[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: Bulgarian (English tr. Victor Friedman, Christina Kramer, Grace Fielder, and Catherine Rudin)
country: Bulgaria
year: 1895
form: short fiction
genre(s): literary
dates read: 29.7.22-30.7.22
Aleko Konstantinov’s Bai Ganyo: Incredible Tales of a Modern Bulgarian (tr. Victor Friedman, Christina Kramer, Grace Fielder, and Catherine Rudin) is really and truly wacky. it’s a series of vignettes published in the 1890s, arranged in loosely chronological order, following the title character — Ganyo Balkanski, a disreputable but modestly successful rose oil salesman — as he travels across Europe and then as he returns to Bulgaria and gets involved in politics.
this was not the most enjoyable book I’ve ever read: Aleko (apparently he’s normally referred to by his first name) was very much a modernizer/“Westernizer”, and Bai Ganyo becomes, as such, a repository of everything that Aleko regarded as bad about “traditional” Bulgarian culture and society. he’s boorish (to put it mildly) and wears bits of Western culture only as a thin veneer, his understanding even of Bulgarian politics is dubious at best, his speech is rough and full of Turkish loanwords, he has the “wrong” taste in music, he cares only about finding ways to get something (ideally a meal) for nothing, … the list goes on.
at the same time, there’s some interesting ambiguity or ambivalence in this, at least in the first half of the book, where the narrators of these tales of Bai Ganyo — a collection of roman à clef-style pseudonymous versions of Aleko’s fellow literati — seem at times to admire Ganyo’s audacity even as they cringe at his crudeness and speak of him in the most condescending terms. unfortunately this very much stops in the second half of the book, which positions Ganyo squarely in the camp of Aleko’s political opponents, as a thug helping rig elections, as a defamatory tabloid journalist, and similar. whatever was sympathetic about Bai Ganyo in part 1 is lost in part 2, which soured my overall impression of the book more than the classism and condescension already had.
the most interesting part of the book for me was probably the preludes and interludes where the narrators speak among themselves and offer their own reflections on contemporary Bulgarian culture and politics. it’s an interesting snapshot of its time.
I appreciated Victor Friedman’s editorial footnotes throughout, but especially this incredible callout for Aleko during a description of Bai Ganyo’s attempt to perform a Verdi aria:
We will pray, too, Divin Maestro [i.e., Verdi], to the Almight Creator, lest Satan be allowed to lead you into the salon where Bai Ganyo is singing ‘Terrible Is the Night.’ And when your delicate hearing has been touched by these wild, inhuman sounds, which you can’t understand, the Evil Spirit will reveal to you the horrible truth with his satanic laugh: Ha ha ha! Verdi! This is a song from your divine La Traviata! Ha ha ha ha-a!![*]
[*] The aria ‘Oh qual orrenda notte’ is not in fact from La Traviata but from Verdi’s Macbeth. In 1897 Aleko referred to Verdi as his favorite composer.
moods: dark, wacky