IWM Junior Visiting Fellows' Conferences, Vol. XV/5 © 2003 by the author Readers may redistribute this article to other individuals for noncommercial use, provided that the text and this note remain intact. This article may not be reprinted or redistributed for commercial use without prior written per- mission from the author. If you have any questions about permissions, please contact Klaus Nellen at IWM, Spittelauer Laende 3, A – 1090 Vienna, e-mail <
[email protected]>. Preferred Citation: Trencsényi, Balázs. 2003. Peasants Into Bulgarians, or the Other Way Round: The Discourse of National Psychology. In Locations of the Political, ed. S. Gorman, Vienna: IWM Junior Visiting Fellows' Confer- ences, Vol. 15. Peasants Into Bulgarians, or the Other Way Round: The Discourse of National Psychology1 Balázs Trencsényi The question of Bulgarian national character was always bound to the problem of statehood. This is mainly due to the fact that, as the prominent Bulgarian intellec- tual historian, Ivan Elenkov, put it, the state was perceived as "the only source of modernizatory initiative, the only means to catch up with the structures of moder- nity,"2 and it also constituted the principal horizon of expectations concerning the future. Furthermore, the state-centeredness of the political culture also explains the relative compactness of the intelligentsia in the first decades of independent Bul- garia. This feature entailed that the cultural elite did not become polarized accord- ing to alternative traditions, which led to a constant oscillation between different political and meta-political positions. 1 The present essay is an extract from my longer manuscript on inter-war Bulgarian political discourse, entitled "Symbolic Geographies and Normative Pasts: The Search for the True Bulgarian Self." 2 Ivan Elenkov, "Spisanie 'Prosveta'" in: Arhiv.