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The "sixteenth republic" has now been heard from, and it's the same old horror story. The concentration camps that littered the fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union were replicated in neighboring, and equally Stalinized, Bulgaria. The twentieth century's distinctive story may be short on humaneness but not on monotony.
The reporter for the Bulgarian chapter is the acclaimed literary theorist and cultural historian Tzvetan Todorov, born and reared in Bulgaria and now a citizen of France. Contemporary literary theory is notorious for its abstruseness, its trendiness, its political leftward tilt. Within this rarefied academic conversation Todorov writes on verbal symbolism, the nature of language, French literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, alterity. One purpose of his is to explore "the possibility of opposing nihilism without ceasing to be an atheist:' Nothing in this list of interests prepares us for the turn his writing takes in the 1990s.
In his book Facing the Extreme (1991),Todorov analyzes the effects of the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps upon the moral life of all those victims who were unfairly incarcerated and tortured. The book under review can be considered a sequel. Indeed, its lengthy introduction to the latter draws heavily upon the nuanced meditations of its predecessor. Together, these volumes comprise a major contribution to the literature of the Gulag.
The great name in Gulag literature is, of course, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In The Gulag Archipelago he sketches the panorama and provides many details. Various witnesses have answered his call to fill in blank spots in the picture. The Black Book of Communism, with its global sweep, has put a frame around the unfinished picture-a black border, to be sure. And now Todorov fills in Bulgaria's blank spot.
Actually, Todorov fills in only a small patch of Bulgaria's blank spot. Of approximately one hundred concentration camps in a nation of eight million people, he reports on only one, Lovech, which endured for a mere three years. Todorov's cast of characters totals a mere seventeen; and, of these, we meet only three male and three female prisoners, the rest being prison guards and administrators, plus three family members of prisoners. Only one prisoner provides an extended narrative. Much of the information in this book derives from other sources: some books plus a...