Dabbing in theoretical debates could be dangerous in Eastern Europe during the Cold War period; it could create risks for one’s career, basic freedoms, or even existence. Nevertheless, direct or covert clashes were a common feature of intellectual life, and confrontations with visible or invisible, concrete or anonymous, present or virtual opponents were а persistent trend that would now and then explode into heated polemics. In spite of the isolationism of the Eastern European regimes, these clashes were never simply internal: as a rule, they would extend beyond the Iron Curtain and involve an actual or imagined West. This involvement was not a one-way street: a substantial part of the debates in the humanities in Western academia was inflected by processes on the other side of the curtain. Due to the constraints of Eastern European censorship and the clever strategies employed to overcome it, however, much of what went on has become impossible to detect today: like the dark matter in the sky of contemporary astrophysics, its existence may be conjectured only on the basis of inexplicable anomalies in the observable history of the humanities.

Such an anomaly would be the swift rise to international prominence of Bulgarian-born scholars Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva: the background that allowed them to become part of major intellectual trends in France immediately after emigrating in the 1960s seems never to have been seriously discussed, and the Bulgarian theoretical scene has remained a blind spot in the European history of the humanities. The essays in this forum attempt to reconstruct the theoretical and existential dimensions of this background. Their goal is to revisit, on the basis of the Bulgarian example, the role that the humanities played in the implosion of the Eastern European communist regimes. As Kristeva put it apropos Juri Lotman’s death in 1993, “I believe that the fissures in the [Berlin] wall began to be clearly felt in the early 1960s. A few unknown scholars—thinkers expressing disturbing ideas in hermetic idioms—were regrouping, like a colony of ants, to carry out subversive labors. Too complex for the already nascent media culture, their work was, of course, invisible from Paris or New York; but the masters of the Kremlin were not unaware of its undermining effects.”¹

Exploring the hermetic idioms of unknown scholars may have historical significance in itself; it may throw light on their undermining effects in their day, but it may also turn out to be strikingly relevant to our own era. The publication on March 30—in an unprecedented move made “because of the great interest society and the media have shown in [her] dossier”²—of the entire dossier that the Bulgarian secret services kept on Kristeva makes one wonder whether, perhaps, the old masters are as ever not unaware and whether, perhaps, they have finally found their perfect match in the aversion to complexity of the new media culture. The so-called Agent Sabina case, which drew the attention of major media like Nouvel Observateur³ and the New York Times,⁴ provides a strange addendum to the present forum, especially to my essay “Noncoinciding Coincidences: Tzvetan Stoyanov with Julia Kristeva and Georgi Markov,” which was written before the publication of the dossier. Georgi Markov was a writer who defected to the West and became the victim of the infamous Bulgarian umbrella assassination case: he was stabbed with lethal poison on a London bridge in 1978. His close friend Tzvetan Stoyanov, a brilliant writer and theoretician, died a rather suspicious death a few years earlier in a Bulgarian hospital after having met with Markov in London. Now Stoyanov was Kristeva’s boyfriend before she left for Paris in 1965. Of the three, she seemed to have been the one who successfully evaded the traps of the regime: her marriage to a renowned French intellectual and her brilliant career appeared to have placed her beyond the reach of the petty and vindictive mediocrity that stalked the short lives of Markov and Stoyanov.

Well, so it seemed. The publication of the nearly 400 pages of Kristeva’s dossier revealed that sixteen officers wrote reports on Kristeva and, for a time at least, in her name.⁵ While nothing in her dossier—apart from her personal correspondence that was intercepted by the services—was written by her and nothing in these reports could have harmed anyone, the case was nevertheless instantly circulated in the media and social networks and Kristeva was dubbed an “agent.” No other dossier ever caused so much commotion in Kristeva’s country of origin. Difficult writing, theory, intellectuals, women who are intellectuals, women from small places who marry in Paris, women who write about women (including the author of this introductory note): all this was trampled in an unparalleled avalanche of slander, abjection, and hate.⁶ Coinciding as it did with vicious campaigns in Bulgarian media against refugees and against the Istanbul Convention (in the course of which I received three personal threats)⁷ and, more generally, with the alarming trend apparent in Viktor Orbán’s infringement on academic freedom in Hungary, the hysteria unleashed around Kristeva’s dossier manifested a disquieting tendency. People, including journalists in both the East and the West, were more prone to believe the claims of “old spies” (i.e., the same ones who harrassed intellectuals and ensured the regime’s power) than the statement of a prominent intellectual.⁸

The Kristeva dossier affaire exposed, therefore, the disturbing degree of trust invested today in structures whose function used to be to intimidate and manipulate through deception and fear, and, conversely, a plummeting of the trust in “hermetic idioms.” This marks a complete about-face when compared with the status of intellectuals immediately after the end of the Cold War, when Zhelyu Zhelev, a philosopher, and Blaga Dimitrova, a poet, became the first democratic president and vice president, respectively, of Bulgaria. Many factors contributed to this reversal, both local and global; these all play a role in shaping the national and international political and academic climate today but cannot be pursued here. The point that the contributors to this forum wish to make is that theoretical complexity was precisely the tool that Eastern European intellectuals used to oppose the repressive ideology of the regime. As Tzvetan Stoyanov’s protagonist Budi Budev (see my article in this forum) puts it, “We will fight with the weapons we have! We will fight with brains!”—Do not speak their language!—was the first commandment of this fight. The goal was to erode the ideological clichés of the communist nomenklatura and force the functionaries of the regime to speak—insofar as they wanted to spy on and control intellectuals—the language of intellectuals. The wrestling with the spelling of “semiotics” in Kristeva’s dossier is a hilarious illustration of the effects of this strategy.⁹

Understanding today what went on there and then, however, is not a simple task. The essays in this forum try to shed light on the various rhetorical strategies employed in the invisible battles, which allowed these battles to take place at all: The theory of reflection that Bulgarian hard-core Stalinist philosopher Todor Pavlov imposed on Eastern bloc aesthetics was cunningly challenged through his own examples (see the contribution to this forum by Kamelia Spasssova). In clashes around structuralism, Marx was invoked on both sides, with the more genuinely Marxian side losing in the eyes of official dogma (the contribution of Maria Kalinova). Embattled structuralists deferred direct confrontation with Bakhtin while claiming their critique of Bakhtin was a more viable opposition to dogma (the contribution of Enyo Stoyanov). The Bulgarian Guillaumist school invoked dogmatic authoritative figures in the critique of certain brands of structuralism while developing ideas much further removed from the official dogma than the ideas they criticized from supposedly dogmatic positions (the contribution of Darin Tenev).

The reconstruction of the invisible battles is further complicated by the fact that debates in Eastern European intellectual circles would weave in and out of oral discussions; because of censorship, certain parts would never go into print or would be published only much later. A typical example would run like this: an older colleague told a younger colleague (Enyo Stoyanov) that when he visited Moscow in the 1980s, certain Russian colleagues told him that the lifting of the ban on Bakhtin’s writings in the early 1960s was part of a plan to oppose Bakhtin to the rising star of structuralist and semiotician Yuri Lotman. At that point in the post-Stalinist thaw the authorities decided to allow Lotman to be for intellectual export, so to speak, while silently obstructing the internal circulation of his work and, for internal usage, taking Bakhtin out of the freezer as presumably the one better fitting official Marxism.

Now let us assume this intrigue is not the product of theoretical biases or well-founded paranoia; it is possible that classified or even published documents exist that back this conspiracy. It would still leave open the possibility that people who had been trying for decades to rescue Bakhtin and his work from repression used the “let us find an opponent to Lotman” as a subterfuge. And it would not change the fact that the result of Bakhtin’s resuscitation was a proliferation of debates with far-reaching effects.

The forum addresses this proliferation from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. It focuses on the clashes between structuralism, Bakhtin, and other brands of literary theory, placing these clashes in an international context without trying to exhaust the full spectrum of thinkers and schools of thought that, while opposing each other (and even then not always explicitly), were all effectively dismantling the dogmatic theory of reflection as ideological basis for repression in the humanities. In doing this, they frequently had to enter complex negotiations with official Marxism, leaving to later interpreters the task of differentiating merely strategic gestures from genuine revisionist readings. And while persecution, presumably based on Marx, frequently turned to those who took Marx’s thought seriously (Kalinova), the lip service paid to dogmatic Marxism doomed the highly original contributions of the Guillaumist school to isolation both inside and outside the country (Tenev). Bulgarian figures recur in all the contributions in an effort to compensate for their total eclipse so far. Nevertheless, we believe that the discussion can serve more generally as an example of the venues of free thinking and the political efficacy of the humanities in hostile times and environments.