In Italy, too, interest in Bulgarian literature has increased, especially after Georgi Gospodinov won the Booker prize in 2023; the success of his international editions has acted as a driving force for other young authors. And it was thanks to the interest of Giorgia Spadoni, a translator and journalist expert on Eastern Europe, that the Neapolitan publisher Wojtek published the novel by one of that country’s most successful writers: Radoslav Bimbalov.

L’Europeista met him in a café in Sofia to talk about literature, history and politics.

Your novel Ecstasis was translated into Italian last year. It’s the story of Mihail and Lara, two Bulgarian youngsters who are becoming adults and discovering freedom at the same time. Could you tell us more about that?

The end of communism in Bulgaria was interesting for young people. I was as old as Mihail’s in the book when the wall fell down in Berlin, and I discovered freedom exactly as he does. For ‘our’ generation freedom was something to feel, something to taste. Let me give you an example: in those years we lived behind curtains, it was black and white and sometimes grey, but in every city there was this chain called CORECOM  where western goods were sold. However, you couldn’t buy them unless you had foreign currency, so they were just for the elite, the diplomats or international traders. As a child I would look  through the glass to see these treats with great curiosity. When freedom arrived in 1989 we saw democracy as a gift from the fallen Russian regime: we authentically enjoyed it as it was that chocolate egg behind glass. For example, we started to go abroad: the first place I went to was Istanbul, which was a real shock then. For Mihail it’s the same, he craves for experiencing freedom to its extremes. And notice that borders are not only geographical, they’re also about human relationships:  for many of us it was the time to experience what was unconceivable for the previous generations.

How about Lara?

Unlike Mihail, his girlfriend Lara is more of a closed, introverted person, searching for love and passion. She pursues this also in unconventional ways, so to speak, especially the so called asphyxiation or breath control play; it’s part of her way of being.  This practice is widespread notwithstanding that it may end up badly: statistics show that in the US only more than 10,000 people die because of this every year. Most cases are incorrectly classified as suicides, partly because of the stigma and also because their relatives find them in disturbing situations; I’ve done research and I can say that people who die this way are not a nice view.  Having said that, the intensity of that feeling can be explained biologically and is known historically: medieval sources reveal that the hanged would often die having a deep orgasm. More generally, this threshold between life and death reveals her personality and is connected with the theme of the last breath.

Right: Mihail has suddenly a terrible incident and, as you write, ‘he goes to the left’. What does this expression mean?

That he’s in heaven, perhaps or, as some readers have pointed out, that he’s going through a process of detachment and purification. Be as it may,  the heavens give Mihail the task of collecting people’s last breath. It’s the longest in our lives, the one that gathers our emotional memories exactly when the soul is leaving the body. This shouldn’t be taken necessarily as a sad thing: all the people dying in the book, for instance, are experiencing moments of  deep joy or at least of intense experience. I should point out here that once I experienced all of this myself. While having a short cardiac arrest I saw the notorious white tunnel: it was probably the most wonderful moment of my life because I stopped feeling the burden of the body and started experiencing utter lightness. ‘Oh wow, that was amazing!’ I exclaimed immediately after recovering my senses: my wife, instead, was in tears after trying to revive me.

Going back to Mihail, we read that he breaks the rules but it’s not clear to me whether he gets punished or rewarded because of this.

True, he finds himself in between – the readers will figure it out on their own. This idea came out at school when I decided to give an alternative ending to Don Quixote. In my attempt of interactive fiction, Don Quixote reached heaven after passing away but even there he turned everything upside down to the point that God got upset and threw him out. I thought it was great, but my literature teacher didn’t agree: how could I dare to finish Cervantes’s masterpiece? Well, thirty years later I decided to give life to Mihail who effectively breaks all the rules.

Let’s move to contemporary Bulgaria. Who breaks the rules, making the country dysfunctional?

Firstly it’s organised crime. We say that every country has its mafia, but only in Bulgaria the mafia has its country. In brief, this consists of a long-lasting combination between underground business and political leaders. Throughout the last twenty years or so that we’ve joined NATO, the EU, the Schengen area, the Eurozone and so forth but the people in the government are still heavily tied to powerful clans. In practical terms this means that  the European infrastructure funds have been stolen, so our roads aren’t as good as they should be; the same applies for agricultural development, healthcare and so forth. For every million Euros received, half of it goes into this mafia’s pockets. Secondly, it’s Russia and particularly our dependence on Russia. You know, for many years we’ve been told that Russia saved us twice, firstly in the war against the Ottomans – and we were under them for five centuries, surely not an easy time – and then after the Second world war. However the truth is that when WWII ended, more than 100,000 troops of the Red Army invaded our country. Think that the recently dismantled monument to the Soviet Army was the tallest in the country for decades, far higher than the equivalent of any national hero. You see, Bulgaria is an important country for Russian propaganda: we’re the victim of that.

As a matter of fact, when communism fell a mass-migration process started.

Correct: the first migration wave was at the beginning of the 1990s. Around two million people left Bulgaria in the first five years of democratic changes, that is one fourth of the whole population of the time. Some of them remained abroad, some returned. It wasn’t easy, though, for we had to apply for visas; joining the EU released the visa issue, of course. However, throughout the years things changed: many people came back especially because in COVID times, and Brexit also had an effect: in the UK there was a large community of Bulgarians, part of whom have returned home.

What are the feelings of Bulgarian people towards the EU?

Joining the EU in January 2007 was a dream coming to life for everyone, from having the chance to work and study abroad without obstacles to expanding one’s business and operations. It really was like this for years, but things dramatically changed with the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. A new form of hybrid war with a strong focus on propaganda emerged and we were among the victims along with other Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania and  Poland. The result is that people’s perceptions are changing, so right now the public opinion is divided: half the population believes that joining the EU was a mistake because this didn’t improve our lives, but this isn’t true. Bulgarians live way better now than they used to do, even compared to just five years ago. Propaganda, though, is a powerful thing. Think that now there are rising voices, yet still weak, in favour of leaving the EU. I don’t think it’ll prevail because most of the Bulgarians would like to remain, but Europe itself is shaken by the great contradiction between traditional populism and liberal ideas – a shift in my opinion provoked by Russian influence.

Are you politically engaged at the moment?

Yes, I am a member of the Forum for Democratic Development. It consists of more than 60 professionals, ex diplomats and opinion leaders in Bulgaria coming from different generations and political views but all believing firmly that our democracy is threatened and it needs to be supported. What we want is to help the democratic parties inside and outside the parliament to have one common candidate for the next presidential elections to be held later this year. We’ve succeeded in convinced most of them to sign an agreement for a single candidate and now we’re in the process of preparing screenings to choose them. In order to do this we’re travelling across the country meeting people virtually everywhere; and we do this by ourselves, unsupported by financial organizations or NGOs. You know, convincing different political parties to sustain a common candidate is complicated because each of them has its own agenda and would like to express its own. However, we have to stay together in this process for the circumstances are adverse.