When looking back, can you clearly see the importance of the Bulgarian book for you?

There are no books in my earliest memories. There are branches of a tree (behind the window), there are stars in the night sky, sounds of crickets and frogs (for a long time I thought those sounds came from above, from the stars). There are horses, buffaloes, little lambs, the dog, Sivak, lying on the straw stack. There is a bread oven, an iron stove in the room with a kettle and tongs, a glass water jug, which I break with an accurate throw of the scissors… There were no books in our house. Nor in the old house of my grandfather; there was a horse saddle there, made of shining leather: it was my rocking horse, since I didn’t have a real toy as the town children did. I was born in a village, my mother loved learning but she started buying books when I went to school. My father, the cooper, read neither books, nor newspapers; he wrote with a flat carpenter’s Usta Gencho pencil; actually, he only left marks on the planed boards, it was not writing.
I didn’t learn the letters from the primer but from a calendar of the Common Bulgarian Crafts Union; this long appellation contained nearly all the letters of the alphabet and when we started leaning them at school I already knew them. I had learned to read almost by myself and I couldn’t wait to read the “first reader” at the end of the primer; then I lost interest in it. They say it is not good to read your lessons in advance and this may well be true; I don’t know if it is true that that who gains knowledge gains sorrow, as the Ecclesiastes says, but I am certain he gains boredom.
When I was in first class they subscribed me to the Children’s Joy magazine. I read every booklet at least twice a day for thirty days, until the new booklet came out. Believe me or not, I remember them even today. The first books which an uncle of mine gave me were Uncle Ganyo by Aleko Konstantinov and Fellow Countrymen by Chudomir. I was in third class. I don’t know what books were for me. I don’t know what they are now. Probably a part of the vivid world in which I lived. I lived in it and it lived in me. I have never seen them parted.

Which books have given you the most and from which books have you been able to take more than you believed it possible?

I knew a man from Sliven, his name was Shivarov, who memorized every book he read. I am not such a type of reader. Nor did I become absorbed in the plot, the peripeteias: even Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie could not bring me to a reading trance. I know that young people prefer the dialogues, the direct speech, and skip the descriptions; but I liked the descriptions better. I still like reading the stage directions in a play or script; I don’t know why. The last three lines of The Cherry Orchard continue to move me, no matter how many times I read them. (I’ll take Chekhov’s volume to quote them directly: “A distant sound, as if from the sky, the sound of a broken string – dying away, sad. Silence sets in, only the sound of an ax chopping a tree is heard in the distant orchard. Curtain.”) I have seen the play several times but the theatrical effects have never been as moving as the final lines of the stage directions.
I have always liked prose, I have always found in it some inner rhythm, word order, sentence structure. Unpremeditated, I mean, natural, without tension, pomposity, mannerism. I found Vazov, Elin Pelin, Yovkov, Karaliichev, Ilia Volen natural storytellers, and P. U. Todorov, stylized. Or Nikolay Raynov. Emilian Stanev is a great master: of the atmosphere, the detail, the pause, the perspective. His weak point is the dialogue. Such was he in life, too, a monologist: he didn’t listen to his interlocutors, he interrupted them, he talked and talked. This, I think, is the reason for his unsuccessful dialogues in his stories and novels. Most prose writers are describers: they depict events through a detailed, sluggish or nervous description of people, settings, backgrounds, etc. I had to read them to learn how I should not write.

What is the destiny of fine letters now, and what could this destiny be in the near and in the more distant future?

I am afraid I will repeat some common truths that everyone knows but it is difficult not to mention them. For instance, the truth that in order for art to exist there should be a talent and in order for the talent to exist their should be a proper climate, etc. Good literature is not created with occasional insights of occasional people, who are suddenly seized with inspiration. Suddenly or quickly one can create a maxim, an aphorism or an epigram, but in the deep roots of this there is a cultural layer, intellectual accumulation. The writer must be a professional, which is almost impossible in Bulgaria. Vazov still remains the only professional writer in Bulgaria. All other writers had other jobs or were maintained by organizations, parties, funds, i.e. they were not independent, free, making their living with literature. In short, there are almost no conditions for the appearance of a serious artist. As there is not much need for literature, it seems, since there is no serious demand and supply (market!). What is sold on the bookstalls substitutes the need for reading, the remaining time is dedicated to television, video and drugs. There will be bookshops in the next century of course, graphomania will assume larger proportions than today; computers will facilitate easy-writing and fast-publishing. We can only hope that there will appear – among the future digital text authors – some new writer, who will create works like If They Could Speak, Wolf’s Nights, We, the Sparrows, or Before I Was Born…

The cultural crisis of today has its causes and its signs, but it also has a remedy that is basically universal. Perhaps, the purely Bulgarian specifics of this remedy remain out of focus?

If civilizational backwardness is some specific feature of ours, we should look in that direction. But I am afraid that we will constantly discover the bicycle and the hot water. Let us first achieve the universal, the unique will come along. During the 30s, they somehow realized that, probably intuitively: the Hemus publishing house supported several poets and prose writers and then published and distributed their works. That was the beginning of professionalizing writers, the precondition for serious literary work, for good literary climate. During the time of real socialism there were also forms of support, there were also professional writers but they were ideologically dependent on the system. (Does anyone now remember books like At the Border, The Village of Vedrovo, Ordinary People, We from the Water Tower, The Barren Plain, or A Ballad for Yanko?)

Where are we today, under this cover version of capitalism in Bulgaria?

We are in the pre-capitalist era. With many paper-tiger publishers: without capitals, without distribution networks, without bookshops, without readers, and – why not – without serious authors! If not directly proven guilty, the so-called political class is indirectly responsible for the cultural collapse in the past ten years. Not a single government after 1989 made any tangible efforts to stop the erosion processes: not a single government offered any incentives to books, to literature for children and adults, such as tax reliefs, encouraging donations for culture, etc. Let me stop here, because we are all tired of repeating these complaints, laments and curses, which – of course – do not reach to the senses of the incumbents. There is no way out. We live in democratic times, though we think in totalitarian terms, in a state that cares about its own officers only. "That’s it," as Vonnegut says, I would be happy if you could give the lie to me.

There are many secrets to a book, and the author’s mastership tends to be among the most obscure. Have you reached a conscious explanation for yourself of everything that you have created – as creative art, besides a pure will, is also the product of the artist’s instincts, of the artist’s enigmatic and mysterious self that he deciphers only partially in his texts to the reader?

Long questions usually get short answers. Writers belong to the spiritual crafts; there are things there that cannot be regulated, nor subject to calculation, standardization, recapitulation. Man has invented words like magic, mystery, etc. in order to evade answering questions he doesn’t know or cannot explain. The moment art lifts its mysterious veil, it becomes serial production.

What has been the major source of hope and belief for you through the years?

One only belief: the belief in myself. It may not sound nice but I say is with confidence, at the end of my road. I don’t believe in upward spirals; man’s life is an alternation of ebbs and tides, a part of the equilibrium of the solar system. It depends on you to keep your senses in good order, so that you don’t lose your balance. At the same time, I have tried to suppress my instincts, the irresistible energies that have caused the accidents in my life. I haven’t always been successful. I have been desperate but never completely. I don’t believe in the absolute deadlock. I gradually realized how right Socrates was to advise us to look within ourselves, within our own nature, if we want to know the others and the world. It is useless to fight the others; it is enough to fight yourself: the only fight we can win. As far as hope is concerned in a personal plan, I don’t much care what readers or critics think of my works. One day a more careful reader will turn up; he will sit down and turn the pages slowly. While living, so to say, I couldn’t find such readers; perhaps they will appear in the 21st century?

What is your vision of Bulgaria at the end of the 21st century? What does Time mean to you?

This question can only amuse our distant heirs at the end of the 21st century. The way we smile when we read that story Vazov wrote on the eve of 1990 and see that none of his prognostications has materialized. Long-term forecasting is a loss of time, and Time is the real God that administers grace or punishment for the deeds performed by us, the living souls under the Sun.
Nevertheless, when I look back to the past few decades and see how we developed, it is not so hard to imagine what our country will look like in future: a poor country with depopulated regions; the people overweight and mentally unstable; nature artificially maintained in reserves; mass-media, i.e. mediocre, culture. I won’t be surprised if the first man to step on Mars is a Bulgarian. Or the first to swim the ocean between the Gibraltar and Florida. The cartridge that will blast the Cheops pyramid in 2065 may also turn out Bulgarian… No matter how popular we are in the world, the Bulgarian tavern-keeper will continue to put bread in the meatballs, the milkman, water in the milk, and the Bulgarian Olympic Committee will continue to re-elect its chairman unanimously…

What is the weight of the values created over the last hundred years, and what is the burden that these years have placed on us?

It depends on the scales. On the scales of global virtues we have very few things to place: a Yovkov’s sigh, a drop from Liliev’s “soft spring rain”, a hair from the Master’s paintbrush, a note from Diko Iliev’s cornet… But I wouldn’t talk about our basic burdens; they cannot be weighed.

Is there any peculiarity of your character that you freely joke about in public? And does it happen frequently?

Self-joking is part of vanity, which we all depend on to one extent or another. Self-irony, as a lighter form of masochism, brings delight, pleasure or, as they say now, soul fitness. But I haven’t experienced it often, I haven’t had to. I don’t see many of my compatriots joking about their flaws: the Bulgarian is not self-critical. Self-criticism requires another scale of thinking, it requires inner energy. When criticizing ourselves we more often reach to self-pitying and more rarely to self-irony. This shows certain spiritual poverty, insufficient self-confidence, not to mention spiritual aristocracy. In the Bulgarian literary world Ivaylo Petrov likes talking about himself in this manner: he is the best. Who else? Chudomir in some stories. I can’t remember anybody else… Wait a moment! How about Sofronii? Or Zahari Stoyanov? Or Mincho Kanchev the priest? Or Aleko?… It turns out that those who lived in the century immediately following Bulgaria’s liberation from yoke were truer spiritual aristocrats than us, born and living a century later, in free Bulgaria!

What would you choose – if you had to choose today – between a bag of gold and an eternal book? And what would have been your choice 30 years ago?

I would take the bag of gold and the eternal book. And more bags of books because I cannot imagine a human life with one book only, were it an eternal book. There is an eternal tree, they say, but there is no eternal power, truth, lie, nor secret.

Do you think that in these times when the path to the reader is difficult and uncertain, new names could emerge? Could the experience with your own public recognition be useful today? How did you gain recognition, was it easy?

I had various ideas about life when I was young, call it plans if you like. But there was one thing I could never predict: what I would write, what about. If we call this creative art (it’s pompous but let’s call it so provisionally), I didn’t make creative plans. I started with some vague idea and in the process of writing I realized what the result would be. This is also true for script writing, where I know from the very beginning the text has to be screenable. In my everyday life things were more predictable. I had a fellow student at the university who once told us very seriously how he had planned his life in five-year fractions: five years after graduation he would specialize abroad, for five years he would be assistant professor, for five years senior assistant professor… and a deputy minister in the end! I have to admit his calculations were absolutely precise: he became a deputy minister shortly before the November 10 changes. But we should not forget the “tiny detail” that his father was a former guerrilla, then an ambassador somewhere, and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party throughout his life. (His name is available upon request!) The model of my fellow student, no matter how attractive, was inapplicable to me; I had to seek other ways of gaining recognition. The best model turned out the one where you don’t lose your time searching for models but move ahead, led by your inner intuition – without hurry but without stopping, either – and hoping you would get somewhere in the end!

Would you disclose your own anthology or collection of names of masters of the prose whom you hold in highest esteem – names from the Bulgarian and world, including Balkan, literature?

I already mentioned quite many names from the Bulgarian literature: from Vazov (Uncles) to Ivaylo Petrov. I also love some stories by Konstantin Konstantinov, Ilia Volen, Karaliichev and Pavel Vezhinov, the younger authors, S. Stratiev and D. Dimovski, as well as Dora Gabe’s only book of stories, Someday.
The world authors: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Moravia, Marquez… Also Bunin and Nabokov. And Andrey Platonov and Yury Kazakov. From the Balkan authors, Kazantzakis.