June 9, Vera Mutafchieva

Albena Hranova, Kultura - Issue 23, June 19, 2009

The one who, a few hours after Vera Mutafchieva's death on June 9, mechanically scrolled through TV channels like me, must have experienced a short and sharp anger that would bring him out of his stupor in just a moment: influential media listed her books' titles, and in that number also “Kaloyan's Daughter” (actually, a novel by Fani Popova-Mutafova, not Vera Mutafchieva). They could not pay last respect to a professor without formally making a first-year pupil's factual mistake. I hope she hasn't heard them, but then, she has long been accustomed to the trouble-free, easy-going lifestyle of public speaking with mistakes that seem in the nature of things. And that has never been her speaking. If the viewer that night also opened the Internet forums – the places where the triumph of publicity and the end of literacy snugly meet and justify each other – he also saw how quickly the participants in the topic actually forget about Vera Mutafchieva's writing, life and death. It is an occasion for them to talk about favorite topics such as politics and others; to judge a fate of which they know nothing; and most of all to get excited about the conceptual alternative between ‘Ottoman domination’ and ‘Turkish slavery’ (of course, the supporters of the latter are the majority). Among the rare voices of grief and reverence dominates the harsh pronouncing of decree absolute, the brandishing of dubious but very self-confident historical competencies, the bulging I-forms of anonymous connoisseurs of matter. And that was never been her speaking either. If she had been present in the first hours after her death, Vera Mutafchieva would surely have repeated her favorite Eastern sentence: “This too shall pass”. Or she would say, slightly paraphrasing the last sentence of her Nishanji Mehmed Pasha from his testimony in The Cem Case: “I cannot testify what happened after that because I died.” That was her speaking. She is generally said to have brought together historical science and literature in her writing; but it seems to me that in fact she has succeeded in clearly separating them, in making them different narratives, in removing the label of ‘historical truth’ from the claims of a weakly changing and decades-long magma-like and easy language that is neither science, nor art, but has spread over various sciences, arts and institutions. It traditionally combines nationalist spiritualism, inaccurate concepts, poor imaginations, love stories with patriotic ending, a fateful geographical and international situation, miserable messianism and all sorts of political types of a bright future. During her life she did not say anything in this language, and her texts will continue to resist its articulation. Her reading-writing is always skeptical, critical, and therefore penetrating and telling: as she reads Cem Sultan against the European troubadour model of ‘unfortunate Zizim’, and Sophronius against his own Life and Suffering or Anna Komnene against the apologetics of her Alexiad. Vera Mutafchieva wished for her own books such a sharp, doubtful, incredulous, and deeply devoted reading. In science and literature, she uses the weapons and tools of one craft to read and write with them the other; in the space of their mismatch arises and develops her own hidden critical genre – the romance of commentary, and the main theme of this genre – the mismatch between history and man. For her, history is just someone who lives among other people – history is derisive, ‘she’ confirms someone's opinion, calls something in one way, but claims the exact opposite of the name just given; sees or overlooks, notices, reproaches, is picky, admits, counts someone as a man or counts him out, thinks, doubts, loses confidence, someone's promptings are not clear to her, she has whims, makes mistakes, etc. But apart from being an imperfect being, history is also a text written by imperfect people, and therefore never final; but it is also a monumental institution that crushes anyone who wants to enter it, and yet it leaves without a name and memory the one who did not want it. In these different versions of history are also the different versions of human life and choice, of all historical and non-historical people written by Vera Mutafchieva, whom she called ‘my people’ in her memoirs. That is why everywhere in her writing man is above all something that must be understood on the whole horizon from up the self-understood, durable and thus salvatory ethic of “We have one humanity left, so will we throw it away” (Stamena from Chronicle of the Troubled Time) to down that dangerous boundary of experience and suffering, beyond which all self-evident ethics freezes: “...no one helps anyone in the world in which we live. Step over another lie – the duty for help – and you will leave completely naked, completely free and alone under the stars (Saadi from The Cem Case). This unfathomable horizon of possibilities, versions and choices of the human makes the contradictions apparent, because in and through the understanding it fits without residue their details and chiaroscuros. Thus, both as a writer and as a person, Vera Mutafchieva heavily combines the ability to trust with the complete lack of trust; intellectual superiority with living empathy; unbelief in love with sinking in love; memory with detachment; derision with lack of sarcasm; eccentricity with everyday life; the coldness of the blade with the softness of the embrace. For many, these would be indecisions and inconsistencies. For her, however, they were just living and just working. I think the last thing she really cared about was the land. He watched channels and movies about animals, the elements and earthquakes. She was inclined to believe the exact sciences, as long as they didn't trust themselves so much. She did not know what was there beyond earth and promised in no way to find out and understand. Now, for a master of words like Vera Mutafchieva, it is difficult to pronounce even the ritual formulas, the simple ancient keening for saying goodbye to one person. How to say “May the earth be light upon you”, since she knew very well that no earth is light. How to say “memory eternal”, since ‘eternity’ has never been a word in her vocabulary and a category of her thinking. Therefore, let the memory of her be like herself – bright, bitter, lasting, insightful and strong.