Download PDF | (Ceu Medievalia) Roumen Daskalov - The Making of a Nation in the Balkans_ Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival-Central European University Press (2004).
297 Pages
Preface
A few paragraphs to explain the motivation behind this work would seem to me appropriate. Generally speaking, the book contains a presentation and critical consideration of the ideas of historians on the major problems, processes, events, and personalities of the era of the Bulgarian (national) Revival. I trace how the Bulgarian Revival was viewed by historical scholarship, and how notions and representations have changed over time. In so far as historical scholarship is meant to reveal, and so help towards an understanding of, historical events, a representation of the movement of ideas and of the debates on various problems inevitably has a bearing on the past itself. The epoch is “contained” in the attempts to conceptualize, represent, and make sense of it. The various notions and narratives are mutually complementary or mutually corrective, and even entirely wrong ideas have some (negative) usefulness in showing what the Revival was not. The “truths” of the Bulgarian Revival can be glimpsed through the conflicting ideas about it, and through their evolution. My own views and opinions, where not stated directly, may be inferred from the manner in which the various authors’ views and the polemic surrounding them are introduced and represented, and from certain general reflections, ete.
The Revival is often approached—and understood—by way of comparison with other regions, epochs, ideological trends, or events. The various analogies and more elaborate comparisons employed in making sense of the Bulgarian Revival are based on phenomena (and mental constructs) from two major areas that were, in fact, the source of the actual influences: Western Europe (“Renaissance,” “Reformation,” “Enlightenment,” “Romanticism,” the French Revolution, national liberation movements,
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and capitalism) and Russia (the “agrarian question,” “populism” and
revolutionary democratism,” and the Russian revolu-
“utopian socialism,” “
tion of 1905. These analogies or parallels between developments in Bul- garia and other historical phenomena may be revealing, but, as we shall see, they may also be misleading.
In realizing my initial intention, I was also led in other directions. To begin with, it was fascinating to trace connections between the ideas of historians, on the one hand, and the social context and political power on the other. This revealed how historical facts about the Revival were instrumentalized for ideological purposes, such as the fostering of national and state loyalties through the reproduction of identities and their reinforcement by an image of the enemy, or for directly political purposes, such as the legitimating or contesting of a current political regime under the guise of disputes over historical legacy. Bulgarian historical scholarship, including that which passes for “serious” or “scientific,” offers plenty of material of this kind, accumulated in successive epochs of ideological mobilization under the banners of nationalism, right-wing authoritarianism (shading into Fascism), and Communism. In fact, it is difficult to draw the line between professional historical scholarship, as represented by many scholars, and the more popular versions of historical writing, where the biases stand out more graphically. Still, | hope that the present work is not dominated by ideologo-critical negativity but rather by the hermeneutic effort to understand how the Bulgarian Revival has been conceived of and imagined, and by the keeping of a certain distance from the various views presented— whether critical, ironic, or simply that inherent in the presentation of another person’s view. In this respect I have been greatly inspired by Francois Furet’s book on the French Revolution.
Particular attention is paid to the way that the Bulgarian Revival has been narrated, with respect to selectivity, the principal meanings, protagonists and plots, continuities and breaks. Without presenting a radical deconstruction of the grand narrative of the Bulgarian Revival, or, to be more precise, of the two grand narratives under the banners of nationalism and of Marxism, the present work sets in relief some of their mechanisms, logic, fictions, etc., and thus to some extent relativizes them. The very demonstration of the “movement of ideas” in historical scholarship, through theses and their revisions, has a sobering and humbling impact. This is due not least to the fact that it demonstrates the indelible impact of standpoints, values, and theoretical frameworks. (According to some postmodern historians, theoretical reasoning itself proceeds by way of likening in the generation of “true knowledge.”)
Finally, and somewhat in the spirit of the “history of concepts” (Begriffsgeschichte), | briefly address such issues as the semiotic reworking of the historical happening into a “Revival epoch,” the participation of phenomenological (life-world) experiences and the role of secondary reconstruction in this process, and the specific temporality of this epoch and its delimitation from (and contrast with) what preceded and succeeded it, etc.
It should be added that the Bulgarian Revival has been a privileged period within Bulgarian historical scholarship. Enormous interest has been shown towards it, and understandably so, as an epoch of national formation (in which the national foundation myth is embedded), as the beginnings of modern Bulgarian development, and, as such, as having a crucial impact on the subsequent history of the country. Various views have been set forth over the years and a number of comparatively free debates and discussions were held even during Communist times. One might say that the specific intensity and sharpness of the debates on the Revival reveal them as an indirect expression of a (dissident) stand on actuality and reflect the absence of free political life under Communism that made the past into an arena of Ersatz politics.
A venture of the kind undertaken here is quite novel for Bulgarian historical scholarship and entirely absent in the sparse foreign writing on the Bulgarian Revival. The (historiographical) systematization and stocktaking carried out by scholarship on the Revival epoch so far has dealt mostly with particular issues with limited goals, and it has been less critical as to fundamentals. For that reason I hope that this work will arouse the interest of many students of modern Bulgarian history, and, beyond that, of those involved in national (and nationalist) historical scholarship more generally. In a way, my effort is inscribed within the post-Communist rethinking of history and historical scholarship, but hardly as straightforward and negative revisionism.
Given the immense number of historical monographs, studies, papers, and general courses on the Bulgarian Revival, omissions and gaps—even important ones—are almost inevitable here. But in pursuing the kind of conceptual review of historical writing (or “conceptual historiography”) that I have in mind, exhaustiveness is less important than establishing conceptual continuities and changes. However, even here there may be lacunae, and some ideas may not be traced to the source.
A comment should be made regarding the considerable imbalance in favor of views that go under the banner of Marxism, or, in fact, of certain Marxist vulgates (Leninist, Stalinist, Chervenkov-Todor Pavlovist) and of their subsequent implicit or explicit revisions by nominally Marxist authors. This results from the fact that the field of the Bulgarian Revival
was most intensively cultivated during the state socialist period, which saw a characteristic increase in the number of “scholarly workers” (historians), many of whom took refuge in the Revival period from the even more ideologized more recent history, and some of whom used the opportunity to smuggle in dissident views of their own. More substantially, as we shall see, some of the fundamental thoughts on the Bulgarian Revival then established have been preserved in some guise until today, after “overcoming” so much.
A note is needed in order to justify my returning to a given problem (or a certain author) in a different context and from a different perspective. The necessity for this comes from the thematic method of presentation, where the same thing recurs in various contexts, for example, the bourgeoisie as social class, in connection with capitalism, as bearer of certain political ideas, as leader of a bourgeois revolution, etc. Thus apparent repetitions are not in fact repetitions.
Finally, a word of thanks to the Humboldt Foundation and the Central European University for their generous support in the carrying out of this research. My thanks go also to Rachel Hideg for the careful copy-editing of the manuscript.
INTRODUCTION
From Metaphor toward Historical Epoch
The Bulgarian Revival' is commonly understood as an epoch in Bulgarian history comprising the last century or so of Ottoman rule, which ended in 1878. Its interpretation as a process of the formation of the Bulgarian nation—or, in contemporary parlance, its revival, awakening, coming to its senses, being brought back to life, resurrection, etc.—began while the Revival was still under way (not, admittedly, from its outset, but in its final phase). This self-consciousness can be explained by the reflexive and ideational (or ideological) character of the process by which a group of people becomes aware of itself as separate and different from others, and begins to mobilize itself in the struggle for national recognition.
The term “revival” (vtizrazhdane), which literally means “rebirth,” and the related terms, were first employed metaphorically to designate the sudden and profound change experienced by the Bulgarian people, much like a magical return to life (after having been asleep or dead). At the same time, the Revival was thought of as a process with a certain duration, which led the Bulgarians to a state of being “awake,” “ “alive again,” etc. The conception of it as a historical epoch is potentially present here. In describing what was going on around them, observers of and activists in the unfolding processes in the 1860s and 1870s were actually writing “history of the present,” and were imbued with a sense of its historical significance. The meanings of this experience were still open to the surrounding world with its shifting horizons, since the process was not complete. But observers already had a certain “historical” perspective at their disposal. Especially in the 1860s, when the struggle for an independent Bulgarian Church was entering its crucial phase, and with the establishment of a Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870 (which in practice meant the recognition of the Bulgarian nationality), one could look back to the beginnings of the process and trace its turns. The first historians of the Bul-
garian Revival to be regarded by later scholars as their “predecessors” were thus involved in its “making.”
The initial elaboration of the Bulgarian Revival into a historical epoch is signaled by attempts to define its chronological boundaries and to pay tribute to its first leading personalities. Vasil Aprilov (in 1842), Georgi Rakovski (in 1860), and Marko Balabanov (in 1870) all dated back the beginning of a Bulgarian revival to 1826, with the reforms in the Ottoman Empire initiated by Mahmud II and continued by his son Abdul-Mecid. In their view, the Revival was signaled by the literary activities of Vasil Aprilov, Neofit Rilski, and the Ukrainian scholar Yuri Venelin.? In his influential article in the Periodical Journal of the Bulgarian Literary Society (1871), Marin Drinov, regarded as the first professional Bulgarian historian, moved back the initial date to the middle of the eighteenth century (with Paisii Hilendarski as the first “awakener”), and this view became widely accepted.’ The two principal trends of the Bulgarian Revival—the scholarly-educational (connected with Vasil Aprilov, who lived in emigration in Russia) and the revolutionary (initiated by Georgi Rakovski in emigration in Serbia and Romania)—are mentioned in the foreword to the first issue of a newspaper characteristically named Revival (in 1876).! One can observe how a spontaneous interpretation of the process by its participants was being gradually shaped into an awareness of a historical “epoch” in Bulgarian development. It is worth noting that the national process gave the epoch its name. The term “revival” (viizrazhdane—“rebirth”) imposed itself as a technical term in competition with “awakening” (probuzhdane) and Dinov’s “resurrection” (viizkresenie).
The Revival remained part of the biography and memories of several generations, as something experienced personally. The liberation that followed the Russo-Turkish war in 1877-78 does not present a boundary in this respect, since many activists of the epoch lived long afterwards and some wrote memoirs and historical works late in their lives. Soon after the liberation there began an urgent gathering and publication of materials about the preceding epoch from personal archives—letters, notes, proclamations, projects, telegrams, etc., which were usually introduced as “materials from the Revival.” The writing of memoirs continued until after World War I.° Such efforts were motivated by the idea that the deeds of the past must be rescued for future generations, and for history. They were regarded as “building blocks” (gradiva), the very word attesting to the fact that the authors imagined their contribution as something to be used in erecting an entire edifice.
The memoirs are narrated from the standpoint of the author and they are typically local and loosely structured, containing gaps in time and often relating trifling everyday events. Generalizations are rare, and at best they add details to the struggle for a modern educational system or an independent church. But it is exactly because of these peculiarities that the memoirs present a specific picture of the years under Ottoman domination, quite at odds with the grand national narrative constructed by professional historians. They abound in colorful descriptions of places and persons, and of events with local significance. They are low-pitched in tone, and the actors act mainly out of pragmatic motives rather than being driven by great ideals. As to language and style, theirs is a concrete and particularistic language, replete with words from the material sphere (and Turkish words) as opposed to the abstract terms and general assertions of the professional historical narrative. Only here and there do the memoirs refer to the central meaning of the grand narrative, then known as the “people’s affairs” or “Bulgarian affairs.”
The Bulgarian historians of the Revival generally play down the value of the memoirs as historical evidence by pointing to the gaps and errors that result from memory failure or attempts at self-justification. While this may be true, the often condescending attitude towards the memoirs conceals something more important. The point is that they actually subvert the grand (“high”) historical narrative of the nation, which is unitary, coherent, teleological and emotionally tense. In reading the “debasing” testimonies of the times, one becomes aware of the all too active role played by the historian in constructing a historical narrative with a supra-local (national) meaning, and in making generalizations in terms of factors, forces, processes, tendencies, etc. With their localism, particularism, disparateness, pragmatic lowering and personalism, the memoirs generate skepticism toward the encompassing narrative with its generalizations, continuities, and the ascription of attitudes or actions to collective protagonists such as “the people,” the nation,” or a certain class.
The “genre” of local histories, most often of a town and its surroundings, should also be mentioned in this context. These were written, in most cases, by local amateur historians who sympathized with all things local and did research using various materials: personal, community, and parish archives, oral testimonies, and sometimes personal recollections. In fact, some do conform to the highest scholarly standards of exactness. The intriguing thing about them is the comparatively rare mention of the term “revival,” which occurs mostly when speaking of certain personalities who
made contributions toward it; normally they prefer to date events as happening “before” or “after” liberation, “under the Turks,” etc. One can infer from this that revival is not meant in a comprehensive epochal sense but in the sense of particular aspects and processes, especially educational and church struggles, situated within a broader profane, that is, nationally non-accentuated, time. This can be contrasted with works of professional historical scholarship, in which the Revival spans all aspects of life and imbues them with its meanings. One can also note, in relation to the previous point, the existence in the local histories of breaks and displacements between the local and the national, with little “communica-tion” between them.’ No encompassing narrative is developed to bridge them and raise the local to the level of the national.
Some works about the Revival written shortly after the liberation belong to a peculiar hybrid “genre” between memoir, historical scholarship, journalism, and historical fiction. The broadness and significance of the events depicted, the presence of general reflections, and the retreating of the personality of the narrator to the background impart such writings with a scholarly quality even when they are based primarily on personal experience, memories, and imaginative writing. On the other hand, they are strongly rhetorical and strive to impart to the readers the opinions and biases of the author. The most powerful work of this type is Zakhari Stoyanov’s Notes on the Bulgarian uprisings (published between 1884 and 1892).* Similar, though of less artistic value in spite of its perhaps more solid historical qualities, is Stoyan Zaimov’s The Past (1884—1888).? Both authors were among the organizers of the April uprising of 1876, and their works focus on the revolutionary struggles of the receding past with the clear objective of glorifying and immortalizing the revolutionaries. Zakhari Stoyanov, especially, points out in the introduction to his famous Notes (and in the introductions to his biographies of Levski and Botev) that he was guided by the purpose of showing that “we Bulgarians,” too, have heroes, who would do credit to any nation.'° These honest, pure, and ideal heroes are contrasted with the times after independence, when disinterested patriotism gave way to job hunting and the all-engrossing pursuit of things material.'' One can see the elaboration of national heroes at work, as well as the accumulation of a symbolic capital of heroism. The heroes and heroism thus extolled would subsequently be used to various purposes— nationally affirmative and state-building, or subversive and revolutionary."
The establishment of a cult of heroes and of the entire Revival epoch was helped enormously by the great Bulgarian national poet and novelist Ivan Vazov, and especially by his collection of poems The Epic of the Forgotten (1884) and the novel Under the Yoke (1894).'* Vazov became a true “ideologue of the nation,” as the title of a recent book about him puts it. As pointed out by the author, he selected a glorious, heroic image of the past and projected it onto the collective consciousness in such a powerful way that it came to be accepted as the “sacred truth” by future generations. In various ways he imparted the impression of authenticity and historical truth to his works of fiction and blurred the boundary between poetry and history. All in all, Vazov succeeded in creating a positive self-portrait of the nation, a reassuring one with which the individual could readily identify." He also made an enormous, though non-avowed (coming from fiction, as it does), impact upon the scholarship of the Revival. Together with Zakhari Stoyanov, he sanctified the epoch and its personalities and inspired a strongly emotional, truly pious attitude that excluded a distanced, manysided, and critical treatment, that is, a scholarly approach. Both authors promoted a vision of Bulgarian history in black and white, consisting of treason or heroism (or martyrdom), that goes together with strong partisanship for one’s own “kin” and hatred towards one’s enemies.
In parallel to the memoirs and historical fiction, there began the systematic treatment of the Revival epoch by the nascent historical and literary scholarship. The first professional historians actually spanned the times before and after the liberation. With the passing of time, the Revival receded from actuality and from the memory of the living, and the perspective changed. Attitudes toward the past could now be more neutral and theoretically distanced. Not possessing a personal experience of the epoch, later historical scholarship reconstructed it entirely from documents and earlier testimonies.
Three main points of concentration of scholarly interest in the Revival may be distinguished thematically, corresponding to the major public movements of the epoch. The key words are church, that is, research on the struggle for an independent Bulgarian Church; culture, that is, research on education, literature, the printing press, art, etc.; and revolution, that is, interest in national revolutionaries and their organizations, conspiracies, and revolts. To these, one should add specialized works on the economy.!° There was also the great interest in the Bulgarian compatriots in Macedonia, most of which was lost in the wars.'’ There follows a brief and simplified outline of the dynamics of the scholarly field.
The first “strictly” scholarly work—Todor Burmov’s The BulgarianGreek Church Controversy (1885)—is dedicated to church struggles to estab-
lish a national church separate from the Greek patriarchy in Constantinople (Istanbul), which were, for a long time, the driving force of the national efforts.'* During the interwar period the church movement was researched by Petur Nikov, who considered it to be the most important part of the Revival, being, in effect, a movement for the recognition of the Bulgarian nationality."” Ivan Snegarov is another well-known historian from the same period, whose research centered on the evolution of the Bulgarian Church from the Middle Ages to Modernity.”°
For a long time, under the Communist regime, the church’s struggles were eclipsed as the center of interest shifted to the more heroic revolution. The neglect and underestimation of the church movement and of its activists reached such a degree that their vindication in the 1970s by the literary historian and critic Toncho Zhechev, in a widely read and much talked about book, made the impression of revisionism and even of dissidence.?' In a detailed study of the church movement before the Crimean War (1853-1856) the historian Zina Markova legitimized it as a valid manifestation and a necessary stage of the liberation (and bourgeois-democratic) struggle.” The author further developed her breakthrough in a monumental book on the Bulgarian Exarchate between 1870 and 1879, in which she vindicated the legal “evolutionist” national efforts in general.’? Soon after 1989, Iliya Todev coined the neologism “church nation,” in recognition of the formative role of the church struggles in building up the Bulgarian nation.”4
The revolutionary struggles also became an object of scholarly inquiry at an early date. Alongside the semi-scholarly, semi-journalistic works mentioned, there appeared heroized biographies of national revolutionaries. Dimitur Strashimirov is the first great historian of the revolutionary struggles, with his monumental work on the April uprising of 1876 (published in 1907). Several Communist historian-ideologues (Georgi Bakalov, Mikhail Dimitrov, Ivan Klincharov, ete.) wrote about the great revolutionaries of the Revival during the interwar period. In a more academic vein, historical research on the national revolution was conducted by Aleksandtr Burmov, whose first work, “The Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee,” appeared in 1943.?° Under Communism there followed a profusion of works on revolutionary organizations, activists, and ideas. A numerous group of researchers studied the revolutionary movement and its ideology, which became the privileged (and strongly encouraged) topic of the regime.”?
The cultural history of the Revival was the province of the highly re-
spected Bulgarian “bourgeois” scholarship, represented by literary historians such as Ivan Shishmanov and Boyan Penev, historians such as (the early) Mikhail Arnaudov, (the early) Hristo Gandev, etc. In fact, the Revival was regarded by them as a primarily cultural (spiritual) phenomenon. They published extensively on individual men of letters, on foreign literary and ideological influences and cultural relations, and on the general pattern of literary and cultural evolution and world-view changes at the threshold of modernity. Some authors (Nikola Vankov, Stiliyan Chilingirov) specialized in the history of education.”
The initial concentration of the efforts of the “general” (i.e., mostly political and social) historians after World War II mainly on the revolutionary struggles left research on the cultural history of the Revival entirely to literary and art scholars and linguists. Petiir Dinekov, Emil Georgiev, Toncho Zhechev, Docho Lekov, Nikola Mavrodinov (an art historian) and others studied literary trends and styles, personalities and ideas. During the last Communist decades there occurred a characteristic reorientation of an increasing number of historians toward cultural themes, which continued after 1989. The variety of interests is attested by the following list of names and topics: Nikolai Genchev (cultural relations with France and Russia, the intelligentsia, general patterns of Bulgarian culture”), Rumyana Radkova (the intelligentsia, various cultural phenomena, changes in morality”), Nadya Danova (cultural trends, pilgrimage to the Holy Lands*'), Angel Dimitrov (education*’), Ani Gergova (books and printing, the book trade’), Krassimira Daskalova (teachers, readers and_ reading*'), Miglena Kuyumdzhieva (the intelligentsia*’), Nikolai Zhechev (Bulgarian cultural centers in Romania), Virdzhiniya Paskaleva (Bulgarian women during the Revival**), Raina Gavrilova (the history of everyday urban life, historical anthropology”), Nikolai Aretov (representations of other lands and _ peoples*), Ivan Ilchev (advertising in the Revival press”), etc. Literary scholarship changed, too, as a younger generation of literary scholars (Svetlozar Igov, Inna Peleva) explored the texts of the Revival in innovative ways.
One might say that after social-economic history (to be discussed at length later) and the revolutionary struggles were subjected to dogmatic hardening, the cultural (and literary) history of the Revival proved to be an especially productive, dynamic, and innovative field. It generated new topics, legitimated new directions of interest, and served to advance revisionist views under the rubric of culture.
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