Няколко думи за две научни изследвания, както и за един български автор = About two scholarly investigations and a Bulgarian author (original) (raw)

To the many applications of Murphy's law, one may add the following: "If there is any way to be misunderstood, you will surely be misunderstood." The risk is all the more considerable when the addressee sticks to different basic assumptions, or even worse, when he or she is biased and malevolent. In a number of publications, I have defended thenot particularly innovativeopinion that in the era prior to the emergence of national movements people predominantly identified with religious communities, while ethnic identity was of minor relevance. In the Ottoman Balkans to the majority of the population this community was Orthodox Christian. For the sake of brevity, for want of anything better and because Ottoman Orthodox Christians (of whatever ethnic origin) occasionally used this term as well to denote themselves, I baptized this community "Romaic", thus avoiding the cumbersome "Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire". Doing so, I underscored that these "Romaeans" did not consider themselves to be (ethnic) Greeks. In other publications, I studied the acquisition of a national consciousness, not as a mass phenomenon as is done most often, but as an individual psychological development, proceeding from theagain, rather obviousassumption that national consciousness is not innate, but results from socialization. In modern nation states national consciousness is imposed by various administrative, educational and repressive means and appears to be relatively stable. In the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, however, such nationalizing measures were, to a great extent, lacking; in addition, a multitude of national ideologies and various other (regional, vocational, social and cultural) loyalties competed. This explains the vicissitudes in the process of national identification which transpire from the life and work of Grigor Parlichev. After living a "Romaic" youth in Ohrid, during his stay in Athens he became largely Hellenized, presenting himself as a Greek poet. After his return to Ohrid, he revealed himself as Bulgarian national activist. Finally, after a failed literary career in Bulgaria, he retired in his native town, obviously restraining his loyalty to the small Ohrid local community. Studying the life and work of Grigor Parlichev, I dealt with the nationalistic distortions characteristic of many Macedonian scholarly publications but also with the heavily biased approaches in studies by Bulgarian literary historians. While Parlichev increasingly felt alienated by the Bulgarians, he never considered himself a Macedonian. However, one observes during his lifetime the first convincing indications of the emergence of a Macedonian national ideology, which Bulgarian historiography as a rule passes in silence. These observations for some reason infuriate Mr. K. Topalov, a former professor of Bulgarian National Revival literature at Sofia University, to such an extent that he judged it necessary to attack me with a vehemence that largely exceeds the normal tone of a scholarly debate.