Der Lachsack im Spiegel: Bulgariens Ankunft im Westen in den Romanen von Alek Popov 2001 bis 2021
The Laughing Bag in the Mirror: Bulgaria's Arrival in the West in the Novels of Alek Popov 2001 to 2021

Summary/Abstract: With effervescent humour, Alek Popov (1966 – 2024) writes about Bulgarian encounters with the West since the fall of the Iron Curtain. This article compares his novels “Mission London” from 2001 and “Mission Turan” from 2021, which has recently been translated into English. Whereas the book about the Bulgarian Embassy in London in times of pre-EU accession is a self-ironical description of the gap between the Bulgarian self-perception of a proud past and the reality of a corrupt diplomatic staff, “Mission Turan” ridicules the megalomanic Balkan nationalisms since the 19th century claiming ethnic continuity to antiquity, in the Bulgarian case to the Protobulgars of Khan Asparuch. The book reflects on the impact of science instrumentalised by populist politicians. Although Popov lives in Sofia, he takes the perspective of transnational authors and is able to describe his homeland from both within and without: “Mission Turan” transposes the normative hierarchy between EU-Europe and Bulgaria to a symbolic and fictitious topography. In the end, even the reader does not know whether Bulgaria is meant to be the patronising European country that freely distributes EU-passports, or the marginal post-Soviet country of Turan whose inhabitants have been identified as the alleged descendants of the last Protobulgars.

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