The Ideal Dissident – Prof. Milena Kirova about Ana Blandiana

The Balkan Library Series of Publishing House “Balkani” (not to be confused with another “Balkan”-oriented publishing house; the two have nothing in common) started coming out in 2000 with the support of the Culture 2000 Program of the European Union. The result is literally palpable: twenty-four neat books, the most comprehensive presentation of contemporary authors from other Balkan countries to have been published in Bulgaria in the last fifteen years. The selection and anthology have been delegated to good experts and translators from these languages, the publications have been culturally designed, edited and (even on the background of the untroubled carelessness raging in many publishing houses) proofread. The authors are pronouncedly representative of the culture of the second half of the XX century and have been selected in such a way that in the process of their gradual appearance they come to comprise an overall picture of versatility, multitude of languages and yet of unity in its Balkan spirit. Among these writers are the compulsory classic Ivo Andrich, a number of Greek authors – the bias here is evident (Georgios Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, Andreas Staikos…), rivaled only by the number of Serbians (Yovan Hristich, Yevrem Burkovich, Goran Petrovich…). It’s good to see an Albanian presence, but the Romanian one is exhausted by the name (a truly important one) of Blandiana (whereas we’d like to see at least Kartarescu, whom we’ve come to love). Another thing important for the Bulgarian reader: the price is “in a Balkan way” for the people, it’s been set at 5 leva, even for books of respectable volume. (There seems to be some Balkan utopia in the idea of equalizing the prices books of 100 and 320 pages. If this has been demanded by the Culture 2000 Program of the European Union, I’m inclined to appreciate “the Balkanization” of their material imagination.) As if we can summarize the whole concept with the words: good literature at a low price for the reading people who are not ashamed of their own Balkan identity in the united Europe.
Each of the books deserves a separate review but I have chosen (maybe out of stubbornness) the only Romanian one, an anthology of the writer and poetess Ana Blandiana, who’s in fact known in Bulgaria. Of course, another reason for this choice may be the fact her figure is symbolic of the changes which eventually led to the fall of the communist regime. Even more, she becomes of symptom of the development dissident intellectuals undergo in the fifteen years afterwards: active participation in public life, many interviews and articles stating the guilt of having lived through communism, gradual disappointment, retreat to the eternal realm of words… As early as 1977 Blandiana warned that the disappointment in the current democratic coalition leaders of Romania could turn into disillusionment with democracy itself. “And the incalculable result could be not only the abandonment of a trust which will no longer know whom to offer itself to, but a despondency of historic proportions which can at any moment turn into apathy and extremism.” It is hard not to see the prophetic aspect of these words when we relate them to our society’s situation today.
Actually Ana Blandiana is an exceptional intellectual writer and thinker. A woman of strong sense of responsibility (so strong that it stops her from physically procreating because of her inability to deal with herself), of strong thought and sound logic, of moral principles, which we more and more call traditional. Now, already in the beginning of the XXI century, she asks herself, “Who am I to allow myself to believe the Constitution should be upheld and laws abided by? Who am I not to wish to be neither a member of parliament, nor a minister, nor an ambassador? … Who am I to allow myself not to afford a cellular phone, not to hire bodyguards and not to engage journalists to praise me? Who am I to allow myself to live a modest life…?” The anthology “Mirrored Corridors” is comprised of parts from thirteen books published from 1964 to 2000. The genre panorama encompasses poetry, essayistic prose and several interviews. Blandiana’s lyrics have a very refined and lucid poetics mastered in its means of expression. She relies on reason, on conscious imagination, on the rational creative risk. No doubt before us we have a creator – modernist, maybe a little bit late in the European context, but necessary in the Balkan one. Everything we call postmodernism is foreign to Blandiana. She believes in the power and significance of the heightened, even prophetic personal presence. She makes a cult of the human will and desire for freedom. She officiates in the temple of the word and the creative process. She pursues the universalism of the existential human problems. She doesn’t like games and humor: as early as the age of 35 she was accused of “moralistic seriousness”. And she constantly asks herself questions, and one particularly importunate “Who am I?”. The latest answer the already 60-year-old poetess gives now makes you shiver, “… in a world where you die from a bullet without anyone having fired, in a world where everything was plundered without anyone paying attention by whom, in a world where everything is guilt, but no one is responsible, in a world where when you tell the truth it seems you lie and when you defend yourself against accusations others think you incriminate yourself, in a world which is becoming less like me and where I find ever fewer people, who are like me, I am the culprit.”


Kultura newspaper, issue 1
13.01.2006