Vazov’s Under the Yoke

A scene from the 1952 film of Under the Yoke

I recently finished reading Vazov’s tragœdy of the Bulgarian Uprising of 1876, Under the Yoke (Под игото), but it wasn’t until I was almost done with it that I became informed that it was a fairly seminal piece of literature in British politics as much as in Bulgarian politics. The plight of the Bulgarian peasantry during and after the failed uprising prompted a great groundswell of sympathy for the Bulgarian people in Britain. As my gentle readers will be well aware, William Morris’s turn from romantic conservatism towards socialism was in fact prompted by the entire Eastern Question and the genuine, heartfelt and wholly-human pity he felt for the plight of the Bulgarian peasantry.

A quick aside here: Morris’s socialism was of a profoundly democratic variety. But if he lived today, I have no doubt whatsoever that for his purely anti-war and anti-imperial stands, Morris would be tarred as a ‘tankie’, a ‘Putinist’ or an ‘Assadist’ by much of the Europhile and Atlanticist ‘left’. The local anarchist circles in particular seem to have adopted the implicitly-chauvinist attitude exemplified by Morris’s rival in contemporary left circles, Henry Hyndman.

Turning back to Vazov, though. Under the Yoke was actually published in Britain before it reached native audiences in Bulgaria, and it had an undeniable impact. The sympathy and the pity that was roused in Morris’s noble breast for the Bulgarians can be felt in Ivan Vazov’s prose in every page, nearly every sentence. In terms of its sheer literary quality, it’s masterful, and suffers only from a few traces of turgidity. It deftly combines elements of satirical comedy with its overall tragœdian outlook. It explores the natures of heroism and cowardice – both moral and physical. It draws somewhat caricatured, yet vivid and poignant, images of the political trends in Vazov’s Bulgaria, in ways that remind one strongly of the writing of Nikolai Gogol – Taras Bulba in particular. It spends time to portray the inward lives and commitments of its protagonists – particularly Boicho Ognyanov and Doctor Sokolov, the two primary revolutionaries – in ways that show Vazov to have been a pupil also of Dostoevsky.

Yes – Vazov was incontrovertibly a literary Russophile. He himself is not coy about showing it, with Dostoevsky’s name being mentioned at several places in the text. But his work is quite original in that it explores the peculiarities of the Bulgarian situation in lights that can be unflattering. He muses deeply on what might have caused the rebellion to succeed or fail, what caused one village to take up arms against the Turks and another to surrender. He depicts the soaring hopes of the Bulgarian revolutionaries and the ordinary people that followed them. He also does not shy away from the grisly realities of defeat, meaning not only genocide and (not uncommonly) rape as weapons of war, but also the more pathetic realities of informing, favour-currying and backstabbing that were the means of self-preservation among a populace that had much to fear from Turkish repression.

But what struck me the most strongly about the text was Vazov’s tacit understanding of the folk-poetics of the desperate. Here he does not come off as necessarily a literary Russophile, but he does observe the folk tradition with the appreciative eye of one of his British near-contemporaries like GK Chesterton or JRR Tolkien.

Oppressed peoples have their own philosophy which reconciles them to life. An irredeemably ruined man often ends with a bullet in his brain or in a noose. People enslaved, no matter how hopelessly, never commit suicide; they eat, drink and beget children. They amuse themselves. Look at the folk-songs in which the people’s soul, life and outlook are so strikingly reflected. There, intertwined with black sorrow, long chains, dark donjons and festering wounds are pæans to roast lambs, ruby-red wines, burning brandy, joyful weddings, boisterous dances, green forests and shady bowers, from which whole oceans of song have sprung.

The historical events in which Vazov was intimately involved, and which he describes in Under the Yoke, may have inspired William Morris to become a radical socialist. But Vazov was not one himself. Although as we see, he placed himself very firmly on the side of the poor, the enslaved, the desperate – in short, on the side of the common people of Bulgaria – he seems to have seen socialism as an over-intellectualised and over-determined dogma for minds steeped in academic debate. Indeed, his attitude toward socialism can be seen in his portrayal of the character of Kandov, the Muscovite Russian who joins the Bulgarian revolt out of his high ideals. Kandov does not start out as a particularly likeable character – he is a naïf and a hothead; he is modelled very deliberately on Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment. But just as that character had, Kandov too has a salvific ‘arc’. Kandov falls in love with Ognyanov’s wife Rada, who is very much a full character in her own right, but who also may be taken to symbolise the Bulgarian spirit. And Kandov ultimately sacrifices himself in a hopeless struggle for Byala Cherkva against the Turks. For Vazov, the socialists might be naïve and possibly dangerous, but at least they are on the right side of the struggle.

He seems to have a very similar attitude toward the Orthodox Church. One of his revolutionaries, a semi-fictionalised version of Deacon Vikenti, is cajoled by Ognyanov into stealing a bag of money from his monastery with which to buy guns for the revolution. Vikenti is caught in the act by his father confessor, a priestmonk named Yerotei, who – when he hears what Vikenti was going to use the stolen money for – forgives his wayward deacon and gives the money to him freely. He reveals that the money was actually always going to be used for the education of Bulgarian children; and fighting for their freedom was a cause just as good. Deacon Vikenti takes the money and gives it to Ognyanov, but he is stricken with remorse and retires to another monastery to do penance. He reappears later in the fighting for Byala Cherkva and is killed. In this episode, and in others, we can see Vazov’s sympathy for the Orthodox Church, but it is a sympathy which takes the Orthodox Church’s openness to the national spirit, the spirit of revolt against the Ottomans, as primary.

Still, though Vazov’s attitude toward the Church seems somewhat pragmatic, we can see that he has pulled off a rather telling feat from a literary perspective. He has subverted our expectations and showed us that good in a character can be interesting and even surprising. Father Yerotei is the emblem of the ‘good’ Bulgarian priest. His total and conscious forgiveness of Vikenti – whom Father Yerotei knows is prepared to steal and even murder him to get his money – comes to the reader as a eucatastrophic twist. And then we discover the true origin and use of that money and we are treated to a fleeting glimpse of Orthodox sainthood in Yerotei’s martyrific spirit of all-giving. And yet – this is only a glimpse. Vazov is more concerned with Ognyanov than with Father Yerotei. He has not yet approached the problem of goodness in literature with the same power and thirst that Dostoevsky has.

I still feel as though I have not done a very great service to Under the Yoke. I have dwelt here mainly on the conscious similarities Vazov’s writing has to a most un-revolutionary author in another country. And yet it is a martial epic tragœdy – a revolutionary epic tragœdy. It dwells profoundly on the paired themes of revenge and forgiveness, honour and degradation, in such a way that even someone who is not particularly inclined to nationalism must be stirred, if he has a heart at all.

Ivan Vazov