The Bulgarian Renaissance (1762-1878)

II THE BULGARIAN RENAISSANCE (1762-1878) In his stimulating essay on the beginnings of the Bulgarian Renaissance1 the eminent literary historian Bojan Penev describes the conditions prevailing in his country before and during the Renaissance. Some sense of Bulgarian national identity survived, he comments, because the Turks differed too sharply from the Bulgarians in language, religion and culture to assimilate their subjects easily. Furthermore, as the Turkish population preferred to settle in the rural lowlands, many mountain areas and cities were granted privileges which helped them keep the Bulgarian spirit alive: thus the people of Gabrovo were not obliged to accept Turkish settlers at all, and that city later became an active center of Bulgarian nationalism. In addition, the mountains furnished a natural refuge for Bulgarian rebels waging partisan warfare against the occupier. Conse- quently, it is not astonishing that mountain towns supplied a remarkably large portion of the prominent revolutionaries and educators active during the Renaissance. Greek influence, Penev goes on, was more subtle and in some respects more pernicious than Turkish oppression because the Greeks were on the whole culturally superior to the Bulgarians. This meant that those who wished to advance their fortunes were strongly tempted to hellenize themselves. A large portion of the Bulgarian church hierarchy was hellenized, and the urban population became thoroughly Grecophile. The adjective "Greek" was thought of by many as equivalent to "educated". Private and business correspondence was frequently conducted either in Greek or in Bulgarian written in the Greek alphabet. From time 1 Bojan Penev, Naialo na balgarskoto vazraidane, Sofia, 1929. Although the Bulgarian word vazraidane is ordinarily translated by the English 'Renaissance', the term here is not what it is in the phrase 'Italian Renaissance', which denotes a blossoming of humane learning and a turn to the models of classical antiquity. The Bulgarian Renaissance not only began much later, it was also largely ecclesiastical, at least in its early stages, and effected chiefly a resuscitation of the Bulgarian national spirit, which had been stifled by centuries of Turkish and Greek oppression. 38 THE BULGARIAN RENAISSANCE (1762-1878) to time the Greek cause was promoted by native propagandists. For example, about 1760 a certain pop Daniil published a small dictionary and phrasebook covering Greek, Albanian, Bulgarian and Rumanian, in which could be found some verses beginning: Albanians, Wallachians, foreigners, rejoice, And prepare to become Greeks all. Reject your barbarian language and customs And shortly your descendants will forget all about them. The hellenizing pressure was so great that some convinced Bulgarian nationalists of the nineteenth century even preached their doctrines in Greek (the pure Bulgarian language was best preserved in the rural areas, especially among women). For a time the Hellenistic threat to Bulgarian nationhood was such that the Bulgarians are said to have endured a 'double yoke', Turkish and Greek. Some western influences did reach Bulgaria, in the eighteenth century mostly by way of Serbia. A prime channel of western ideas was Dubrovnik, a major link during that era between western Europe and the South Slavs generally. In Bulgarian cities like Ruse, Varna, Sumen, Tarnovo and Plovdiv Dubrovnik maintained colonies which served not only to advance Dubrovnik's commercial interests, but to disseminate notions of consti- tutional government and legality as well. Serbs and Bulgarians also met in Austrian Serbia and at Mt. Athos, where monks from the various Orthodox Slavic countries congregated. Indeed in the eighteenth century and earlier it was often difficult to tell whether an individual born in a border area was a Serb or a Bulgarian. Consequently, in the early days books were published for the South Slavs as a whole. Thus in 1741 in Vienna, a center of South Slavic émigré cultural activity, was printed the Stematografija by Xristofor 2efaroviô. It is uncertain whether Zefaroviô was a Serb or a Bulgarian, for in his book he refers to both countries as his fatherland. The volume contained pictures of Bulgarian and Serbian czars and saints, together with coats of arms of all the Slavic countries, each coat of arms accompanied by a poem of an historical nature. Another book intended for the South Slavs generally was one by the Serbian historian Jovan Rajic (his father was a Bulgarian) entitled Istorija raznix slavjanskix narodov, najpace bolgar, xorvatov i serbov {History of Various Slavic Peoples, Principally the Bulgarians, Croats and Serbs, 1794-1795). Finally, as we shall see, toward the end of the Renais- sance Serbia was quite important in the plans of Bulgarian revolutionaries. Russian influence in Bulgaria during the first three or four centuries of THE BULGARIAN RENAISSANCE (1762-1878) 39 the Turkish occupation was significant. Later, when Russia and Turkey fought a series of wars during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Bulgarians looked with alternating hope and despair to the Russian Empire as their liberator. With each war Russia came closer to freeing Bulgaria, and when the deed was finally done Russia laid claim to a debt of gratitude which has not been completely paid to this day. In the final decades preceding the liberation a number of Bulgarian intellectuals studied or at least lived for a time in Russia. Many Bulgarian students were brought to Russian universities, especially Moscow University, by the 'Slavic Benevolent Committees' formed by Russian Slavophiles; Odessa became a major center of the Bulgarian emigration. In the closing phases of the Renaissance Russian influence was paramount in Bul- garia. In passing, one may note an interesting contrast between the beginnings of modern Russian literature, starting from about 1730, and the early period of the Bulgarian Renaissance, from 1762 to around 1840. Under Turkish rule Bulgarian society was much more egalitarian than Russian society of the eighteenth century. At that time Russia possessed a hereditary aristocracy widely separated from the common people, and the rapid development of eighteenth century Russian literature was in great measure — though not entirely — the work of those either born to the aristocracy or actively supported by it. Usually, well-educated Russian writers were familiar with some non-Slavic foreign culture, especially French or German. They could therefore import contemporary western literary modes into Russia and in this fashion quickly bring her abreast of the West.In Bulgaria, on the other hand, the hereditary aristocracy had been eradicated by the Turks, and the aristocracy of wealth (the corbadzii) remained comparatively close to the people, especially in their unconcern for matters cultural. As a result Bulgaria required a long time to accumulate the 'cultural capital' to invest in a modern literature. Moreover, Russian literature passed almost entirely from ecclesiastical keeping to that of the secular aristocracy around 1730; but in Bulgaria, where there was no secular aristocracy, literature and culture remained for years — almost entirely to the beginning of the nineteenth century, to a lesser extent until about 1840, in significant measure even down to the liberation — in the care of monks, bishops and other churchmen. The secular intelligentsia did not really begin to emerge until around 1840. Thus the aristocratic period of Russian literature which filled the space between the ecclesiastical writing of old Russia and the 'democratic' era of nineteenth-century realism did not exist in Bulgaria. The ecclesiastical 40 THE BULGARIAN RENAISSANCE (1762-1878) and 'democratic' periods in Bulgarian literature overlapped, and churchmen contributed to the secularization of Bulgarian culture. Finally, Rumania also played a part in the Bulgarian Renaissance. The Rumanian language is of Romance origin — though it has borrowed many Slavic words in the course of the centuries and has lent some of its own to Bulgarian — and Rumanian culture was not sufficiently superior to the Bulgarian to affect it strongly. Still, the two countries were joined by their common Orthodox faith and geographical propin- quity. In the decades immediately preceding the liberation, Rumania, as it enjoyed a more autonomous status than Bulgaria within the Turkish Empire, sheltered Bulgarian refugees, who gathered in cities like Braila, located near the Danube which separates the two countries, and Bucha- rest, situated in the southern part of Rumania. Such revolutionaries as Xristo Botev, Ljuben Karavelov and Vasil Levski used Rumania as a sanctuary from which to mount forays into Bulgaria and even, during the 1876 uprising, as a staging ground for the formation of armed insurgent bands to be sent into Bulgaria. But Bulgarian revolutionaries in Rumania always felt like foreigners, as the title of Ivan Yazov's story about them, "Nemili-nedragi" (Unloved and Unwanted), more than implies. The Bulgarians could cultivate a certain affection for the Serbs and the Russians, for all that the latter lived under an oppressive regime some of the time ; feelings toward the Greeks could range from toadying admiration for their power and culture to incandescent fury against them; the Turks could be universally hated ; but between the Bulgarians and the Rumanians there was an invisible wall. The Rumanians could tolerate and assist their neighbors, but they could never genuinely take

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