Imagining Themselves in Europe: Two Nineteenth-Century Balkan Perspectives

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Stoyan Tchaprazov is a Senior Lecturer at Iowa State University’s Department of English. His research interests lie primarily in portrayals of the “other” in late nineteenth-century British literature. Most recently, he has published articles on Bernard Shaw’s Bulgarian characters in Arms and the Man and on Bram Stoker’s Gypsies and Slovaks in Dracula.

Notes

1 In the early 1800s, after centuries of Ottoman rule, Greece became an independent state and Serbia gained autonomy. In the 1850s-60s, independence and nationalist movements among Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire grew bigger and stronger, culminating in a number of insurrections against the Ottomans. In the 1870s, Montenegro was recognized as an independent state and Bulgaria was granted autonomy, leaving only Macedonia and Albania under the direct rule of the Porte. By the end of the nineteenth century, “Balkan” became inextricably associated with the European territories the Ottoman Empire used to or continued to control.

2 See Edward Said’s analysis of the Orient as a Western invention in his seminal Orientalism. As he argues, the West establishes and deploys the Orient, largely through academic and imaginative texts, as the foil to Europe. The process of dichotomizing the relationship between Orient (East) and Europe (West), Said aptly terms “orientalism,” “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3).

3 The title of the play is in my translation and so are all quotations from it.

4 Even though they set their texts in Bulgaria and populate them with mainly Bulgarian characters, both Aleko and Voinikov invite readings of their texts as Balkan, rather than specifically Bulgarian: Aleko gives his protagonist a last name—Balkanski—that literally means “of the Balkans,” and Voinikov directly states in the Preface to his play that he envisions it as a critique of both the Bulgarians and the “neighboring peoples” (91). For more on Bai Ganyo as a Balkan character, see Svetlozar Igov’s “Bai Ganyo as Homo Balacabicus.”

5 It is widely accepted among Bulgarian scholars to refer to Aleko Konstantiov as Aleko.

6 The key importance of “West” and “Europe” to my inquiry in the following sections necessitates a short note on how and when Voinikov and Aleko employ these terms in their respective texts. First, whenever “West” is used in both texts, it usually denotes the western part of Europe. Second, in both texts “West” means/is “civilization” and vice versa. Finally, “West” means/is “Europe” as well. In both The Misunderstood Civilization and Bai Ganyo, “Europe” is exclusively treated as Western Europe, and the Balkans are not a part of it. Voinikov, for instance, uses “Europe” in reference to going to or returning from France, and Aleko literally uses it in the title of the first part of his book, “Bai Ganyo Starts Out for Europe,” which suggests that Bulgaria, the starting point of Bai Ganyo’s travels, is not conceived as European. In both texts, then, the operative formula is: West = Europe = Civilization.

7 Voinikov was one of many Bulgarian intellectuals and revolutionaries who immigrated or fled to independent Romania in the mid-nineteenth century. He was forced to immigrate to Romania because of his strong views on the independence of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

8 The first print announcement of the play’s performance in Bulgaria was published in the Bulgarian newspaper Dunav 620, 1871. To this day, the play is one of the most successful comedies put on the stages of Bulgarian theatres.

9 Most Bulgarian historians view Istoria Slavianobulgarskaia as the text that marks the beginning of Bulgarian national awakening.

10 See P. R. Slaveikov’s Malakova (1864), T. Stanchev’s Drandavela (1872), T. Peev’s Fudulesku (1876), and others. In their own way, each of these texts addresses the issue of foreign influence through a critique of those who are quick to submit to it. Nikolay Aretov offers insightful analyses of some of these texts in “Свое и чуждо във възрожденската драматургия.” Научни трудове. Vol. 45, book 1. Филология. Пловдив: Университетско изд. Паисий Хилендарски, 2007, с. 208-231.

11 A few words about Voinikov’s choice of a Greek character as the representative of Europe are in order here. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Bulgarian Christians in the Ottoman Empire became subjects to the Greek Patriarchate in Constantinople, which meant that liturgy was conducted in Greek, usually by Greek clergy, in all Bulgarian churches. In addition, almost every major city in Bulgaria had a Greek school, where children, mainly from the more affluent Bulgarian families, were taught in Greek and brought up to venerate Greek culture. By the nineteenth century, “the Bulgarians found themselves saddled with a double yoke: under the political authority of the Turks and under the cultural and spiritual domination of the Greeks” (Raikin 353). In addition, as Genchev points out, “Most intensely, the ideas of the bourgeois West enter [Bulgarian society] through Greece, which first among Southeast European countries absorbs [Western] bourgeois culture” (272). For Voinikov, then, as well as many Bulgarians of his time, nineteenth-century Greece was one of the major pipelines through which Western culture and ideologies traveled to Bulgaria.

12 In many critics’ view, Bai Ganyo is the most popular Bulgarian book. It has been translated in more than thirty languages, and by “the end of the 1980s, the editions are already numbering sixty-six: a total of 2, 295, 700 copies in print” (Kiossev 205-6).

13 All quotations from Bai Ganyo are from its recent translation in English (Bai Ganyo, Ed. Victor Friedman, U of Wisconsin P, 2010).

14 Aleko refers to the Viennese as Germans throughout his text.

15 The poetry and prose of Dobri Chintulov, Georgi S. Rakovski, Ivan Vazov, Hristo Botev, and Liuben Karavelov celebrate with enormous enthusiasm Bulgarian culture, identity, and patriotism.

16 “[T]thousands of things” and “you know” are the words in Turkish in this quotation.

17 See Richard Jenkins’ The Victorians and Ancient Greece.

18 A quick Google search of the term in Bulgarian—“байганювщина“—reveals that it is commonly used in the Bulgarian press, even to describe the prime minister’s (mis)conduct at a recent meeting with the Georgian prime minister. Also see Christina Kramer’s article about the Canadian Bulgarians’ reception of the first translation of Bai Ganyo, which came out in 2010. As she concludes, to this day, “Bai Ganyo continues to provide a forum for self-reflection and ascription—like Bai Ganyo or not” (269).