What have we lost with the fading of Mitteleuropa as a place and a state of mind?

An Old Love Story with New Meaning
by Boyko Vassilev

Sometimes 80-year-old tales of poetry and love can tell us something about the present.

Consider the storied relationship of Slovenian intellectual Izidor Cankar and Bulgarian poet Elisaveta Bagryana, 1930s-era luminaries whose behavior would seem right at home in contemporary Hollywood, and whose cultural contributions were remembered at a tribute evening organized by the Bulgarian and Slovenian embassies in Vienna last month.

Bagryana was beautiful and independent, an internationally acclaimed talent; Cankar was a philosopher and a diplomat who left the priesthood to marry, much to the outrage of his conservative countrymen.

They became lovers after meeting in 1932 at a literary congress in Yugoslavia, where Cankar and other Slovenian writers were astonished by Bagryana’s gifts and looks. Poems were written and translated, visits were exchanged, tears were shed. When Cankar's first daughter, Kajtimara, died at age 3 in a tragic accident, Bagryana wrote a poem in her memory. (The girl's name, a Slovene portmanteau, was a riposte to those indignant over Cankar’s abandonment of the priesthood; it translates roughly as, "What business is it of yours?")

World War II ended the relationship. Though a successful diplomat in both pre- and postwar Yugoslavia, Cankar was isolated by Tito and died forgotten in 1958. Bagryana died in 1991 at the age of 97, having negotiated an uneasy compromise with Bulgaria’s communist regime.

But this is not just a story of two kindred spirits. It has elements that contemporary observers would do well to ponder.

First of all, Bulgaria and Slovenia were much closer 80 years ago. There was great mutual interest and genuine cultural exchange, even as Bulgaria maintained an official hostility toward Yugoslavia, to which it had recently lost territory.

After World War II, Yugoslav arrogance met Bulgarian ignorance. Before 1989 the proud citizens of Tito’s semi-communism looked down on everything east of Nis, an ancient city of southern Serbia. On their side, Bulgarians were so obsessed with their love-hate relationship with Serbs that they ignored Slovenes and Croats.

Slovenes would not have expected Bulgaria to produce a woman as empowered and culturally influential as Bagryana, and Bulgarians would have been astonished to learn that some Slovenes inside Tito’s Yugoslavia harbored a deep love of them.

Today, with both countries in the EU, Bulgarians and Slovenes tend to look toward Brussels rather than to Ljubljana and Sofia. A Bulgarian event would not make headlines in Slovenia, and vice versa. The globalized world sheds light on greater distances and the old neighborhood loses some of its appeal. Call it the cognitive paradox of southeastern Europe: the closer the country, the less interesting it is.

Maybe back in the 1930s there was a sense of Mitteleuropa – Central Europe. Sofia, Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Bratislava – these were cities that resembled Vienna and seemed much more integrated in a small world of shared values. Now, it’s East or West, North or South. To paraphrase Yeats, the center does not hold.

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