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

I cannot specify whether music of the Bulgarian book brought my first encounter with the spiritual during my childhood. Music was often played at home, while father liked to have a glass of wine after supper, to open Under the Yoke or Balkan Legends and read aloud to us from there. On most occasions he chose the presentation of the “The Sufferings of Genoveva” from Under the Yoke, while he read Yovkov’s works one after another, and after the last words of the short story “In the Primrose Meadow” he usually shed a tear or two. No one dared to get up from the table before he had finished reading. Thus, for me, being touched by Bulgarian literature turned into a rite.

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

I find it difficult to answer this question. There are books one likes, and books one adores. I myself like San Michele by Axel Munthe, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck, I loved The Three Comrades, but I admired The Brothers Karamazov and Shakespeare’s dramas.
I admit that I never managed to read War and Peace to the end. I love and admire Yordan Yovkov – for me he is a phenomenon of a planetary scale. I cannot claim that I am sufficiently knowledgeable in literature, as many other things have occupied my attention throughout my life.

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

It seems to me fine letters are becoming less and less fine. The definition itself is perhaps already outdated or it is not sufficiently correct. But if the issue is about literature in general – then it has some fearsome competitors – television, video, the cinema. And I personally think that only the literature that succumbs with an ever growing difficulty to some type of visual representation, or to say it simply – to screening – will have some future.

Is there a remedy to the cultural crisis and doesn’t the purely Bulgarian specifics of this remedy remain out of focus?

Frankly speaking, the terms “cultural crisis” is being abused. Things would look quite simple if the term was used to explain only the deficit of means for spiritual performance. That’s money. Let us then make a fairly bold assumption: that the ministers and the members of parliament have finally come to their senses and have understood that those that invest in arts, sciences, education actually invest in the economy. Would people visit theaters more frequently? Would people flock to concert halls? Would people read more? Would better Bulgarian books be written? Would these books be read more? I doubt it. We need a national revival of the type the Bulgarians experienced before and after the Liberation. National revival bears the thirst for spirituality, it makes the young willing to study and create. The world already lacks unifying ideas. Communism turned out to be a deadly utopia, nationalism harmful, religions are perishing, religious and philosophical deficiency is spreading everywhere. And young people are forced to search for reason in entertainment, sports, amusement. A new breed of Ноmо sapiens is emerging. Ноmо divertissimus! But as far as religious necessity, the need for a common target of sanctification, is still existent in most people, there have emerged substitutes of the Gods, albeit substitutes of a dubious immortality – rock singers, football players, pop musicians, sex idols etc. It all means that the so-called cultural crisis will not be overcome before new humanistic ideas are born, if ever.

What is your vision of Bulgaria at the end of the 21st century?

In any case I do not see a Bulgaria confined within closely guarded borders.

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?

The astounding technical progress. I knew a hundred-year-old man who did not know what a train was when he was a child, and who saw with his own eyes the emergence of electricity, of the motor car, the radio, the telephone, the tape recorder, the television, the computer… All within a single life… There were times when people never saw a single change for ages. Well, this hundred-year-old man used to say: when I was born at the end of the last century, people did not know what was happening in the next village, behind the hillock, and now everybody knows what is happening anywhere in the world. Then I asked him: “Have humans become better?” “No”, he said. “And they will never be”.
It is true that the knowledge, the power of technologies, the capabilities of communicating and establishing links between humans have still not brought about substantial changes in morality and humanity. The fact that we are not cannibals is no more too encouraging and could be easily explained with the easier access to food. Man remains slave and potential killer. The last hundred years saw the shedding of more blood than any other period of human history, they saw the largest-scale delusions. Blood continues to be shed and no one knows when this will stop, I dare hope only that we shall manage to shed also some delusions. At least, these delusions were clearly revealed: communism, fascism, nationalism and the efforts to reign over nature.

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the destiny of mankind?

I do not believe either in my own immortality, not in the immortality of mankind. And we shall perish before our time unless something unifying and healing for the people and for this planet is found in the 21st century.

Which is the peculiarity of your character that you freely joke about in public?

I like to joke with myself in public but I don’t like it when the public decides to joke with me. This is simply a demonstration that my sense of humor is far from perfect.

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?

This is a misleading question. If I say: the book, everybody will decide that I am putting on airs. If I say: the gold, they will say that they have never expected anything else from me.
Perhaps the right question would be: if it was up to you to preserve for the generations a great book, of which there is a single copy left – for instance The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam – by abandoning the bag of gold – that would be something different, but the situation is becoming too fictitious to be true. You have no right to pose questions to me that cannot be posed by an experiment, Werner Heisenberg said. Well, I will tell you: give me the gold and I will hide the book, too.

Would you disclose your own anthology?

Anthologies are always incomplete and hence, unfair. Still, I will try:
Of the Bulgarian literature: Vazov - Uncles, Zahari Stoyanov – The Records [on the Bulgarian uprisings], Aleko Konstantinov – Uncle Ganyo, Elin Pelin – some of his short stories, Dimitar Talev – The Iron Candlestick, Yordan Radichkov – some of his short stories.
Of the Balkan literature: Kazantzakis and Andric.
Of the world literature: Chekhov, Steinbeck, Camus, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Exupery – well, this is a time when you could say with relief – and other great writers….
No, nothing will come out of it.