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

When I was a child I didn’t value the Bulgarian book much, I neglected it in favor of the foreign book: I believed it to be the real “window” to the wide world. So many of today’s adult readers who do the same remain children. Few of them will have the chance to understand that without Vazov’s Uncles, without Stoyan Mihaylovski’s torments, without Yordan Radichkov and even without Racho Stoyanov that “window” will remain obscure.

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

There is a happy moment when you stop dividing the books into foreign and Bulgarian: any book published in Bulgarian becomes a Bulgarian book. At different ages and at different stages of his development a man can take from a book not only more than he has expected but often more than the book actually gives. I remember my taking extra from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. When I reread Bulgarian poetry, which I occasionally do, I am happy to gradually strengthen my conviction what a true poet Assen Raztsvetnikov is, though often omitted in the rank-lists.

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

Probably Gutenberg’s era is really coming to its end but the mourning of it is somewhat atavistic. It will only end if a new industry of distribution of writing replaces it fully, the way hand rewriting was replaced by the printing machine. But what is the problem? You print out the pages you like and you read them lying in bed, the way you read a good book in the past.

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?

The Bulgarian specifics of the cultural crisis are also paradoxical. On the one hand, our small market is stuck with literature and, on the other, demand exceeds supply. This is absolutely true, because readers who seek the Bulgarian book do not find it. And how could they, when every publisher has his distributor and there are towns which the Bulgarian book doesn’t reach at all. With the establishment of a normal book distribution network, the universal remedy will come: the good book by Bulgarian writer will continue to be an insufficient means of life for the author – it is not intended to – but at least it will cover its costs and this will no longer be a crisis.

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

Nothing. Nature has its subtle tricks to make us do our job even when we know it is useless.

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

At the end of the next century Bulgaria will be like the developed countries at the end of this century. Then the Bulgarians will not feel so painfully the difference, which will nevertheless remain a century’s difference.

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?

What has been created in our literature is not little at all for such a small community: Vazov, Elin Pelin, Yavorov, Yovkov, and so on until the end of the century, a continuity that can always produce something more stormy. As for the burden, it is old: hatred, envious denial of even the small success of the other.

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the destiny of the Balkans and mankind, and why?

I am optimistic about the future of humankind, because people have succeeded in coping somehow for so many thousands of years, so they will continue to cope somehow in the years to come. But this “somehow” makes the well informed optimist a pessimist. Because of six billion people in the world only a billion and a half live fairly well, the others live in misery – both material and spiritual. The Balkans – which probably are at the bottom of the list of those living fairly well or at the top of the negative list – will keep their place. But there is a new, favorable precondition for them. Before, the Balkans were reconciled by the great powers because of their global interests. Now even disconciliation on local initiative contradicts the interests of the big and they are compelled to pacify us.

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

I joke about the fact that, except for writing texts, I am entirely helpless. I do it as long as this engages somebody’s interest.

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?

If this is a metaphor for the choice between low consumption and high spiritual life, now, of course, I choose the second. It is more difficult when a man is young, because he dooms his relatives to woe. That is why we all hope that the establishment of a middle class will solve the problem in a Solomonian way: a couple of handfuls of gold from the bag, so that we can buy all books we want, even the not so eternal ones.

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?

The times have never been good. As far as I am concerned, I was recognized the hard way: through a political campaign stigmatizing my book A Running Tree as ideologically harmful. It is a normal practice to throw stones at those who say new words, no matter how changed we think the conditions are. This experience is not useful but many will continue to follow it willy-nilly.

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?

There is no use enumerating the globally recognized names, as for the others, preferences differ with age: sometimes Ivo Andric and Emilian Stanev, sometimes Ismail Kadare and Georgi Mishev…