Only we Bulgarians have May 24 and November 1. The first is the day of the Cyrillic letters and of culture; the second is the Day of the Buditeli, the National Revival enlighteners, the people who turned those letters into a creative force. On May 24, Ivan Landzhev, with fiery and meaningful words, reminded us why these days are celebrations not only in words and not only of words.
He is first and foremost a poet, but he heads the creative team at an advertising agency. He has written the scripts for successful TV series. He holds a PhD in Russian literature and degrees in philosophy and cultural studies.
Ivan is one of the few people who truly love words and, rarer still, words love him back.
We will talk about the awakeners and those who wake you. About words and deeds. About the awakeners, the wide-awake and the fools. About hope. About the magic of language in the digital world and the meaning we will lose if we forget it.
– Sometimes it makes sense to ask clichéd questions, because a cliché only matters in the answers. Are there any buditeli, any awakeners, today?
– Of course there are people of the spirit who do their work with dignity. But the very fact that you’re asking means they aren’t that visible. Why is that? I think there are two reasons.
First, by asking the question we unwittingly look for figures of the same colossal historical stature, with the same halo—and we can’t possibly find them, because the awakeners of the National Revival—I mean the real Bulgarian Revival—had a far harder task than we do.
We can’t repeat their feats, but we don’t live in their dramatic situation either.
Because they did that work, today we don’t need to create a literary language under two foreign dominions—Ottoman political rule and Greek ecclesiastical rule; to build a nation while we don’t even exist on the map; to fight for spiritual and physical liberation… They did all that. And us?
It is enough simply not to be soulless, vulgar and apathetic, so as not to betray what they did.
The second thing is that visibility today still depends on the media, and people of the spirit rarely get media attention. How could it be otherwise, when the catapult to fame is brainless reality shows and the most reliable principle is “Underestimate the audience and you’ll win”? I’m telling you this as someone who was a screenwriter for 10 years—in television, especially in prime time, there’s a frantic fear that something might sound or look “intellectual.” It’s considered a ratings killer.
And it isn’t.
The media simply stopped realizing that besides those two things—delivering the news and entertaining—there is a third: shaping taste and ethos.
That isn’t boring, unwatchable or elitist; on the contrary, it can be genuinely interesting.
I’ve noticed that every now and then TV channels invite me as a guest, and if the invitation happens to come from a lifestyle show, there’s always great anxiety that something complicated might be said. I reassure them—
I tell them, don’t worry, I won’t say “transcendental.” And sometimes I say it on purpose, just to give them a fright.
– Which of the awakeners who once lived would you like to meet on a social network?
– Why on a social network? Let’s make it in person. I would very much like to talk with Zahari Stoyanov, the revolutionary who chronicled the April Uprising of 1876 in his memoirs. Because he would tell me about all the others too. I have never read a single dull or uninteresting line from this shepherd, who called himself “a simple narrator of facts and events.” An incredible natural talent and feel for language. He doesn’t even try to write anything special, and yet his most ordinary phrasings are priceless. He muses on what other path in life Hristo Botev, the poet and revolutionary, might have chosen (whether to become a village teacher like his father, and so on), and in the end he asks the reader: “Does a billy goat give milk?”
Zahari Stoyanov is a rare mix of natural artistic talent and sound common sense. Everyone talks about his sharpness, but his empathy shouldn’t be overlooked either.
– What do we need to be woken up from today? As a people, as a civilization, as a species…
– I think I started talking about that a moment ago.
We love—sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deliberately—to cast ourselves as victims,
because that’s part of our grand historical narrative. Only today we are nobody’s victims. When you don’t have a state, it’s natural to want to wake up your people. But it’s sad for that same people to be asleep in 2022. It’s sad to compare a free country—a full member of the European Union in the 21st century—with a people inside the Ottoman Empire in the 19th.
The absurdity of this anachronism is, to put it mildly, not in our favor. Because we are not founding a state now, nor chasing causes of national liberation—don’t listen to the liars who tell you we are. They’re selling you patriotic chewing gum, smacking their lips at you and blowing bubbles. These people are minding their own gechinmek—their bread and butter, to borrow Zahari Stoyanov’s word again.
In fact, today we are simply trying to live normally, in a civilized way, like the European country we are by definition. We have a crying need for that.
We need things that don’t sound grand but that, sadly, we have almost never had—
competence in governing, political culture and foresight, civic awareness.
A poem by Ivan Metodiev begins: “So much effort to turn nothing into a crown…” I have the feeling that in our political life we do exactly that every time. Perhaps these are the simple truths we need to wake up to—more things depend on us than we think.
– You won over a lot of people, even those who don’t know your poetry, with your May 24 address. Do letters and language really matter? Won’t they be devalued more and more as technology advances?
– Thank you for the kind words; writing and delivering that address was something very important and moving for me. It was also a great responsibility.
But I take your question as rhetorical—of course they matter! And not only do they matter, they are the main thing. I really like Plotinus’s definition of philosophy—
it is “the most important thing,” he says. Let’s say that about language.
– Do words have the same power today as before the internet era?
– Even greater; the problem is that speed and scale have turned them into weapons of mass destruction. Fake news, propaganda, post-truth—all of this rages far more unbridled and chaotic, and technology feeds the demons of logorrhea. Meanwhile the truth walks along slowly. But in the end it arrives.
– “Technology may make life easier, but it doesn’t give it meaning. Machines will break, iron will rust. But the very language we quarrel in will remain and will reconcile us,” you say. Do we know how to speak the same language today? Why are we creating more and more rifts?
– To answer that question, we have to learn to look at ourselves from the outside sometimes. Imagine we had to explain Bulgaria to a foreigner. Or that aliens landed here tomorrow and tried to understand Bulgarians—what would they see? They would see wonderful, interesting people who by and large dislike the West but send their children to study in the West. People who want to leave the EU but don’t want their neighbors to join it.
And it would surely look strange that there are places at the university but no places at the kindergarten. It would also be strange that the facade of our parliament reads “Unity makes strength,” while the actual rule is “everyone decides for themselves”… And you would constantly hear
a delightful cacophony of “They’ve wrecked this country, but long live Bulgaria,
because nothing ever works here, but we’re number one!”
– The most common search that brings people to Digital Stories from Google is how to spell „незнам“ (neznam, a frequent misspelling of не знам, “I don’t know”). And I don’t even give the answer there… What do we dontknow today?
– That’s great, I love it! There’s something Socratic about it, mixed with bad spelling. But Socrates never wrote anything down; we know him mainly through Plato and Xenophon. So it isn’t certain that he would have spelled his own “I know that I know nothing” correctly either. Would he have got it wrong? I don’t know. Or “dontknow.”
And what don’t we know? I’ll repeat myself—we don’t know that we are not victims. If we knew, we’d calm down and stop believing, for example, that someone is poisoning us from the sky.
– What do poetry and advertising have in common?
– That famous sister of talent—brevity.
– Which of the two will be easier to teach to artificial intelligence?
– AI can learn anything that can be automated. I think that rules out poetry.
– Will AI manage to create “high” art?
– I can’t answer you with a “yes,” because
my definition of art runs through freedom. Art is free expression.
The creative act itself is freedom. And for that you need a subject. Even after the ritual killing of the author by literary scholars in the second half of the 20th century and his subsequent resurrection, again by literary scholars, we have to agree that Somebody out there is still expressing themselves. Even folklore by unknown authors tells human stories. Somewhere there is a subject. And I find it hard to define the subject if the author is artificial intelligence. What does it have to tell me, why would I listen to it, how will it have a clearly recognizable style? The question of style is actually key. What is AI’s style?
That’s the first thing. The second—where will artificial intelligence make a mistake?
Error is of fundamental importance in art. Where will your hand tremble so that you make it your own? I realize the future may prove me wrong, but I
still think art needs human error.
A computer can’t be careless. And in that, it falls short of us.
– Have you ever tried writing computer code? Or poetry in a computer language?
– I haven’t. I can’t even call myself a dilettante or a layman in that field, because I’ve never tried. But your languages are undeniably interesting—they create reality.
In that sense they are definitely creative; it’s a performative text—the saying is the doing, you say it and it happens. Something like the Word of God.
But again—the one who creates through a computer language is the human being. After all, he is the one giving the commands. At least until the robot uprising comes.
– How do we restore the value of words?
– By no longer hurling them at each other.
Just because we click on different links doesn’t mean we can’t talk and listen to each other now and then.
– Who are the geniuses among people today?
– The last genius I’ve seen in person is the world chess champion Magnus Carlsen. I can’t explain it, but I knew immediately that I was in the presence of a genius.
– Is there creative work in advertising?
– Advertising is creative work insofar as it uses the tools of art, but it is not art in itself. An ad has to solve a problem. And that problem isn’t yours, it’s your client’s. Once the client briefs you, the problem becomes yours. And if you come up with a creative solution to their uncreative problem, you’ve done your job. That’s it.
Art, meanwhile, has no such tasks before it. Take poetry—it may speak about problems, but it is under no obligation to solve them. It isn’t obliged to give any answers; that’s not what it exists for.
Birds don’t sing because they have answers, but because they have a song.
– Do the times give birth to great personalities, or do they give birth to the times?
– I’m tempted to say that personalities give birth to the times, and the next moment I think of the ’60s and that incredible concentration of genius. Even the Renaissance lasted three centuries. And here we’re talking about a mere ten years! It’s incredible—imagine being a child growing up then: every personality you look to as an example is some kind of giant, a mythical creature larger than life itself. In music—the Beatles, the Stones, Jimi, Dylan; in sports—Muhammad Ali; in cinema—you have the French New Wave, you have Antonioni and Fellini in Italy, Tarkovsky starts out then, Bergman carries on… Civic leaders—Dr. Martin Luther King. And more, and more… Wherever you look, you see greatness; people fly into space and land on the Moon.
And at the same time, so much pain and disillusionment from wars, political assassinations, uprisings crushed with tanks, saber-rattling all over the planet…
– How do we win young people over to books?
– I’ll try to do without pathos—young people today seem much more practical and pragmatic than we were, so I’ll try to say something pragmatic too. I’m asking seriously: what is the difference between people who don’t read books and people who can’t read? How is someone who chooses not to read better than an illiterate person? They’re actually worse off, because the illiterate person at least has an excuse.
Choosing not to read when you can sounds like a really stupid choice.
– Where does the road of hope begin and the crossroads of weariness end?
– That question actually preoccupies me quite a bit. The problem is that in the two traditions that shaped Western thought—the Greek and the biblical—hope is interpreted very differently. In the Greek tradition, hope is not a virtue. It is the last thing in Pandora’s box, and it looks much more like some empty expectation that is downright harmful. In the Christian tradition, of course, hope is a virtue. It leads us toward what we can become.
You say “the crossroads of weariness”—and indeed, we’re supposed to grow weary of our empty hopes, yet the opposite happens. I have a natural inclination toward skepticism; I like to think there’s some ancient dignity in it, but in fact it’s exhausting. The truth is that a person gets fed up with being a skeptic all the time, gets tired of telling himself “I expect nothing.” I strip away the whole political layer from these lines by Nikola Vaptsarov, the poet executed in 1942, and leave them here because they fit: “I don’t expect… No! I expect!”
There’s something too defensive in all this guarding against hope. All that guarding—so what? Why? So that no one thinks we’re naive? In the end there’s a certain pretension in it, too. That’s why in the show we’re doing at Sfumato, a theater in Sofia, at one point I ask: “Who am I to lose hope?”
