With what thoughts do you send off 2024?
Teodora Dimova: With anxiety for the world and the generation of our children. With a sense of guilt that we are leaving them an inhospitable, slushy, dark world. Not that the world we inherited was brighter. But at least we had the great hope that in a few years we would fix it. And now we hurt more for our children than for ourselves. The thought that the threat of war hangs over their future is unbearable. Unbearable and real. As is the thought that they could fall into the new totalitarianism that is coming. And this feeling of shame, that we have not done our job properly, that we have not been awake and active enough.
Liberal democracy seems to be suffocating; we have cognitively returned to the horror of the very thought and consciousness of war; avoiding uncertainty leads to a swing of the pendulum in the direction of hidden longings for a strong hand and a state. Can order be born from this chaos, or the opposite - should it not be born in any case?
Teodora Dimova: Yes, liberal democracy was attacked by Putin's pack and his ideologues and torn apart from all sides. They have created their own nuclei in almost all countries in Europe and, in order to weaken democracy, they emphasize its weaknesses, its imperfections, convincing people that they cannot cope with their freedom on their own, that they are too small a vessel for it, that they must give it to those stronger and smarter than them, and that they, in turn, will return it to them multiplied. Such a banal and, above all, painfully familiar scheme, and we see how many people fall into it like flies in a spider's web. Moreover, people from Western Europe, who remained uninfected by totalitarianism. And these flies begin to get entangled and infect others with their stickiness, to eat away at liberal democracy from the inside. One cannot help but wonder how it is possible that after 45 years of communism, we are now observing a kind of "resurrection", no matter what we call it - neo-communism or neo-fascism. We failed to tell it well or we did not deny it categorically enough. Either our decommunization was only a facade, and not like the denazification in Germany. Or simply in the Bulgarian consciousness, Grandpa Ivan is ineradicable like a malignant and destructive bacterium that seemingly disappears for a while, but then attacks the living organism again with even greater fury.
How do you live in the notoriously interesting times? Or have we never been in "uninteresting"?
Teodora Dimova: I don't know. Those years of my life spent in communism, how can I define them? Interesting or uninteresting? The feeling that you live in a swamp, that nothing moves, that the news, the headlines in the newspapers – everything is the same every day, devoid of color and meaning, simply repeats itself and will repeat itself endlessly. And the feeling that this is natural, this is normal. From today's perspective, it's interesting, yes.
Does the digital "social media" era increase anxiety?
Teodora Dimova: Yes, it increases it. Anxiety is fueled by hatred, and the digital space has become its lair. Hate has become an ideology, a national doctrine, with a party slogan. The more and more inventively you hate – the further and higher you are from the object of hatred, the more you have nothing, but nothing in common with it. If you hate hard enough, then you are from a higher race, you are superior. This hatred was unleashed a few years ago and cannot be quieted down and tamed. It has struck everyone, regardless of whether they are smart and beautiful or stupid and ugly. By practicing hatred, people felt whole and satisfied, significant, meaningful. Without it, they clearly felt dissatisfied and meaningless. Now we are reaping its bitter fruits and there is no way out.
I have always said that it is not how much, but what one reads that is important. Is that still true? And what are you reading right now?
Teodora Dimova: I am reading "Fatelessness" by Imre Kertész, a very heavy book, written magnificently, masterfully translated by Svetla Kyoševa. It tells about the concentration camps, it is a head-on collision with the experience of a former concentration camp inmate. Every person is obliged, for the sake of the memory of the victims, to go through this head-on blow. I am infinitely grateful that such a book was written, it elevates literature to another level. If only we could read books like this!
Certain circles in power over the past thirty years have made it so that we almost sweep the memory of the crimes of communism under the rug, in the style of – Teodora Dimova: On February 1st next year, it will be 80 years since the so-called "people's court". Should we think that the head of state will come to the pilgrimage in front of the Monument to the Victims? Or that the current speaker of the parliament, elected by the party that carried out this same "court", will send his representatives? No, of course not. These are signs to society. It absorbs them. They shape and format it. How do we generate memory? Many people even curse when these things are recalled. "Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past" - this is the universal platform of every totalitarianism. How should we speak? To whom? Teodora Dimova: To our children first and foremost. Jesus Christ repeats many times "Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear!". Isn't everyone supposed to have ears? It has been said, it is written the same, but everyone listens and reads differently. Some use their freedom for good, others for evil. We should not have the feeling that our words are going to the wind and we should be discouraged. On the contrary, it is the wind that can scatter the seeds. The important thing is to tell the truth and to be responsible for what we say. Some seeds will fall on fertile soil, others on barren soil. Because the Christmas depression has been a topic for me for years: the consumer imperative and the culture of ease dominate the peculiar "lower earth". However, is there still an "upper"? Not just "highly cultural", but emotional and empathetic? Teodora Dimova: Down is always easier. Down you go by inertia, you roll. Climbing up is difficult, it takes effort. But people always climb peaks. Jesus was born for everyone - both from the upper and lower earth. Free people are different. Only totalitarian societies want to make them the same. So at Christmas some rejoice with the Son of God, others with lights and trinkets. Do we have to be good people? Doesn't this throw us out of the furious competition of today's life "with two hundred"? Teodora Dimova: It's good to be good people, but it's not good to be obligatory. Seemingly successful people are not good, and good people are not successful. In this dilemma, it is more important to be good than successful. But as in sports - we sincerely applaud those who win the competition with talent and hard work, and those who succeed with doping, we despise. In life, there is both. That's why we have a choice. Our lives are in our hands. I am convinced that there is no person in the world who would say to himself: "I managed to raise a good criminal" and be happy about it. Only good creates joy. Author: Ivaylo Noyzi Tsvetkov