The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier

December 20, 2023 1:22 AM

Dimiter Kenarov writes about returning to Bulgaria after years in the US; about his childhood in the country under communism, the cultural explosion of the 1990s, and the sense of returning stagnation.
posted by automatronic (6 comments total)

To abandon my peaceful but mostly prospectless academic life in the States in order to plunge into the cesspool of my homeland was a bit of a gamble, but also, I thought, the most American thing I could do.

This is a really good piece and relevant to my interests. Thanks for posting
posted by chavenet at 1:35 AM on December 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

The key insight this lengthy piece leads up to is, to my mind, this:

Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself. My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition.

Am in the UK and this resonates strongly with everything that's happened since 1979, when the neoliberal revolutionaries seized power.
posted by cstross at 4:07 AM on December 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

There's a short video about Angela Rodel, who translated the Booker Prize-winning novel Time Shelter from the original Bulgarian, and who lives in Bulgaria now as a translator. Some of the experiences she talks about living in Bulgaria perhaps hint at the creative and cultural energy around the "changes" that Kenarov refers to.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:15 AM on December 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting this, never would have come across it otherwise. Thoughtful writing and great photos.
posted by lwxxyyzz at 7:40 AM on December 20, 2023

A few months before Russia attacked Ukraine, I was at a residence in Vienna, where a Ukrainian friend told me that his country was the only one in Europe that still unreservedly believed in the European Union and the Western liberal-democratic project, that, if the EU took Ukraine on board, it would expand not only its geographic frontiers but renew its sense of purpose as well. I think the war, for all its terrible human toll, or because of it, has largely proven him right. Ukraine has turned into a rallying call for much of Europe, a vicarious way (dangerous, but not too dangerous) to experience once again the forward vector of time. How long that momentum is going to last, however, is impossible to know...

Notice that the people who profit from everyone being on the hamster wheel are the ones trying to sabotage the US contribution to Ukrainian resistance.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:01 AM on December 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Great insight not only into our current time but also human nature generally.
posted by blue shadows at 11:28 PM on December 20, 2023