Vera Mutafchieva's work does not need to be critically shared in the spirit of preliminary praise. That is why it is appropriate to treat her new work targetly.
We must first clarify that this book, which is now before us, is only the first book in the multi-volume autobiography of Vera Mutafchieva. We are facing a large-scale plan and thank God! Finally, one of our great writers, whose life was split by the change of three epochs (as a parody of Timothy's full-fledged spherical being of Plato!), so as finally one of the great, modern classic authors to decide on such self-rigor, such as the story of oneself about oneself.
When I think about it now, it seems quite logical to me that the professional historian should be the first to wake up to this fatality of the epoch-making changes; to the contradictory meaning of their frightening dialectic: they give birth, but they also kill.
But on the other hand, we should also consider the redeemed chance of the writer, of a writer the stature of Vera Mutafchieva; a writer whose curiosity makes her “always be there” in what seems impossible to tell, because it itself is the so much gloomy, frightening, exorbitant, or, conversely, elusive to experience because it runs and hides in everyday life like the autumn mouse, like the autumn mouse in the barn of life.
In this sense, who was more fatefully punished with a writer's chance (the chance of a well-placed “observer”) than Vera Mutafchieva? – the professor's daughter of the eminent historian, herself a future professor of history; the urban, metropolitan girl in an overwhelmingly rural country; the woman who has to settle the accounts of her life in a macho society.
And here, through the last sentence, I touched on the content of NonFables (Bivalitsi) – Book I. In it, the story begins with the betrothal of the parents of the future Vera and ends with her heroicomic struggles to get an OF- (Fatherland Front) letter in order to be able to apply for higher education. As I said, Prof. Mutafchieva offers us today only the first part of a future major work, which will be her autobiography. This honor and this work are rightly placed on the hand of our writer. As a scholar-historian, and as an artist, she more than anyone else developed a complex taste for discovering and handling the chronicle tradition as an intimately memorizing modus where life and language exchange meaning; she was the first to point out and gather them to show us as testimonies of the early Bulgarian National Revival the chronicle notes and references left in the margins of liturgical books, church registers and guild records; she also claims in her new book that living in the margins is the most interesting and there the most interesting of life experience becomes recorded; she uses this wording tradition in her best books. Just as a reminder, I will mention the quasi-epistolary form of The Cem Case, the annals in the Chronicle of the Troubled Time, the protoscript of the Alexiad in Me, Anna Komnene. We owe to her the most interesting book so far on the life and autobiography of the most interesting person from the early National Revival – it is, of course, the Book of Sophronius and reference is to Life and Sufferings of Sinful Sophronius. But we can add – her essay on the life of the young Rakovski and the essay on the life of her own father...
This quick list confuses us, but this confusion fills us with hope for the new idea of Prof. Mutafchieva. Because we are obviously facing a case where the artist has performed excessively difficult tasks, while maintaining a high note of heralding her own commitment, her own philosophy on life and history, on life in history. For Vera Mutafchieva, this will be the search for the drop of life that reflects the whole; the search for strong individuation through characters; the search for the intimate gaze and the distinctive voice expressing the entanglement between causality and cause. Or, if put in terms, it follows the path of a lyrical-philosophical deepization of the historical occurring and passing. In years when man and the human were hardly worth the mention, Vera Mutafchieva made a discreet escape into man, the human nature, the humane and their bordering retention as a value.
As we know, the biographical text, being self-knowing, is a kind of Socratic. But even more so the autobiographical text, where you yourself become Plato of the Socrates of your life. Of course, this maieutics is complex, this is not your life, but your experience with life, alienated and credited to the language – so the autobiographer becomes an obstetrician of himself. In order to weave this paradox into her work, Vera Mutafchieva uses witness time when she tells about her parents' betrothal. With their love, ostensibly with this betrothal begins her story, her autobiography, although she could not be a witness. Viewed in this way, the title of the work is a bit misleading. It is as if NonFables suggest a scattered story of events, circumstances, family stories, anecdotes, whims of memory. But it's not like that. The opposite is true. This first part, it is true, is mostly about the home, about what has been called Vita Domestica since the Renaissance, but Vera Mutafchieva clearly applies the so-called genetic type of autobiographical writing. Amazing works such as Confessions of Blessed Augustine, Confessions of Rousseau and before that Autobiography of the great Giambattista Vico, as well as Poetry and Truth by Goethe were performed in this key. I am convinced that with NonFables - Part I Vera Mutafchieva lays a foundation stone in this direction, i.e. she will write an autobiography not just like that, but an intellectual autobiography that will show not only the path of someone in life, but also why this path was chosen. I say ‘chosen’, but sometimes providence chooses instead of us, we weigh on the palm of God, the shadow of destiny falls on us. But what is fate? What is destiny on the outside is character on the inside, and it is our philosophical duty, while overhanging, to think of this couple. This is the Socratic self-knowledge, on this philosophical canvas the plots of NonFables unfold.
I read somewhere that in his autobiography (written in Latin in verse!) Thomas Hobbes had written the following sentence: “Frightened by the invasion of the Spanish Armada, my mother gave birth to twins: me and fear.” In the story of her childhood and adolescence, Vera Mutafchieva could replace only the word “fear” with the word “labour”. First of all, this is the labour of the father, quietly respected by the young Vera, who is playing on the green pillow in his office. Then – her labour on defending her own character, called “serene sullen”, to recall, it seems, the classic predisposition to melancholy of the philosophically inclined person. The character is mostly defended against the mother in a series of semi-anecdotal events – the reluctance of little Vera to walk on Vitosha mountain without carrying her night pot with her; Vera's reluctance to wear clothes at all when she was a little girl; the initial reluctance to learn French, because French is learned by those who know it, and she did not know it. And so on and so forth. Then comes the second labour, the fight against early diseases – typhus, broken and crooked leg..., operations. Then – the despair when, as a 14-year-old, she lost her father. The effort of survival in rural Bulgaria due to the bombing of Sofia. Hunger.
And finally – instead of the invincible Spanish Armada comes the Red Army. The labour becomes excessive, exaggerated, unimaginable, and to some extent meaningless, because we are entering an age of barbarism and chaos. The labour, the character, the destiny – the undismissible tramphood and the excellent success in the girls' high school – here are the ways of building the image, the methods of this Bildung: the image of the child who cried out for fear of the dark: “I'm a child, I'm alone, I'm a little, have mercy”; the image of a 14-year-old girl sneaking into her late father's university office to take his two pistols so that she could inspire security in herself; here is the girl who goes to a brigade to get an OF-note because she wants to study…
I will stop here to add something else and put an end with it. I wonder - where does this serenity, this hope that radiates from the work, where does this trembling moisture, this humor, this vitalistic restraint that permeates the text, where does the courage to say “yes” – yes to childhood, yes to difficult adolescence – where do these all come from?... And all the answers that come to my mind are unsatisfactory – except for one: I’d like to point through the book of Vera Mutafchieva to Vera herself and just pass over in silence, if not fall silent at all.
The text was published in the newspaper Kultura – Issue 1 (No. 2427), January 12, 2001
http://www.kultura.bg/bg/article/view/4947
To the author's manuscript –
http://veramutafchieva.net/pdf/237.pdf
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