revealed. To meander is to evade the conventional grid of responsibilities. One meanders in hopes of being surprised by the familiar. The purposeful planned direction, on the other hand, knows its end before it sets out and is unsettled by surprise. The meander is its own purpose. There is no destination.

The novel, no matter how realist its manner, is not a blueprint for "real" life but is artifice. Fiction is finally invention, no matter how realistic or "truly" historical its claims to represent reality. The novel is a work of the imagination. Movement in art and literature is never forwards or backwards but is always towards a centre. Art seeks the center not the terminus. Each age not only encourages and celebrates certain forms of art and literature but also suppresses regions of the psyche and the imagination. In its seeking, its meandering, our imagination is never wholly free from the fashionable forms of representation. Creative autonomy is a myth. Perhaps an ideal. But no matter how "original" a work, it is always of its own time and the passage of time reveals its complex temporal dependency.

Forms of representation are as fundamental to literature as they are to the visual arts. The greatest critic to have discoursed at length on this is Erich Auberbach in his magisterial work, Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.5 A book that was written not in Paris or New York but in Istanbul. "Dante," Auerbach says, "used his language to discover the world anew." That is, Dante did not create a new world with his imagination but revealed the unfamiliar in the familiar world. Writing a novel is re-writing; it is revisiting a familiar place time and again and seeing it anew each time. Beginning the writing of a novel is entering a puzzle, a maze whose centre is unknown to the author. In the beginning the novelist's material is without form. This does not mean the novelist is without subject, or is without something to say, but only that the novelist cannot know what he or she is going to come across before the intricacies of the work have been witnessed and it has assumed its final shape. With a novel, as with the exploration of a maze or a labyrinth, it is not a matter of reaching a conclusion, but of finding the centre. It is the centre that satisfies the form. When the centre is reached the novel is abandoned. It may look finished. But that finish is artifice. So-called craft.

5 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Trans Willard R. Trask. Princeton, 1953.

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So we want to write? We want to make art? But what is to be our subject? How are we to know your material? When I was a young would-be writer I felt I had a statement to make, but what was my statement to consist of? Having the desire to be a writer but not knowing what to write about is the principal dilemma of many young writers. What does our imagination have to do with knowing our material? It was all a mystery to me. When I was a young aspiring writer I thought that if my desire to write was authentic then I ought to know what it was I wanted to write about. If I were going to write, I believed I should not only have something to say, but should know what it was I wanted to say. All the great novelists whose works I was reading, Dostoyevsky, Iris Murdoch, Proust, Doris Lessing, Patrick White, and so on, seemed to have known what they wanted to write about from the beginning. This was my misunderstanding of the process, my ignorance of what really happens. The Grass is Singing,6 that astonishing first novel by Doris Lessing. It read - and we all read it - as if it had been written in her heart before she attempted to set it down on paper. What did I have to say, I asked myself, that might correspond to such a work? I stared at the blank page and saw nothing written in my heart, except a yearning to write. Was I really a writer? The question tormented me.

On the perennial debate about the death of the novel it's worth remembering that the novel is just another way of telling our stories. It is story telling, not the form of the novel, that is the permanent aspect of our human endeavour in writing fiction. As human beings we will always find ways to tell our stories, if not through the form of the novel then through other forms yet to be imagined. I grew up in a family where story telling - though not story writing - was a nightly delight. Telling a story is an improvisational form, like jazz, and the form the story takes depends on the nature of the audience. The written story, however, is the product of reflection, like written music. Although it may contain long passages of spontaneous composition, the written story, especially the long narrative form, is essentially the product of endless re-writing and reconsidering.

From early childhood I had been a story teller, but as an adult it took me a long time to find my material as a story writer. I discovered it wasn't a matter of simply deciding what to write about. There had to be some addition or the written work lacked a life of its own. As Simone de Beauvoir rightly said, "We cannot arbitrarily invent projects for ourselves: they have to be written in our past as requirements." The reason we can't simply invent projects for ourselves is that the imagination is ignited by something other than our conscious decisions. I think of writing as a conversation with the unconscious; being open, that is, to the promptings of the imagination. Like Klamm in Kafka's novel The Castle, no matter how hard we try we are never going to meet the elusive entity of the unconscious face to face, but we know its influence rules

6 Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing. Michael Joseph 1950.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES our lives. Its prompts, however, are not always forthcoming. "My work is resisting me at the moment," I wrote to a friend who had asked how things were going. "I dwell with it in a kind of anteroom of the imagination. I know it's down there but I can't force it." Craft will often suffice to get us by, but the imagination will not be coerced.

The discovery of one's material and the awakening of one's imagination are inextricably linked. It is Proust, in his final volume, Time Regained, who most beautifully deals with this complex event in an inspired passage of something more than a hundred pages. I would like to quote the whole of it here. I will quote a short passage: "And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which had made me perceive that the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me. And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in idleness, in affection, in unhappiness, and that I had laid them up in store without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence . . . And I began to perceive that I had lived . . . without ever realising that my life needed to come into contact with those books which I had wanted to write and for which . . . I had been unable to find a subject."7 Proust's frivolous meandering has brought him unexpectedly, and by means of a brilliant prompt of the imagination, to a realisation of his material and at once his imagination is ignited and his lassitude and boredom are forgotten. That the novel is about the intimate lives of us holds true from Proust to Joyce to Georgette Heyer. The novel may be about everything else as well as us, but at its heart it is about us and the trivial intricacies of our private lives.

Thank you for listening. I’m afraid this is all I have time for today, but of course this conversation continues among us as it does among all writers.

7 Marcel Proust, Remebrance of Things Past, vol X11, trans. Andreas Mayor. P.267. Chatto & Windus, 1970.

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KRISTIN DIMITROVA

ON BEING A BULGARIAN WRITER Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 27 May – 1 June, 2010

Ten years ago, at a reading at the University of Chicago – where I was in the company of Fulbright scholars Vladimir Trendafilov and Vladimir Levchev – the poet Mark Strand, who was in the audience, asked me what it was like to be writing for eight million people.

His interest in numbers caught me unprepared. I did not have an answer ready, and I was later to find out that this was precisely the type of question that stays with you forever: it may deepen, widen or transform itself, but never really disappear. A bit like the Biography effect of religious beliefs on your sex life. Or vice versa. Bulgarian poet and writer Kristin Dimitrova was born Without much hesitation, I replied that writing for eight million is in 1963 in Sofia. the same as writing for three hundred. She graduated in English and American Studies from I thought my experience with writing couldn’t be that much Sofia University, and now different from that of other writers around the world. In trams works as an assistant professor at the and buses, I hurriedly jot down observations. I try not to attract Department of Foreign Languages. With her first attention, but the pages rustle and people end up staring at me, novel Sabazius she won the thinking I am strange. Strange in a clinical kind of way. national contest of Ink (Imprint of Locus Or: At night, when everybody else at home is in bed, I spend hours Publishing Ltd.) for the Bulgarian participation in in front of the computer trying to figure out what my characters the international Myths are going to do next. I reach a solution and I go to bed, but the next series, launched by Canongate. morning I wake up with the thought that I’ve just created an even bigger problem for myself.

Or: I use the break between two lectures at the university to revise a poem. I weigh each word again and I comb the invisible world for clever ideas. But the moment my students turn up at the door, I pretend I am grading papers. We all like to be called poets, but we don’t like to be caught writing poetry. Much in the same way many people want to be writers, but are never willing to spare the time to do so.

Whether you are writing for eight million or for 300, I imagine that the effort, the fear and the excitement are the same. One is bound to experience them even when writing a letter, and letters are usually addressed to one person only. That’s what I said to Mark Strand that day.

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But if he were to ask me his question today, he would have to use a different figure. The population of Bulgaria has shrunk from eight to seven and a half million. And the real question, of course, is how many of these people read. A survey on reading habits in Bulgaria conducted by Alpha Research in 2009, found that 27.4% of all Bulgarians had no interest in reading at all and 14% believed that buying books was a waste of money. More and more young people are convinced that literature has nothing to teach them, and that reading is uncool. The glamour is on television, in movies, social networking sites and computer games. And while the first three of these are media [and offer a variety of content], the question remains as to what you can learn from a virtual battle in which a sword-wielding hero can run for days on end without signs of exhaustion and after each death comes back for a new life. Didn’t Socrates say that understanding is the greatest good, and ignorance – the worst of evils?

But let’s continue to stare down the well of statistics in order to find out what chunk of readers’ love Bulgarian writers can hope to claim. According to the same Alpha Research survey, the percentage of Bulgarians who read on a daily basis is 9.5%, while another survey, conducted in 2005, put the number of those with an interest in Bulgarian literature at 4% of all readers. I am unaware if and to what extent these figures still hold, but given that they do, we currently have a total of 28,500 people who are interested in anything written by a Bulgarian.

So how did we get here? Why is it that we are no longer interested in reading about ourselves in our own language? Certainly, we Bulgarian writers (if we could think of our highly autonomous selves as a group), are not without blame. Foreign literature has the reputation of something tried and true, something that’s been clinically tested on other people and good for consumption. While Bulgarian fiction scares readers off with too much literary ambition. I’ve conducted my own little survey on the topic. People tell me that Bulgarian writers experiment with form too much and that their books are written to impress the judges in the various literary competitions. They have also confessed to being unable to identify with the characters. That there isn’t sufficient mimesis, in the Aristotelian sense of the word. But why so much effort to undermine the literary cannon on our part? I believe it comes from a fundamental lack of faith that the reader exists at all. The good news is that in recent years some lessons have been learned and that both sides have started to seek each other out.

But there is a further reason for translated literature’s advantage on the Bulgarian market which is beyond the powers of the Bulgarian writer. Foreign books often come to us as messages from a higher authority, as deliveries from the high-speed lane of thought. I am by no means willing to doubt here the enormous contribution of so many translated writers to Bulgarian culture. I am simply looking at how the mainstream of foreign books is marketed in our bookshops. While Bulgarian books have to grapple for space on the shelves, translated literature is already

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES comfortably there, with unbeatable tags like “translated into 36 languages,” “best book of the year according to this-and-this daily,” or “the most influential writer of his generation,” followed by the signature of another writer, no less well-known to us. This stamp of institutional approval carries such weight with readers that even when they are not sufficiently engaged by what they are reading, they are often willing to place the blame on themselves. They read and re-read, patiently and thoroughly, until they understand whatever is there to be liked. The truth is that although the centers creating literary value in the world often speak as if they know all the writers of the world, they only know some of the writers in the world. And the writers who happen to be outside their vision find themselves in the position of eternal students. I am not sure that the phenomenon of Joyce’s Ulysses would have been possible if Joyce had written his book in Bulgarian and if on June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom had been walking the streets of Plovdiv.

What happens in the end is that we, Bulgarians, know more about the culture of the great nations than they do about ours. When Michael Cunningham writes about Virginia Woolf, for example, he doesn’t have to explain to us who she is. We have every chance of enjoying his book because she has been rendered in Bulgarian, studied at the universities and occasionally imitated. Read, extolled or unread, people just know who she is. While if a Bulgarian writer has a protagonist whose name is Ivan Vazov, the first reaction abroad would be: “Who is Ivan Vazov?” And the answer is that he is one of the founding figures of Bulgarian literature. But this would hardly be sufficient help for anybody. I am now used to Americans referring to their Declaration of Independence without explanation, or British people asking me if I’d recognized the hidden Shelly quote, or Russians expecting me to deftly navigate the power struggles between Stalin and Beria. While those of us who hope to be published abroad often try to avoid including local personalities and events, unless they want to see their books awash with explanatory footnotes. Being part of a small language teaches you to use details with an unpleasant kind of calculating prudence.

I was recently a judge at a literary competition for young writers. What I expected to see were stories about the world these young people lived in, about the experience they’d accumulated to this point in their lives. To my surprise I got acquainted, instead, with characters like Tom and Annie from the village of Little Hope, the old craftsman Uncle David, sick Lucas, little Emily, dead Eleanor, Alice Franklin who talks with her doppelganger, and the writer Chris Colven, who chooses money instead of truth. The names Alex and Emmy were particularly popular, as they throw a convenient bridge between the characters’ stated localness and their unstated foreignness. The strange thing was that Tom and Annie from Little Hope had apparently had an uplifting effect on the style of their author, since his/her other, locally-inspired texts were

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES neither able to begin nor to end properly, wobbling high and low in their choice of words. A kind of hidden emigration was taking place there. The masque of English literature seemed capable of summoning the self-assurance of English language literature, along with the confidence that even the simplest story can outline an important problem. Such a travesty straightens out the characters. It uproots them from their daily lives, seen as grotesque, and gives them the chance at greatness by providing them with important dilemmas to mull over. Of course, the participants in this competition were just beginning writers and God-only-knows-what-kind-of readers, but even if they are questionable as a literary example, as a social example they are not.

An imported pen name can help with your sales, too. In the turbulent 1990s (when a good press run in Bulgaria was in the neighborhood of 100,000, a far cry from what it is today, which is 50 times smaller), many people made a living by writing gamebooks and astrological predictions. Their books were signed with foreign names and sold just as well as translated literature. And the strangest thing was that this theft of authority went unnoticed. I never heard anyone complaining about a difference in quality. But, of course, borrowing the cloak of some foreign literature is nothing new in our part of the world, especially in genres with unstable traditions, such as crime fiction. Whatever it is we are talking about here, half of the answer is bound to be rooted in tradition.

But let us now see how our Bulgarian names are perceived abroad. I had a funny incident last year. Someone told me that a Spanish poet had translated a short poem about sailors by an Irish author, but later on he discovered that the real author was perhaps me. The Spanish poet wrote all about it in his blog. At the beginning, I was entertained. But I Googled the English translation of “Beliefs,” my only poem about sailors, and, indeed, I found it posted in an international poetry site, signed with the name of the translator of my Irish book, A Visit to the Clockmaker. This wonderful poet and person, my translator – may he rest in peace – had nothing to do with it. He had been dead for five years. It turned out that a friend of his had done him a dubious “favor” by crediting him with authorship of something he had only translated. But that’s not the point here. The English translation of “Beliefs” had been on the Bulgarian website Liternet ever since 2006 and no one had shown any interest in it. Yet the moment it appeared under an Irish name, it got translated into Spanish. And into Turkish as well. I even found it as “poem of the week” on an Indian website. I panicked. I sent out various letters insisting that my authorship be restored or the translation removed. I received no replies from the Turkish and Indian websites, while the person who deprived me of authorship wrote to me that he was doing me a favor, since this was the only way my poem could appear on such a prestigious website. He asked me where my gratitude was. In the end, the story reached an acceptable conclusion. Friends of mine from the UK, Bulgaria and the United States bombarded him with letters of indignation. Meanwhile, I

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES managed to get in touch with “the prestigious website,” which turned out to be Dutch. I asked them to delete my poem or move it to a Bulgarian section, which – much to my regret – I had not found on their site. I wondered what they would do. The next day my poem was deleted.

The Iron Curtain has collapsed but instead of revealing our faces, it has revealed a dim silhouette which has yet to outline its features. I am not convinced that the Bulgarian state is doing its best to overcome our cultural absence from the world. I am not even sure it’s aware of the problem. I am not sure if we are aware of the problem. Cultural presentations of our country abroad usually begin with folk singing and dancing and end with the Thracian gold treasures. So it’s either folklore or the Thracians. Everything which is the result of individual abilities and efforts slips somehow between them, dripping away like sand in a broken hour glass.

Years ago, a guy who was at another reading of mine in the U.S. asked me whether my poems were really Bulgarian. I replied that they were poems written in Bulgarian about things I had experienced in Bulgaria. I asked him if whether that made them sufficiently Bulgarian for him. He wasn’t convinced. He needed something more than that. “You didn’t expect me to read in a national costume or something, did you?” I probed. “I guess I did,” he said with an awkward smile. “I must admit that’s exactly what I expected.” Did I have reason to be insulted by his words? No, if we look at the situation objectively. After all, as recently as the 1990s, when Bulgaria was the focus country at the Leipzig Book Fair, our group of writers was lead by a bagpiper. To bring the point home, just try imagining Philip Roth going to a reading accompanied by a klezmer band. It seems that some countries produce literature, while others produce anthropology.

Of course, the two things you need if you want to participate on an international level are a translator and a publisher. But regrettably, no translator from Bulgarian can make a living from what they do. Bulgarian philologists around the world are rare enthusiasts whose language of choice has extremely complex verb forms and much of their work is done on a voluntary basis. As my friend, writer and translator Reynol Vazquez likes to say: “There are many sophisticated ways of starving yourself to death and being a Bulgarian scholar is one of them.” There is hardly a country around the world where readers are in a position to form a more or less thorough idea of what is being written in Bulgarian on the basis of what is published in their own language. Moreover, publishers often resort to quotas: “We already got someone from this generation. Give us one of the classics and someone younger.”

Here is the place to say that I have, in fact, had many instances of interest in my work from various corners of the world. These were true gifts – invitations for readings, with fully covered travel and accommodation costs – which I’ve been unable to reciprocate. Not because I have not wanted to, but for the same reason why Bulgarian writers rarely get the chance to present their

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES work abroad: there are no institutions and regularly organized events in our country which aim to promote our work on the international stage. So it must be clear by now how necessary I think the Sozopol Fiction Writing Workshop is and I would like to thank Elizabeth Kostova for organizing it. I am also grateful to my colleagues from Catalonia, Croatia, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom for having extended their hospitality to me. I list the countries in alphabetical order, as it would be both impossible and vulgar to classify these gestures of good will according to who gave what. These people had no special reason to take interest in my writing, but still they did it. They didn’t read my texts as some kind of integration quota fulfillment, as a sample of the prevailing moods on the Balkans, or as an example of artistic work from the post-communist countries, but as a personal endeavor. As something written by a human being for other human beings.

In fact, this is the best definition of literature I can come up with.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

ILIYA TROYANOV

IGNITING THE NARRATIVE ENGINE: ON THE INTERRELATION BETWEEN RESEARCH AND PROSE

WRITING Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 26 May – 2 June, 2011

Why Research?

Living in Trieste, James Joyce one day wrote a letter to his brother in Dublin. He asked him to check whether the house number of a certain pub was 16 or 18. It seems amazing that Joyce, who has never been accused of fastidious realism, would go to such great lengths to find out about such a minute detail. Such bureaucratic exactitude would seem ridiculous and superfluous were it just an end in itself. Suppose, however, that even an author of Biography deconstruction like Joyce, who challenged the facile affirmation of In spite of the fact that he is best-known as a German language and perception, believed he had to use the bricks and author, Iliya Troianov was stones of the existing world in order to construct his alternate born in Sofia, Bulgaria. In the 1990s he wrote several vision. Suppose that without his belief in the prerogative of the non-fiction and travel books about Africa, exact detail, the 12-cylinder-engine of Joyce’s narration would not published an anthology of have jump-started. In this case, we might understand his urge to contemporary African literature and translated find out about the exact location of a particular pub, for only then some African authors into German. His first novel, The could he enter it, only then would he be able to notice the ad for World is Big and Salvation “Plumtree’s potted meat … stuck under the obituary notices.” Lurks Around the Corner, appeared in 1996. One of He would hear Bloom’s thoughts, meandering from ham to his most famous novels, The Collector of the cannibals, missionaries and the purity of meat in religion. Once the Worlds, was published in 2006 and brought him table has been properly set, the taste buds can go wild: “Peace and several awards. war depend on some fellow’s indigestion.

Religions. Christmas turkeys and geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat, drink and be merry. Then casual wards full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mighty cheese.” The trampoline allows for the most miraculous flights of fancy, yet if it weren’t firmly bolted to the ground, the triple summersault with double rotation would end with a broken neck. Maybe this scene would not have been possible had Joyce not known whether the pub was located at No. 16 or No. 18. Pubs are mentioned eight times in Ulysses. One of them is called Davy Byrne’s, the others are anonymous, and not once is the location of the pubs given. By the time the vision had blossomed, the information had become redundant.

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Virtues of Research

The Writer’s Launch

In literature as in criminology, inconspicuous details can turn the tide. Don DeLillo has described the initial impulse for his novel Underworld, which spans decades of US-American history and draws a psychogram of the nation. It seems hard to believe that this ambitious, wide-ranging book started off with a small newspaper article commemorating the championship-winning home run of the 1951 World Series. A few weeks later DeLillo decided to find out more about that game and its context. When he looked at the front page of the New York Times of Oct 4, 1951, he saw two neatly balanced headlines. On the left it said: GIANTS CAPTURE PENNANT, and on the right: SOVIETS DETONATE ATOMIC BOMB. Sitting in the basement of a local library, the author felt the excitement of history. An interest awoke. A few days later he discovered that figures like Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Edgar Hoover had been present at the ballgame. In regard to this information, DeLillo speaks of “combustibility.” The names pointed towards different communities, working-class backgrounds surfaced, the three men becoming “a herald of themes and character.” Authors tend to live with certain ideas, motifs, which are vague and unfocused. They are clouds of methane – once a spark is added, they can explode into creation.

Richard Burton, the 19th century traveler of many talents, has fascinated me for many years, as part of my crucial interest in cross-cultural exploration. But only when I read of one weird scene in Cairo did the transformation of his life into fiction become feasible. Burton was walking through the bazaar with a few fellow British officers. They reached an open area, on one side a group of dervishes were celebrating detachment. Their ritual consisted of a technique of breathing, a canon of incantation and a style of whirling. Burton joined the dervishes, to the great dismay of the British officers and the bystanders. He seemed to be imitating them. But the Sufis, at least those who were not lost in ecstasy, realized that he knew all the elements of the ritual, that he had mastered a technique which was the privilege of the initiate. They welcomed him as a brother. After a while he took their leave and rejoined his fellow officers. “By Jove, Dick,” one of them is supposed to have said. “For one moment there I thought you were a nigger.” Combustibility is at hand. The dramatic shift, the double identity and the question which arises out of the remark: how will this multi-layered identity survive in a world of dichotomy?

The Reader’s Landing Strip

If concrete details are launching pads for the quivering imagination of the author, they are also runways for the reader, guarantees of a safe touch-down after a turbulent flight. Even Science Fiction relies on the stabilizing authority of facts. I remember reading a Sci-Fi novel, probably set

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES in the year 2314 in galaxy YXZ. In one scene, two non-human creatures were discussing the finer points of preparing Chinese Duck. This minute detail helped the reader to take the bizarreness of their world seriously, to feel interest and even empathy. On a comic, inconsequential level, this underlines the effect of details. The reader needs a reference point to understand and judge the peculiar, provocative vision of the author. You can get rid of the laws of gravity, you can expand the universe, but you cannot make the mistake of giving the wrong recipe for Chinese Duck. The duck is the saving grace, your passport to trust and persuasion.

Enter the Devil

A German – and an English – proverb says that the devil is in the detail. It seems to have been coined for literary usage. Not only does it draw attention to the fact that sloppiness can wreak havoc, but it also seems to imply that skepticism is nurtured by competent knowledge. For the devil is – at least according to a certain Western tradition – the symbol of doubt, the good genius of heretics. Research gives the author access to a history behind the hidden official history. One example would be the subaltern historiography that has defined many post-colonial novels. Another example would be how Milan Kundera exposed the Stalinist rewriting of history by comparing two versions of the same photograph: the first with the Czech foreign minister Gottwald and the second, after his downfall, omitting him. But these are direct efforts at unmasking official history. Literature is often more subtle, challenging the whole concept of history as a stable edifice of the past. Literature draws unusual connections through society and even from one epoch to the other – pylons of detail support these connections. I believe this to be the reason for the creative success of Rushdie’s Midnights Children and Shame. The later novels, devoid of such precise knowledge, are as brilliant and ephemeral as fireworks.

Incorporating the Body

Writing encompasses many physical aspects, but the process itself seems to negate the body. Some authors have written standing up, including classics like Goethe and Schiller, but also the contemporary Günter Grass; others have stressed the need to walk while composing their thoughts. Nevertheless, the author usually sits at his desk and only remembers his body when his back aches or his legs feel numb. Research gives the author a reason to use his body. A few years ago I followed Richard Burton’s footsteps through Tanzania, two tough months of hiking and camping. One evening we ran out of water. We went to sleep, we woke up with slightly parched lips and set off immediately, expecting to come across a river or some locals. By lunchtime we had not met anyone and started to panic. Eventually we reached a village, where we gulped down the water given to us and for several precious minutes splashed water on our faces. My body remembers this vividly and I am convinced that I have been able to describe drought and the absence of drinking water more convincingly.

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Escaping the Author’s Autism

“The passionate mastering of documentary material is a bracing cure for the self-spiraling and unremitting inwardness that a long novel can inflict on a writer.” (DeLillo again). You try to overhear conversations, to stare into a face in an effort to decipher it, you meet people who can guide you in certain matters, and you immerse yourself in activities you normally wouldn’t even dream of doing. Looking through my notes, I realized that the research on Richard Burton has forced me to interest myself in such diverse topics as witchcraft in Tanzania, the Hajj pilgrimage, opium, malaria, marble, the taxes in the state of Baroda in 1845, falconry, chronometry, sacred prostitution, surveying and cartography. Bizarre as this selection might sound, I would not want to miss the chance it gave me to embrace a variety of themes and thoughts that makes a writing life so exiting.

Fact Forms Form

Beginning the Beginning

The beginning is a root that stretches into the future. Antonio Lobo Antunes, a wonderful Portuguese writer, recently said in an interview that once he has found the first sentence, everything else unravels automatically. Allowing for some exaggeration, it is easy to see what he means when reading the first sentence of one of his many novels: “The family of the judge lived on the other side of the market, beyond the cypresses of the private school and the house of the doctor, supported by gillyflowers and shadows, in that part of the small town, that spread out around the ruins of the synagogue, suffocating in a labyrinth of hey stacks, in front of the swath of fog coming down the Caramulo Mountains.” MS Word Software immediately warns me that the sentence is too long, even though I have shortened it, leaving out two lines set in brackets, which establish the historical dimension. The novel, literally translated as Treatise on the Passions of the Soul, goes on to describe the interrogation of a terrorist by the judge, old school friends, reunited in adversity. As the narrative progresses, the childhood memories dominate over the political confrontation, and the accused becomes the prosecutor of a deeply rotten, “unchristian” society. One could argue that all this is encapsulated in the beginning, that the established choreography of urban exactitude foresees a rummaging in the folds of the bourgeois worlds. Social and architectural relations are established, which will dominate the rest of the novel. To achieve this, the text is laden with a factuality that overburdens this sentence. But at the same time, the sentence conveys a feeling of an old-world fatigue, of a room stuffed with defining paraphernalia, which cannot be discarded without throwing the reality they represent overboard.

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The first sentence of the Richard Burton novel took a long time coming. I knew I wanting to start with his death. Throughout the years of my research, I had compiled a long list of non-connected sentences, idioms and proverbs. Sometimes I read through them, some of them stuck in my mind. One day, the opening sentence presented itself from somewhere: “He died early in the morning, before one could distinguish between a black thread and a white thread.” The image is based on an Arab proverb and in the unfolding drama his pious wife will force Catholicism onto him by having the last rites performed on him. But maybe he dies as a Sufi, maybe as a free thinker, maybe even as an Agnostic. His wife’s ambition is ideological, binary. She distinguishes between black and white threads – but only after Burton, the reader of shadows and shades, has died. I realize that these allusions will not be understood by the reader, certainly not on the first reading. But that is not so important. The opening sentence establishes a comfort level between the story and myself. It sets the tone for my version of fictional biography.

Perspective

In A Thousand Mutinies Now, Naipaul asks a slum-dweller to describe the gully in front of his house. Naipaul juxtaposes this description with his own perspective and the result is a devastating blow against most travel writing. The most far-reaching decision yet to come out of my research concerns the narrative perspective. I realized that an African called Mubarak Sidi Bombay was one of the most experienced and fascinating figures of the epoch of imperial exploration. But his achievements are unsung. He was an active part of four expeditions, following and leading Burton, Speke, Grant and Cameron into the Dark Continent. His take on the achievements of these Victorian heroes would be illuminatingly different from the established perceptions. He would supply the negative to the well-known prints. Through his eyes the forays of Burton would find an unheard judgment. There was a similar figure in the India period of Burton’s life, his trusted servant Abdalla, who I renamed Naukaram because I needed him to be a Hindu. By placing part of the narrative authority into their mouths and trying to imagine their perspective, I had found a literary equivalent of Burton’s crossovers, his camouflages and his immersion into the unknown. On a different level I am taking a similar risk.

Lexical Törlü Gjuvetch

Törlü Gjuvetch is the Turkish equivalent of Irish stew, but much richer and more varied than its poor cousin from the impoverished West. You can add everything to it, depending on the season, your means and the economy of leftovers. Therefore every törlü gjuvetch is by definition a unique composition. But good cooks will taste it and make sure that the combination is right, thus ensuring that the törlü gjuvetch does not become the culinary equivalent of “anything goes”. The Richard Burton novel is a lexical törlü gjuvetch. I add foreign words – Hindi, Gujarati, Arab, Kisuaheli – without explaining them, in the hope that they will radiate through the narrative

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES structure – in what ways, I do not know. On the Internet I found a list of Sindhi names. I have read this list several times and when I write the chapter on Sindh, I will start the day with this mantra of strange names, for they exude a certain rhythm and a certain atmosphere.

Responsibility

Sometimes the responsibility one feels towards the researched material changes the form of a book. When I started researching a book on Bulgaria and the so-called revolution of 1989, I had a mixture of the literary travelogue of Chatwin and the precise reportage of Kapuscinski in mind. I ended up writing a factual statement of little literary leeway. I had planed to be brilliant, but when I sat over the depressing testimonies, which summed up the tragedy of wasted lives, I felt that I was not at liberty to change or alienate them. Their awful dignity was not to be touched. My book eventually came to resemble a mixture between a chronicle and an oral history, with a dash of accusatory act.

Ethics of Writing

“Narada said to the manasaputras: How can you create when you are nothing as yet? First travel around the earth, get the measure of it, then you will be able to create with discernment. The sons of Brahma agreed and set off. No one has seen them since.”

After the World War II, the ascetic, withdrawn artistic ideal of Adorno, the highly influential German philosopher, led to the dominance of a subjective, self-centered aesthetic in most of Western Europe. This concept, more appropriate for an Early Christian saint on a pedastal than for a modern artist, has produced two generations of soul-searching literature, of orgiastic sensibility towards one’s own perception of the world. Laws, warnings and instructions were taboo, legitimacy given only to the self-righteousness of the I. Peter Handke, the Austrian writer, formulates his credo: “As an author I am not interested in showing or overcoming reality. I am only interested in showing my own reality.” The more I have researched, the less interested I have become in my own feelings and my personal biography. I have been fascinated by the way one can overcome one’s own prejudices and limitations through writing, how one can be surprised and even bowled over by what emerges from the creative process. More and more, writing for me has become a process of subduing the ego. In dealing with the unknown, I am held in a state of glimmering uncertainty, an excellent state of mind for writing, for nothing is more crippling than the dominance of established facts and certainties. The more we live in a monoculture of fast-forwardness and three-minute-statements, the more the role of the questioning and meandering author is re-established.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

RANA DASGUPTA

WRITING INTO THE UNKNOWN What follows is an abstract of a lecture delivered in Sozopol, 26 May – 2 June, 2011

I feel a mysterious kind of belonging to this country, Bulgaria, which is not my own. The reason for this is that I wrote a novel set here. Before I wrote it I knew almost nothing about this place: I obeyed only an instinctive attraction built up through such things as music and newspapers. So it seems appropriate to talk here about the – possibly strange – decision to devote years of my life to writing about a far-off place with which I had no connection or even familiarity.

We know that the advice to young writers is so often: Write what Biography you know. I want to suggest here that there are good reasons for

Rana Dasgupta was born in contemporary writers to consider writing about the things about Canterbury, England in which they have no idea. Reality, after all, consists mainly of 1971 and studied at Balliol College, Oxford and the what we do not know, and this is perhaps excessively apparent University of Wisconsin- Madison. After his studies today. Many of us have a certain kind of highly specialised he worked for a marketing knowledge which both connects us to the world and divides us consultancy firm which took him to London, Kuala from it. The model I am going to ask you to think about here is Lumpur and then New York. one in which the writer moves between the zones of known and In 2001, he moved to Delhi to write. His first unknown. In this respect he or she adopts both of Walter novel, Tokyo Cancelled, appeared in 2005 and was Benjamin’s models of the writer, described thus in his essay, shortlisted for the John “The Storyteller.” Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Solo (2009) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. .

[Among storytellers] there are two groups which, to be sure, overlap in many ways. And the figure of the storyteller gets its full corporeality only for the one who can picture them both. “When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about,” goes the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions. If one wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives, one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman. Indeed, each sphere of life has, as it were, produced its own tribe of storytellers. Each of these tribes preserves some of its characteristics centuries later. Thus, among nineteenth-century German storytellers, writers like

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Hebel and Gotthelf stem from the first tribe, writers like Sealsfield and Gerstacker from the second. With these tribes, however, as stated above, it is only a matter of basic types. The actual extension of the realm of storytelling in its full historical breadth is inconceivable without the most intimate interpenetration of these two archaic types. Such an interpenetration was achieved particularly by the Middle Ages in their trade structure. The resident master craftsman and the travelling journeymen worked together in the same rooms; and every master had been a travelling journeyman before he settled down in his home town or somewhere else. If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-travelled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place.

The way these two archaic types interpenetrate in my work is this: the essential question arises from my own place, my own need. But the landscape and history are often from somewhere else.

Why would one choose to do this? Why take the foolish step of writing from ignorance instead of knowledge?

My answer to these questions is a personal one. It is not a prescription for how one should write. Nevertheless, in my own writing, ignorance has not been merely incidental. It has provided for me a new structure of relationships between the writer and the twenty-first century reality, firstly, and between the writer and his or her readers.

The first reason why I am attracted to writing from a position of ignorance is that it instantly deprives me of the power of the expert, which is a power I find corrupting and suspect.

Expert culture which arises from the professionalization and specialisation of all human activity. Only experts are allowed to speak. Only professional musicians can play music. The production of culture and knowledge, basic human activities, become denied to the majority in such a culture. Once, houses were full of such production. Now, increasingly, they are not. This I regard as a massive spiritual diminution.

Experts derive their authority from knowing more than everyone else. It is difficult to challenge them because they inhabit fortresses of information, procedures and jargon. They speak from a position of unassailable knowledge and though they may appear suspect to us it is difficult for us to say why.

It is partly as a response to this that I have been attracted to the idea of writing from a position of total ignorance. To being suspect from the very beginning. When you write about your own life, your own experience no one can challenge you: you are the expert. When you write about

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES other people’s lives you are completely vulnerable. This vulnerability makes me equal to everyone else. It is an advertisement for the democratic and joyful embrace of the world rather than the erection of towers.

In my writing I know less than my readers. My writing displays not that I know something that no one else knows but that I have a will to knowledge that everyone else has. To me this is a way of reclaiming the universality of culture – culture that is produced, and not merely consumed, by everyone. It advertises a living relationship to knowledge rather than one that is authoritarian and dead.

The second point I want to make here is that ignorance is a much better account of our relationship to our twenty-first century world than knowledge. Ignorance is truer than knowledge. It carries the frisson, the danger, the edge of reality.

This has something to do with the globalisation which has changed the nature of the familiar. Of that which we thought we knew. It has rendered the world strangely distant and uncanny.

Of course it has always been the case that most facts about the world remain unknown to most people. What has changed in our era is that the vast unknown has drawn close and become intimate.

Most of us now know little about the social and economic relations from which our food comes, our clothes or most of our possessions. At the heart of our own existences is the unknown, and this structures much of our contemporary affective relationship to the world.

In this context it seems to me to be pointless to insist merely on what one knows. The immense unknown – the void of ignorance has always seemed to me to be a proper starting point for writing. The leap into the unknown carries with it the energy of reality in a way that the reproduction of the known cannot.

But I propse this not simply as a mimetic device. It is born out of a faith that by leaping into the unknown one might produce something radically new, something which could not otherwise existed.

We live in a moment of genuine intellectual and spiritual crisis when previous forms of knowledge have become exhausted and my own hope for the novel is that it can become a laboratory for new thought.

There is almost no area of life where the ideas we have received from the past are not either discredited or regrettably impossible. We are in need not of gentle micro-adjustments to these

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES ideas. We require fundamentally new ways of seeing ourselves and our relationships to each other and the world.

Though this sounds like what we hear from politicians and businessmen who wish to re-order society in order to profit better from the global economy – or to shield themselves from its more painful excesses – it is not the same thing at all. Such people produce knowledge that is at times important and spectacular but their surface activities mine from a far deeper continent of thought and experience which is where reality is generated. The re-generation of reality must come from this continent, whose language is culture and philosophy.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

BARRY LOPEZ

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE STORY Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 24 – 27 May, 2012

It’s been my good fortune, and a privilege as well, to travel to about 70 countries in my life, and to visit with writers and storytellers in many of those places. As an American writer, I’ve long been interested in the roots of storytelling, in the reasons why storytelling emerged in human culture. I’ve also been interested in the responsibility storytellers feel toward the members of a society in which they have taken on this role. In addition to their concerns about the techniques of storytelling

(or, later, writing) or, as artists, about being in service to an Biography artistic vision, it seems to me that, historically, most Barry Lopez is the author of storytellers have also been aware of an implied, ethical thirteen books, among them Arctic Dreams, which received obligation—a dual obligation to retell traditional stories, in a the National Book Award, and Of Wolves and Men, a finalist modern idiom or with a modern context, and to invent new for the National Book Award stories that, one way or another, help their societies. and a winner of Christopher Medal for humanitarian I begin with these thoughts because one lesson that has grown writing. His short stories and essays appear regularly in out of listening to (or reading) storytellers in other cultures for Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, National me is an understanding that each storyteller approaches the Geographic, and other task a little differently. Also, the sense of what it means to be a periodicals and literary journals in the United States storyteller differs, both from individual to individual and also and abroad. In his fiction he frequently addresses issues of from culture to culture. So, I’m a little uneasy, and it also seems intimacy, ethics and identity. presumptuous, really, standing up here today trying to convey The focus of his nonfiction is often on the relationship my notions of how a good story works when I am far outside between human cultures and their physical landscapes. my own culture and a guest in this culture. There’s a mix of Mr. Lopez’s essays are collected cultural experience, custom, and belief in this room; also, no in Crossing Open Ground and About This Life, and his short two individual writers here today from the same culture have stories in Resistance, Light Action in the Caribbean and matured in the same way, let alone with the same influences, or four other volumes. His work is with the same convictions about what literature should be. And widely translated and anthologized and his research our experiences with both official censorship and self- has taken him to sixty-eight countries. censorship are different, as are our traditions about who is to be regarded as a storyteller in our separate, unique cultures,

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES and who is not.

All of this is by way of saying that I am here only to share an idea, in this case an idea about the power of physical geography to enhance and enrich certain stories. Or, to put it another way, how evoking the specific physical place in which a story unfolds can increase the impact a story has on a reader. I don’t mean to suggest that everyone should agree with this, or that this approach is a technique for improving every story. Using geographic detail in a work of fiction reveals a writer’s awareness of the world through which his or her characters are moving, but characters also move, of course, through psychological and spiritual landscapes. The point I want to emphasize is that it’s the selection of particular details in any one of these various landscapes that makes a particular story grow larger in the reader’s imagination. And it is these suggestions, if you will, concerning the ideas that are buried deep in the story—some of which, of course, are beyond the writer’s own imagination—that anchor a story in a reader’s memory, that prevent it from being discarded, like a momentary entertainment or distraction.

I grew up in the United States in an agricultural part of southern California, in a place called the San Fernando Valley. We lived just a few miles from the shores of the Pacific Ocean and only about an hour’s drive from both the Mojave Desert and the southernmost peaks of a mountain range called the Sierra Nevada. This was the physical landscape in which my imagination matured, the one in which I felt the first inkling of what it might mean to be human and to live in a social context in a particular place. As it happened, I had a number of benign encounters with wild animals in those years that, like the changing weather, animated the landscape of my childhood, and fixed as representative images for me certain ideas about awe, reconciliation, and the Other.

When I was 11 my family moved to Manhattan Island (New York City), where I spent my teenage years; and then, at 17, I was off to university, where I immersed myself in a world of abstract considerations. Among the most influential of these ideas, ideas that would stay with me for life, were: the nature of prejudice; the fallibility of a single way of knowing; the existence of a kind of exhilaration that people associated with exploration; and the appearance among people, in different sets of circumstances, of what philosophers in the Western tradition call the cardinal virtues, primarily reverence and justice. In order to address ideas like this as a writer, and make them clear for a reader, I have approached them using the concrete details and inherent complexity of the world in which I grew up. In other words, when I wrote a book about wolves, approaching this animal not solely from the point of view of a biologist, but also from the point of view of a social historian, a folklorist, and an anthropologist, I was after something more than the wolf. My deep subject was not Canis lupus but the way in which human beings perceive mysteries such as the wolf, and make assessments about these mysteries that are sometimes

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES prejudicial. To write about prejudice, then, I naturally gravitated toward a creature in the natural world—the wolf—but, by coming at the wolf in different ways, I did not leave the animal isolated in the natural world. I hoped to make the wolf resonate metaphorically outside the natural world.

Like most writers, whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, I try to establish a context or framework in which the story can unfold. In fiction, people often call this element of the story the “setting;” in nonfiction, we might call this framing element the “topic,” the subject from which nonfiction’s observations emerge. The contexts I most often use in both fiction and nonfiction are landscapes—which include, in addition to physical landscapes, urban landscapes, seascapes and skyscapes. I frequently employ local geography, especially elements of natural history and sensory phenomena, to create a dramatic setting for an abstract idea such as “prejudice” or “justice.” Other writers use psychoanalytic or social theory, say, to establish the setting for a story, or to take us deeper. Again, for a writer working within any culture or with any particular predilection, it’s not a matter of one approach being better here than another, but of the writer’s using, almost unconsciously, the landscape that for him or her will reveal the most about the story’s deeper meaning or significance.

I am going to ask your indulgence for a moment while I read the opening of a short story of mine called “Dixon Marsh.” I hope by doing so I can make clear what I mean by implying that details of physical geography can enhance or brighten a story. And I probably need to stress that in doing this I am looking back at the creation of this story. I have never written a short story to make a point, as I would with an essay; and I am not aware, while I’m writing, of the appropriateness of the sort of detail I’m selecting. It’s only after the fact that I can go back and be discerning and analytic about such things, speculate about what I am up to, and try to improve it.

The barren mountains rose swiftly from the plain, an accordion of jagged walls from which no water seemed to flow, the vault itself harboring creases of fugitive shadow amid planes of adobe brown and burnt sienna light. Two hours after sunrise little life moved on the plain below, aside from small rodents and their hunters, coyotes and hawks. Less life stirred above in the stone redoubts. The woman in the blue pickup, seen from the high ridgeline, was no more than a dark dot on the gray sage flat, and would have been lost to the eye had she not been following the straight rule of the highway.

From behind the steering wheel the black road ahead would appear to terminate at the foot of the mountains, but the woman with the dog knew it didn’t, that it swung up to the left and climbed through a long set of hairpins to the ridge. From there it dropped into a high valley.

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The woman was comfortable with none of the people she’d met out here, but she understood that the dark forge of her own life had made her a difficult person to approach. Only some patient and diligent inquirer might work past her inbred suspicion, the squirrelly sense of danger she emanated, and enter through some door she had not secured. Pride, anger—perhaps even despair—had kept the door ajar. She didn’t know why and hardly thought to care. She could not remember completely nor entirely forget what had been done to her, and years of indistinct and poisonous memories had made her habitually tense. Only the dog, a black-and- white border collie she’d gotten fixed, moved around her easily.

I want to emphasize again, before I continue, that I was not aware in composing the first draft of this story that the landscape I was using as a setting to introduce the central character was as reflective of, or congruent with, that character as turned out to be the case. The two—character and landscape—reflect each other; and the nature of the land, its physical geography, informs the character. In my experience with visual and performing artists, it frequently happens that you’re not able to say exactly why you chose one set of notes over another, or one palette of color over another, or one bit of stage direction over another; but long afterward, when your thinking mind comes into play and the creative mind is less dominant, you can understand that your decision was right, that it was anything but random.

We see the central character in this story first from the high ridge of a mountain; and then the point of view is reversed—we see the towering mountain wall from behind the steering wheel of the truck, from the driver’s point of view. We are more aware now that she is only a speck in a huge volume of space. This suggests the isolation the woman has chosen to live in, and it gives the story at the outset a particular spatial geometry, which, as the narrative progresses, contains or helps define the story. There is about both the land and the woman a certain starkness; the life she leads and the forces that created the mountains are, metaphorically, the result of similarly dark forges. And we behold each of them as remote, living in silence.

I don’t want to put too much thinking, too much analysis, into this. After all, it’s just a story; and, in fact, if I heard in this moment a critic approaching the story in this way, I would run out of the room here, repelled and offended by this kind of analysis, which that can kill a story by trying to explain it.

But I hope you can see what I mean. For me as a writer, a person shaped emotionally and psychologically at an early age by the suggestive power of physical landscapes, this way of bringing geography into a story in order to heighten the personality of a character and enhance the human drama that follows the opening paragraphs of the story, is an approach that is natural to me.

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Let me read another, very brief story, one set in a similar desert landscape, to further illustrate what I am trying to get at, how physical geography, in this case, works to reveal something deeper in the story. This piece of fiction, 350 words in its entirety, is called “The Trail.”

On a winter afternoon, along a trail in the Sierra Madre in the state of Mensajero, beneath an immense rampart of rising cumulonimbus cloud, a deeply imperfect man bent over to collect a small piece of black glass. He recognized its kind: obsidian, a thick sliver of it. When the molten interior of the Earth is thrown into the frigid sky and cools quickly, it becomes a stone like this. People say of its edges that no knife is sharper, and of its color that it is transparent but bottomless, like the sea’s, so it cannot be rendered on paper or canvas.

The man turned the spalled flake over in the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other. He tested the edge with his thumb and held it up to the sun. He knew of no volcanoes in these mountains, but the trail was many centuries old, and people had carried red coral, abalone shells, and turquoise up and down it for generations. Someone dropped this, he thought, in the time when his grandfather was alive, or in the year of his own birth, or a pilgrim might have dropped it, only days ago.

It glittered in his palm, like sunlight in ice, and he wondered, as the heaving clouds encroached on the sun and the shard of glass darkened, what his obligations were. Should he give it back to the trail or pocket it for the single daughter he was traveling to see? In another age he would not have hesitated to take it to the girl. Now he felt he must put it back, even if later someone else might take it. He believed he had come upon a time in his life when everything, even the things of God, needed protection. When he met his daughter, he would tell her he had found a black tear in the dust of the narrow path and understood he must leave it be. And she would ask whose tear it was, and he would have to use his imagination, in the way his people had once done.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that this kind of writing, the unfolding of human drama in a physical place, is, if not peculiar to American literature, at least a major strain in what makes American literature unique, beginning, perhaps, with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and carrying through in fiction with writers like Willa Cather, John Steinbeck and Peter Matthiessen. A common theme in all this work, over more than 150 years, has been differing immensities of space and the relatively small area in these volumes of space that humanity fills. This is not so much a matter of the authors suggesting that man is insignificant but of emphasizing that nature itself presents an overpowering presence—a thought that does not much register with a modern audience until a tsunami suddenly hits the west coast of Honshu in Japan or a volcano erupts somewhere.

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I know, from listening to storytellers in traditional societies in the Arctic, in Australia and Africa, that their oral literatures very often take this same route, exploring the tension that persists between the natural world and human desire, between a particular physical setting and a resident people. What this tells me is that to write as though the landscape were playing a role in the story, like a character, is a very old way of going about telling a story; and that by bringing elements of natural history into a work of fiction we can, as modern readers, rediscover the nature and importance of our own biology, which modernity of one sort or another has marginalized.

In an age of great human suffering, brought about, for example, by pollution, by depleted aquifers, processed food and deforestation, and by the contamination of the human body by synthetic chemicals, it seems that to create a story that promotes a reconsideration of human life, of the biology of Home sapiens, is a good thing.

I said earlier that I do not write fiction to make a point or promote a cause. Like other writers, I write in order to disturb complacency, provoke conversation, and help preserve essential ideas about what it means for a human being to aspire to ideals. And I write to defeat the kind of forgetfulness that empowers tyrants—intellectual, political, or religious.

Someone better at critical analysis than I will ever be could take a short story by anyone, I suppose, and give us a “geography” for it, using physical geography or cultural geography to describe the setting and the drama, the place and the actions of the characters through time in that place. This suggests to me something about how useful the metaphor of geography is as a tool for illuminating those things that lie just beyond the language on the page, the adumbrations that haunt any good work of fiction.

Here’s what I am getting at. If I were working with a couple of young writers who were intent on writing memorable stories, and these students of writing had an affinity with the natural world, I would try to show them how, through a careful evocation of, say, the geology of a place, or its woods and waters, or its wildlife, they could strengthen both the setting of the story and the actions of its characters. I’d be asking them, literally, to consider the geographic dimensions of the narrative in order to create a deeper resonance in the story itself and also a greater rapport with the reader. But, because I believe that geography has great metaphorical strength, that “physical geography” can easily include the man-made environment, and that “cultural geography” can include, say, something as esoteric as grappling with the structure of the atom, I feel free to use the phrase “the geography of the story” to imply not just one but two things. First, that the details of a particular place’s natural history can inform a story as effectively as any other sort of matrix, such as psychology, that might serve as a “setting” for the story; and, two, that a successful story can be said to evince a coherent or integrated geography—the separate

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES pieces come together here naturally. A man and his daughter who, say, are completely at odds with each other, find a resolution to their disagreement on a wilderness canoe trip with, in the story, very little conversation. Or a woman and her aging father, sharing the confines of a small apartment on a humid summer night in New York City, rediscover respect for each other though the shared history of their lives, which they find embedded in a few objects sitting on a shelf in one of the rooms. If the setting (or what I am calling “the geography”) illuminates a character’s state of being, if the setting opens up the characters’ inner selves for us, we have the possibility of a memorable story.

I began by saying, if you will, that it is not the same thing to grow up in Bulgaria and to become a writer and to grow up in the United States and become a writer; and that the thought of my speaking as an American writer to a Bulgarian audience about writing is a little presumptuous. But there are some ways in which every writer transcends both the history of his or her nation and his or her own cultural history. One way we do this is through our mutual concern as writers for the fate of the reader. Another is through our belief that stories are sometimes more important than food to keep a person alive. Still another way is through our understanding that language is not a technology, that it is alive, a kind of wild animal that we care for, and whose fate we agonize over. Across all the cultures, writers are, as the Uruguayan journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano has said, “the servants of memory,” their own memories and the memories of their people. We are, as the Japanese novelist Kazumasa Hirai has said, caretakers of the spiritual interior of our languages. We are, as a Native American elder once told me, years ago, all of us trying to write a story that will help.

In every country I go to, I try to find a translation of the seminal American novel, Moby-Dick. To find it in translation is to hold in my hand a symbol of international respect for literature, to know that men and women in the country I am traveling through thought enough of this very American story to render it in their own language, in order to share it with their countrymen. I want to think that writers in America are doing our part to transcend the sometimes destructive impulses of national government and the avarice of economic imperialists in order to keep humanity’s belief in the possibility of reconciled conflict and a shared life—community life— from crumbling; and to encourage the circumstances in which the truly great imaginations can emerge and, together, forge a safe path for us and our children, in a time when so much menace is gathering on the horizon.

Read The Museum of Game Balls extract.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

DEYAN ENEV

WRITING PLACE: ON THE HOLOGRAPHIC NATURE OF FICTION Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 24 – 27 May, 2012

Our theme “Writing Place” is a key which can unlock any text, since every text constructs a space for itself and its characters.

I will refer to “Writing Place” from now on simply as PLACE, by which I mean PLACE as either a subject or object of fiction. I will try to explain what I mean by this in a moment.

PLACE in fiction has several characteristics and before moving on it wouldn’t be a bad idea to outline them.

First, a PLACE is an active ingredient of a work of fiction, a real Biography place – a house, a street, a city – inhabited by the characters Deyan Enev was born in Sofia, and the action. Bulgaria. He graduated from the University of Sofia, where he Second, a PLACE could belong to the past or the future and only studied Bulgarian language and literature. He is married with two be alluded to in a story, but could still function as a PLACE children. Among his various through the force of the fictional narrative. occupations are house-painter, hospital attendant, teacher, copywriter. As a journalist he has Third, a PLACE could be absent and unidentifiable in a work of published over 2000 pieces, fiction, and could merely be the PLACE where the work was among them interviews, pieces of reporting, articles, essays, written. Here I would like to emphasize that invisible threads feuilletons, appearing in newspapers such as Maritza, continue to tie the PLACE with the text, and thus knowing the Novinar, Express, Otechestven writer’s biography and the PLACES he or she wrote the texts in Front, Monitor, Sega, etc. Mr. Enev has published 12 short story would in any case be useful in deciphering their meaning. collections so far. One of them – Everybody Standing on the Bow – In other words, PLACE is a complex part of a literary work with was released in Austria (Deuticke) and UK (Portobello) a distinct effect on the fictional alloy. Yet making it an object of under the title Circus Bulgaria. academic analysis contains several risks coming from several The English edition of this collection, translated by the different directions. On the one hand, slicing a work of fiction Edinburgh residing Bulgarian writer Kapka Kasabova, was into pieces with the aim of isolating one element could easily longlisted for the prestigious destroy the mysterious nature of fictional PLACE, which is Frank O’Connor English language short story collection wrapped up in the magic of creation. On the other hand, putting contest. the focus solely on one element would inevitably and unfairly come at the expense of the other elements of fiction. We should, therefore, remain aware that although PLACE does rank among

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES the elements in the periodic table of fiction, the end product in all the greatest literary works is always a substance different from its parts.

Because I am not a theoretician, I’ll resist the temptation of saturating my lecture with clever quotes from established masters. What I’ll do is choose a simpler but, to my mind, more dignified approach and tell you how PLACE works in my latest collection of stories – The Bulgarian Lad from Alaska, whose subtitle is “Sofian stories”, which directly refers to our theme.

The book contains 41 stories grouped in three sections: Iron Cliffs, A Letter to Kameliya and Silver Mountains. The first and the third sections contain 19 and 21 stories, respectively. The middle part contains only the eponymous “A Letter to Kameliya”.

The titles of the first and third sections are reminiscences from an Eastern text I came across many years ago, which read – and I’m quoting here from memory: “The silver mountains in the distance turn to iron cliffs, when we approach them.”

In my book, I’ve used this metaphor as a philosophical key to the experience of human life in general and for our individual passage through space in time; but it can also be taken as a key to the peculiar time-spaces within which we model reality in our works and whose two elements should, in my mind, be thought of as an inseparable whole. Time-space is what I consider to be the definition of PLACE in fiction.

The section Iron Cliffs contains stories which closely follow the relief of [Bulgarian] daily life; their landscape is often seen by readers as raw, some would say painfully raw. The stories in Silver Mountains also follow the ups and downs of daily life, and critics have, in fact, described them as “hyperrealistic”, but the slices of life in them – the time-spaces I’ve just talked about – are rendered through the optics of nostalgia for past youth and the places of youth, which gives these stories a patina of relative calmness. The single story A Letter to Kameliya and the middle section which contains it would create the impression of imbalance, had the story not been the most intimate in the collection. As the emotional heart of the book, it radiates its message backwards to the first section and forward to the third and provides a key for deciphering the meaning of their titles – Silver Mountains and Iron Cliffs.

The subtitle Sofian stories, on the other hand, spells out the real location where the stories take place and transforms the city of Sofia from an at times rougher, at other times mellower cityscape into an independent fictional character; into a place worth describing, a place- inspiration for the stories, which functions both as an object and subject of artistic interpretation. Sofia was also where these stories were written and the subtitle directly supports the view that PLACE in fiction is, in fact, a collection of places which, seen through the optics of time, are merged into a single time-space. A place is thus transformed into a PLACE.

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I will now use this introduction to look in greater detail at the story bearing the name of the collection – The Bulgarian Lad from Alaska.

The title of the story immediately directs the reader’s attention to the geographical axis Bulgaria-Alaska – which, stretching across half of the world, is [for most Bulgarians] an almost unthinkable distance. So from the very start, this story is assigned the hyper-task of containing two very different geographical locations and of reconciling them into a single notion.

The story begins to unfold at Sofia’s Central Railway Station, whose state, although not directly described in the story, is a very colorful metaphor for the dilapidation which has befallen Bulgaria over the last twenty years. So those of you who are familiar with it will begin reading in the right mood.

The Bulgarian Lad from Alaska is at the station to board a train to Belgrade – a familiar, nearby destination which is meant to make his ultimate destination of Alaska feel closer to a [Bulgarian] reader. One of the main characters in the story is the Lad’s mother, who has come to the Railway Station to see her son off on his long journey to the other end of the world. Throughout the story, she says nothing – her feelings are described through the expression in her eyes – which is just as well, since most readers are familiar with what mothers’ eyes look like before such separations.

From beginning to end, the action takes place in a compartment of the international train from Sofia to Belgrade in the form of a dialogue between the Bulgarian Lad and a writer in the same compartment who is the writer’s alter-ego and the story’s first person narrator. The conversation reveals that the Lad is a graduate of the Library Institute in Sofia who was unable to find work and is now employed as an assistant chef on an oil platform off the coast of Alaska. He shares a home with his Native American girlfriend, traveling to Bulgaria once a year to see his mother. The diminutive ethnonym in the original title – “bulgarche” [Bulgarian Lad] – refers to a well-known poem [whose title is Az sum bulgarche [“I am [proud to be] Bulgarian”] by the eminent Bulgarian writer Ivan Vazov, and grieves over the scattering of Bulgarian youth across the world in the last two decades – a scattering often triggered not so much by dreams of a better life, but by mere survival instinct. So the fate and words of the Bulgarian Lad and the mentioning of his new home in Alaska draw the far-away state closer to us and thus the Alaska- Bulgaria axis begins its transformation into a [fictional] PLACE.

Next, another Bulgarian classic – Aleko Konstantinov – is summoned to help in this process by way of a quote from his popular travelogue To Chicago and Back, in which he notes that “the

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES appearance of Indian [Native American] women reminded me very much of our Shopkini…” [natives of the region around Sofia].

More than a hundred years ago, the great Aleko mercifully thought of providing for Bulgaria’s future generations and created a sense of familiar at-home-ness on the distant and unfamiliar American continent.

The end of the story completes the process of transformation of the Bulgaria–Alaska axis into a PLACE by returning to the great literary theme of motherly love, which is economically described through the mother’s gaze, through all mothers’ gazes, and reappears in the narrator’s thoughts in the following way: “I thought of how Bulgaria must appear from outer space, pierced like a pincushion by hundreds of thousands of such looks, which encircle the Earth and reach its opposite end. As far as Alaska.” [Translation by Christopher Buxton.]

I will now briefly discuss one other story from the same collection called Shapkite Café, which is part of the Silver Mountains section.

The principle I’ve used in it is, to some extent, contrary to the one used in The Bulgarian Lad from Alaska, since, unlike the Bulgarian Lad, its protagonist is anchored in the same place and never moves around. Yet, it is through this very selfless choice to stay in the same place that he achieves a state of inner emigration and transports himself out of the morals he disapproves of. What’s more, he transforms himself into something of a cornerstone of moral choice and in this way, by remaining literally stuck, like a pillar in space over the course of decades, he singlehandedly transforms an ordinary Sofia café, Shapkite, into a PLACE.

Shapkite was an iconic café in downtown Sofia during the communist period, which provided a daily haven for a number of dissident-minded individuals. One of them was writer and translator Vladimir Svintila, a mythical figure of Sofia’s intelligentsia and Bulgaria’s last surviving polymath in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1940s, he was sent to a labor camp and subsequently prevented from publishing. His full talent is only visible now when a number of his works have been released posthumously. In one of them, called From Marx to Christ, he traces the spiritual journey of his generation and, in an aside, tells the story of a street bum, Nikolai Karadjov, whom I also vividly remember from my own teenage years. With his white hair and beard, and his hermit-like behavior and dress he defied the social code of the day and for years remained an enigma to me and my generation.

Here is quote from Vladimir Svintila, which I’ve also used in my story:

“He was known as the only street bum in Sofia at the time”, writes Svintila. “He seemed to have emerged out of thin air. No one ever found out where he was from – what town or village, what kind of family, what tradition.

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He was tall and dark-skinned, with long, smooth hair. The length of his hair was always a source of anxiety for the communists.

A street bum not so much in his clothes and itinerary, but in his denial of everything earthly, material and mercantile. His was a life dedicated to the spirit.

Once he told me:

‘God put us in our places like stones. He arranged the trees and the rocks and the people. I love his order, the divine order of things. I stand here like a stone by a stream. People always want to change everything – they are against the order of God. I was like that, too. I was a man. But I am now a big round stone at the curve of the river.’”

I’ve used this quote as the end of my story, adding only a single sentence: “Nikolai Karadjov and Shapkite Café disappeared from this world together, in the early 1990s.”

The place in this story is Shapkite. It no longer exists. It belongs to the past. But despite this it exists as a PLACE in memory and texts (which are another type of memory), because it fulfils all the criteria for it – a space intersected by time and transformed into a time-space through an obligatory human presence – in this case, the figure of a hermit.

The other stories in the Silver Mountains of my book are built on a similar principle. They are snapshot comparisons of specific places in Sofia through the dual optics of past and present. Such optics, however, are not sufficient to transform the places in these stories into PLACES. The necessary glue between then and now – whether for a local cultural center, a second-hand bookshop, a gazebo in a park, the former digs of a cult poet, a cinema, a café, the museum house of a great national poet, a bookbinder’s shop, a vegetable market, a gallery – is nostalgia, a form of love for what no longer is but continues to occupy our heart. It is with the help of nostalgia that these places acquire a holographic quality and are transformed into time-spaces. It is through the lens of nostalgia that they begin to operate as separate characters in the stories.

The semantic key for understanding my book is the scattering of Bulgaria’s youth, the explosion of our native galaxy. And it seems to me that the only way to contain this galaxy is through the Word, which is its last refuge, its only witness and archeologist. I would like to acknowledge this by using a capital letter here.

In conclusion, I would like to say that although logical constructions can help us understand a work of fiction better, they cannot help us write a better work. To turn a place into a PLACE, we pay in years of our lives and that is the only valid thing I know on the subject.

At the end, I would like to share with you a short, but significant story that came as confirmation that I may, indeed, have been able to turn the places in The Bulgarian Lad from Alaska into

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

PLACES. Like any writer, I am full of impatience before the publication of any book of mine, despite the fact that this has now happened to me a dozen times. The Bulgarian Lad from Alaska was meant to come out at the beginning of last December to coincide with the International Book Fair at the National Palace of Culture in Sofia. But the days passed and there was no news of the book. I kept phoning my publishers to ask what was happening, couldn’t they publish it at least before the Fair was over? They couldn’t. The Fair was over on 10 December. The book came out on 13 December, which my Orthodox calendar showed to be the day the Church honors the memory of St. Germaine, the Baptist of Alaska. I see this sign as the highest recognition of my work.

Read The Bulgarian Lad from Alaska extract.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

RICHARD RUSSO

THE DESTINY THIEF Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 23 – 27 May, 2013 1.

Not long ago I had a lengthy telephone conversation with a man I’ll call David. I’d known him nearly forty years before at the University of Arizona where we shared a fiction workshop taught by a writer named Robert C.S. Downs, who encouraged both of us, but especially David. He was working on a novel about a rock and roll band, and having once played in a band myself, I was envious of both his subject matter and his bold talent, and even more Biography jealous of the fact that at age twenty he’d already figured out what Award-winning novelist and he wanted to do with his life, whereas I’d wasted the better part of screenwriter Richard Russo is the author of seven novels a decade pursuing a PhD in literature I no longer really wanted. and two short story What I didn’t know about David was what a rough time he was collections. Empire Falls (Knopf, 2001) won the having. His mother, whom he’d dearly loved, had recently died and Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His most recent book is the his father was an emotional tyrant. David himself had very little memoir Elsewhere (Knopf, money and was drinking heavily. In fact, the fiction workshop—his 2012). He lives with his wife in Portland, Maine. dream of becoming a novelist one day—was just about all that was holding him together. Near the end of the semester, he got into some trouble, courtesy of his poet girlfriend. She’d been assigned six poems and the day before they were due she hadn’t written a single line. When she told David she was thinking about dropping the course, he said, “Nonsense. We’ll write them now. How hard can it be?” So they sat down and did just that, the girlfriend writing three poems, David the other three. They both thought the results were pretty good, but the girlfriend was in no way prepared for the praise lavished on the poems, especially David’s, in workshop. After class, she made the mistake of confiding to a classmate that all six poems had been written the night before, three of them by her boyfriend. When the classmate reported the infraction, both the girlfriend and David were hauled before the director of creative writing (Downs) to explain themselves. The girlfriend came to the meeting determined to defend the work as her own. David, they agreed beforehand, would admit only to offering advice. But this was not Downs’s first experience with academic dishonesty, and instead of asking her if she’d written the poems in question, he quoted the best line from the best of the six poems and asked her if she’d written that line, whereupon she immediately broke down. Since it was a first offense, Downs told her he’d recommend a D in the course and no mark on

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES her record, then dismissed her. Then he regarded his star fiction writer seriously and said, “Good poems.” David sighed, accepting the compliment, proud to have written the line that his mentor admired, but fearful of what came next. The academic dishonesty charge was the least of it, he confessed. He was out of money and about to be evicted from the shithole he was living in. He’d dropped the rest of his courses earlier in the term, and now he had no choice return home in defeat. When he asked what his grade would be, Downs said he’d be getting the “A” he’d earned and, perhaps to bolster his spirits, added that it would likely be the only onen the class. Apparently we were not a stellar group. “What about Rick?” David said. Downs shrugged. “Rick doesn’t want to be a writer. He wants to be a teacher.” (He was wrong about that, but he couldn’t have known. I was, after all, finishing up a PhD, after which I’d be applying for teaching positions.) Fast forward twenty-five years to 2002. A lot has happened. David’s eventually finished his undergraduate degree, then gone on to graduate school, taking an MFA in poetry writing, not fiction. He’s married, had kids, taken a college teaching position to support his writing habit, become middle-aged. He’s continued to struggle with alcohol. At some point he also finished the rock and roll novel begun in Arizona and, unable to interest an agent, finally published the book himself. Maybe his life isn’t the one he imagined back in Tucson, but for the most part he’s been pretty happy. Until one day he picks up the University of Arizona alumni magazine and discovers a student from his undergraduate fiction workshop has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. According to the article, the prize-winner taught for while, but then quit to write full-time. David feels something inside him come untethered then and, really, can you blame him? Somehow he and I have swapped destinies. He is the teacher, I the writer. He would like someone to explain the cosmic mechanism by which such a cruel joke is perpetrated. In fact, he’d like to ask me, the perpetrator. As if I’d know. 2. I’ve written a lot about destiny in my fiction, not because I understand it, but because I’d like to. If David was puzzled by the narrative arc of our lives, he wasn’t alone. At the risk of appearing falsely modest, I have to say I’m not aware of anyone—teacher, friend, family member—who predicted anything like the great good fortune that has befallen me in the writing career that I came to fairly late. Some years ago I ran into an old girlfriend, who said she’d been following my career with pleasure but also mystification. “I always thought you were a nice enough guy,” she told me, “but I never dreamed you had books in you.” I know exactly how she felt. I can’t explain it even now. I lived the first eighteen years of my life in a moribund upstate New York mill town called Gloversville. Raised Catholic, I was for many years an altar boy. My parents separated when I was a kid, so I was brought up by my nervous mother, who hated where we lived, and by

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES my grandparents who owned the house we lived in. If my mother was adamant about anything it was that, as an American, I could be anything I wanted. I was as good as anybody. I was always to remember this in case anyone had the temerity to suggest otherwise. My largely absent father had come to a whole different set of conclusions. He’d been part of the Normandy invasion and he returned from the war with a personal philosophy that fit neatly onto his favorite coffee mug, which I still have. It reads: Here’s to you as good as you are and here’s to me, as bad as I am, but as good as you are and as bad as I am, I’m as good as you are, as bad as I am: to complete the gag, the mug’s handle was on the inside of the cylinder. Call it an object lesson: that being as good as anybody might not be of much use if you had to go through life with a basic design flaw. In addition to America, my mother believed in education, its ability to negate such design flaws. My high school was tiny and without expending much effort I flourished there. The University of Arizona, though, was twice the size of my home town, and what a rude awakening it was. My first day there I went to the registrar’s office, hoping to sign up for classes early and was met by a grim woman who sized me up at a glance. Tomorrow, she told me sternly. I was a freshman and would matriculate with the rest of my class and not before. What I was asking for, she explained, was special treatment, and I wasn’t going to get it, not from her. My roommate that first semester was a boy from a tiny Arizona mining town that he was clearly homesick for already, less than twenty-four hours after leaving it. He couldn’t tell me enough about the place, which was apparently perfect in every way. He seemed to have little interest in his classes, and as the semester wore on he had a devil of a time making friends. He wanted to pledge a fraternity, but none would have him. Back home he had a girlfriend, but at the university the girls he asked out looked him over and said no in a way that made him understand he was wrong to have asked. At first he did poorly in his classes, which seemed to surprise him, then worse, until finally the dean of students requested an interview, at which it was decided that he’d be happier at a junior college closer to home. I was glad when he left and not just because it meant I’d have our room to myself for the rest of the term; in the brief time we’d been roommates I’d come to loath him viscerally, though at the time I didn’t understand why. Now, it couldn’t be clearer. Looking at him, his face alive with angry zits, was like looking in the mirror. And so, rattled and far from home, I set about developing a strategy for surviving at an institution determined to make me understand that while I might be as good as anybody, I was certainly no better. The gist of my plan was this: henceforth I would (1) pretend to know things I didn’t rather than risk humiliation, and (2) conceal, as far as humanly possible, who I was and where I came from. I’d figure out what I was supposed to like and admire, and I would like and admire these things even when I didn’t. I would lie through my teeth about everything. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only liar there. College is, after all, where we go to reinvent ourselves,

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES to sever our ties with the past, to become the person we always wanted to be and were prevented from being by people who knew us to be someone else entirely. And so I changed. I took my classes more seriously than I’d done in high school, not out of any abstract love of learning but rather because the competition was stiffer and I figured the more I actually knew, the less I’d have to pretend to know. I ditched all the “stylish” clothes I’d brought with me from back East and dressed in western jeans with button flies. When asked where I was from, I substituted “upstate New York” for Gloversville, a deft maneuver that allowed me to trade shame over my origins, a new experience, for guilt, which, having been raised Catholic, I was used to. Summers, when I returned to Gloversville to work road construction with my father, were toughest. Because in truth I was very happy to be back home, living in house where I’d grown up, where people knew the old me. I hadn’t realized just how much I loved my grandparents until I saw them again that first summer, and in their company I felt the sting of my dogged efforts at reinvention out west. I began to understand that in denying where I was from, I was also denying them. I’d made my choice, though, and there was no going back. I was becoming someone else. Someone better. If the cost was high, I’d pay it. 3. It might be helpful to make a short inventory of what I’d learned by the time I left the University of Arizona in 1980 with an MFA in fiction and a PhD in American literature. I knew:  quite a lot about the 19th century novel, Twain and Dickens in particular;  less about the 20th century, very little about the 18th;  how to create characters that, for the most part, rang true;  that it’s conflict more than plot that drives a story forward;  that characters had to speak out of their own need, not their author’s;  the ins and outs of point of view. I also had a theoretical understanding of tone—that it represented the writer’s attitude toward his material—and that I wasn’t going to be much good until I’d mastered its practice. Before leaving Arizona I gave my just completed novel to Bob Downs, who’d continued to encourage me despite his unshakable conviction that I was going to end up a teacher, not a writer. The novel was set in Tucson and I was hoping to be told I was wrong, that the book was good, but I knew otherwise and so I wasn’t surprised by Downs’ verdict, that the book was largely inert. What knocked the stuffing out of me, though was what he considered the silver lining. There was, he said, one short section, about forty pages of backstory set in a small, upstate New York mill town, that came vividly to life. “You really know that world,” he told me. Even now I remember how the blood rushed to my face and roared in my ears. “Not really,” I told the man who’d been kind enough to read my novel and tell me the truth about it. “I made

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES that all up.” I mean, come on. Who did he think I was? Some rube? 4. My first academic posting was at a branch campus of Penn State University. There I taught what everybody in the English department taught, a ton of freshman composition and the occasional lit course whose purpose was to keep us from swallowing the entire bottle of amphetamines instead of just the one or two we needed to keep grading papers deep into the night. My syllabus that first year was made up entirely of books I’d taught before. Not very adventurous, but I could use the time saved writing stories. One night, preparing my morning class on Steinbeck, I came across the following passage in Cannery Row: “Up in back of the vacant lot is…the stern and stately whore house of Dora Flood; a decent, clean, honest, old-fashioned sporting house where a man can take a glass of beer among friends. This is no fly-by-night clip-joint but a sturdy, virtuous club, built, maintained and disciplined by Dora who, madam and girl for fifty years, has through the exercise of special gifts of tact and honesty, charity and a certain realism, made herself respected by the intelligent, the learned, and the kind. And by the same token she is hated by the twisted and lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands respect the home but don’t like it very much. Dora is a great woman, a great big woman with flaming orange hair and a taste for Nile green evening dresses….” I pause here, because that’s where I ground to a halt at the time, my jaw open on a hinge, dumbstruck. How had I not seen it before? As I said earlier, I understood that “tone” was the writer’s attitude toward his subject matter, but I somehow hadn’t imagined how this attitude might manifest itself in actual language. Dora Flood, we’re told, is a great woman. The word great, used to modify a noun, seems to convey a value judgment about her character. Except Dora’s supposed greatness is immediately undermined by what follows: a great big woman. This time great is used to modify not a noun but another adjective, big, and the meaning pivots slyly. We’re no longer talking about Dora’s moral attributes, but rather her physical size. Further, her taste for Nile green evening dresses to offset her bright orange hair actually suggests a lack of taste. The words say one thing but mean another. Lurking somewhere in the rhetorical shadows is an authorial presence, a disembodied voice, and it’s tempting to identify that voice as Steinbeck’s until we remember The Grapes of Wrath and The Red Pony where the voice is

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES different, more earnest, less playful. It’s not so much the John Steinbeck we sense behind the curtain, as a John Steinbeck, the author in a particular mood, chosen specifically for the material at hand. I’d been told before that writers had two identities: their real life one—who they are with their spouses and colleagues and friends—as well as who they become when they sit down to write. This second identity, I now saw, was fluid, as changeable as the weather, as unfixed as our emotions. As readers, we naturally expect novels to introduce us to a new cast of characters and dramatic events, but could it also be that the writer has to reinvent himself for the purpose of telling each new story? If he’s free to invent a different voice for each new book, then which is his “real” one? And how was it remotely fair for Steinbeck to possess so many voices when I still didn’t have even one? What pissed me off even more than this glaring inequity was that the voice Steinbeck used in Cannery Row was so damnably familiar. The wry insistence that we understand Dora’s place isn’t a whore house so much as a sporting house? That what goes on there could actually be construed as virtuous? That people who object to prostitution are small-minded? Where outside of Cannery Row had I heard conventional morality mocked so winningly? Who else in my experience had cunningly insinuated that there was more than one kind of charity? Who, back when I was an altar boy, had demanded of me a certain realism when it came to moral matters? How was it, I asked myself, that John Steinbeck was suddenly speaking to me in my own father’s voice, a voice that, once I’d recognized it, I felt every bit as entitled to as his signature widow’s peak. This wasn’t a voice I’d have to imitate, as I’d tried to do with Salinger and Twain and Raymond Chandler. It was already mine. That evening I dug out my failed novel and reread the forty pages that Downs had liked. He’d been right, of course, damn him. Like it or not, I did really know that milltown and I saw now that there was no reason a whole novel shouldn’t be set there. They weren’t exactly good, those forty pages, but they were alive and mine, which was more than could be said for the other two hundred. That should’ve been good news, right? For the last year I’d been churning out stories and sending them to magazines as diverse as The New Yorker and Mademoiselle and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. And to what purpose? What I’d wanted from editors at these magazines was for them to like and admire me, never realizing the simple truth that as yet there was no me to like, much less to admire. Now I could set aside all that silly striving and get down to the real business of becoming a writer. Why, then, did rereading those forty pages cause my spirits plummet? Why, for the first time, did I feel like giving up? No doubt part of my despair had to do with the magnitude of the mistake I’d been faithful to for so long. Over the last twelve months or so, I’d gotten a few acceptances for stories in little magazines, and editors at the trades sometimes added a short

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES note—try us again—at the bottom of their rejection letters. I’d allowed this evidence to convince me that I was close, whereas, I now saw clearly that I was just becoming more skilled, more sure-handed with my tools, which wasn’t the same thing. Discovering who I was as a writer might be the final piece of the puzzle, but it also sent me back to the beginning. Yesterday, before visiting Dora Flood’s whore house, I had a dozen stories to send out to magazines, each representing the “break” I’d been longing for. Now I understood they all belonged in the trash. If, armed with my new identity, I went right back to work it might be a year or more before I had anything to show anybody. Close? I was starting over. Nor was that the worst. Sure, rereading those forty pages, seeing their potential, was exhilarating, but it was also dispiriting. If at long last I’d found not just my material but also the voice I’d need to bring that material into sharp focus, did it necessarily follow that the resulting book would be one anybody would want to read? Okay, great, I’d discovered a “me,” but it was the same low-rent mill town “me” I’d been fleeing since I left Gloversville. The “me” I’d been hoping to discover was more like Dickens’ me, or Cheever’s or Ross Macdonald’s. They all had good me’s, the lucky bastards. My “me” sucked. Earlier in the semester, when my department chair in far off State College somehow caught wind of the fact that I was writing stories instead of doing research, he’d warned me to quit. I’d been hired as a scholar, not a fiction writer, and by ignoring my scholarship I was endangering my chances for tenure and promotion. I’d all but told him to go fuck himself, but now I wondered if maybe he was right. I was broke and my wife was pregnant with our second child and maybe it was time to quit trying to do something I clearly wasn’t cut out for. Destiny is forged in moments like these. Curiosity and discovery in Manachean balance with despair and self-loathing. Writing, like life itself, is difficult. Every day, talented people give up. 5. The publication of my first novel, Mohawk, whose origin was the same forty pages that Downs liked, got me my first job as a writer at Southern Illinois University, where I had the great good fortune to become good friends with the poet Rodney Jones. He hailed from Alabama and his background—small town, lower middle class—was similar to my own. Rodney seemed as surprised as I was to have met with success doing something so different from what had been expected of him. SIU was very much a blue-collar campus, which suited us fine. We were both committed to our craft, but also to our apprenctice writers many of them first generation college students. Most semesters Rodney and I had students in common and we gossiped about them like a couple of matrons over a clothesline. One beery Friday afternoon Rodney was singing the praises of a young poet and I of my best fiction writer, only to discover we were talking about the same guy. He’d come to the university over the objections of his family, none of whom had been out of the tiny Ohio River town he was writing about. He seemed to have few friends, and

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES when we snooped around in his academic records, we discovered he’d not to this point distinguished himself in his other classes. But he wrote—both poetry and prose—as if his hands were on fire. Though I don’t think it occurred to us at the time, Rodney and I probably both saw a lot of ourselves—Rodney’s rural Alabama and my upstate New York—in the poems and stories our student was writing. We each took him aside to let him know that his talent was rare, that it was our job to help him nurture it if that was what he wanted. His writing already would have gotten him into the best graduate writing programs in the country. More than anything, he seemed genuinely baffled that we were interested in him. Nobody ever had been before. Were we a couple of idiots? Then he disappeared. From our classes. From the dorm. From campus. A family emergency, we thought, since he’d notified no one that he was leaving. Except he never returned. We assumed he’d flunked his other classes. Without any real justification for doing so, Rodney and I gave him incompletes, leaving the door open. One morning that summer Rodney appeared at my door and suggested we take a drive. Still troubled by our student’s disappearance, Rodney’d gone to the registrar’s office and gotten his parents’ address in that tiny Ohio River town, and it was there we found him working in a dilapidated video store. He apologized for leaving without saying goodbye and thanked us again for our interest and concern. But no, he wouldn’t be coming back, he told us. His mind was made up. Was it a question of money, we inquired? Because there were scholarships and other forms of financial aid, and we could help. But he insisted it wasn’t really about money. He just didn’t think he’d be writing any more. Clearly, our presence—in the video store, in the town he’d written about so vividly—made him anxious, and so in the end there was nothing for us to do but leave. On the drive home, Rodney and I came to the same reluctant conclusion. Our fear had been that it was his other professors, his failures in their classes, that had caused his sudden departure, whereas he’d actually left because of us. He was used to the poor opinion of others. To him, failure was a warm embrace, as familiar and reassuring as his family and the grungy little town he’d written about so vividly. What Rodney and I were offering was a different narrative entirely, one he must at some level have yearned for or he never would have gone to the university to begin with, but up close he found it terrifying, and so he fled. Now he was the kind of embarrassed you get when you flirt with a pretty girl who for reasons you can’t fathom, flirts back. She’s clearly out of your league, which means she’s either toying with you or she’s temporarily lost her mind. Later, when she returns to her senses, she’ll send you packing. Better, surely, to send yourself packing before you’re completely in love, before you become so lost you’ll never find your way home. What will haunt you, maybe forever, is the possibility that you were wrong about her, which in the end is another way of saying that you’re wrong about

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES yourself. 6. Destiny. Since talking with David on the phone I’ve been unable to get him out of my head, how for a time he’d been convinced that I’d stolen the life that was supposed to be his, that he was somehow entitled to. Such a belief can be corrosive, but no more so than its opposite, the belief that you’re entitled to nothing, even your own dreams. I’ve never believed that writers are special people with special gifts, but writing isn’t easy. Most people who want to be writers end up abandoning the struggle. Who knows why the others slog on against reason and the odds? I can only tell you why I did. That night when I came close to giving up, when I feared that I was saddled with a cut-rate artistic self, I didn’t give it one last shot because I thought that this time I’d succeed. My mother’s mantra to the contrary, I no longer believed, if indeed I ever had, that I could be anything I wanted. I just thought—and I thought it in these exact words—fuck it. If the person I was wasn’t good enough, fine. If I harbored a basic design flaw (my handle inside the mug) that disqualified me from being a good writer, then so be it. But I was tired of running away, tired of apologizing, tired of trying to figure out what editors and other people wanted. I would make one final attempt to write a novel so I could be done with writing once and for all. More than anything writing Mohawk felt like an honorable exit strategy. It’s tempting to say, in hindsight, that I was coming to understand how self-consciousness is the enemy of art, but more than that I think I was just tired of always being in my own way. I needed not just to claim as my own the very place I’d been fleeing for so long, but also to lose myself there, to give my full attention to the kind of people whose lives were, at least to me, important. And so, with no one left to impress, not even myself, I began, finally, to write.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

VLADISLAV TODOROV

THE CONSTANCY OF IRONY Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 23 – 27 May, 2013 I will attempt to share with you my own creative experience to a degree that I myself can bear. Sharing such experience exposes the speaker’s intimate world to quite an extent and requires laying one’s self bare in the view of others. Such an exposure is absolutely foreign to me, since in principle I avoid turning myself into an object of discussion in my public appearances.

Although I believe that irony defines the language of my creative

Biography writing, here I will have to suspend it. It is a well-known fact that irony is a tool for concealing and masking, rather than exposing the Vladislav Todorov teaches film and cultural history at speaking subject. the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Irony constitutes radical sabotage of the discourse of sincerity and author of several scholarly revelation. It undermines the earnestness and reliability of the books on modernism, performing, and visual arts. speaker vis-à-vis his/her audience. He has contributed essays to The Yale Journal of Criticism, The ironist is an extremely unreliable narrator. He deliberately College Literature, Textual Practice, L’infini, Neue falls into contradictions and forges paradoxes. Thus, he wriggles Literatur, etc. His first creative pieces out of any possibility of being recognized, grasped and judged. appeared in Post Modern Culture and Chelsea. In 2006 Everyone who has decided to offer oneself up to others’ scrutiny he published his first novel, faces the enormous risk that his/her innermost self will appear Zift: Socialist Noir (Paul Dry Books, 2010). Todorov wrote utterly banal. Irony is a clever tool that helps one cover up that the script of the Bulgarian movie Zift (2008) released in banality. Self-ironizing makes the attempt to share oneself with the US by the Independent others artfully bearable. Film Chanel (IFC). His second novel Zincograph (Fama Publishers) came out in The lyricist, as opposed to the ironist, is insufferable in his/her Bulgaria in 2010. Its film demonstrative sincerity and affected eagerness to share. Lyricist adaptation The Color of the Chameleon premiered in seeks to infectiously lay himself bare before others, his assumingly Toronto 2012 Discovery wonderful intimate self. The ironist refuses to be sincere, not Program. because he is inclined to lie and deceive, but because he fears banality.

Paradox: banality authenticates sincerity as genuine and artless. Thus banality acquires moral value, the only one possible.

ON THE HUNT FOR CLICHÉS AND BANALITIES

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

In the media, throughout universities and professional circles, mass plagiarism in all spheres of cultural and intellectual production has become a hot topic of discussion.

The dearth of original ideas has seriously weakened the global cultural market, including cinema and literature. Most films in distribution are made according to established formulas – clichéd, contrived, one-dimensional cinema. The same is true for books.

Formulaic fiction and cinema is quickly and easily digestible. However, this leads to the serious banalization of a form of production that in principle should offer unique works – it should create phenomena, and not ready-made prefabrications.

The social networks and the tech boom have made possible direct, unfiltered intervention in the global spheres of human experience. However, this democratization of the means of creative and intellectual expression has not led to an increase in talent.

Anyone, regardless of how stupid he might be, can shoot a film and post deep thoughts on the net, as long as he has a smart phone. Equipment doesn’t beget genius, however. Likewise, mass literacy among modern nations has not led to an increase in literary talent in comparison to previous epochs.

The serial production of original ideas is impossible, unlike their serial reproduction. Thus, a vast gray area in the idea market arises – the zone of daring simulations, of blatant borrowings and concoctions. The original ideas disappear into the shadows of their imitations and copies.

People are thinking less and less. It takes time and effort. Fewer and fewer people dare to think. It’s a risky enterprise. More and more people think borrowed thoughts. It’s so much safer.

We busy ourselves with convoluted chatter. We master empty subtleties. We – the narcissistic echo of the thoughts of others.

Contemporary Bulgarian public life is a good example of living within a regime of loud imitation and imposture. Bulgaria is on its way to becoming an incompetently miscopied quote, a deplorable remake of the world.

Young people don’t have ideas. They have lifestyles. They don’t ask themselves questions. They master styles. How are we to understand them? They are not subject to understanding, but to stylistic analysis.

Who are they? What is their point? Coiffed imitations, web-runners roaming in the wide virtual world, they parade their assumed physiognomies and e-identities. Blurred copies of foreign ideas and attitudes. Illegible carbon copies (for those who even remember carbon paper.)

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

Saying that, I don’t mean to wag an indignant finger at the world, but to help us realize what the context is for anyone who intends to write, imagine or invent amidst the global graveyard of worn-out clichés.

CONTAGIOUS CLICHÉS

Fiction is not a mirror image of reality, nor is it a parallel world. Fiction is a contagious agent. Art is an infection, to quote Tolstoy. It infectiously participates in the formation of the individual, in the development of his/her abilities, imagination, behavior and perceptions. It inflames the senses. The powerful, infectious effect of fiction on the life of the reading masses is ensured by contagious clichés.

The clichéd persona interests me more than any other – a person with a borrowed soul and rented thoughts, plagiarized feelings and fiction-fuelled desires. In the modern world, everyone is infected and clichédéd to a certain extent.

People acquire ideas about themselves and the world; they sense themselves through cinematic and literary clichés. The intimate world of modern man is astonishingly hackneyed, imitatively borrowed from a popular song, film, soap opera or gossips in circulation. Having fallen into the mood of deep lyrical sincerity, a man like that has nothing more to reveal to others but his composite banality.

For the abovementioned reasons, I openly use formulas and clichés, widely shared fallacies, and fabrications in my novels with the aim of subverting them. The language in my novels is a rogue agent, ironically discordant, atrociously playful with regard to the formula being employed. In the end, language is what exposes the cliché in all its idiocy.

Irony unchains. It is roguish intervention in the world of the banal. It devastates the junkyard of prefabrications. It desecrates the graveyard of clichés. Irony is a subversive intervention in the kingdom of banal by the following formula: In the World of Evil, the Devil arrives to do Good.

It is no accident, that the production of clichés is a basic theme in the novel “Zincograph.” The zincographer’s workshop is one of the central places where the action unfolds, one of the key interiors and symbolic spaces in the novel. This is the place where matrices are made, where clichés are etched by acid, where images are printed for mass circulation.

The protagonist and antihero in this novel/film is radically clichéd – a zealous police informant, code name Marzipan. He is demonstratively bookish, literary camouflaged. He is a deadly mimicking chameleon.

Marzipan loves reading and listening to others read aloud to him. There is a sort of resigned eroticism in reading aloud. In this lies the eroticism of the movie “The Color of the Chameleon”

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES based on “Zincograph.” Otherwise, the movie does not contain sex scenes or nudity. It does contain infectious reading aloud.

The voice is a powerful aphrodisiac, a catalyst in sexual contagion. The softer line in the film comes from a quiet beauty with a game leg who reads aloud: Girl. In the film, she doesn’t have a name. She innocently (ignorantly) plays the role of fate. Girl is fatally clumsy. Without meaning to, she blunders about and kills. She punishes by accident.

Girl is Marzipan’s hobbled fate – his angelic arbiter. She is both a witness to and the cause of his ultimate demise – his death, his liquidation. She pushes him while meaning to save him, in effect knocking him overboard from a ship that is taking them to their much-yearned-for Casablanca.

Girl brings fatal lyricism to the film. She is lyrical, yet destructive. In other words – she is ironic. It is the irony of the angel-annihilator, who comes down to push the antihero into the dark waters of the ocean at a moment of perfect bliss.

This is how the film ends, by disposing of the biggest cliché in this film – the protagonist himself.

Ultimately, the sense of the fundamental absurdity of clichéd existence comes from death. In both novels/films, the main characters die at the end. We bury the clichés.

GENRE FORMULAS AND AUTEUR’S INTERVENTION

Auteur cinema is a demonstrative refusal to use clichés. Such films are difficult to label and cannot be universally deciphered – for example, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s cinematic novel “Last Year at Marienbad,” 1961. Such films are truly startling, as if a powerful idiosyncrasy is trying to express itself outwardly and burst into the world, running roughshod over its controlling formulas, disrupting its causality, its space-time continuum. A world perceivably populated by incognito personae.

Auteur films are the flipside of genre films, which are made according to formulas and which largely dominate the world today. In the domain of genre, one is forced to find one’s own way of overcoming the fundamental anonymity of the formula in an effort to say something about oneself. This is quite a tall order – to demonstrate one’s genius through a cliché. In genre cinema and fiction, the challenges to one’s talent are of an entirely different nature.

For many long years, Bulgarian cinema suffered from a lack of genre specificity, since it fancied itself auteur cinema. In terms of imagery, this is a cinema of wandering rootless people, of proverbial humanity and compassion within the menagerie of life, of magic realism and artless idiocy. Films were also made to conform to popular festival trends, such as “the great pains of small nations.”

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Such films lack dramaturgy in the classical sense -- overarching structure, a recognizable beginning, middle or end, action based on conflict, reversals of fortune, sudden realizations, an entanglement, climax, denouement, as Aristotle established way back in his “Poetics.”

THE FILM-NOVELS

There are no great scripts or screenwriters in the history of literature. A script is not a stand- alone work. It is extremely important to a given film, but not above and beyond it. It is the weight-bearing structure, the ideological, thematic and creative platform for the visual superstructure. In the end, it is not the script, but the editing process that tells the film’s story on the basis of the usable footage shot.

I find it useful to write novels following plot structures worked out in advance. This helps me apply a tried-and-true method for storyline analysis: what motivates the characters to act at every given moment in every given place.

I only begin writing with the ending in my head. Then I can see the mechanics of the plot with the clarity of an engineer. My work is based on analytically organized research that I have conducted in advance. For example, “Zincograph” drew upon the work I did in my theoretical study “Chaotic Pendulum,” which examines the phenomenon of imposture and royal pretenders, of revolutionary terrorism and conspiratorial networks, the doctrine of “the police happiness of nations,” etc.

CONFESSIONAL AND CONCEPTUAL FABRICATION

As a hard-boiled constructivist and anti-intuitivist, I believe that art is a construction, whether it be consciously sought or intuitively found. So-called full-blooded, vivid images are phantoms, nonetheless. They are equally non-existent. What does exist is a system of assumed notions of “full-bloodedness” that historically change. Today one thing is full-blooded; tomorrow it grows anemic, while by the next day it is already bloodless.

What lasts over time is not the blood itself, but ideas and concepts about humanity. Art’s job is to make the inventory of such ideas interesting and attractive, shocking in new ways and astonishing at every single moment of human development.

The readers/viewers are doomed to constantly realize banal things about themselves. For example, that since the dawn of time, man has been the quintessence of dust, to quote Hamlet.

The reader/viewer yet again comes to grasp a banal fact through something that makes it surprisingly fresh – the power of art, spectacle, gesture, a metaphor.

The infectious power of art lies in the fact that it makes man, that most banal specimen, the most enigmatic dweller of the world. Man perpetually reinvents himself as a “full-blooded” paradox.

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In this respect, art is an inexhaustible source of news about humanity, since the number of possible creative infections of our idea of what a human being is, borders on infinity.

ZIFT: SOCIALIST NOIR

My interest in noir fiction and films arose from reading American crime novels from the 1930s and watching films from the 1940s based on those novels. My interests gradually became methodical. Instead of only reading and watching for entertainment alone, I began studying this material, tracing the expansion of noir into socially engaged cinema, science fiction and psycho- thrillers.

“Zift” had to fit into a long literary and cinematic tradition, while also serving its particularly Bulgarian purpose. In that sense, the film/novel represents a consciously sought combination of the retro-socialist and neo-noir genres.

My intention was to create an infectious journey back in time to Bulgarian socialist reality that has since been fading away. So, I tried to revisit socialism and grasp it within a genre frame of “hardboiled” fiction.

Nothing is “soft.” The characters are oddballs and restless strivers. They chaotically navigate the underbelly of society, which is inherently a breeding ground for crime. The past explodes into the present, dialogue is sharp and aphoristic, and the spring winding up the action is stretched to the breaking point. The woman is fatal. The man is doomed.

Noir has an interesting history. The genre was invented by a group of European filmmakers who fled to America during the war, such as Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder. A whole group of émigré directors, set designers, and cinematographers tried to find jobs in Hollywood and ended up working on so-called B-movies.

A-list movies or mega-productions remained closed to them. The B-movies in question arose during the 1930s. At that time, in order to encourage more people to go to the movies, studios began showing a second free low-budget film alongside the main feature film. Such B-movies were made quickly and cheaply, yet were highly entertaining – the precursors of the thriller.

In the early 1940s, Europeans flooded the B-movie industry and took it over. They gave it a powerfully artistic visual style borrowed from German expressionism. This gave rise to a whole swarm of B-movies that have contributed enormously to the history of both American, and later global, cinema.

Film noir stems from two basic sources – American crime novels from the 1930s and the visual techniques of 1920s German expressionism. Film noir grew out of the artistic encounter between the famous “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Black Mask” – an American magazine that

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES began publishing comics along with “hardboiled” crime fiction by Hammett and Chandler. The encounter in question changed the idea of “cool” attitude created by the westerns. The rural Wild West is replaced by the urban Asphalt Jungle. This effectively changes the cliché of “cool.”

I had three sources of inspiration while writing “Zift.” The first was a canonical and highly clichéd American film genre. The second was the highly clichéd jargon and symbolic order of communism. And the third was my personal experience of an unruly boy growing up in the underbelly of the capital city. In the novel, that boy runs amuck within these clichés, smashing them.

I imagined an antihero who is released from prison in the early 1960s, having landing there before the communist coup. The cliché of communism has seeped into his brain in a strange bookish way, through reading books and listening to the official radio broadcasts in isolation. The ideological clichés have distorted our hero’s mind in a particularly absurd, tragicomic way.

I wanted exactly this type of linguistically clichéd character to serve as the novel’s narrator. The story is told in the first-person, hewing to the genre of a doomed man’s final confession. The sense that we are witnessing a black comedy should come not only from the course of the action and the situations it creates, but also from the peculiar language that defines the narrator/voiceover in an odd way.

I was strongly influenced by James Cain, his “Double Indemnity” (1936) and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1934.) He is one of the creators of this type of noir novel, in which the narrator is not a detective describing his investigation of a strange case, but the criminal, who in the final hour of his life confesses to his crimes.

Camus admits that he had consciously followed precisely this “American formula” when writing “The Stranger” (1942.) What’s more, in 1943 the great Italian director Visconti made his cinematic debut with a film adaptation of “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” This debut marked the beginning of neo-realism in European film. The crude sentimentalism, the unchecked powers of instinct and society’s criminal underbelly became major themes in cinema.

Death breathes down the ironist’s neck. Our antihero is a street ironist, so he must meet his end in order for the irony to transform into verbal agony, into some kind of prickly nostalgia for the fact that at every moment of his life, a person parts from himself with a wink and so on until the fatal one.

So, Moth is freed on parole after spending time in prison on wrongful conviction. All hell breaks loose as soon as he walks out of jail. His frantic chase after the truth about a heist that went wrong and the missing diamond draws the map of a diabolical totalitarian city. The story ends inside the gravediggers' trailer where all secrets are revealed.

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ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS

The novel and the movie “Zift” have different endings. At the end of the movie the missing diamond is found. It turns out that it has been always kept inside the lump of zift (pure asphalt) that the protagonist carries in his pocket. At the end of the movie, he takes it out, swallows it, rolls over and dies. Moth pretends to chase after something that he actually carries at all times. By doing that, he twists and turns the love triangle, provoking the antagonist. In fact, the English version of the novel adopts the movie ending with all the necessary internal adjustments of the plot. This ending is a lot more ironic.

What calls for such change is the plot-driven visual fabric of cinema -- the spectacle, as opposed to the written narrative of the literary text. The medium is demonstratively different and demands different approach.

The novel methodically emphasized the fact that what we read is a revealing confession of grave sins and crimes written in the face of death. The confessor’s clarity of mind is increasingly devastated by the deadly poison that he knows will finish him off soon. Thus, not the mystery surrounding a missing diamond carries the final point, but the fact of writing as a score of dying. A doomed man is scratching confession on paper hoping to outrun death and deliver the whole truth. Doom is markedly present in the very process of writing, page after page, and score after score until the last one when death seals the document forever. The novel ends as there is nothing more to read.

Contrastingly, the protagonist in the movie narrates speaking (not writing) his confession almost from his grave, a typical noir VO. The diamond needs to be produced at the end of the movie, just like the magician pulls a rabbit out of an empty hat and the viewer gasps of surprise. Admittedly, in the movie the diamond’s mystery drives the plot forward and creates suspense. The viewer develops a burning desire to finally see the (goddamn) diamond. The eyes demand satisfaction. Undoubtedly, the diamond will be fed to those thirsty eyes, so they can finally rest. The movie ends as there is nothing more to watch.

ZINCOGRAPH: SOCIALIST PSYCHO-THRILLER

Just like “Zift,” “Zincograph” is a genre-inspired novel/film. This time by a different genre that is historically related to noir. In the 1950s, the psycho-thriller essentially killed off noir. At the time, Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith reworked the crime drama, changing the nature and the origin of the crime impulse.

The catalyst of crime is no longer the social distress and the call of the asphalt jungle, but the unhinged psyche – the neuroticism and psychopathology of the everyday life. What drives the

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES crime is not social degradation and the need to satisfy the femme fatale, but mental derangement, manic-depression.

Crime arises not from the dregs of society, but from the dregs of the soul. The man’s fate is sealed not by poverty and treacherous women, but by a deranged impulse. The criminal is not a wisecracking guttersnipe and street philosopher, but a murderously inventive pervert.

Film noir, being heavily influenced by German expressionism, exteriorizes man’s criminal nature, unpacking it in space, deploying the horror right into the set. Expressionistic film sets are not designed to recreate objective spatial forms, but rather to exteriorize the somnambular interiors of the criminal mind. They are markedly figurative -- artificial, blueprinted and geometric. I mean the sinister black-and-white, diabolically ramshackle, infernally angular and yet unmistakably plywood sets, where man lurks as the most deadly predator in all creation.

These sets expose human criminal nature. They project the killer’s intimate world on larger scale – showing the firm geometry of his evil imagination – evil, but not sick. Hell is in the social landscape, while the characters are beasts from “the asphalt jungle.”

Conversely, the psycho-thriller represents a radical interiorization of the roots of criminality. It puts hell back into the human soul. Monstrous is the psyche, not the dregs of society. Phobias, manias, and mental disturbances become the driving force for the action, rather than a doomed male striving for a better life with a fatal female – better life understood as achieving personal happiness on the basis of material wealth gained through a crime.

In the psycho-thriller, the murder has no social or rational justification. It shows no externally or rationally traceable cause. It stems from some encapsulated pathology within the soul, from some accumulation of demonic force, which explodes at some unknown moment, at some unknown place, and the demon flashes its face.

The action is driven not by a clever plan to swipe a diamond, which will bring happiness to a sane, skillful and glib villain, but from fantasies of murder and violence that will bring temporary solace to the murderous instincts of a rapacious soul, who inhabits an ostensibly pleasant and well-mannered world – the world of full-color horror.

THE CONSPIRATORIAL IMAGINATION

Using artistic devices, “Zincograph” attempts to reconstruct common popular ideas and theories about Bulgarian history, as well as origins of mysterious public and private affairs, long-held Bulgarian secrets, and national conspiracy theories.

The impossibility of grasping the truth as a whole, but only in parts which turn out to be lies, is at the heart of the plot. The whole truth about who we are and why we are what we are

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES disintegrates into shared lies -- a snarled ball of lies and fabrications. A lie has long legs. It goes far.

The story told in “Zincograph” involves broad, objectively existing, deeply contradictory discourses regarding Bulgarian fortunes and misfortunes that I have researched extensively – creeping rumors about past events and personae, gossip, twisted facts, proven falsifications, archival evidence, conflicting historical interpretations, outright lies, half-truths, presumptions, complete fabrications, sick fantasies, good humor, anecdotes and Lord knows what else.

The protagonist is completely fictional – a seductive impostor and deadly chameleon, he is based on literary prototypes, not on real people. He is an enterprising conformist, for whom the absurd system of denunciations and informants becomes a source of thrills, power, and material gain both before and after the fall of communism.

The movie “The Color of the Chameleon” based on the novel “Zincograph” is about a maniacal police informant. After being dismissed, he creates his own phantom secret-police department. He recruits a group of unsuspecting intellectuals to spy on each other and after the fall of communism uses his secret archive to wreak havoc on the government.

The movie offers a paradoxical twist in the standard representation of totalitarianism as a society of victims and victimizers. This is a story without innocents. Secret policing reveals its dark nature not only in its nauseating cruelties, but most suggestively in its deviant pleasures.

Glitch: The systems of secret-police control crashes not because of organized opposition, but because of random agents who enterprisingly make use of it and fanatically serve it.

PLOTTING AGAINST CHAOS IMPOSSIBLE

Personally, I am very skeptical of conspiracy theories. Such theories construct paranoid and meticulously crafted explanations of exceptionally complex phenomena, in which the universal conspiratorial connection is about as likely as the successful construction of an eternal engine.

These theories don’t take into account the friction of material chaos, which is the more stable state. Chaos persists in every dynamic system. The more universal a conspiracy is the more chaotic, uncontrollable and disorderly it is. Every additional order of magnitude adds to the chaos factor. Just as it is impossible to execute the perfect crime, it is likewise impossible to carry out the perfect conspiracy. Any such scheme involves players who interact somewhat rationally, somewhat irrationally, somewhat cold-bloodedly, somewhat passionately – players, who in striving to set things in order, end up knocking them about. A conspiracy against chaos is impossible. Chaos ironically persists in any actual order.

Death makes people better – more bearable for the living. Death ironically persists in Life.

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MATTHEW KNEALE

THE USES AND PERILS OF HISTORICAL FICTION Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 29 May – 2 June, 2014 I really wasn’t sure what to say in this talk today. The theme of the festival is, of course, historical fiction. I’ve written some, it is true, but did I have anything useful to say on the subject? Milena [Deleva] said I should concentrate on the craft of writing it. I tried to think what I know.

To date I have a written seven books. My most recent was a non- fiction history of belief, which looked religious and political beliefs from 30,000 years ago to the present day. I’ve also written a Biography volume of short stories, three contemporary novels, and two Мatthew Kneale wrote two historical novels. I’m currently working on a further historical novels set in the nineteenth century. Sweet Thames (1992) novel. What have I learned over the years? Most of all I’ve learned tells the story of an enlightened London drainage that writing historical fiction is hard. engineer whose wife mysteriously vanishes during a First there’s research. One or two writers, such as Jim Crace, have cholera epidemic. English Passengers (2000) has twenty managed to write historical novels without doing any research at different narrators and follows a religious-scientific all, but they are unusual. Most writers, myself included, see it as expedition seeking to find the unavoidable. I enjoy doing research. I find it the easiest and most Garden of Eden in Tasmania, Australia, where the enjoyable part of the process. If anything I like it too much. I find it aboriginal people struggle to survive the British onslaught. hard to stop. Problems begin when I finally do. As a lover of history Kneale’s collection of short stories, Small Crimes in an Age I find almost everything I discover fascinating. I want to relay every of Abundance (2005) is set all drop of it to the world. I want to put it all in. It is a very bad across the globe, looking at the lives of people trying to survive impulse. Novels make poor history textbooks. and do the right thing, sometimes managing neither. A novel should not be structured around your research. The This was followed by a novel, When We Were Romans research has to be broken down and realigned around story and (2007) which is told from the point of view of a nine-year- characters. This can be a protracted process. When writing English old, Laurence, whose mother Passengers, the book that has brought me here, as it has just been inexplicably decides that she and her family must flee published in Bulgarian, I spent a little over a year doing research. I England to Rome, where she lived many years before. visited and read about Tasmania and the Isle of Man, where important parts of the book were set. I read about Tasmanian Aboriginals, their culture, their languages, and the terrible things that were done to them by the British. I read about the cruelty of Australian convict settlements. I read about Nineteenth Century sailing ships, about Manx smugglers and the strange dialect that the Manx spoke, that mixed English with their own Celtic language. I learned about the revolution in guns that

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES occurred in the 1850s, that gave the West a dangerous of sense of its own superiority. I learned about the racial supremacist ideas that, interestingly, appeared at the same time.

Having spent a year on research, I then spent two years trying to work out what to do with it all. It was a frustrating time. Again and again I would try and begin the novel, then stop, abandon it as quite impossible, only to be lured back. I tried writing it in different ways. I’d begin it in England, in Tasmania, on the Isle of Man. I’d begin it in the past, in the present. Nothing worked. I was living in Oxford at the time and I would go for long bicycle rides to try and clear my head, occasionally stopping to get off and kick the bicycle.

The trouble was that everything seemed too obvious. The Aboriginals were good, the Manx were tricky, the British were bad, and British racial theorists were worse. Where was the fun in that? Finally I discovered that some Victorian British were very interested in finding the real locations of Biblical sites. On the very same day I also came across two famous British explorers who took part in an expedition to Africa. Ideologically opposed in every way, they nearly murdered one another in an argument, though it was not about politics or religion, but about a pillow.

What, I wondered, if the novel featured a religious expedition to find the Garden of Eden in Tasmania? That included one of the new racial theorists. And which ended up commissioning a Manx smuggling ship? Finally I had something that seemed unpredictable, and wholly disconnected with the book’s main themes. Most of all I had something that seemed funny. I needed to do a little more research but not much. I discovered I’d finally cracked the puzzle. I’d tamed my research. For weeks I woke up with a broad smile on my face, amazed that I was able to write this impossible book after all.

But even after research is brought under control, historical fiction has further potential pitfalls. One is how to get facts across to your readers without seeming to lecture them. As I said, novels make bad textbooks. This is a problem with any work of fiction but it’s worse in one set in the past. There is so much information you need to convey. Matters are made even more difficult if, as I did, you choose to tell your story entirely through the voices of your characters. In English Passengers I ended up with about twenty of them, including British colonialists and convicts, Manx smugglers and Tasmanian Aboriginals.

Why on earth, you might ask, would you choose to make life so difficult for yourself? If you employ a traditional, third person narrative, you can step back and explain what’s going on. But your characters’ thoughts and utterances will only ring true if they explain nothing at all. Why would they? People are oblivious to the obvious. They don’t think, ‘I’ll take the Tube, the world’s first urban underground railway system’. They think, ‘where’s my damn Oyster Card.’

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Yet it is possible to write a historical novel told only through characters’ voices. It just has to be done with care. You have to hold up all your characters’ thoughts and statements up to the light and test them. Preferably a good few times. If they seem at all unconvincing, or shoved in, then cut them out and try again. In some cases a key nugget of information may have to wait its turn, till a moment comes when you believe a character would happen think about it.

Though it’s harder, writing in this way has advantages. It can give prose an extra power, as characters seem to look out directly from the page to address to the reader. Dramatic irony can be richer, too, as we hear characters contradict one another, misunderstand one another, or just lie. If the novel has some kind of agenda, as novels usually do, then there is less danger that the reader will get annoyed, or feel lectured to, because they will feel they are making their own decisions, choosing which voices they take seriously.

Something else that has to be handled with great care in historical fiction is dialogue. All dialogue is by necessity an approximation. It is more concentrated than the wandering, often interminable things people actually say. Dialogue set in the past is even more of an approximation. It may not even be in the language in which it would have been spoken. It requires delicate judgement, and writing it is a little like walking a tightrope. Lean too far one way and the result will be stilted and archaic, but lean too far the other way and you will have painfully anachronistic modernisms. Again, I would say the only answer is careful examination of what you’ve written. Hold up each statement to the light and check it till it seems acceptable.

Finally there is the dilemma of what might be termed the morality gap. Some moral imperatives, such theft or murder, are happily universal but most are not. Across the ages morals have constantly changed. If you ever found conversations with your parents or grandparents a little awkward at times, as their assumptions were different from your own, think how it would be if you were chatting with somebody from ten or twenty generations back. Somebody from a time when sexism, racism and religious hatred were widely approved of. Along with littering, animal cruelty and a suspicion that many of one’s neighbours were witches.

This is only a problem because readers expect to have characters they can identify with. A sexist, racist donkey-beater is unlikely to carry them through many pages. Some writers, faced with this dilemma, resort to desperate measures. They cheat. Into the distant past they throw a character with impeccably modern views, together with an unshakeable conviction that they are right and the bigots and donkey beaters around them are wrong. I feel this is a mistake. It will not ring true. It is also a shame. Part of the joy of writing about the past is to show what it was really like. Colour your portrait too much with the present and you will throw away its richness. You have to let the past be what it was.

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Besides, it is not as if nobody was likeable a few centuries back. Audiences today continue to identify with the characters of the plays of Shakespeare, Plautus, Euripides and Aristophanes. If one has a character who believes his neighours are witches, that does not mean he or she cannot be likeable. In fact I would say they will make a far more interesting subject if they are likeable.

If historical fiction is so hard, is it really worth the trouble? There have been many who have suggested it is not. In Britain during the era of the Bloomsbury Group, most leading writers considered historical fiction to be beneath contempt. In the last few decades views have changed greatly, and these days it is hard to think of a major fiction writer who has not had a try at writing it, from Ian McEwan to Peter Carey, and from Kazuo Ishiguro to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yet old prejudices linger still. Look carefully at reviews and one can often detect a faint whiff of snobbish disapproval.

I used to worry that the critics were right, and wonder if one should leave the past to those who had lived in it, but these questions do not bother me so much now. This is thanks to a discovery I made when researching my book on the history of belief. It concerned imagination. I was fascinated to learn that imagination lies at the very heart of what makes us human. It is well known that we have remarkable skills in language, tool-making and our ability to throw rocks and spears accurately. Less well known is that we have a unique ability to envisage what other people are thinking, and to imagine the world through their eyes. Call it empathy, or intuition.

The scientific term for this is Theory of Mind. In the last few decades it has become a hot topic for evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and also students of literature. Put simply we have it in sackfuls. Every waking moment of our day, whether we mean to or not, we imagine other people’s thinking. We are constantly trying to guess others’ feelings towards ourselves, and theorize why they act towards us as do.

We can hold five or six layers of points of view in our heads all at once. A good example is a bedroom farce. Members of the audience can keep in their mind, simultaneously, the point of view of the wife, of her unfortunate husband, of her lover under the bed, and of her second lover who, unknown to the first, is hiding in the bathroom. Plus the viewpoint of the author. And, finally, there is the members of the audience’s awareness of themselves, deciding what they think of the play. By contrast our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobo apes, struggle to see any viewpoint outside their own.

It is easy to guess why we became so specialized in this skill. It would have been key to our ancestors’ survival. In hunter-gatherer societies violence was common. Having a sound grasp of Theory of Mind would have helped fend off danger from our fellow humans. It would have allowed us to make friendships and win others’ help, to feed and protect ourselves. And, no less

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES crucially, to feed and protect our children. It would have been a case of survival of the most intuitive.

Learning about Theory of Mind I became convinced that it had played a huge part in the first development of religious belief. It made sense that, tens of thousands of years ago, our extraordinary specialization led us to start detecting humanlike personalities even outside the world of humans. We saw them in the animals we hunted, in the sky, in brooks we drank water from and in trees that gave us food and shade. So it was, I believe, that we invented our very first gods.

But there is also something else that Theory of Mind is widely thought to have been responsible for. It is not chance that the best way of explaining it is with a bedroom farce. Evolutionary biologists believe that the reason we are so fascinated by stories is because they give us a way of practicing our skills in Theory of Mind. Like snooker or tennis for hand-to-eye movements, stories are games in which we can practice following others’ points of view. If this sounds far- fetched, think which parts of a drama we tend to find the most entertaining. They are frequently the scenes filled with dramatic irony, when some characters know more than others and we know more than any of them. The scenes that play games with theory of Mind.

This implies that every genre has equal validity. Fantasy, horror, romance, detective fiction, science fiction and historical fiction can all play interesting games with characters’ points of view. All need to create convincingly drawn characters, and intriguing interplay between them. Only if they do so will readers respond to the emotions that the story tries to convey. Any genre can be a classic and has probably done so. As a few examples, for a mystery story, one could offer Bleak House or the Brothers Karamazov. For terror, what of the Turn of the Screw? For romantic fiction, Pride and Prejudice?

Historical fiction also has other uses aside from as an arena for Theory of Mind. It can inform. Many people would never think of picking up a non-fiction history book but will happily read a historical novel. The past seems more tempting when sweetened with a story. Historical fiction also plays its part in our endless reassessing of the past. In some ways it is as much about the present as the past. We pick moments from history because they reflect modern concerns. This does not mean it should cheat, but it can represent the past in a truthful way that has not been done before. So historical fiction forms a small part in that great, unending project: our constantly shifting understanding of ourselves and our world.

Historical fiction can be enlightening for its authors as well as its readers. It certainly was for me. When I began writing English Passengers I was excited to have discovered what seemed an important yet neglected subject, but it was a distant excitement. That changed. As I wrote the

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES book, seeing the world through the eyes of brutal British settlers, blind British officials, an evil British racist, tricky but humane Manx smugglers, and Tasmanian Aboriginals, watching their world being stolen around them, I became increasingly angry. My father was from the Isle of Man, but I was brought up in London and I had hardly been to the island except when I went to do research. Now, though, walking through the streets of Oxford, I began to think of myself as a Manxman surrounded by evil English. I needed to distance myself from my own origins, for my own sense of sanity.

It was a fairly short-lived phenomenon. I am now quite willing to feel English again. But I feel I understand my homeland better, good and bad.

And what do I think about historical fiction? Something I learned when researching my book on belief was that it has been around a long time. The earliest known literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, composed in Mesopotamia some 4,000 years ago, is historical fiction. So are all the first classics, from Homer and the Bhagavita to Beowulf, and from the Norse Sagas to the legends of King Arthur. Likewise the Greek Tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles. Also Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Henry the Fifth, Macbeth and, last but not least, Hamlet. And, more recently, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. All in all, I feel I am continuing a long-established and honourable tradition.

So I’ve come to the end of my talk today. Before I finish I’d like to do a short reading, from English Passengers. Here are excerpts from three of those voices, who are oblivious to the obvious and cannot explain anything. First Illiam Quillian Kewley, the captain of the Manx smuggling ship Sincerity, who, for reasons to complex to go into here, unhappily finds himself conveying to Tasmania a religious expedition to find the Garden of Eden

(From 1st – 2nd page of chapter 3)

So here they were, strutting about the ship as if they owned it. Three passengers. Worse, Englishmen all of them. I can’t say I was happy about the arrangement. I dare say I’d expected the Sincerity to see a few humiliations in her time - to be nibbled by barnacles, shat on by gulls, and poked and prodded by customs men - but never, not once, did I think she’d be reduced to the shame of passengers.

Strange articles of passengers they were, too. Truly, you never did see such a clever and pestful trio as these, all disagreeing with themselves and taking their great clever brains for a little stroll about the deck. I dare say it was hardly a surprise they were odds, mind, seeing as their quest was to discover themselves the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden! As if it couldn’t just be left in the Bible where it belonged. They weren’t even looking to find it in any sensible spot, but on some rotten island at the very ends of the earth, called Van Dieman’s Land, or Tasmania, as it

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES couldn’t make up its mind. It was there, and all the way back, too, that we were supposed to carrying the three snots. A whole year of Englishmen. What a thought that was.

Worst was mealtimes, when I had to suffer them in them in the dining cabin, with all their genteel little smirks and thankyous and I wonder if you could you pass the salt, captain? The hardest to take was that vicar, Reverend Wilson, who was a thin, twittering sort of body, with a toothy smile that sat on his face all the time, like he never tired of himself. Truly, you never met a body so rich in his own importance, and watching him smirk and chew at his dinner it was hard not to think what a surprise he’d give to the fishes if he accidentally got dropped over the side.

Next the English vicar himself: the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, who has strong views concerning his fellow passengers, the lazy botanist Renshaw, and the surgeon, Dr Potter.

(From Chapter 5, Section 2, Rev Wilson, 4th page)

While I am never someone to judge others with undue harshness, and it is my greatest delight to find goodness in my fellow men, I confess found my patience increasingly strained. Though Renshaw had a tiny cabin of his own, the wooden partition that divided this from ours was of such poor construction that there were large gaps between the timbers, and one could hear his every movement, while frequently during the night I would be disturbed by the sound of his fidgeting with his person in some curious, twitching way, quite as if he had some ailment. Dr Potter was more distracting still, and would insist on keeping a light burning late into the night so he could scribble notes in his notebook with that infuriatingly scratching quill. “I’ll just be another moment, vicar,” was his ever repeated cry when I requested, with all the gentleness I could muster, that he cease.

I did my best to regard the man charitably, despite his many provocations. When he insisted on draping his clothes, that he had just had washed, around the edge of his bunk, so they dripped seawater directly onto my own cot, leaving large damp places, I told myself this was not the result not of some lawless nature, but only of his having been brought up without the advantage of fine manners. I even thought to help him improve himself, drawing up a few simple rules with regard to domestic matters, which I then placed in written form on the wall just above his own berth, so he might observe them with convenience. One might have supposed he would welcome such a kindness, but no, he instead showed a maddening forgetfulness as to my little suggestions - a forgetfulness so pronounced that I could not help but doubt its sincerity - while he would insist on referring to them as the ‘the parson’s laws’, in a tone of voice that was little less than offensive.

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Finally I’d like to read from the surgeon, Doctor Thomas Potter, who has an agenda of his own, as a collector of bones to support his theories of racial superiority. Which seem to be becoming strongly shaped by his opinions of his fellow passengers.

(From Chapter 5, Section 3, Dr Potter, 2nd page)

The Norman (instance: priesthood, aristocracy and monarchy of England) is similar in physique to the Saxon, though on close examination he will be found to be slighter and altogether lacking in latter’s rugged hardiness. His facial shape is typically long and narrow, indicating arrogance.

The character of the Norman is one of decline. He has ever relied on inherited advantage, a state of affairs dating back to the lucky accident of conquest. Likewise he is prone to weaknesses from which sturdier types would not suffer (instance: sea sickness).

The morality of the Norman is poor, being typified by concealed selfishness. His dominating characteristic is cunning. In conclusion, the Norman place is hardly higher than the Celt within the European Division. The development of Norman embryo can be assumed to be arrested after thirty-seven weeks, or two weeks fewer than the Saxon. The Norman’s enduring control of that triple curse of Aristocracy, Priesthood and Monarchy can be ascribed not to his ability but to the great abhorrence, among his Saxon subjects, of any form of disorder.

So ends my talk today. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you very much for coming and listening.

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES

VLADIMIR ZAREV

HISTORY IN THE WRITER’S PERSONAL WORLD Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 29 May – 2 June, 2014

Dear friends and colleagues,

It is every writer’s calling and innermost desire to create his or her own recognizable, yet unique personal world. The more significant the writer, the more magnificent and distinctive his world is, the more inexhaustible and unattainably singular it is. In my youth, I believed that artistic creation was a terrible sin, because God is the Image and we are his Likeness, He is the Creator, while we are merely His creations. Back then, I considered writing, the creation Biography of a world different from the visible, divine one, to be a heresy, Vladimir Zarev, born in Sofia since just as heresies describe God in a different way, so, too, does in 1947, is a leading Bulgarian contemporary the writer describe the real world in a different and hence sinful writer of fiction. He graduated from Sofia way. In other words, through this act of vanity, the writer tries to University with a degree in make himself commensurate to God. With the passing years I have Bulgarian language studies. He is the author of the book come to realize that not every heresy blasphemes and offends God, trilogy Genesis (1978), The Exit (1983), The Choice but rather complements and expands Him within human (1985) [The Laws(2012)], as consciousness. We are in no condition to know the essence of God, well as the novels: The Day of Impatience (1977), The just as the ant crawling over our feet is in no condition to know Trial (novella, 1984), The Hound (1987), The Hound even the physical – to say nothing of the spiritual and moral – Versus the Hound (1990), significance of man. We can only describe our ideas about God, or Annum Dei 1850 (1988), Ruin (2003), Father Bogomil more precisely, we can describe our ideas not about His essence, and the Perfection of Fear (2004), and Worlds (2008). but about His form. In this way, I reached the insight that every Vladimir Zarev is the editor- heresy is a question directed at God, through a question directed at in-chief of the prestigious Bulgarian literary magazine His form, and what’s more, that every writer is an indisputable Sǎvremennik (Contemporary). heretic who further invents and creates the visible world, while also enhancing the invention and creation of man. Man’s infiniteness. He does this with the help of reason’s most awe-inspiring achievement, with the help of the Word, which is both the spirit and the flesh of the literary work.

Years ago, an academic report appeared, which we immediately reprinted in the journal Suvremennik (Contemporary), of which I am the editor-in-chief. The report claimed that language and the genetic code are built according to one and the same laws. This sheds light on and gives meaning to what is written in that most ancient of annals, the Bible: “In the beginning

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES was the Word.” In fact, this means that God first gave the genetic laws according to which life on earth arose. Before creating the Word, God was boundlessness and existence; after he created the Word, He took on the characteristics of primordialness, cause and effect, origination and meaning; that is, reality’s simple physical presence acquired spirit, it transformed from existence into Being! Language is the most exquisite instrument for both divine and human spirituality. Through the emotional and semantic intensity of the Word we not only perceive of reality more deeply, but we also change it, because we further enhance its creation and its invention. To every normal person, the world is relatively “open”; even though it has already been “described” by her past experience, it remains forever unfinished. Thus, thanks to language, human life remains boundless. As spurious as it might sound, it is precisely thanks to language that we live as immortal beings, we know with certainty that at some point we will die, but our own inescapable death seems abstract, impossible, and absurd, sunk in the oblivion of language and somehow postponed forever. What’s more: without language, without that constantly streaming internal monologue inside us, imagination would be impossible, and imagination is an astonishingly powerful tool for knowledge, it is part of man’s cognitive instinct. Studying the world and developing and using one’s imagination is not just a matter of intellectual entertainment, it is also an attempt to understand reality by influencing it, by changing it in our consciousness and even distorting it. The unique influence of imagination lies in the fact that even without wanting to, we puzzle out, but also expand the world, the endless being surrounding us. Furthermore… it is precisely with the help of language that God allows us to measure ourselves against Him, to create our own world. Thus, in accordance with our spiritual and intellectual experience, every one of us becomes a Creator, a Demiurge. In some sense, we complement reality with our own ideas, thoughts and experiences born from that reality itself and it is as if we are assisting God by expanding what already exists by loading it with meanings, by defining not the facts and events themselves, but rather their meanings as truly crucial. This is why the fixed, reoccurring objective world, when passed through the imagination and language, becomes truly boundless and turns into something different from reality, into something that belongs to the individual person alone, into something unique. This gives me the courage to state: the world is an endless story, which each one of us tells. Absorbed in our everyday lives, we don’t stop to think about the enormous, the downright staggering significance of language in the lives of each and every one of us. For example, we don’t stop to think that that which has not been named, that which is not clad in the Word, seems to be deprived of the energy of knowledge and for all practical purposes does not exist. It is a hidden, elusive, still latent form of existence, the dozing material world’s hazy dream, the universe’s lifeless slumber. In order to awaken this world that has drifted off into itself, it must be named, and that means

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES transforming universal natural life into one’s own life, into a singular, personal life. That is, words awaken Being and turn it into meaning, and finally into memory and History.

The world we know and in which we are immersed with all our senses, reason and feelings, which we love or reject, in which we struggle to find ourselves, that world is actually language, the Word, which we are able to make sense of and endure. Every sensation (pain, pleasure, revulsion, delight) at the moment it happens is “narrated” in our consciousness with words, we not only think and remember with the help of language, we also feel through it, we make our crucial decisions and develop strategies, building up our own uniqueness. Human consciousness is structured such that it makes us sensitive towards the unknown, it fills us with anxiety and morbid anticipation, we are afraid of the unknown. We always see it as aggressive, it swoops down on us, sweeping away our previous human experience and filling us with a deep sense of uneasiness, with a sense of uncertainty about the future. A child is instinctively afraid of the dark, because it cannot see into its depths; an adult fears death, since he doesn’t know what lies beyond it. One of the ways of overcoming the unknown is through communication. Sharing with others seems to “open up” the world to us, making it more recognizable and predictable. There is one more powerful reason that magnetically pushes us towards communication – human otherness, the difference of other human beings. If we think about it, difference is a form of freedom, which is why I love to say that the madman is irresponsibly, dangerously free, while the dead man is absolutely free. It is precisely the unusualness of others, the mental and spiritual uniqueness of those around us, their sense of difference and freedom that attracts us. Shared and experienced otherness is part of our own desire to achieve difference, hence it also becomes part of our personal freedom. This drive to share experience is one of the most powerful instincts that transforms us into reasoning, creative creatures. The Word makes it possible for us to communicate, it is participation and sharing, but even when we are silent and left alone with ourselves, an endless and splendid monologue still continues inside us; that is, when we are silent, we are speaking to ourselves. Children also play with the help of language, it is impossible to think up a game beyond language; reason’s greatest achievements – difference and human freedom – come about through and in the Word. The homeland, for example, does not exist within some sentimental memory or in some scabbed-over landscape beautified by our own internal sorrow, it is in language. The true homeland, that which evokes unbearable nostalgia when we leave it, lies in the lost closeness between people, hence it is in communication and sharing. The Word is not simply a form of communication, it is not even the only possible form of thought, it is something far more significant and voluminous, it is a way of being. The language of great writers is a wonderful experience, but it is also a form of expanded “wakefulness.” When reading them, you live out dozens and hundreds of lives. In contrast, the complete vulgarization – which has been deluging us on all sides in recent years and which profanes language – makes

SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES life impoverished. For example, the media use no more than 400 words, young people communicate with 300 or so words, thus whatever might happen to them, no matter how ostensibly interesting their everyday experiences might seem, their lives will remain trifling and insignificant. With our gutlessness, we have branded several generations of Bulgarians, dooming them to spiritual asininity and a primitive existence. I will finish this apotheosis about the Word with perhaps its most majestic quality – in and of itself, it is the truest, most enduring form of memory. In stories, legends, fairy tales, and most of all in the written word, that is, in fiction, literature contains the personal human memory, national memory and – at the risk of sounding exaggerated – planetary memory. In its essence, the written Word is humanity’s emotional memory and hence its deepest form of memory, it traces the arduous and difficult path of civilization’s development.

Thus far, I have tried to share with you two of the most important things that make us into writers. Namely that each one of us must construct and create his differing, inimitable and unique world, and second that this must be achieved through the ecstasy of the Word, through the energy and richness of the Word, through one’s personal style and personal words, through one’s unique literary language, because only in this way can we transform our observations, our human experience, our imaginative ideas and visions into something that interests and moves others, into something truly lasting: into memory.

Since the topic today concerns history in literature, let us return to it. There is no doubt that individual, national and planetary history pervades literature and is an invariable part of literary narrative. I would be glad to discuss with you how historical realities saturate the works of Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann and Faulkner, great writers to whom I pay homage and consider my teachers, but the parameters previously set for this discussion require that I share with you my own humble experience. I have written two purely historical novels “Anno 1850” and “The Priest Bogomil and the Perfection of Fear.” In the early 1980s, I happened to learn about a Bulgarian uprising against Turkish repression that had broken out in the Vidin vilayet in the year 1850. In terms of its scope, the brutality with which it was suppressed, and as an expression of national enthusiasm it does not pale in comparison to the more famous April Uprising of 1876, but rather surpasses it in scale – we must also note that it broke out a quarter-century earlier. It was then that I asked myself why nothing was known about this great national event, why it hadn’t left a trace, not even a scratch on the national memory. And I reached the only possible answer: because it had not been written about, the great Bulgarian writers Zahari Stoyanov and Ivan Vazov were not there to witness it, it had not been preserved through and within the Word. In my novel Anno 1850, the main character is a humble monk, Father Ioan, who continuously writes down what he has seen and experienced, which is, in fact, the preparations for the uprising. After

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES it was bloodily stamped out, the clever vali or governor of the Vidim Fortress, Rashid Bey, not only refrains from executing the uprising’s organizers, he rewards them and sends them to the Sultan in Istanbul. “There’s only one thing I ask,” he says, “give me what you have written.” He burns Father Ioan’s manuscript, chops off his hands and cuts out his tongue – thus punishing the crushed rebellion in the most terrible way… with silence and oblivion, because in truth its relegation to oblivion spells the uprising’s true defeat. “The Priest Bogomil and the Perfection of Fear” is a postmodern work, a game-novel consisting of four hagiographies or saint’s lives. The first three take place in the year 957 in Bulgaria and their main character is the great heretic Bogomil. The plot and situations in these three stories ostensibly repeat themselves, but the priest Bogomil is so different and contradictory that each subsequent hagiography contradicts his previous image, hence building it up. In the first version, the priest Bogomil is an instinctive philosopher and unbelievable hedonist, recalling Rasputin to some extent; in the second he tries to bring about human happiness through absolute equality, that is, through constant, sinister violence, distantly recalling Stalin; while in the third, he appears as a truly humble spiritual Teacher. The fourth tale takes place in 1327 in the monastery brilliantly described by Umberto Eco in his novel “The Name of the Rose”; one of the main characters is Umberto Eco of Bologna himself, who plays the role of an Inquisitor. A Cathar agent was planted in the monastery as a novice already as a young child – as you know, the Albigenses in France and the Cathars in Italy are the heirs and adherents of Bogomilist teachings, so he had been sent to the monastery on a mission to penetrate the mysteries of the Library and there, amidst its lofty secrecy, to discover those three hagiographies from 957, the copies of which have been destroyed by the Inquisition, since according to legend they preserve the original source of the Cathars’ heretical belief system. This uncover Cathar agent is Nicholas of Concorenzo, the keeper of the monastery’s reliquaries. The inquisitor Umberto Eco also hopes to make his way into the library and there to find Aristotle’s lost manuscript on comedy, hence their interests coincide. After a series of interconnected events and the depraved deaths of several monks – because other monks are also trying to find Aristotle’s heretical text – the two manage to slip into the Library and find themselves in the secret room of Blind Jorge, where the most heretical scrolls are kept. There Nicholas finally finds the three versions of Bogomil’s life story. He himself sets fire to the Library, since he is convinced that not Knowledge, but Faith is the most important and redeeming thing capable of exalting human existence. Later, when the whole monastery has been reduced to ashes, Nicholas reads the three lives and at first is confused and stunned, but their contradictoriness moves him to reflect. The staggering incompatibility of the three biographies strangely exalts him, because he concludes that the priest Bogomil, as described in the saint’s lives is simply inconceivable, hence he must not have existed. “Then I am the priest Bogomil!” the erstwhile keeper of reliquaries concludes and sets off towards the Old Homeland, towards

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Bulgaria, to restore, spread and exalt the true faith. Of course, the plots, characters and especially the messages of these novels are far more complicated than described here.

Several years ago, I wrote two novels, Ruin and Worlds, which are very important to me. Both are completely contemporary and at first glance seem to have nothing to do with history. In fact, in my humble opinion, they have become testimonials to the painful, hopelessly criminal transition to democracy here in Bulgaria. German literary criticism called Ruin “the novel about the transition in all of Eastern Europe.” More than forty reviews of the novel appeared in the German press; they underscored the fact that critics had expected such a book to be written in Germany, in the Czech Republic, in Hungary or Poland, yet it had appeared in Bulgaria. In Ruin, and to a certain extent in Worlds as well, I describe how after the democratic changes in 1989, Bulgaria was plundered and sucked dry, how the fruit of millions of people’s labor was stolen, made meaningless and most importantly, how the former communist nomenclature and secret police have attempted to transform their political power into economic power – and by-and- large have succeeded. How the police and the judicial system were deliberately and criminally first paralyzed, then finally corrupted; in short, how the whole nation’s “immune system” was trampled and bought off. I also describe how the intelligent, and most importantly, honest people here in Bulgaria began to identify with idiots, while scammers, out-and-out low-lives and criminals were lit up by the spotlight of media attention and transformed into the heroes of our time. Democracy has one enormous drawback – the fact that society’s problems are not solved by its elite, by its inspired, capable and competent members, but by the simple majority. The enlightened person has one vote, and the uneducated bumpkin also has one vote. This is why the primitive, vulgar taste championed by mafiosos, the nouveau riche, crooks, Playboy bunnies and chalga singers often predominates in the Bulgarian media and public space. Here I’d like to mention one more thing… In his magnificent dialogues about the state, Plato defines three possible forms of government – tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. Clearly democracy is the most positive and productive form of government, but when the rules are not kept clear and transparent, when the laws do not apply to everyone equally, democracy is the most easily corrupted form and descends into anarchy. I claim that even now, we do not live in a true democracy, but in a state of constant, semi-legal and devastating anarchy, which was deliberately and intentionally created. The plots, characters, and messages – in short, the whole intellectual effort put into those two contemporary novels – was influenced and pervaded by the sweeping historical events that we have experienced over the last twenty years.

And now we’ve come to my most important and decidedly psychological, yet also historical novels – namely the trilogy consisting of Genesis, Exodus and The Law, an epic family saga telling the story of the Vulchev clan spanning 120 years of national historical time and spread over

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES more than 2,700 pages. The action in Genesis begins in the year 1890 in the provincial town of Vidin and continues until September 9, 1944, the date of the communist coup. The second part, Exodus, begins on September 9 and continues through Gorbachev’s perestroika; that is, it covers the whole historical period of socialism. The third volume opens with the first painful symptoms of transition in early 1989 and ends with Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union. The trilogy was published in German in hardcover by the prestigious publishing house Hanser, and last year the rights to the three novels were purchased by another major German publisher, DTV, and will be reprinted in soft cover, which means formidable print runs. I am proud of this, given the general lack of familiarity with Bulgarian literature in Europe and around the world. And so, the trilogy’s plot takes place in Vidin and Sofia; the Vulchev family hails from Vidin, but most of its members eventually move to the capital. Vidin is a miniature model of the larger world, but I deeply believe that just as the ocean contains droplets within itself, likewise every droplet contains within itself the ocean. Bulgaria is a small country, but its existence is closely tied to, influenced by and interwoven with world history. The world, the objective surrounding world is as the person within it makes it. It is possible for a person to live isolated in the desert, yet for his rich sensitivity and spiritual significance to fill the emptiness around him with life, dramatism and meaning. And conversely, another person living in the middle of Paris or New York could be so nondescript, gray and boring that even his world could look small, empty, and downright insignificant. In this sense, Vidin is indeed a small provincial town, but it is exalted by the magnificent presence of the Danube River, a mobile mirror of life as it flows past, while my characters populate it with tireless energy, with human significance and with strong, unbending passions, with the powerful breath of their desires and dreams. It is an obvious fact that writers are attracted to major historical events, since they affect everyone, the whole nation, sometimes even the whole world, they dramatize life, put people to the test, place them in extreme situations, and change their lives. However, it is important for the writer to realize that these sweeping external events (war, revolution, social upheaval) must be described via the characters’ internal state. The story of one human destiny, powerfully told and filled with suffering, or one interesting detail is more convincing than an external description of horrors and destruction. A while ago a veteran of World War One told me: “You know what war is?... People are constantly dying all around you and you get used to it, but while we were lying there in the trenches for 67 days, I never once took my boots off. Now that’s war.” The great Bulgarian doctor Petar Dimkov, who was then a lieutenant, was leading a company in the Second Balkan War. To save the soldiers from lice, he ordered them all to strip naked and bury their clothes in the ground, where the ants would eat up the nits. During that time, however, the Turks unexpectedly launched an attack, so Lieutenant Dimkov ordered a bayonet charge as a counterattack – one hundred stark naked Bulgarians with bayonets affixed to their rifles jumped

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES out of the trenches, causing the stunned Turkish soldiers to beat a hasty retreat. I’ve described these episodes in Genesis.

What I would really like to share with you, however, is that in the trilogy, I have tried to solve for myself what is likely the most important existential problem we all face: the problem of power. As overblown as it might sound, if we look carefully at man, we will see that all of his strategies for the future, as well as his passing whims, strivings and actions in the present are dictated by and subordinated to his desire to wield power… to wield power at any price over someone, over something, or at least over some skill. All of our rational behavior is an attempt to manifest and impose our power. Note, for instance, that at least half the time when a baby cries, it is not because it is hungry or wet, but rather it wants to attract its mother’s attention and in so doing exercise its power over her. Everything that exists within ourselves strives towards wielding or expressing some kind of power. Even spiritual purity exercises power, while treachery is a form of power as well; love is power, yet hate is power, too, beauty is a form of power, yet ugliness also powerfully attracts us as well, since it acts upon us, repulsing us; money is power, but even destitution and suffering are forms of power – the lame beggar purposely exposes the stump of his missing leg, thus wielding power over us through his misfortune and forcing us to show him charity. Knowledge, human skills and intelligence, as well as ignorance and our most base instincts, everything within us is striving to transform into power. Because of this unabating drive, some people get a dog, others endlessly and needlessly accumulate wealth, yet others become tyrants. This is also the reason the forest ranger in the village of Bistritsa near Sofia, where I spent the summers of my childhood, would go swimming in the river with his cap on – he would throw down his gun, strip naked, but he never took off his peaked cap – because it was a sign of his significance, of his power. This was no ordinary man bathing in the mountain streams, no sir, it was the forest ranger, the overseer, the powers-that-be. Even art itself is a wonderful form of power and if you think about it, every great writer, artist or composer is a charming tyrant. Man’s lust for power is all-encompassing and pervasive… even suicide expresses someone’s final act of power, even if the one committing the act is destructively exercising that power over his very own self. In Genesis, the first part of the trilogy, I am very concerned with what I call the “primitive power of blood,” of instinct, of the internal need to overcome your very self and make your mark, the genetic power of a primitive, patriarchal and vigorous people. It tells of their frantic, sometimes destructive drive to build, to wield power over others and over themselves by constantly constructing and creating.

In Exodus, the second volume, I try to puzzle out the methods and meanings of totalitarian power, that lunacy that swallows up everything around it and turns violence, brutal horrific violence, into the only tool for attaining happiness. I have a character Krum Mariykin who in a

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES most sinister way, waving his whip, forces the villagers to “voluntarily” hand over their fields, livestock and property – their most precious possessions – and to join the collective farm. During this whole scene, Krum, who is sincerely baffled, keeps asking: “Why don’t these people want to be happy?” In fact, the secret of totalitarian power lies in the fact that it tries to instill a sense of guilt in everyone and even more insidiously – it tries to turn everyone into an accomplice. In this way, both the victim, but also the executioner are victimized by the violence, by an ostensibly beautiful ideology, which, however, can never be realized in practice. Socialism constantly promised people a bright future, putting off their lives until the future, yet their present was hard and devoid of justice. An important characteristic of power during that era was the striving, the furious desire of party leaders to believe in their own immortality. Similar to some Roman emperors and other tyrants, they deified themselves and strove to convince us mere mortals that history began and ended with them.

In The Law, the third part of the trilogy, I wanted to describe the power of money. Under socialism, the difference between the rich and the poor was insignificant; of course, people strove after wealth, but it didn’t bring prestige. Close ties to the party elite, connections to the powers-that-be and the job you held were what brought prestige; people with a lot of money were considered suspicious, if not outright crooks or “enemies of the people.” Besides, back then you couldn’t do anything with your money, even if you had it – you couldn’t build a factory, open up a store, a restaurant or a hotel, or even buy an apartment or a car (people waited decades even for apartments in panel-block complexes!). You couldn’t travel the world freely, while the only bank was the State Savings Bank which paid a whopping one percent interest. After the democratic changes in Bulgaria, money suddenly took on life-altering, unfathomable, intolerable significance, becoming the supreme value. People were suddenly blinded by the revelation that money brings freedom, ineffable freedom, since it furthers difference… and it brings power, crushing, all-pervasive power to the point that those who had it were untouchable, self-declared gods. And so people en masse began to believe that they could miraculously become millionaires, and in the first years of democracy several million new “companies” sprang up like mushrooms, and quite a few uneducated, primitive, yet brazen and arrogant crooks turned into well-respected entrepreneurs and businessmen. For me as a writer, I was interested in analyzing this strange new type of self-deification, the way most of them seemed to embrace the faulty conviction so typical of parvenus that money, especially quick, easy, dirty money in large amounts, brings immortality. You’ll probably want to ask: is the problem of power solvable? I’ve pondered this question, and from the personal point of view it probably is solvable, or at least seems to be so – and such a solution could come about through the difficult yet redeeming path of humility or smirenie. Note that I don’t use the related Bulgarian word primirenie, or resignation, because resignation implies something imposed on us from the outside, and we are

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES simply forced to accept it, whereas repentance and humility are a dramatic internal choice, they are a rejection of something imposed from the inside. As you surely know, Eastern philosophers discuss humility in detail – especially Taoism and Buddhism. From the civic and social point of view, however, the problem of power appears unsolvable, because even in the most democratic society possible, those who govern are the minority, they are fewer than the governed, and this imbalance leads to constant contradictions and to an inevitable conflict of interests.

I will now read you a short excerpt from my novel, Exodus, which depicts an episode from the phase of nationalization of private industry, an important historical moment in the changes in property ownership that were immediately carried out following the establishment of the socialist regime in Bulgaria. The action takes place in Vidin and involves the factory owner Iliya Vulchev, a crotchety, scowling, man with a thick neck and a searing gaze who despises the weak. Although rich, he doesn’t care about money, instead he is obsessed with the grandeur of construction, driven solely by his instinct to build up and expand his factory for porcelain dinnerware. The scene also involves Gina Vulcheva, his brother’s wife – a vain, ugly, foolish woman they call “the Learned Auntie,” since she is constantly reading the Larousse Encyclopedia so as to quote it and show off her own erudition. Finally, there is also Krum Mariykin, their bastard son, the child resulting from their sinful liaison, which is based not on love but rather on their mutual hatred (a note on his name: Mariykin means “son of Mary,” i.e., as a bastard he has no patronymic as most Bulgarians do); Krum is a hulking man, radiating strength, strangely, painfully handsome, as only the child of extremely ugly parents can be. He has been abandoned and forgotten by Gina Vulcheva, who sent him away to a village, from whence he has returned to Vidin as a fanatical communist. The factory owner Iliya Vulchev has no idea that Krum is his son, but Gina Vulcheva has realized the truth, since in his fanaticism, in his unbendingness, he greatly resembles his father.

When they flung open the door and burst in, Gina first caught sight of Koychev, the school teacher – uncertain, polite, and gangly – then the policeman Blazhe with his loaded rifle and overcoat buttoned up to the top. The group was jostling and shuffling around, as if trying to see how many people could fit in Iliya’s office, new faces were flashing by and disappearing, sinking back, pressed to the wall, until suddenly the crowd swayed, split in two and in the unimaginable effort of the gaping emptiness, Krum appeared. His angelic beauty at once attracted and repelled, he demanded to be observed, insisted on grabbing others’ attention, it thrust itself upon them, his brow and chin resembled a clenched fist. He looked lonesome amidst them all, somehow lethal, armed only with a blotch of red wax and a seal, a puny seal, a round dot, yet visible, heavy and deadly as a mace.

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“Krum, my child…” she said to herself reproachfully and theatrically, “The whole family is finally gathered all together, your father, you and me…”

She suddenly realized that this was a moment that could last for an eternity, her heart quailed, her chest shuddered with inordinate curiosity and exquisite dread. “It’s not a strike,” Gina mused, “yet they’ll still ask something of Iliya. What if they demand everything?”

She put the needle away, so as not to stab anyone, then settled herself comfortably into the armchair and gave her agedness over to the winter light, which kept evenly, indifferent flowing into the boss’s office, helping the people to see, but preventing them from seeing clearly. Iliya stared at Krum, sizing him up, his fists relaxed, but his eyes squinted all the more, the whole of him resembled a vessel filled with poison, such that the thought flew through Gina’s mind: “If Iliya moves, his hatred will spill over and drain away!”

He took a slight step, pulling away from the desk, Krum, too, stepped forward away from the men, such that the two of them met in the center of the widest and most comfortable place for their hatred, separated equally from everything that protected them and in which they had faith: Iliya left behind the cash box and the plans for new furnaces, while Krum left behind the people he had led. Gina felt as if she were watching a theater performance, that the stage was slowly going dark, so as to better light up the two actors. She had the deception sensation that she was merely a spectator, that she was watching the others and herself from somewhere far off to the side, that the workers in their wretched cloths, the policeman and Koychev the schoolteacher, had also somehow silently and with the greatest of ease tiptoed out, so as to yield space to Krum and Iliya, who were still waiting for the audience to quiet down, waiting for that solemn, human silence to reign, which would be worthy of their first words.

“Please come in, gentlemen,” Iliya said, his voice perilously mild. “You’ll have the state deliveries I’ve promised by the end of the month.”

“That’s not why we’re here,” the policeman snapped quickly, then fell silent. “The comrades here, all the comrades… especially Comrade Mariykin.”

Nobody laughed at this ridiculous name. “Even if he were wearing a dress, my son Krum could never be ridiculous,” Gina thought. She still didn’t know whether she loved him, still couldn’t tell whether she was ashamed or proud of him, she was simply happy to see him standing face-to- face with his father, happy that the learned auntie’s hour of ruin, of complete disorder and misfortune had finally arrived! “The scent of misfortune, of unending misfortune is simply in the air…” she kept saying to herself.

“Has one of my men gotten out of line?”

“No,” Krum replied. “Now please, Mr. Vulchev, hand over the paperwork and keys.”

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“What keys?”

“To the cashbox and the factory!”

“But I have the keys only for this cashbox and this factory, gentlemen.” Iliya was sincerely puzzled. “If you mean to do an inspection, then please go ahead!”

“We don’t want the keys for an inspection, but for good, Mr. Vulchev!”

Iliya laughed out loud and his voice seemed to blow the workers back slightly. Krum also burst out laughing, now he resembled Iliya so strongly, it was as if Iliya Vulchev was standing face-to- face with his own self, magnificent in his fury, separated from his own reflection by two feet of air, but also by two miles of hatred. Iliya seemed to have sensed this, as his voice grew hollow and broke off. He realized that his only son Bozhidar was dead, yet this young man reminded him of something, of some time, of a torturous and impossible love for which he no longer had the strength. The two of them drew even closer together, they were almost touching, as if yearning to come to know each other.

In fact, they hadn’t moved, but Gina could sense how they couldn’t live without each other, how they simply needed their own mutual destruction, fate was pressing in on them with everything they had – the one had his unholy deeds and his factory, the other his faith in the bright future and in the communal factory. They were the unadulterated, terrifying present itself, that moment of extreme loathing, projected onto one and the same person, yet a person split into two equally strong halves!

“As of today, your factory becomes the property of the people,” Krum said in the same cavalier tone.

“Are you drunk, my good man?”

“The Council of Ministers has issued a resolution for the universal nationalization of private industry, so I ask you to please hand over the keys voluntarily.”

Only now did Iliya realize the significance of the red wax and the round seal, objects designed to conceal, but also to command, to carry out the authorities’ will! Krum Mariykin was holding in his hand the most terrifying weapon, the symbolic signs of an endless living death for Iliya.

“He shrank and staggered,” Gina would later say at the Restaurant Royale, “he was clutching the end of the day like a dying man, his forehead was speckled with sweat, spittle dotted his lips, his clothes could have been pulled off him as off a hanger.”

But that was a deceptive feeling, because only a minute later, Iliya began to grow and then the policeman lifted his harmless carbine. He wasn’t stopped by the empty rifle, he was stopped by

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Krum Mariykin, who poured him a glass of water and brought it to him, who helped him precisely when Iliya did not need help, but needed resistance.

“Vermin… bloodsuckers!” Iliya gasped, but Gina was no longer thinking about his health, she was watching the well-built Krum, wedged into the silence, but before she could be enraptured by the perverse and unconscious resemblance between them, before she could feel the base thrill of revenge, she realized that Iliya had lost once and for all and would have to die. Iliya had lost irrevocably not because they had taken from him the last thing he owned, his factory and his construction. But because he had come face-to-face with himself for the first time and would be crushed by his own self! The two men, the old and the young, were standing there eye-to-eye, without backing down, fierce, irreconcilable, yet doomed to carry one and the same seed.

“It’s like strangling yourself with your own hands…” Gina said aloud, and overcome by pain, shock and happiness, she silently slumped to the floor…

Where, however, can we find the connection between what is said and read in literature, ladies and gentlemen? Where is its point of intersection with that Bermuda Triangle made up of history, the human as memory and bearer of the Word, and the prickly problem of power? The answer is very simple: literature in its very form embodies that connection, only in it do they meet and elevate this conflict to the level of spiritual timelessness and Being.

My dear colleagues, may you experience comfort in your soul and discomfort in your spirit in your long and unending work, I hope that you always preserve your dignity, I wish you many more creative successes, life-changing, memorable successes in the painful yet splendid world of the artistic Word. In closing, let me thank Elizabeth Kostova, who brought us together for this wonderful adventure.

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CLAIRE MESSUD

KANT’S LITTLE EAST PRUSSIAN HEAD & OTHER REASONS WHY I WRITE Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 18 – 22 June, 2015

Not long ago, we sat down with our children to watch the first episode of a new television series about the cosmos. It proved essentially unwatchable for me, in part because of the exhausting computer graphics that resembled a screen saver on overdrive, and in part – and this has happened to me before – because what the presenter was saying gives me vertigo.

All he had to do was to lay out for his viewers the earth’s cosmic address: Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Biography Group, The Virgo Supercluster, The Observable Universe. To Born in the United States to a French father and a Canadian remind those of you who may have forgotten, the Milky Way is one mother, Claire Messud grew up there, in Australia, and in of about a dozen galaxies in the Local Group, which in turn is but Canada. She studied at Yale University and at Cambridge one of thousands of clusters of galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster. University, where she met her spouse, the British literary critic The Observable Universe involves a very large number of James Wood. superclusters of clusters of galaxies, and extends more than 10 Messud's debut novel, When the World Was Steady (Granta billion light years in all directions. More than that, the presenter Books, UK, 1994; US, 1995), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner explains, “Many of us suspect that all of this – all the worlds, stars, Award, as was her book of novellas, The Hunters (Harcourt, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe – is but one tiny 2001). Her second novel, The Last Life (Harcourt, 1999), bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes.” which tells the story of three generations of a French- This dizzying reminder evokes the feeling I had several times in Algerian family, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might the Year and Editor's Choice at The Village Voice. The fall into the infinite void. Maybe for some people this is causes Emperor's Children (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), an international exhilaration and wonder. For people like me, however, it chiefly bestseller, was published in more than 20 languages. Chosen provokes anxiety. In spades. Oh, there’s wonder too, to be sure – by The New York Times, Los how can one not marvel at our unlikely existence? – but this re- Angeles Times, and Washington Post as a Best Book of the Year, awakening to humanity’s infinitesimal insignificance re-awakens in it was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Messud's fifth me also my nine year old self, a child whose response to the book and fourth novel, The Woman Upstairs (Alfred A. magnitude of the universe might have been, “then I guess there’s Knopf, 2013), was longlisted for Canada's 2013 Scotiabank Giller no point going to school today. And if I don’t feel like it, not much Prize and France's 2014 Prix Fémina Etranger. All of Messud's point getting out of bed, either.” books have been named New York Times Notable Books of the Fortunately, age, experience and general busy-ness make it largely Year. possible to repress our underlying knowledge about the cosmos.

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Once we’d turned off the television, I could let go fairly quickly of my vertigo. There were dishes to be done, dogs to be walked, children to be bustled to their beds – the stuff of life, as we call it, when we don’t deem it the impedimenta to the life we might have lived, that life of the mind that, for all but the hermits among us, is ever more reduced and pushed to the interstices by the contemporary world’s demands, by family and students and homework and emails and so forth.

As Thomas Bernhard’s scathing narrator recalls, in his brilliant novel The Loser, while reflecting upon his friendship with the pianist Glenn Gould (who is, needless to say, the narrator’s figment, a version of the genius that, fittingly, only partially resembles the man himself – but that’s another story) – anyway, the narrator recalls Glenn saying:

Fundamentally we are capable of everything, equally fundamentally we fail at everything, he said, I thought. Our great philosophers, our greatest poets, shrivel down to a single successful sentence, he said, I thought, that’s the truth, often we remember only a so- called philosophical hue, he said, I thought. We study a monumental work, for example Kant’s work, and in time it shrivels down to Kant’s little East Prussian head and to a thoroughly amorphous world of night and fog, which winds up in the same state of helplessness as all the others, he said, I thought.

A good friend of mine, a philosopher and a Kant scholar, has devoted the past twenty years to interpreting passages of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. It is but one of the briefer texts in Kant’s monumental work; and yet, in order properly and thoroughly to understand it, she has committed all of her adult life thus far, and considers her labor far from complete.

For almost all of us, the prospect of such serious focus on Kant’s thought is impossible. For most of us, if we apprehend even “a so-called philosophical hue”, we consider ourselves in pretty good shape. It’s like the dizzying enormousness of the cosmos in reverse: if, in order properly to understand a paragraph of Kant, one would need to engage in a lifetime of study, what are we to make of the entire breadth of his oeuvre – the Observable Universe of his oeuvre, if you will? And what, beyond that, are we to make of the fact that Kant’s published writings represent already a careful ordering and editing and articulation into intelligible language of his philosophy, of his conscious thought? And beyond that, given that his thought arose in part from his experience (the empiricist in him), experience which is all but entirely lost to us – comprised of countless minutes and hours and days and years of life upon this planet, of Kant’s individual and particular life – how are we to conceive of the unknowable vastness that was Kant?

And from there, indeed, if Kant is but one philosopher among thousands, but one German among millions, but one man among billions – how to conceive of the entirety of un-communicated and incommunicable human experience? What infinite invisible universe of Bernhardian “night and fog” is this, in which we must drift – the great genius Kant, according to Bernhard, “in the same state of helplessness as all the others”?

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As we all know, Thomas Bernhard was a writer who took the dark view. The shrinking of Kant’s mind, the breadth of his interests and wisdom, down to his little East Prussian head does seem like a loss; but maybe, too, it’s like the freeze-dried vegetables in packet soup: merely awaiting hydration for reconstitution.

In contradiction of Bernhard’s darkness, I’ll offer you a quotation from the 1980 film, The Long Good Friday, in which the gangster Harold Shand (brilliantly played by the late Bob Hoskins) gives a speech at a party on his yacht in the Thames, welcoming the American mafia to London to collaborate on some white-collar skullduggery in the East End: “Hands across the ocean,” he exults in his Cockney rasp, replete with bullish optimism. “Hands across the ocean.”

Because, of course, Bernhard is absolutely right – of so much of our lives we retain but “a so- called hue”, philosophical or not; but to convey, or to grasp, what Bernhard laments as “a single successful” sentence – that, I firmly believe, is cause for celebration. Even a single successful sentence can be transformative; and at the risk of sounding like Pollyanna, a single poem or novel can alter someone’s life forever. That, my friends, is “hands across the ocean”, and it is a meeting that happens if not only, then most fully, through language. With words, we can travel across nations and through time; we can inhabit lives far from our own.

Here’s the first paragraph of Tolstoy’s Childhood, his first-published novel (1852):

On the 12th of August, 18—(just three days after my tenth birthday, when I had been given such wonderful presents), I was awakened at seven o’clock in the morning by Karl Ivanitch slapping the wall close to my head with a fly-flap made of sugar paper and a stick. He did this so roughly that he hit the image of my patron saint suspended to the oaken back of my bed, and the dead fly fell down on my curls. I peeped out from under the coverlet, steadied the still shaking image with my hand, flicked the dead fly onto the floor, and gazed at Karl Ivanitch with sleepy, wrathful eyes. He, in a parti-coloured wadded dressing-gown fastened about the waist with a wide belt of the same material, a red knitted cap adorned with a tassel, and soft slippers of goat skin, went on walking round the walls and taking aim at, and slapping, flies. [p.7]

So swiftly, intimately, Tolstoy draws us into the experience of young Nikolai, his semi- autobiographical protagonist. Specificity is essential – from the first, we know it is the 12th of August, the late summer – and if we pause there, we can feel the light of a late summer morning, the dozy air before the day’s full heat, and what it is to waken into it. We can hear the intermittent buzzing of the flies, now swooping, now frantic against a windowpane. We know, too, that our narrator has just turned ten, and his “wonderful presents” are still in his mind: he evokes, in passing, the particular delight of that birthday, of reaching the double-digits, of the unadulterated joy of one’s birthday presents, if they’re the right ones, when you’re ten – and this simple Tolstoyan specificity renders Nikolai’s world both present and vivid to us. We, too, have been ten years old; we, too, have been wakened, unwilling, at seven in the morning; we, too, have

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES felt the laziness of late summer, as we have been irritated by the buzzing of its flies; and although we may never have seen one made of “sugar paper and a stick”, we have surely wielded, or at least seen, a fly-swatter.

Each of us, then, can imagine the particular displeasure of opening an eye – on what should be such a glorious morning -- to the sound of the swatter’s slap, to the faint but unmistakable sensation of a fly’s corpse falling in our hair. The particular image of Nikolai’s patron saint may be unfamiliar, but we can sense its frame trembling on the bedstead above our head, and can imagine, too, raising a hand to steady it. In a matter of sentences, we are fully in this room, with this boy, seeing, hearing and feeling as he sees, hears and feels. This Tolstoy gives us in a shared language, in familiar words, if you will. His simple, lucid descriptions insist upon the transparency and commonality of his words.

But key to this particular August morning is the swatter’s zeal of Karl Ivanitch. Now, Karl Ivanitch is thus far, to the reader, merely a name, a cipher. But we understand, simply by the way that name is evoked, that for Nikolai, the words ‘Karl Ivanitch’ imply much more. The physical description Tolstoy offers us will evoke him as clearly as any photograph, in his gown, cap and slippers; but it’s his restless fly-baiting roam that gestures towards the tutor’s personality that we will come to know: fierce, even obsessive, crucial in young Nikolai’s life, but also petty, and somehow absurd. All this is here, from the outset.

What Tolstoy achieves – and what any fiction writer hopes to achieve – is, in fact, magic. I use this term not sentimentally, but literally. Tolstoy conjures for us a world familiar enough that we can place ourselves in it; and then, more profoundly, he conjures its inhabitants. Nikolai knows Karl Ivanitch; and the promise, if we read on, is that we shall know him too, that Karl Ivanitch will enter our private imaginary and abide there along with the jostling population of characters, real and fictional, who fill our consciousness and shape our lives.

Because naming is magic. Spells are, if you will, essentially a private language; and the magic that they work is very particular. If, for example, I say to you the name “Marjorie Riches”, you may have some thought about the given name’s relative obsolescence; or about the literary potential – either ironic or symbolic -- of a character with the surname ‘Riches’. You may even know a ‘Marjorie’, in which case the name will evoke something more particular and distinct.

But if I say ‘Marjorie Riches’ to my sister, I am performing an act of magic: I am conjuring a person. Marjorie Riches was our maternal grandmother, and simply in the utterance of her name I am evoking an entire life, in our childhoods, in Toronto: the heavy front door of her grey stucco house; the cul de sac above High Park on which she’d known all the other residents forever. I am raising her before us, and in us: the tiny ridges of her fingernails and the wart-like callous on her

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES left index finger; the shiny, papery quality of the skin on her hands; the slithery sound of her synthetic floral dresses against her slip when she pressed us to her bosom; the difference in the size of her blue eyes behind their glasses (where they looked enormous) and without them (where they looked quite small); the slightly duck-like flare of her nose; the flossiness of her granny’s perm, upon which she wore a hairnet at bedtime. I am conjuring, too, our child’s delights in her house, with its laundry chute and the hatch next to the side door for the milkman, where foil-topped bottles and pounds of butter would appear before breakfast; the oxblood colored concrete floor in the basement with a drain in the middle, around which we rode a tricycle in circles, at speed, even when we were too big really to do so, and our knees were hunched up to our chins. I’m bringing back the bowl of pastel-coloured non-pareils on the side table in the living room, our lunches of tinned ravioli in wintertime, eaten on a creaky stool in the sunroom overlooking the snowy garden. I am conjuring, simultaneously, the apartment of her old age, and the high firm ship of her long-widowed marriage bed, and her glossy crimson Underwood typewriter, that she kept on a little table near the window. There is her jewel box full of sparkly clip-on earrings, and the powder-puff music box with its silver filigree. Here, now, we picture the particularity of her handwriting, the slight downward slope of her signature – whether she wrote ‘Marjorie Riches’ or, on all our cards, ‘Grandma’. And here, too, the warm, flowery smell of her neck, which lived in her scarves long after she died, and which, having taken a few of them home to my apartment (I was grown up by then) I would inhale greedily every so often just to bring her back, until one day the scent was finally gone. I can hear her persistent habit of clearing her throat, that so irritated our mother; and know again the intent way she had of listening as she grew blind, with her eyes looking off slightly to one side of your face, focused but unfocused.

To tell you these things is to give you but an infinitesimal fraction of what her name evokes, of the magic that her name carries now, since my parents’ deaths, for only two of us on this planet, for my sister and for me. It is to make of Marjorie Riches a little Canadian head to stand upon its stake next to Kant’s little East Prussian one: but I would insist, again, that this, even in its near- total failure, is cause for celebration.

In a language slightly less entirely private, but no less magical, I can utter the words “Parc Isthmia”, and bring into life -- for my sister and myself, but also for others who have lived or been there – the apartment complex on the outskirts of Toulon, in the south of France, where our paternal grandparents lived from the late 1960s onwards, so for all of my remembered life, and to which my sister and I and our families still return. Parc Isthmia, a collection of apartment buildings set in a large park, perches on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, above a tiny blue bay with a crescent pebble beach and a fishing village tucked inside each headland. Upon one

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES headland looking straight out to sea is a tiny chapel, Notre Dame d’Afrique, before which stands a pristine white statue of the Virgin, arms open to the Mediterranean.

Back to the Parc’s entrance, off a broad avenue rising from the Corniche: Behind Parc Isthmia’s wrought iron gates (at the opening of which a large yellow light flashes persistently) extends a long alley of palms intersected by little pathways, these leading to the many routes through the soccer field, the tennis courts, the outside and underground parkings, the storage floors, the swimming pool, and eventually, the windy, maze-like cliff-paths to the beach, that we knew intimately, as children, from breathless games of cops and robbers with the other compound kids, played in the dark after supper, when the illuminated pool and the waxing moon provided our only light. The swimming pool, right at the cliff’s edge, is surrounded by a slatted terrace – how well I know the ridges those slats imprint upon your thighs or back when you lie sunning, watching the droplets on your arms and belly evaporate in the heat. Leaning against the terrace with the pool behind you, you see only the vast sea, each day different, blue or slate grey or even greenish, wrinkled or glassy or multiply crested depending on the wind, the light, and the sky.

Parc Isthmia is unchangingly the mimosa in winter, and in summer the screaming cicadas, and the apartments’ metal blinds squeakily lowered to blot out the fierce afternoon sun, so that my grandparents’ apartment, with its cool marble floors, was as dark as a tomb and as quiet, except for the soft rolling snores of my grandparents – both of them snoring, not quite in unison -- laid out upon their bed for the inevitable sièste, and looking, if you peeked in upon them, like open- mouthed corpses. The words bring with them the sound of the sea against the shore in the night- time, when we lay in bed; and the pungent stalks of lavender we crushed between our fingers on the long climb up from the parking lot, or the scent of the sprawling rosemary plants on the terrace.

‘Parc Isthmia’ is also all the concierges who have tended it. It’s the generations of residents, too, all those I knew best now gone, like my grandparents and my aunt: the woman dentist with the sharp nose; the grumpy old fellow who looked like his schnauzer; the elegant Zerolo family with their yapping black dachshund Zeus and the three impossibly beautiful children, only one of whom seems to have fared okay in life. Forever a part of the park, though dead these twenty years, is the ultra-tanned Monsieur Innocenti, leaping like a mad Indian saddhu in his black loincloth on the tennis court, his long black hair tied in a straggly top-knot, his nipples barely visible on his bony amber chest, and his naughty son Franck, who looked like an angel, long blond curls and china-blue eyes, and who now is middle-aged, somewhere, and surely shorn, and probably besuited.

Again, I can, for you, only scratch the surface of what those two words – Parc Isthmia – evoke: but a good portion of their meaning to me is understood not only by my sister, but by the long-

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES lost children with whom we played, Franck and the Zerolo kids among them, or by Madame Peugniez, the current concierge, the repository now of so much of the Parc’s lore. To share the invocation is not to dilute its power, but to expand it. Such private language, in the sharing, becomes a story.

From another of my memory’s boxes, I can utter the one word ‘Kambala’ – an Aboriginal word meaning ‘fair hill of flowers’ – and perform an even wider magic. Not here, of course, nor in my daily life in the States; but in Australia, and in Sydney in particular, it has its powers. It’s the name of the girls’ school of my childhood there, frozen for me in 1975, the year we left to live in Canada, when I was nine years old; but it remains alive as it was then in the memories of hundreds of little girls, now grown women, and alive as it is now in the minds of today’s pupils. For each of us it will mean different things, of course, and will conjure different emotions and experiences; but much, too, is shared, and contained within that name.

Kambala, Church of England School for Girls is a cluster of buildings on a hillside in Rose Bay. The boarders inhabit the oldest of them, a grand old house with a wide shaded porch that stares straight back at the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House, around which the rest of the school has grown over time.

For all of us, Kambala is the uniforms – pale grey checked tunics with gold piping and straw boaters in the summer time; grey flannel tunics with blazers and gold and grey-striped ties in the winter. Long grey socks with garters that left red rings around our calves; itchy grey underpants; our hair, if touching our collars, pulled back in grey ribbons that frayed, over time, at the ends. It’s the rigid order of the sports houses – the girdle on my gym tunic was red, for Wentworth; and the tiny enameled pin on my blazer’s lapel was its red, cream and gold crest – and the parade across campus in crocodile file, from the library to the gym to our classrooms, in which we were taught to stand when a teacher entered the room, with a great scraping of chairs. It’s the morning assemblies of hymns and prayers, when an older girl who’d skipped breakfast would occasionally faint, causing a ripple of disturbance in her row. It’s the doodles and cartoons in our hymn books, passed back and forth like notes while the headmistress droned on. In my day, the headmistress, Miss Gibbon, had the hair of a grey poodle and a small white pet poodle on a leash to match.

It’s not just the school itself – it’s the bus stop afterwards, and the clamor onto the upper deck, watching to see if a prefect was on board and, if not, our delight in removing our hats – the elastics cut into our chins, the way the garters cut into our calves – and even more risqué, the delight of hopping off the bus at the Milk Bar to buy lamingtons, or Cherry Ripes, or Flake bars, devoured in haste because, of course, we all knew the rule that there was to be no eating in public in uniform, which made the treats perilous, and only the more tasty.

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Kambala was the teachers – Miss Watt in first grade, with her wandering eye, her bottle-bottom glasses and orthopedic hose; beloved, mild Miss Dixon of the second grade, with her smooth skirts and gentle hands; in third grade Miss Clark, gruff at first but generous, with her spiky short hair and shiny skin; and in fourth grade the exuberant Mrs Perini, who’d trained as an opera singer and loved to sing for us, and who, I realized much later when looking at old notebooks, introduced us, perhaps untimely, to the existence of Leibniz and Spinoza.

Not long ago, I returned to Sydney for the first time in many years, and inevitably dragged my husband and children on the bus to my old house, and again on the bus to Rose Bay, to see Kambala, my fair hill of flowers set upon the hill, to make the magic real for them. I don’t know that I did, entirely, not least because although the school is in a memorably beautiful location it is, in fact, the school in my mind that is magical; but I had subsequently the joyous experience of seeing again several of those girls, now women, and of remembering with them: each name, each phrase, a conjuring, a private language, an entire world and many lives spirited into the restaurant where we were gathered – so much to say, and, blissfully, so much that did not need to be said.

How, at this point you might wonder, does this relate to fiction, to why I tell stories, to why fiction has, for me, the force of a calling? Autobiographically, there is a simple answer: were you to describe any little head that bore my name, it would be, by now, an American head. I am chiefly an American writer, indeed. But, like any of us in this age of constant movement, I’m a mongrel, made up of many things. As you might surmise from what I’ve just said, my childhood was itinerant, my identity complicated. My father was French, my mother Canadian. I grew up in Sydney, in Toronto, and then at boarding school in the United States. I went to graduate school at Cambridge University, where I met my British husband. I did not live in the United States, outside of school, until I was in my late twenties. Like every single one of us, I can echo Walt Whitman in asserting “I contain multitudes.” I am who I am because I was where I was when I was; and almost all of it is invisible to the world. This is true, of course, for each of us.

I am by no means ungrateful for all my life’s disruption – I may never have had a sense of rootedness, except in family; but I’ve had many wonderful experiences -- yet I know well what Salman Rushdie meant when he wrote his important essay “Imaginary Homelands”: ‘home’ for me, such as it is, is in my mind.

Rushdie wrote that “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.” I, for my sanity, for my heart, could not afford to lose these things. I could, instead, tell stories: I could become a writer. As Flannery O’Connor famously said, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Camus’s Meursault puts it slightly differently in

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L’Etranger: “a man who had only lived for a single day could easily live a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from getting bored.” I could not hoard them all – just as one cannot fully capture a single day, just as Kant is reduced to “a single successful sentence” or to his little East Prussian head – but I could salvage fragments, I could convey a “so-called…hue”. Knowing that I must necessarily fail, I could but try, with the particular gift of the English language at my disposal, its carpet-bagger’s opportunistic capaciousness, its extraordinary and elastic vocabulary: more than that, I could not not try.

And I could go further: I realized that in making up stories, as in reading stories, I could create a contained world in which an experience is shared in its entirety. I could invent characters, name them, evoke them, and with and around them a society, or a landscape, born of my experiences but as free as my imagination. Weaving together the known and the unknown, the public and the private, I could cast a spell.

After reading Tolstoy’s Childhood, and then its companion pieces Boyhood and the unfinished Youth, there is much we don’t know and will never know about Nikolai’s upbringing (let alone Tolstoy’s, of course). But how much we do know, and more than that, how much we have experienced ourselves, and internalized. Karl Ivanitch, first seen in his wadded dressing gown, will be forever our familiar, buffoonish, poignant, passionate and uniquely himself. He will join the ranks of our relatives, his name a magical evocation, along with Casaubon, or Uriah Heap, or Effi Briest, or Leopold Bloom, or Mrs. Dalloway or Anna Wulf or Okonkwo or Portnoy or José Arcadio Buendià... If I say to you ‘Marjorie Riches’, it may not carry much meaning for you – yet. But if I say any of these names, or Hamlet indeed, or Humbert Humbert or Raskolnikov – then we’re talking, with the thrill of a shared secret knowledge, the evocation of so many formerly private relations and experiences we have had with our books.

The late Renaissance scholar Thomas Greene, my professor when I was an undergraduate, wrote that “the act of interpretation lies close to the core of our humanity, and poetic or literary interpretation, in particular, offers an experience akin to the complexity of a lived event.” Our relation to literature is a very distinct one: we enter a narrative in order to experience it; and experience it in order to understand it. We do this with a particular divided awareness: on the one hand, we seek a childlike immediate immersion in a story – we want to succumb to its magical conjuring – and at the same time, we want to understand it, to interpret, perhaps even analyze our experience as a means of better understanding our lives, or life in general, outside the text. It might be too much, then, to say that it’s a necessarily spiritual experience; but it is certainly a sacred one: as we live in literature, we are simultaneously attached to it and detached from it, seeking both to be and to know.

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The fact that a work of literature is limited or contained – that it is a necessary reduction of lived experience; or, more generously put, a distillation of it – is what makes this two-fold involvement possible. The very infinitude of life itself – not just in the dizzying immensity of the cosmos, or the unknowable expanse of one man’s thought – but also the wild, ineffable complexity of each moment of our own, small, lived lives, in which our interior thoughts and physical sensations are endlessly interwoven – this infinitude makes it all but impossible simultaneously to be and to know. But what seems to Thomas Bernhard’s narrator a cause for contempt and lamentation is, in fact, a mercy, and a source of revelation. Constraint and limitation make communication possible.

In the first of his essays in Poetry, Signs & Magic, Thomas Greene makes a distinction between a ‘disjunctive’ theory of language – one which understands language to be “conventional”, “a theory that conforms to common sense and that separates sharply word and thing”; and a so- called “conjunctive” theory, by which he means “any theory of a natural language whereby the word might be seen to correspond to its referent, or worse, whereby the word might acquire the referent’s power.” Witchcraft, after all, he writes, is “the power…to work wonders.”

This division – between language that functions in a magical register, as a performative utterance, if you will; and language that functions in a conventional, serviceable fashion – finds reconciliation, according to Greene, in one arena: the place where “the tensions between disjunction and conjunction are not repressed, where they can be acted out freely, is the work of art.”

Greene cites Picasso, in this regard, writing in a letter to Françoise Gilot about his visit to a museum of ethnographic art: “then I understood…that Painting is not an esthetic process: it’s a form of magic which is interposed between the hostile universe and ourselves, a means of seizing power, of imposing form on our fears as on our desires.”

Fiction, too, is a means of “seizing power, of imposing form”. It’s a way of navigating between a shared conventional language – to return again to Tolstoy, we all know what the 12th of August is; we’ve all been ten years old – and a private, magical language – Nikolai knows exactly who Karl Ivanitch is, while we do not; but through Nikolai, we too will know him.

If I tell you a story about girls at Kambala, in Sydney; or about a man and his son in a place called Parc Isthmia in the South of France; or about an elderly woman in Toronto who may or may not be called ‘Marjorie Riches’, I am “seizing power” of a kind. I am sharing my magical language, and thereby casting a spell – I am “working wonders”. My magic will always be partial, always a failure, a shrunken head next to life itself. But as my friend has given her life to understanding

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES and explaining a small portion of Kant, I give my life to describing – which is, to attempting and failing to understand and explain – some small portion of life.

(It’s worth saying, by the way, that it is the vivid and tangible detail that speaks volumes. Just as thought must be translated into language in order for it to be communicated, so too, in fiction and in poetry, abstract emotion must be translated into concrete physical reality in order for a reader to have a lived experience. Edith Wharton put it well when she explained: “We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.” We cannot see into the hearts of our neighbors’ estates, just as we ultimately know only a little of our own terrain. But from what we can see, we can infer much. From the absolute specificity with which Tolstoy describes for us what Karl Ivanitch says and does, from the nature of his movements and from what he wears and from who he consorts with and what he reads, we will understand much about him that isn’t directly articulated, nor exactly articulable.)

If all language were conventional – disjunctive, if you prefer Greene’s term – then ours would be a dull and limited world. It is the world of functional discourse, in which we live much of our lives. And of course, if language were entirely private, no communication would be possible. The terrain of a fully private language is madness or dementia. It’s the situation where “hands across the ocean” can’t quite bridge the gap, where we the recipients, the readers, are left without access to experience, where it remains veiled, or frankly unshared.

My mother, as her memory and lucidity abandoned her, came to speak in poetry, in an oracular language. In the last two years of her life, she was often quiet – she who had been vitally gregarious – and once, as she sat in silence, I asked her what she was thinking. With a wry and wistful smile, she answered, “Shards of memory, and new worlds discovered.”

This beautiful postcard from across the abyss, from the incommunicable private island of her later experience, stays with me in each day. What is our hope for the experience of literature, if not to share this: shards of memory and new worlds discovered? What, indeed, if not this, is the best truth of our experience of life?

I have my own collection of little literary and philosophical heads, my own stock of single successful sentences (some of which you’ve heard today). Each of us is constructed, like a magpie’s nest, from these as much as from our childhood experiences and our innate temperament and our loves and losses. We are as much the sum of our lived literary experiences as of our literally lived experiences. This, of course, is what Eliot expressed in The Waste Land, and his is one of the essential sentences I carry with me everywhere. I’ve slipped it into several of my books. “These are the fragments I have shored against my ruins.” That’s all. It’s why I

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES write, really. Fail again, fail better -- to cite another from my collection. A single successful sentence, a so-called philosophical hue. Each an invocation; each a hand across the ocean; each a wresting of power from fear and desire; each a small magic.

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HRISTO KARASTOYANOV

ON THE THIN LINE BETWEEN THE TRUE AND THE TRUE-TO-LIFE Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 18 – 22 June, 2015

The book which became the reason for me to be invited by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation to take part in this seminar and for me to be here tonight, came out last year at the end of April. By fall, a surprising number of reviews, critiques and opinions had been published about it – something that I don’t think had ever happened to me before. Not after 1989, in any case.

For example, Angel Igov wrote: “It is obvious that the novel was

Biography written with a flourish, but it is equally as obvious how stylistically masterful Hristo Karastoyanov is.” In 1981, Hristo Karastoyanov made his debut with his collection of fiction Cracked In Culture newspaper, Dimitar Kamburov was more thorough: … Asphalt. He is author of 30 single editions (the number including “one of them (one of the main characters, that is) seems to be all editions that followed and represented through the means of a minimalistic implosion, suited the e-books). His novel Autopia: the Other to the radical ideological evasiveness, psychological slipperiness Way to Hell was one of the five new Bulgarian novels, and the physical elusiveness of a professional anarchist; the other nominated for the Bulgarian Novel of the Year in the first is seen in his bodily-intellectual excessiveness and expressionistic- edition of the Vick Foundation’s contest in 2003. He has won the futuristic over-the-topness, in the generous overindulgence of a Razvitie Award for unpublished novels (Death Is of Preference), genius who knows that he will die soon in any case, so he lives life the Bulgarian Writers’ Union to the max.” award for non-fiction works (Notes on Historical Naiveté), the Zlaten Lanets Award for According to Hristo Blazhev, it is ominous “how many analogies short story of the year in a contest, held by the newspaper can be made to our time – from the literary practices to the Trud, the Chudomir Award for merciless police-state mentality…” humorous short stories, etc. In 2012, Dittrich Verlag (Berlin, Germany) published his trilogy Even in the one completely negative review for all of 2014, my Dodder (Teufelszwirn: Roman in drei Büchern), and in December intentions were pointed out quite clearly, albeit with reproach. the same year his novel The Name won the Helikon Award “Geo Milev,” the author Petya Heinrich remarked, “speaks a bit like for new Bulgarian fiction. In a Revival-era Bulgarian who has gadded about Europe and has 2014, his latest novel The Same Night Awaits Us All: Diary of a come back to show us what that there expressionism is, plus he Novel (Janet 45, 2014), won the Dabat na Pencho Award for curses like a sailor to boot. But something doesn’t quite fit, right? significant contribution to contemporary Bulgarian In the novel, there are also several actual emails exchanged literature and its research, as well as the Helikon Award for between Hristo Karastoyanov and the director of the Geo Milev best fiction book of the year (for which seven of his books have Museum. The author could have just as easily signed those been nominated so far). In 2015, he was named a finalist for the Bulgarian Novel of the Year 2014 Award, organized by 13 122 Centuries of Bulgaria National Endowment Fund. SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES messages as Geo Milev, they’re pounded out in the very same joking, buddy-buddy tone.” End quote, as they say.

In one forum, an Anonymous reader said: “It’s like sitting down at the table with Capital-H History and having History itself tell you a thing or two. Whereas for you – believe it if you want.” Another reader, who dubbed himself “Sluggard,” put it flat-out: “In school I never understood why Geo Milev had to be in the textbooks. This book gave me a crystal-clear answer.”

And finally, like the cherry on top, Boyko Penchev placed The Same Night Awaits Us All in the Magnificent 10 – according to the the ranking in Capital Light newspaper.

So why did I read you all that…

Well, first off, to brag, of course! Pierre Bayard in How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read proves that there is no author who is satisfied by even the most flattering and fawning of reviews. But not me! I am very satisfied.

The truth is that I was quietly very happy. Because everything written about The Same Night Awaits Us All or discussed on radio or TV meant that I seem to have done a decent job. Most likely because of this, the jury’s statement when bestowing the annual Helikon Award for The Same Night Awaits Us All stated that the award was being given: “For the splendid, true-to-life and breathless description of the troubled and harsh time in which the poets lived, wrote and died; for the artistic daring to soar from then towards now; for the writerly courage demonstrated over the years to rescue their names and fates from undeserved oblivion, to paint their portraits with words and to set them before the lowered gaze of today’s guilty consciences.”

I was mainly happy because of the fact that I had followed an old rule, which I find important when writing a novel: it might not be true, but it definitely must be true-to-life (believable).

And if when used on TV, “true” and “true-to-life” most often mean that they are lying through their teeth to us – in the game that is literature these two things are in perfect correlation. At least in my opinion. Thank God, I’m clearly not the only one who thinks so. Borislav Gurdev, for example, remarked on the site Lira: “The novel is historically accurate and true-to-life.”

* * *

The story of Geo Milev and Georgi Sheytanov’s comradeship, which resulted in the magnificent magazine Plamuk, or Flame, has occupied me for several decades.

During all those years I don’t ever recall coming up with the idea of sitting down and writing a book about those two people. If such an idea did pop into my head, it most likely would have been along the lines of a literary-historical opus – which I’ve never felt ready for – or something

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES in a journalistic vein. Anything but fiction. But the impulse – or whatever they call it – to start was one very simple little question. I asked myself: OK now, this guy, Geo Milev, who in pictures looks as calm as a swan, did that monstrous wound of his hurt? And because I don’t know anything about such business, I quizzed an acquaintance of mine, an optical surgeon, and from her I found that that not only did it hurt, it hurt like hell. Yet at the same time he kept working obsessively. Hence he overcame that constant and terrible pain in the name of something he considered his calling.

And to tell you the truth, Geo Milev suddenly came to life. Forgive me for the cliché, but that’s exactly how it was: he simply came to life. And all of those recollections about him, letters, documents, his literary legacy, his monstrous body of journalistic works – all of those things that I had supposedly known from before suddenly sounded completely different. I can’t say it any other way, except for with a cliché again: behind all of those things, there was no longer a dry biography from encyclopedias, but a real person.

But there’s something else… All of that could have simply resulted in a biographical novel about Geo Milev. Whether true or true-to-life – I have no way of knowing that now – but in any case it would’ve been a biographical novel. Except for during all those decades before starting the book, alongside Geo Milev, I had also been occupied with Georgi Sheytanov, too. Actually, I had started working on him even earlier. Georgi Sheytanov is one of the most interesting leaders of enlightened Bulgarian anarchism from the 1920s. Elusive and dangerous, having gone underground when he was only seventeen, the Bulgarian Kingdom’s Public Enemy Number One, yet at the same time a convincing journalist, a young man in love with literature, an important participant in the publishing and editing of Plamuk, because he understood that a literary magazine broadened the influence of anarchism.

So there was nothing more natural than letting him take up his place in the book, which turned it into something else – not a biographical novel, but a story about two young men obsessed by their ideas and intentions, whose ideas and intentions turned out to be one and the same: a principled rebellion against the status quo. And this became the reason that they died in one and the same way, killed by one and the same people.

This also would have been a good topic for a research project, but the choice had already been made – I had to write a novel.

And as always happens, in the beginning was the Word. That is – language.

The two men, as well as everyone around them, simply had to speak today’s language. Period. And it seems to have worked, since this modern language – not modernized, but precisely modern – was both noticed and noted. For example, Mladen Vlashki wrote: “Karastoyanov’s best

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES decision was to have the characters speak in our modern-day language, and not to try to make it archaic. Through that language, the figures of Geo and Sheytanov become exceptionally full- blooded and compelling.”

Ladies and gentlemen, archaizing language is a lot of fun; I’ve tried it, I’ve done it, so that’s how I know.

In the now-very-distant year of 1984, my book Perpetuum Mobile came out from the little- remembered publishing house Hristo G. Danov. It also talked about the same era and the same themes as in The Same Night Awaits Us All: the 1920s, enlightened and not-so-enlightened anarchism, an underhanded and vindictive government, bandits, love and fear. In that very book I played around with a supposedly archaic language – the language of the 1920s. The titles of the sections even took the form of so-called newspaper “posters” – a selection of the most important titles in the corresponding issue at the top of the newspaper. (Incidentally, it seems I did the best job of getting the language right in these “headlines,” since several reviews of the book said these were reproductions of old newspapers. Of course, they were not reproductions. I had personally typed them up in my search for antiquated fonts. But anyway…) Later Perpetuum Mobile gave rise to a whole trilogy Strangleweed, in which two of the novels contained this same retro- language.

Please allow me one digression, which I feel is important. No matter how sweet the “language of yore” and that whole linguistic environment with its scent of old books and dusty attics may be, we should never forget for a second that all of that will be read by the people of today.

It is clear that the lexicon is the part of language that changes fastest, at lightning speed, while in the 21st century, given modes of communication that are in principle themselves new, the new words in the dictionary are now like a tsunami. Thus, the game of archaizing language becomes more complex, its rules have become more complicated. I am even tempted to say that the time has come when old words actually become new ones and in fact they, in turn, start to enrich this new Bulgarian language. It sounds paradoxical, but it is not.

In any case, in The Same Night Awaits Us All, I had fun doing the opposite. There was no way I could have done it differently, because I felt both Geo Milev and Georgi Sheytanov as our contemporaries, thus they needed to speak as such. It was a dangerous undertaking, since it would have been all too easy to get carried away. For example, in many recollections about Geo Milev, his contemporaries recall that he cursed a lot. The temptation to have him do it here, too, was great; on top of everything it would have been true-to-life, but I spared him this. After all, there is an enormous difference between modernization and profanization, is there not?

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Incidentally, the modern language the characters use is not merely permissible. It is also completely natural. Most of Geo Milev’s writings sound exactly this way, as if they had literally been written today.

“Athletes from all around Bulgaria are marching through Sofia; husky, rough-and-tumble guys with grey faces, thick brows, and shallow eyes – behind which no flicker of any ‘sound mind can be seen… A sound mind in a sound body! Their sole interest: kicking the ball. Through developing their legs, they are also developing the brains in their heads. In this way, the progress of Bulgarian culture is assured. Surely!”

Sheytanov, for his part, way back in 1919 wrote: “A pig has entered the temple of life – kill it!”

And so I learned yet another lesson while writing this book. If something is said precisely enough for its own era, it remains precise for all eras to come.

* * *

Yordan Radichkov once told me that in his opinion, the reader is like a pig: he likes you to scratch him on the belly and for him to squeal quietly in satisfaction. It sounds shocking if you don’t know how much Radichkov loved every living thing, all of nature; the pig, of course, is a part of nature, too. As I understood his words, you must allow the reader to catch your drift from just half a word. Don’t explain to him as if to an idiot why Gotsa Geraskov scratched his neck. Do it such that the reader himself will decide whether Gotsa Geraskov stratched his neck in amazement or out of suspicious, and do it such that the reader will likewise realize on his own WHY your character even needed to scratch himself in the first place.

And now I must admit that while I may have learned precisely that lesson from the great Radichkov, I haven’t followed it. Simply because I just love those damn adjectives. (Here I go again: “damn” adjectives, even “the great” Radichkov…) Just take a look at this sentence: “The headlights of the heavy automobile cut the darkness ahead, but lit up only the cliffs alongside the highway, all faded as it was, washed clean by the unending rain of that spring, strewn with black puddles, which the car ripped through and scattered pearlishly far to the side.” Six adjectives, one adverb and a participle in a thirty-four-word sentence – this is awful indeed! (How well I understand Izadora Angel… She won the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s translator’s competition and at the very beginning of her work translating the book wrote to me during a chat session: “I have to admit that sometimes when I’m in the middle of one of your nine-line sentences, I get so anxious that I stop breathing. And when the sentence ends, I get up from my chair to breathe a bit and stretch.” Makes you wonder whether to thank her or to apologize!)

But I hope that at least the part about the puddles’ water scattering “pearlishly” is spot on. Precisely because it is true-to-life. And because it is unexpected to boot – it somehow becomes

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES useful… Because the word must be sufficiently expressive (as well as figurative, when possible), yet it must also be bold and sudden. Especially in the beginning of the text, especially if we’re talking about a novel. I mean – a single well-placed word on the first page will intrigue the reader and make her buy the book.

Except that while the question of whether the reader – lured by the first words and lines – will start reading the book depends on the language, the question of whether she’ll read to the end depends on the structure. However, the construction, the rhythm, the precise sequence of the plot, the twists and turns – all of that is entirely another kettle of fish, which we don’t have time to discuss in a single lecture…

* * *

Representing the two main characters as our contemporaries simply would have been a bit of premeditated literary fun, if everything else –all other characters and actors – had remained in their own time. OK, the fact that that time is repeating itself again today like The Same Night Awaits Us All – that’s clear! – but what about the people?! Their presence? Their movement in that divided Bulgaria, which is also divided today, but in quite a different way?...

In other words, can everything from that time sound true-to-life? I mean the things beyond the documents and beyond the clear facts… Incidents, events, conversations that didn’t make it into the larger-scale story.

And then the question arose: “Well, why not?” It’s clear that this is one of those questions which at a certain point turns into an answer. Or perhaps from the start it is at the same time both a question and an answer.

For example, I took quite a bit of liberty in introducing the figure of Nikola Geshev, Bulgaria’s big police boss, into the story. This Geshev guy had at one point worked in one of the precincts in Sofia as a clerk in the housing commission, while at the same time Geo Milev and his family had moved to a new apartment and would have had to get a so-called “address ticket” for that. So Geo Milev went to register. Could it have been none other than our little clerk Geshev who gave him his address ticket? Well, why not? By the spring of 1925, Geshev had already started working for Public Security. And after the barbaric attack on the St. Nedelya Church, in Sofia and all around the country the police began making midnight check-ups on people’s homes. Such check-ups were also made on the apartment Geo Milev’s family lived in then. Could Geshev had gone on such raids and checked up on Geo Milev and his family, too? Well, why not? And finally, could it have been none other than Nikola Geshev who was present during the final minutes of Geo Milev’s life in the basement of the Police Station near Lions’ Bridge? Well, why not? – since that was already his place of employment, indeed, why not?

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Then I clearly got completely carried away with that “why not” and made Geshev personally bash in Geo Milev’s skull. However, my wife told me: “No way! That’s taking it too far…” – and I immediately ditched this idea. She was right, no two ways about it. If I had left Geshev to swing the club himself, it would no longer be either true or true-to-life.

Fine, screw Geshev’s club.

What was really important to me were the two protagonists.

If you’ve already made the decision that they are your contemporaries, some sudden synchronizations come about between yourself and the story you’re working on. Then the experiment kicks into high gear and you start living in some parallel universe. And it’s no longer the case that your character is talking, thinking, getting pissed off or smoking like you. No – you are talking, thinking, smoking and getting pissed off like your character. I’m sure that every one of you has fallen into that state: it’s pure schizophrenia, of course.

I will take the liberty of giving this book as an example. I had long since thought up a phrase which I constantly repeat: “People, read clever books today, so you’re not forced to read banned books tomorrow.” I myself don’t understand when and how it came about that I put those words into the mouth of Geo Milev. Afterwards, that phrase was quoted in most of the reviews – most likely because I’d put it in exactly the right spot in the book, that is, when the literary character was in the same mood as I had been in when it popped into my head. Hristo Blazhev, who even used that phrase as the title of his review in Knigolandia, put a special footnote there about it: “This beautiful and alarming thought belongs to Hristo Karastoyanov, but he has ‘imposed’ it on Geo Milev. I wouldn’t be surprised if a decade later it becomes yet another incorrectly attributed quote.”

And so I realized something important about the craft of writing: when you sit down to work on a project in which everything is permissible, you need to be especially cautious and not go overboard with that damned true-to-lifeness.

It’s easy to be tempted to do so. But you shouldn’t.

* * *

And so. Something about The Same Night Awaits Us All has placed it in the context of the current reading of books. I don’t say the “context of literary life,” because for understandable reasons here in Bulgaria today there is simply no unified literary process. Our current literary activity is too fragmented, not to say parceled out into self-contained circles and centers. Authors from one circle don’t even pay attention to authors from another, (unless there’s some kind of a dust-up). It’s not good at all, but that’s how it is.

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However, I was pleased by the obvious fact that young people noticed The Same Night Awaits Us All. I doubt this is because of the narrative alone. Rather, I think that for some reason the novel appeared at the right moment. And perhaps this is the moment when precisely young people are looking for their Fatherland’s true past – not what is thrust upon them by dogmatic textbooks or by equally dogmatic rejections of these false historiographies. Even the mere rediscovery – actually, the discovery! – of Geo Milev, making him human, taking him down from the portrait on the wall, is already something that would impress them. To say nothing of the alternative viewpoint on enlightened Bulgarian anarchism, according to which in the center of the universe stands not the state, but the person. Anarchism as spirit and thought, but also anarchism as romantic action, bordering on tragedy.

And on the whole, the painful and ecstatic grasping of an otherwise obvious truth that the present is a continuing past, and not soullessly described moments from history, that people from the 1920s are not only our forefathers, but also our contemporaries – I think all of that gives The Same Night Awaits Us All its chance.

That context, I mean.

I’m not the humblest guy around, so that’s why I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m happy.

And I’m happy, because I was understood.

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ELENA ALEXIEVA

THE MAN WHO MADE THE BOOKS Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 9 – 13 June, 2016

An embarrassing question, vain on the surface but rather serious beneath: who has the right to call himself a writer? How do you know if one has made it, getting hold of a position as desirable – and desirable it is, although it beats me why – as that of a writer? And a position not seen in the light of the duty and responsibility attached to it, but rather as a socially agreeable role entitling to certain imaginary benefits? Is it the number of the written books

that counts or is it just the sales? Or is it the yet unwritten ones? Or Biography is it about the quality of the writing – a thing so evasive that one Elena Alexieva (1975) was born in Sofia. She is the author of 11 can hardly detect its absence, not to mention its presence? Or is it poetry and fiction books, among them the short story collections just about the morbidity of the underlying ambitions? Readers’ Group 31, Who, and Pets Syndicated, as well as the In contrast to the right to call oneself a doctor or an architect, or a novels Knight, Devil and Death, The Nobel Laureate, and others. scholar, the right to call oneself a writer is beyond proof. Her works have appeared in periodical publications and Vulnerable and questionable as it is, it is way too easy to anthologies in English, French, Polish, and Spanish, among appropriate. After the first few publications or even the first few other languages. Who was books, it seems natural, even compulsory, to label yourself a published in Spain, followed by Knight, Devil and Death in writer. Then, however, if you have a genuine gift for writing, and Serbia and The Nobel Laureate in France (Actes Sud, 2015). not just for contemplating your own quality of a writer, things Elena Alexieva is also the author of numerous plays, some of them become more complicated. And if, eventually, you manage to grow produced at the National Theatre, Theatre 199, Plovdiv as much as to become the chronic victim of your own doubts – Theatre, and elsewhere, and she has published plays in two doubts in the quality of your writing, and as a consequence, in your volumes, Angel Fire (2014) and quality as a writer – then you have probably reached the beginning Victims of Love (2015). She is the winner of the Helikon Prize of a more authentic, more honest and humble, even truer way of for modern Bulgarian fiction, the Askeer and Ikar national being. You make your way into fiction, probing it, realizing your awards for modern Bulgarian drama, and the Award of the own weakness and insignificance, the tremendous risk involved in Society of Independent Theatre Critics in Bulgaria. the effort to say something, as well as the cruel self-reliance of the Elena Alexieva lives and works in Sofia where she works as road you’ve taken. Confident enough to keep going, you can never freelance interpreter and writer. be too confident that you’ll end up where you want to be. By now you’ve come to realize that you’ll never get there; you can only hope to get somewhat close to it at best. And yet, if you do get somewhere, you’ll be the last one to know. Perhaps others will know first. Or maybe no one ever will. And here the role of the writer – attributed or

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES appropriated as the case may be – becomes a backbreaking burden. The persona comes to stand in the way of the written word, killing the talent, if there has been one at all. The writing individual is now faced with the choice between writing and writerliness. And only if he has the courage to choose the former to the latter does he earn the right to call himself a writer. A right which he has to uphold with each new book or page; with his success and even more so with his failure. Because each new book is your first book. You haven’t learned anything; you start on an empty page. And each new page is more difficult to write than the preceding ones. The more you write, the further you move from that elusive end you wanted to reach, and the more exposed you are to failure. And this will not be the failure of a writer who has written a bad book. It will be the failure of a human being who has profoundly misunderstood the meaning of his life.

A writer is someone who lives on the verge of this failure. He is someone who simply wants to make the books because this is all he can do. He is freed, but also restricted by his writing. To reach the human being, he has to find his way through literature first. The others don’t have to do this; their contact is much more direct, their communication – much more rewarding. They don’t need to dig and probe into the human being to accept him. For the writer, however, there is no other way. Literature, for better or worse, is exactly about him: the human being. Whether a misanthrope or an altruist at heart, a writer is always a humanist. Because literature is not an end in itself; it is the means. And somewhere beyond its vast omnivorous realm there he stands, the human being, alone and unexplained, worthy and unworthy, mortal and finite, a mystifying secret to himself.

Literature is humanity’s biggest secret. And the writer is not more than its means, the means of the means. This is his pride but also his humbleness. And the humbleness should always come before the pride. This is the hardest part. Everything else is a matter of writing techniques. Anyone of average intelligence can learn to write well, even better than well. But it doesn’t make him a writer, nor does it make his writings literature.

Which is why I will now take the liberty and draw a somewhat judgmental distinction between the author and the writer. An author can write dozens of books in his lifetime, and still remain just that, an author. A writer can write a single book, but in doing so, be a true writer. And the difference is not even in the amount of talent involved or in the quality of writing; indeed, there are so many gifted authors producing works of quality and merit. There are even writers whose writing is way too far from the perfection of a savvy and experienced author. Where does one draw the line, then?

In the personality.

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An author’s personality is monolithic. It is present in every line he writes as just that, the personality of someone incapable of getting rid of himself, of being someone different, of questioning or even effacing himself in the name of something bigger. An author is both mentally and physically much healthier than a writer; he has a more fulfilling life and is generally happier, more adaptive and better equipped to survive.

A writer, in contrast, is made of at least three personalities which not only serve different gods but also have to live together, sharing one mind and one body. A writer is someone who, if he weren’t a writer, would have been seriously and incurably ill. Firstly, he is a most ordinary individual with a life to live. He has to pay his bills; take care of his family; have a more or less irrelevant job, other than writing; make a living. Of course, there are exceptions, but even the biggest exception needs to eat three times a day. Sometimes, just like poor Job of the Bible, God inflicts him with all sorts of trials, which is what He does with everyone else.

The second personality is that of the one who makes the books. It is his task to constantly try to erase the first one, effacing him from the world of the living and the pages of history once and for all, in the hope that someday, having ridded himself of everything and everyone, he would be able to finally indulge in his own writing. And this abominable and selfish desire is by no means the writer’s whim nor is it his fault. He is not the one who needs it; his writing does. It’s not his fault (or so he thinks) that sometimes he is more attached to the characters in his books than to the actual people in his real life. On the contrary, he is aware of his moral ambiguity and is often ashamed of it. To learn to stand yourself as you keep writing and living that other trivial human life takes much more than talent; it takes a genius. Because to efface yourself from the pages of history might be easy, but to vanish from your own life is almost impossible.

The third personality, the most elusive but also most vulnerable one, is that of the writer inside the book. Just as one is the main character in his own life, so is the writer the protagonist of his own books. And not in the simplistic and tedious scheme of novels and short stories whose main character is a writer with a writer’s block, or a failed writer, or a crime investigating writer, or just any other type of adventuresome writer (and sometimes, for the sake of variety, a university professor), but in the ruthless and absolute imperative of that honesty without which there can be no literature. In writing you can’t hide. Writing is no therapy; it is a frontal collision with the painful and the incurable. The writer is both his own master and material. As material, he resists as hard as he can – no living man would consent to become a character in a book out of his own volition. But as a master it is his duty to overcome this resistance at all cost, sometimes with force and extreme brutality in the name of a much higher goal. And this goal is not art but man. It is in his name that literature sacrifices the individual turning him into its tool and matter. In doing so, literature is often cynical and ruthless, just like medicine, which, in order to cure, has to

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES inflict pain first. The more serious the disease, the greater the pain. Because medicine believes that no price is too high to pay for human life. And so does literature.

This, however, isn’t to say that the writer is the most legitimate protagonist of his own writing. Just the opposite. No matter what he does, it is his fate to be his own character, so the faster and farther away he escapes from the hypnotic fascination with his own self, the better. No one is more interesting than the Other. And nothing can be more boring that one’s own Self. The author’s presence in his own work is just an innate flaw. As he has no way of coping with it, he has to admit and accept it.

These (at least) three roughly and abstractly sketched personalities live in a state of constant conflict. And when they start talking to and attacking each other, the normal, non-writing individual gets on pills. The writing individual, though, due to his hypertrophied ego, decides that God is talking to him. And since he would never ever agree to write under anyone’s dictation unless it comes from the highest possible instance, finally he begins to willy-nilly take notes. They say this is how the best fiction is born. Not of one’s inner conflicts or the gift of putting words together and telling stories. But of humility. And of the hopelessness of our own insignificance.

But then, why offer these archaic and rather loaded considerations to a group of very special people who surely are more eager to hear about how to write a novel, build up a character or write a dialogue that sounds like normal human speech and not like something chopped with the axe of a nonverbal mind? Well, because before we sit down to write a dialogue, a novel or a short story, it helps to know first who we are, what we are about to embark on, whether we have the guts to do it and, above all, whether we really are those we think we are.

As I was reading through the fiction contributions by the Bulgarian candidates for this seminar, it all seemed so nicely clear and easy to me. I could tell right away what people were good at and where they failed. I could tell where, beneath a granular surface and an uneven battle with the lack of skill, the outlines of a rather distinctive physiognomy showed, and where, beneath a polished style and a self-confident narration nothing showed at all. I felt as though from the texts of these over forty authors I learned a lot more about every one of them than if I had known them in person and we had spent long hours in conversation. But when I started looking at their motivation letters, I got scared. They only very rarely mentioned books or literature or fiction as such. Quite literally, those three words were missing. At the same time, however, the candidates loved to talk about ‘projects’ so I wondered whether I was dealing with living individuals or with organizations applying, say, for EU funding. In addition to this, rarely did I come across ambition aimed at the vague territory of fiction writing. Mostly, it was serious ambition aimed at an openly claimed ‘career as a writer’ and all the important steps – advertising, marketing,

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES publishing – required to best ensure its success. I admit that all this not only worried but horrified me. Because some of the candidates for the Sozopol seminar may be a rather representative sample of the authors – the possible authors – of the newest Bulgarian literature.

It is as authors that I want to tell them this: writing and writerliness are two different things. Somewhere along the road they might meet or not. Writerliness is nothing but the form of the writer less its content – that two-dimensional, real-size intellectual who, unable to appear as anything else, likes to pose as a universal authority. You will be taken by the solemnity with which he utters his most trivial reflections and politically correct opinions that he likes to see as acts of civic courage. You will trust and like him, because he knows how to sell himself. This is his main talent. And you will never see him diverge from the straight line of the enthusiastic quasi-intellectual, infallibly convinced that he represents the enlightened elite of a profoundly uncultured society, for which, deep down, he feels nothing but contempt. His works, even when they do look like literature, are nothing more than a required heraldic attribute.

Literary fame is one of the most difficult and pointless types of fame. Which is why, if a ‘career’ is what you seek, you’d do better to seek it elsewhere. And just like it would be absurd for a parent to refer to his children as ‘projects’, to a writer it would be much more natural to call his books – even his unwritten ones – just that, books.

So in conclusion, to career lovers I can only say this: a writer’s ‘career’ starts and ends with writing alone.

To the rest, I wish the strength and courage to make their books.

Most probably, this is all you will get. Because this is all you will ever need.

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JOSH WEIL

INTO YOUR FEAR: WRITING WHAT SCARES YOU Lecture written for the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 9 – 13 June, 2016

When I was putting this talk together, thinking about the importance of fear in writing fiction, I kept remembering a day, three summers ago, when I stood alone in a muddy lot in the middle of Mongolia, scared by what I’d just done. I’d been traveling with companions—the only people I knew in that part of the world—but a few minutes earlier I’d watched them climb into the beat-up mini-bus out of town and, instead of following, stepped

back, waved goodbye, told them I’d meet them in a week, that I’d Biography find some way to get across the hundreds of miles of open steppe Josh Weil is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea and by myself. the novella collection The New Valley, both New York Times There are few things that get the heart thumping more than that Editor’s Choices. A Fulbright Fellow and National Book moment you realize a decision you’ve made is irreversible—and Foundation 5-under-35 honoree, he has been awarded the Dayton maybe really stupid. I watched the mini-bus disappear, then Literary Peace Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize from The shouldered my pack and started walking. There was no real road, American Academy of Arts and Letters, the GrubStreet National just a mess of tire tracks dwindling away into the seemingly Book Prize, the Library of endless emptiness, and a short, middle-aged, maybe very foolish Virginia’s Award in Fiction, the New Writers Award from the American, wandering out there alone. No cell phone. Not much GLCA, and a Pushcart Prize. His writing has appeared in Granta, food. Not even a very good map. Tin House, One Story, Esquire, and The New York Times. He lives with his family in the Sierra Some hours later, I waved down one of the rare trucks churning by Nevadas. in a cloud of dust, did my best to ask the driver to drop me off at the next town. He seemed to find the concept funny. Then did his best to tell me—pinching the skin of his throat, miming someone slitting it—that he thought this a bad idea. Still, a little before dark, he drove me around behind a collection of shacks, told me to get out and run. I took off through horse pastures, humping my pack until I was high in the hills where I found a swale deep enough to hide in, ate a cold supper, and, covered by nightfall, popped up my tent. Over the next days, I’d get chased by dogs; charged by bulls; threatened by drunkards; nearly bitten by not one, but three, venomous snakes; come the closest I’ve been to being hit by lightning; but that night, alone, high above the only lights in an unimaginable vastness, listening to the horses’ snorting, feeling the shake of their hooves, I only knew that I had decided to take a leap—to “go in”, as I like to think of it—and that had left me frightened and free and deeply, powerfully, alive.

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That, that feeling, is what I aim for when I write. “OK,” I tell myself, sitting down, gearing up for the next page, “let’s go in.” I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, just as I don’t mean some impulse in Mongolia to sound admirable. But I do mean it to sound serious. Because what I’m doing when I sit down to write—what, I think we all should be doing—is readying myself to face, full-on, my fears.

Here’s one of the two best pieces of writing advice I ever got: If what you’re writing doesn’t scare you, you probably shouldn’t be writing it. My first mentor told me that when I was twenty. I bet you’ve heard something like it, too. It’s one of those chestnuts, like “write what you know”, that’s thrown around to simplify a complex truth. And, like “write what you know”, the truth is often lost in the simplification. Because, in its full complexity, it’s also the advice that Gordon Lish— one of the great mentors of modern American literature—gave to his students. Write what scares you. What did he mean? What did my mentor mean? They weren’t talking about plot, some shocking bit of action. What they meant, I believe, is that if the thematic subject at the heart of what you’re creating isn’t charged with enough personal meaning, enough moral difficulty, to make you uncomfortable; if it doesn’t feel dangerous emotionally; if it doesn’t dig into the most vulnerable part of your heart, then it’s not worth the effort it will take for you to make something truly worth a reader taking it to heart. They meant find the painful place and push deep. They meant look for the most challenging landscape and walk straight at it. They meant “go in”.

But what, practically, does that mean? I’ve found, in my twenty years of trying to write worthwhile things, that there are two sorts of fears that it’s helpful to focus on: the fear of facing the kind of personal concern I just mentioned and the fear that comes out of a character’s deepest emotional wound and which drives him to try to heal it.

I wrote the first novella in my first book, a collection of three novellas, just after I’d finished my first semester of graduate school. In my MFA program in New York City, I’d been working on a fatally flawed novel and trying to write short stories that I hoped might impress my classmates, but, during the break between semesters, I holed up in an isolated cabin in the Appalachian mountains, and far from school and city, I found I couldn’t hide from the things hardest to look at in my own life and, once faced with them, I couldn’t write about anything else. I was still stricken by the collapse of my marriage: my wife, and best friend since I’d been nineteen, had abruptly disappeared, left me struggling to rebalance the weight of a life that suddenly contained one instead of two people.

The last part of that is a line from the first paragraph of that first novella. Ridge Weather, which I wrote in the weeks I was down at the cabin that year, is the story of Osby Caudill, a middle-aged man living on a remote cattle farm whose father’s sudden death leaves him, for the first time,

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES utterly alone. The plot is about his attempt to save a sick steer from dying, but the piece is really about desperation to be needed, to feel one’s passing days affect some life other than just one’s own. Which was, of course, that winter at the cabin, the fear scaring me most. And when I went back to school the way I wrote had changed. So had the way my teachers looked at me, as if they’d seen something worth keeping an eye on, now.

It just so happened—isn’t it amazing how sometimes the most important moments in life just so happen?—my workshop instructor that semester was the writer Mark Slouka who would become my second mentor and who gave me my other most important piece of writing advice. He spoke about a character’s greatest wound, the thing most vulnerable, most raw, most painful in a protagonist: his deepest hurt. And the thing that most threatens to reach that wound, to open it farther? That’s his greatest fear. Consequently, his great need—what drives his actions throughout the story, and thus drives the plot—is his need to stave off that thing he fears, to keep it from deepening that hurt, to try to salve his wound. What creates tension in narrative are the things that stand in the way, that stop him from healing, that make that wound worse. It’s what allows plot to grow from character so it doesn’t become an artificially imposed set of events. This became fundamental to the way I approach story. These two pieces of advice put together became the foundation of how I write.

If I can look unflinchingly at some great fear of mine, and then transfer it to a story’s main character, I can ensure that the piece I’m pouring my heart into will be meaningful to me, and the events that move it forward will be meaningful to the protagonist, and so, if I tell it right, it at least stands a chance of being meaningful to a reader. I want to be clear, though: I’m not talking about autobiographical fiction. I’m talking about fiction that comes from the author’s core. My fear and the character’s fear are the same. The fear of being so alone in life that nothing I do has any affect on another living soul. That’s me and that’s Osby. The wounds, the hurts in our histories and ourselves that cause that fear to come upon us—for me, a wife’s unexpected leaving; for him, a father’s suicide—are different. That difference is vital. It’s what allows a writer to have range, to work within worlds of her imagination, to unbind her creativity from the confines of her actual life, and yet to keep it true.

The second novella in that collection is about an elderly man whose body is collapsing and whose mind is corroding—I have a bad feeling everyone out there is thinking that’s the autobiographical part!—and his attempt to keep his adult daughter from moving out and leaving him. Despite what you may think, the part that comes from me is the desperation to control what’s uncontrollable (his aging, her free will). That’s the fear. The specifics, the wounds themselves, are all his.

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The third novella is the story of a mentally slow young man—now you’re all thinking that’s the part that’s him—who is caught up in a love triangle (making it a love quadrangle, really), and his great fear is that his handicap makes him unfit for an adult relationship, incapable of experiencing a woman’s love. The reasons why he fears those things were different from mine, but, writing it years after that first novella and still single, still uncertain of whether I’d ever be in another relationship as vital to me as the one I’d lost, I knew what it was to fear them.

That entire first book is built around the loss of loved ones, the struggle to survive their departure, to comprehend how they could choose to leave. A father’s suicide, a daughter drifting, a lover breaking a simpleton’s heart. A wife disappearing from a young writer’s apartment in New York. I didn’t know that was the book that I was writing. It was a reviewer who, later, not knowing my personal history, pointed it out.

But by the time I was trying to decide what my next book should be, I knew enough to look for what, at that time, felt most raw to me. Because that’s one of the wonderful things about writing from your fears: they change. You change. But so long as the honesty with which you pursue the things that scare you doesn’t, the stories you write will remain anchored in your fundamental truths.

The same summer that my first book was published I met the woman who would become the love of my adult life, a relationship that grew to replace the one I’d been mourning so long, that salved that wound. But another relationship—one that had anchored me since birth, that I’d always counted on between me and my brother—was changing. And that change saddened and scared me more than anything in a long time. So when I started a novel about two brothers torn apart by the pressures of their adult lives, I knew that it was right. But, unlike my ex-wife, my brother was still in my life. And so, writing the novel that would become my second book, I had to face a different kind of fear, another level of vulnerability.

Here’s a passage from that novel, The Great Glass Sea, a paragraph in which one brother wrestles with his resentment towards the other’s wife, his difficulty accepting his brother’s devotion to someone else:

He knew he should be happy for his brother on his anniversary, and he told himself he was, he was—but he had never understood it, the chase everyone else seemed compelled to make, the way everyone seemed to need to dilute their love. Lust, he could imagine— his brother’s trips to the dockyard women, his nights with the dance club girls, the way something in the urge seemed stirred by newness—but love? Why the drive to spread it ever thinner? To go from a mother, a father, a brother, to a wife. To a child, another, a

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mistress. No, he could not understand how in the end it could make anyone more happy than they’d been when they began.

Ok, so I said I wasn’t talking about autobiographical fiction—and I’m not—but, as the author John Irving says, “To write about what you fear is also a little autobiographical—even if what you fear has never happened to you.”

My brother and I are still pretty close. The rift between us isn’t as severe as what rips the brothers in The Great Glass Sea apart. And I’m not as obsessed with my brother as Dima, in the book, is with his. His views on fraternal love are extreme, but because they come from his great wound, which is rooted in my fear that I gave to him—of my brother and I losing our love for each other—they reveal something about me.

The writer Sam Lipsyte, who studied with Gordon Lish, sees his teacher’s advice this way: “He was talking about putting yourself in jeopardy,” Lipsyte says, explaining that ‘write what scares you’ is “about a certain vulnerability that comes from the sense that people are going to see what your gaze is fixed upon….And there is something kind of weird about people seeing you seeing. And that is the danger to me, that is the jeopardy: giving others a glimpse of all your tiny weirdnesses, the things that we conceal on a day to day level.”

If you write about your great fears, out of your own wounds, then that’s the glimpse of yourself that you’re giving others. And that should scare you. And you should do it anyway. It is, in fact, another way to write towards, and into, your fear.

Now, Lipsyte is a funny writer. And Irving always seems to write through a slight smile. So why, if what I’m calling for is really meaning, is really digging into one’s depths, am I talking about writing from fear instead of, say, love? Why not, instead of writing about what makes your heart seize up, write about what makes it sing? The answer, I think, has to do with where dramatic tension lies. I do write about what I love. I love my brother. It’s the very strength of that love that gives the fear of losing it weight. The wound might be the loss of something a character loves, or the character might love something because it is the salve that she is seeking: the love is there; but if there’s no threat to it, there’s no conflict, and so no story. You get to have both; it’s just that if you want to write something powerful it needs to come from the one that disturbs the other, or you just wind up with something pleasant. And “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall!” So said Herman Melville, at least.

I should say here, having just quoted the granddaddy of American writers, that this focus of mine on more private, interior, and, in many ways smaller, struggles might have to do simply with the parameters of my life, or might be a particularly American thing, a Western thing, maybe a luxury unique to writers working in societies that are stable and secure. All this time, I haven’t

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES talked about the meaning and power in writing rooted in political or societal fears—of totalitarian oppression, say, or unjust imprisonment—but I imagine there may be some in this room who have known such fears, or known others who’ve faced them. And so I want to be clear that the specific fear a writer faces is, of course, specific to her, and will vary wildly from one writer to another, shaped by the outer world that affects the inner life.

A Mongolian herdsman would probably hear that anecdote I told at the start and chuckle (or scoff) at the concept of facing fear via a stroll into his daily life. But if I were to tell it as a story about that odd American wandering out onto the Steppe alone, if I were to dig into what made him do it—that he had just started a new life, left a freewheeling one to settle down bound to a family: step-daughter, soon-to-be-wife, baby they were already hoping to make; that a decade earlier he had done something similar, striking out solo across rural Slovakia and Romania, had felt more alive then than in the ten years since; more alive than he feared he ever would again; his desperate need to feel it once more before he died—maybe, if I told it well enough, that herdsman would recognize something similar in himself, whatever the fear of losing freedom and vitality might mean to him, and listen. Maybe if I did the same for the younger version of that author—the one who was attacked by Romanian dogs, who faced down five Slovakian men who’d followed him into the woods—a Bulgarian audience one country to the south might even imagine how it had felt, and forgive this American story-teller for seeing adventure in what must seem a familiar place. Because, in fact, the only thing that matters is that we writers manage to tap our fears in the service of characters whose needs can be so honest that the reader can’t help but feel them, too.

That’s why we’re here. That’s why we do what we do. So, after all this fear-mongering, I want to end with a bit of reassurance. Courtesy of my dad. Who, whenever I balk at something that seems too dangerous, get unnerved about going somewhere that for some reason scares me, tells me the same thing: just go. The decision is always hardest, the second before you land scariest. Once on the ground it gets a whole lot easier: no matter how unfamiliar or frightening the place, it’s just one step after another—a way into town, a bite to eat, a bed sleep, a memory faced, a face imagined, a word on a page—doing what you have to do to make it work.

That’s the end of my talk, but I’ve got a few pages I’d like to read that I chose specifically to shed a little more light on the concept I’ve been speaking about. It’s the beginning—just the opening scene—from a short story, The Point of Roughness, that’s included in my new collection, due out the middle of next year. As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, I have a family, including a fairly new baby, who is one of the great joys of my life, but, before he was born, back when my wife and I were debating whether to try to have a kid, I was deeply worried about what it would do to our lives, to our marriage. And the chance that the baby might be afflicted by something like

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES autism terrified me. Almost as much as the idea of how I might deal with it. So, of course, I wrote about it.

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DIMITER KENAROV

RIDING IN THE PASSENGER SEAT Lecture written for the Sozopol Creative Nonfiction Seminars, 8 – 12 June, 2017

In the summer of 2008, just as I was starting our as a journalist, I traveled from Sofia to Kicevo, a small, sleepy town in western Macedonia, to investigate the story of a serial killer. I could hardly contain my exhilaration, like a young dog taken out on his first important hunt. Stories of serial killers have always excited terror and lurid curiosity, from Jack the Ripper to the Zodiac Killer, but this one seemed to push the limits of the gothic. It featured a

bizarre protagonist and a mindboggling, almost incredible plot. Biography Over a period of several years, three women – perhaps four – had Dimiter Kenarov is a freelance writer, photojournalist and been viciously raped and strangled in the exact same manner, their contributing editor at VQR. His English-language nonfiction has abused, half-naked bodies discarded in secluded locations on the appeared in Esquire, Outside, The Nation, The Atlantic, outskirts of Kicevo. All of them were of similar age, in their late Foreign Policy, The New York fifties or early sixties; they had all worked as janitors; they had Times, etc., and has been anthologized three times in The lived in the same section of town. The Macedonian police were Best American Travel Writing. He is currently working on a initially paralyzed, baffled by the crimes, in possession of the biography of the Bulgarian writer and dissident Georgi murder’s DNA (extracted from the semen he had left behind), but Markov (Grove/Atlantic). Kenarov is a member of PEN lacking enough evidence to pursue concrete leads. They held the America and the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria. key but didn’t know where to look for the lock. The lucky break, and the unraveling of the sordid mystery, came about only with the help of a renowned, award-winning local journalist, Vlado Tanseki, who was covering the murders for the national press. Searching for answers, Taneski had done some serious legwork, interviewing various people, including friends, colleagues, and family members; he had talked to officials working on the case, and had then published extensive newspaper accounts. In fact, his stories were at times so detailed that they caught the eye of the detectives. How did Taneski know so much? Was he given to invention or did he have an inside source? Nobody quite knew what to make of it at first, but every new corpse provided additional clues, until one day, completely out of the blue, the police rounded up four suspects. Among their number was, astoundingly, Vlado Taneski.

There was initially a feeling of disbelief among Kicevo residents, who couldn’t accept that one of the most illustrious members of their community – a famed journalist, a respected neighbor, a gentle husband, and a loving father of two – could commit such beastly, unconscionable acts. It

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES was impossible. If surfaces were so deceptive, if ordinary things were not what they appeared to be, how could one read and comprehend the world at all? What was real? How could Taneski rape and kill elderly women – women who, it was afterwards revealed, resembled his own late mother – and then calmly don his reporter’s hat to investigate the crimes he had himself committed, going as far as interviewing the son of one of the victims? This simply beggared belief. It seemed like the far-fetched stuff of movies, of horror novels, a plot cooked up by a writer’s unhinged imagination. Yet DNA test results, when they came in, were incontrovertible: Vlado Taneski, the journalist covering these awful crimes, was Kicevo’s serial killer.

This was not the end of the ordeal: three days after Taneski was arrested, he was found dead in the lavatory of his jail cell, on his knees, drowned in a water bucket used for flushing the toilet. There was a farewell note under his pillow, proclaiming his innocence. All kinds of conspiracy theories immediately sprang up: that he was murdered by the police which was trying to hide something; that he was a victim of a botched waterboarding procedure; that he was killed so his organs could be harvested. Most of the evidence, however, pointed to an uncanny suicide. In a desperate attempt to escape the infamy that awaited him, dreading to face his neighbors and family in a public trial that would have almost certainly resulted in a guilty verdict in light of the preponderant evidence amassed against him, he had done the impossible, making his death as strange as his life. He had not only taken his secrets and shame into the grave, but had also assumed control of the epilogue of his tragic tale, denying others the satisfaction of writing it for him. The author had decided to kill his protagonist at the most opportune moment. Or had the protagonist killed the author? It was a postmodern plot of almost perfect proportions. And wasn’t this journalist really a novelist in disguise?

When people ask me about the difference between fiction and non-fiction, one of the most futile and exasperating literary questions, I like to relate this little horror story from Macedonia. I feel it contains a kind of veiled allegory illustrating the whole vexed issue of genre, and of the vague boundaries between, what we tentatively like to call, imagination and reality. I don’t mean to imply that fiction writers are psychopathic journalists turned serial killers, but it’s worth considering the proposition for a moment. For Taneski, the world out there, the humdrum world of Kicevo, was simply not sufficient to make a good story: something needed to happen; some new ingredient had to be added to the bland, meaningless stew of the everyday. He had to dip reality into the acid of his imagination. He had to invent. All happy families are alike, Tolstoy tells us, they are rarely the subjects of good novels, and so Taneski made a few of them unhappy. Very unhappy. Most importantly, he took authorial control of the plot, shaping it as he saw fit. The only problem – but what a problem! – was that he couldn’t keep the characters confined to the madhouse of his head.

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It’s very hard to sympathize with a sick monster like Vlado Taneski, but as a journalist I do. There is, indeed, something terrifying about the abyss of having nothing to write about. The empty days, the boring town, the people who don’t speak much, the dust. Perhaps the mayor took a small bribe from the sub-contractor renovating the postal office, or the water main burst in the street, or – but this is way too much to ask for – the deputy minister of sport came to inspect the new gym at the local high-school. The fact of the matter is that I would have never visited the western Macedonian town of Kicevo (population 27,076) had not Taneski gone nuts and killed all of these women. We probably would have never heard of the village of Holcomb either, standing “on the high wheat plains of western Kansas,” had not somebody named Truman Capote taken an intense interest in the murder of a certain family there. Nor would have so many reporters flocked to Iraq or Syria if there were no wars. The cynical media slogan “if it bleeds, it leads” may sound cold-blooded and leaden-hearted, but it winds up the creative mechanism. It is not that journalists are vultures, as they are so often portrayed, drifting on the warm air currents in search of a warm corpse, but like all writers they do enjoy stories, and tragedy usually makes for a pretty good one. Unlike novelists, they are allowed to invent neither the plot nor the characters (unless they are Taneski of course), they can’t throw Anna Karenina under the train or slaughter an old pawnbroker with an axe, and so they are left with little choice but to scan the ground for narrative meat. Fine then, yes, I agree, journalists – and non-fiction writers generally – are vultures.

What really makes vultures and journalists alike, however, is not their ghastly appetite as much as their vulnerability. Buffeted by the winds, scorched by the sun, always on the brink of survival, they are both playthings of chance. Some days are unusually fat, but most are hard and lean, with nothing in sight to report but barren landscapes – and let’s be honest, nobody’s that interested in landscapes. Whereas fiction writers are more like deities, selecting from the physical world only what suits them best and inventing the rest, disassembling and reconstructing the universe at will so that each rough element is polished and fits some greater narrative vision or theme, their non-fiction brethren enjoy no such awesome powers. We are allowed to have style; we can use long, rambling sentences with multiple semi-colons; we are free to experiment with framing, pacing, and sometimes even with point of view. If truth be told, we really do write fictions, but for a single difference: we can’t make our characters say what they haven’t said; we can’t stop the rain when it rains; we can’t crash the aircraft to complicate the plot; we can’t kill Hitler to save the heroine. It is fiction on a chain. Perception of the world may be an illusion of the mind, yet it contains some hard objects we cannot ignore. Which reminds me of a passage in one of my favorite biographies, James Boswell’s uninhibited, hilarious The Life of Samuel Johnson, where Johnson, the eighteenth-century British literati, is attempting to disprove the idealistic philosophy of George Berkeley, “After we came out of the

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES church,” Boswell remembers, “we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it – ‘I refute it thus.’” Non-fiction, I think, is that large stone you can neither will away, nor, for poetic purposes, turn into a giant moraine left over from the last Ice Age.

Although it may seem obvious, I believe that here lies the heart of the matter. Non-fiction has to contend with the imperfections and jagged edges of our visible world; it has to accept without complaint the often arbitrary and unfinished nature of events and people, and reconcile itself to empty spaces one cannot fill. “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t,” Mark Twain wrote in his travelogue Following the Equator: A Journey around the World, and he is indeed telling the truth. To put it another way: non-fiction is fiction from the passenger-seat with no road map or idea of a destination, fiction with somebody else – or maybe nobody – at the wheel. Being driven to a new place rarely turns out as expected and every day the story is constantly in danger of collapse. It’s like you’re listening to a pleasant piece of chamber music and suddenly the violinist begins to make weird noises with his mouth, to mumble quietly at first and then shout at the top of his voice about genetically modified foods or the foreign policy of the Bulgarian government toward Burkina Faso. It all resembles a theater of the absurd a bit. What do you do when you’re reporting a magazine feature about snowboarding but there is almost no snow on the ground, as it happened to me once in Sarajevo? How do you make a story about tractor production in Belarus when they refuse to let you into the tractor factory or speak to anyone, although you’ve been promised on the phone unimpeded access by the factory manager? Nothing quite makes sense, and everything is much too complex, contradictory and inconsistent. And the hardest part is that you’re not allowed to make it all fit – you can’t invent the snow, or fling open the doors of the tractor factory. Precisely because of this, I think the genre requires, paradoxically, greater craft and imagination from its author: for it is quite difficult to build, say, a space rocket, when you’ve only been given some plastic, a piece of string, and bubblegum. And it is harder to draw an accurate painting with only two or three colors instead of a full palette. Yet, to me, this is the braver, more honest type of literature: while novels appeal chiefly to our desire for narrative order and meaning, eliding the odd and the illogical, non-fiction seems more keenly aware of the deficiency of perception and the gaps in our knowledge, of the randomness and opacity of the universe we live in, never giving us back the picture we’ve originally imagined. Without a doubt, documentary writing is still mediated experience, a linguistic construct, just as everything else in our human domain, and should not therefore be confused with some objective reality, yet it holds fewer trappings

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SOZOPOL FICTION SEMINARS LECTURES between the world and us. It is like the original folk version of “Red Riding Hood,” free of the later encrustations of the fictional happy end, in which the woodsman never arrives to disembowel the wolf to save Red Riding Hood and her grandmother.

I’m dead wrong about fiction of course. There are plenty of novels which dramatize beautifully exactly this conflict, the misalignment between fiction and non-fiction, expectation and experience. It is, after all, the central theme in the first modern European novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in which an old man obsessed by the ideas and literary images of chivalric romances tries to transpose them directly onto the harsh and rather unromantic realities of the everyday. Kicking Samuel Johnson’s large stone, Don Quixote would have felt pain, but he would have also tried to believe he was kicking a very heavy and tough-leathered football. That gap between the imagined and the actual is the source of both comedy and tragedy throughout the book. The physical world, with its vulgar and meaningless shape, constantly threatens to overwhelm illusion, yet illusion fights back tooth and nail and tries to stamp its own vision onto life. In fact, at their core the stories of Don Quixote and Vlado Taneski are not that different, though Taneski is the sinister double of Don Quixote, guided in his actions by horror instead of romance, raping damsels instead of saving them from rapists. In both cases, however, the creative impulse – and sheer madness – is similar, directed by the characters’ desperate need to impose a narrative order onto a narrativeless universe.

Or let’s take another novelist, my all-time favorite, Laurence Sterne. In his A Sentimental Journey, as well as his later masterpiece Tristram Shandy, Sterne tried to put aside all the neoclassical conventions of selection and order and balance, and create a new kind of free-wheeling, effervescent, digressive fiction, which incorporated all the random bits and pieces in front of the eyes of the protagonist, without caring to make them obey some bigger architectural plan. He pushed the concept of mimesis to its absolute extreme, holding a giant 360 degree mirror up to nature. “But I’m govern’d by circumstances—I cannot govern them,” Sterne’s narrator says, breathlessly, as his mind jumps from one subject to the next, like that of a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. His novels are in essence anti-novels, creating the sensation that there is no authorial intelligence in control of the plot, and the protagonist is just a victim of the situation – I guess the closest a novelist could get to writing non-fiction. Samuel Johnson, always the moralist, who believed that novels should imitate nature, but only “those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation,” did not approve of Sterne, who seemed to collect indiscriminately all the stones he came across on the road, the little ones and the big ones, exercising no judgment or care in polishing them into proper pedagogic shape. “Nothing odd can do long,” Johnson said of Tristram Shandy. He was certainly mistaken.

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But no matter how radically plotless or subjectless or digressive a novel professes to be, no matter how much its author pretends that he doesn’t exercise imaginative control over it and he is just reporting what happened, it is of course all simply a ruse, a narrative artifice. Sterne, as much as Cervantes, as much as Tolstoy, was a fiction writer par excellence, and had at his disposal the full set of the novelist’s arsenal. He wasn’t governed by circumstance, as much as he invisibly governed it. Though historical and psychological verisimilitude may produce the impression of non-fiction, it is never quite the same, for the novelist is always the active agency making the final choice. However faithfully it may try to stick to the facts, whatever hard-core naturalism it boasts, fiction’s true allegiance in the end is never to this world itself as much as to a truth beyond it, an unfamiliar world hidden under the morass of the familiar one, only revealed through the power of the artistic imagination. “A lie has short legs,” one popular proverb goes, “But it runs faster than the truth.” That, I think, pretty much sums up fiction. A lie with short legs that runs faster than the truth.

But what of us, poor non-fiction writers, slaves to facts and circumstance, walking on two human legs that are neither too short, nor too long? What is the meaning of our trade? Why do we keeping on writing what we do, when fiction seems to offer so much more power and possibilities and even truth, so much more freedom? Because of freedom, I say; because there is a sort of liberation in the knowledge that one is just a passenger in this life and nobody is really behind the wheel; because riding in the passenger seat is often more pleasant than driving, and in the end you actually get to see more of this passing world.

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THANK YOU AND SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!

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