Rusana Bardarska, To Essay. Trans. by
Christopher Buxton, Zornitsa Hristova, and the
author. Open Letter, 2025
In To Essay, Rusana Bardarska offers a bold, multifaceted exploration of the human condition through a striking blend of narrative fiction, essay, and philosophical inquiry. Spanning the author's journey from childhood in communist Bulgaria to her adult years in post-communist Europe, this thought-provoking work weaves together themes of time, death, identity, and language.
Bardarska's unique voice combines humor, existentialist reflection, and sharp cultural critique to navigate the complexities of personal history and societal change. From meditations on Marxism and economics to reflections on feminism, multilingualism, and the role of art in human life, To Essay challenges the boundaries of genre and invites readers to contemplate their place in the ever-changing landscape of the world.
Rich with personal narrative and intellectual rigor, To Essay is a deeply engaging reflection on how we experience time, choose our paths, and leave traces of our existence in an increasingly globalized world.
To Essay is a philosophical novel about la condition humainne; it is indeed a monumental creation. Yet, the reader should not fear a complex and boring text, because the extraordinary ambitious “story” is told in an entertaining and irresistibly absorbing fashion, with humour and irony, empathy and love, in first person singular.
Death and time, human world and Cosmos, the insatiable need for sense and meaning, intellect (natural and artificial) and notably human consciousness, reason and love, art (literary, visual and musical) and human aesthetic drive and needs, objective history, national mythologies and individual memory, intergenerational dialogue, generational projects for the future and social ideals, feminism and gender, language as home of the Being, multilingualism and translation, economic theories and social orders, modern science and the future of human civilization… these are only the most prominent of the topics of the book.
The genre is fitting the monumental design. For the novel is a sample of what the author calls “total literature” – the text contains samples of all literary genres, plus some genre experiments. Furthermore, the author essays her thought and craft in physics, astronomy, biology and genetics, IT and AI, modern technologies, economics, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, pedagogy, gender studies, and you name it. The book is supplied with its own Ars Poetica. In its comprehensive and composite nature, To Essay is a (post)modern replica to Montaigne’s Essays.
To “narrate” such content, the style, highly praised by readers and critics alike, masterfully essays all possible registers.
Anybody who has read the novel admits that it is impossible to retell it or to make a summary because reading the book, as much as writing it, is like living – a very personal, and at the same time, overly human, experience. An existential act as much as aesthetic. Therefore, we provide a synopsis instead.
The original title of the book in Bulgarian – Опитът(Opitat) – has three meanings: a) the try/trying/attempt; b) the experience, and c) the experiment. In French, the verb “to try” and the noun “a try/trying/attempt”, respectively, essayer and un essai, gave the name of the new genre: essai, created by Michel de Montaigne. This genrename was taken over in English (an essay) and in Bulgarian (есе, pronounced esé). However, Bulgarian translation of Montaigne’s Essais is not the genre one (есе, pronounced esé), but the original word for “try/trying” (opit) Luckily, English has preserved as well the verb “essayer” in the sense of trying. So, the English title of the book covers one of the three meanings implied in the original Bulgarian title, i.e. try/trying/attempt, while experience and experiment are missing. However, English, too, supports the strong genre connotation.
In 2021, the book was nominated for Elias Canetti Literary prize.
In 2022, the novel won – among 60 entries - the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation's contest for publication of a contemporary Bulgarian novel in English, in the United States. More on this announcement can be found here: http://ekf.bg/news/article/283.
https://endlessbook.art/f/the-
"This is a monumental work. The author is a very smart woman. And he writes terribly fascinating. We see the edifice of our own time, we see it through a telescope and under a microscope. And the challenges to the intellect are so great that we forget which is what."– Marin Bodakov
"Everyone would find something for themselves in this kaleidoscope, or according to Bill Bryson – in this not so much "A Brief History of Almost Everything." The interpreters of the 'postmodern' will have a lot of work to do."– Silvia Choleva
Such a genre does not appear every day in Bulgarian literature. And the themes are undoubtedly the greatest, the "fundamental" ones – life, death, time, language, art, love, life and being, having and being, existence and existence, personal time and the objectively scientific, the meticulous documentation of the life and consciousness of the non-exceptional ordinary man (according to Knaugor) and the epic, our tragic insignificance, the unbearable scale in which the fragile meaning of our life moves and the eerie beauty of starry sky."– Antonia Apostolova
"There can be no doubt, the reader is facing a postmodern novel with all the playful constructions of postmodern writing."– Yanitsa Radeva
Brilliant montage, turning the real, the fictitious and the imaginary into an inseparable mix, into a portrait of not just a woman, but of a contemporary, who tries to find out the links between the past, the present and the future. Brilliant narrating skill – the big “autobiographic” story about this contemporary is by far more engaging than a crime fiction. The mastery of Bulgarian language is astonishing. This is one of the books with most beautiful and rich language which I have ever read. The reflections about death are no way inferior to the philosophy of Philippe Ariès, and those about the life and the Being of woman are equal to Le Deuxième Sexe de Simone de Beauvoir. We must be aware that this is a very important book, written by a Bulgarian, by a cosmopolite, by an artist who has outgrown the “cultural vacuum” and whose portrait hides many, many more secrets.– Georgi Tsankov
What an exciting project! … It seems nearly impossible to understand what this book is without reading it in its entirety … The translation of the prologue is quite masterful … and is instantly captivating, and [the translators] have succeeded in translating even the etymological elements into English, a real feat. - Gretchen Schmid
There are masterfully depicted episodes, where you find contained emotion and high literature. We can be certain that Experience is a first book of its kind in Bulgarian literature as it mixes extensively autobiography, auto-fiction and essays. Though such literature is still rare on our literary scene, it seems that globally, more and more often writers combine personal historicism with that of a higher rank (ex. In Memory to Memory by Maria Stepanova.) Another development is the attempts to harness non-fiction in the elemental force of aesthetics. - Ivan Petrov
In 2020 a best-selling book got all Bulgaria talking. Experience (or To Essay) by Rusana Bardarska was published by Zhanet 45 – a publishing house with a well-founded reputation for supporting the very best Bulgarian writers, including Georgi Gospodinov, Milen Ruskoff and Kapka Kasabova. Bardarka skillfully manages the hairpin bends of a post-modernist structure to convey a unifying human viewpoint through shifting perspectives, contexts and genres. Non-linear, yet gripping, the novel affirms the positive force of human creativity, the urge to locate, release and transmit the stories hitherto suppressed, by patriarchal culture and language.
The extraordinarily inclusive account of life, time, space and death begins in the main street in Lom, a small Bulgarian town on the banks of the Danube, where in the eyes of the child, death only happens on a Sunday. This opens one of the recurring themes of the book, our inability to talk about death of loved ones, death of a mother tongue, death of the entire human race.
The backdrop shifts from childhood in the impoverished but cosy security of a provincial backwater, to the elite Plovdiv high school with its threatening Communist regime, to the struggle to survive in post-communist chaos, and finally to relocation and material comfort in Brussels at the heart of the EU. Seen from so many perspectives and shifting time frames, it is a journey that allows us to question the very core of identity. A polyglot Bulgarian, proud of her history and language now lives in a country with little history and contested languages, working for an organization, whose aim is to overarch all traditional cultural conflicts. Along with our inability to talk about death, language becomes another key theme, both on a personal level, and in the larger context of human identity and survival.
How does communication work between a woman and her lover in a language that is neither his nor her mother tongue? How does a woman communicate the fear she feels gazing at the starry void, over her lover’s shoulder through the bedroom window. How does she negotiate the paradoxes of time and space? How will her voice and the voice of countless women be heard?
Rusana Bardarska wears her intelligence on her sleeve. Her references shift from Quantum Physics, string theory, Marxist economics, postmodern literary theory, ethical philosophy to popular culture – even The Good Place. She is on Christian name terms with Montaigne. She has opinions, and one of the great strengths of this book are the hackles her opinions raise with the reader. That is all to the good, in that this is a book that will promote hot debate. It will not be the last word. Hers is a voice from that border land, a borderland between language and culture, a land of runaways whom understandably many patriotic Bulgarian residents wish to ignore. But from that borderland, one can perceive not just the future of individual nations, but that of the entire human race. - Christopher Buxton, writer and translator. – Christopher Buxton
“Experience” (or To Essay) is a composite book, much as experience itself is composite. Each chapter is a layer which brings a new meaning to what it is to have lived – from childhood encounters with death in a little town by the Danube to the inside story of trying to make sense of time, the economy of everyday life set against violent economic storms, the imaginary demise of the Self as viewed from the eyes of a loved one, the intricacies of love and writing in today’s virtual world (told by a female Cyrano), family history from a female perspective, immigration and belonging, gender issues, the mind against the machine, the Self in language, art and science, among many things. A small girl travels around the (desktop) globe with her paralyzed Grandma; a woman loses control over the wording of her illicit affair; a rape buried deep in family history has unexpected consequences generations later; a stopped watch, a rammed bike, an empty box of chocolate eggs, a boy who refuses to speak and give hugs. A lunar landscape with a little figure in it.
None of this is straightforward. Much as Montaigne’s original essays, whose charm is in the mix between the strive to depth and the candour of imperfection, the chapters often evade their stated purpose. They also tend to defy the impulse to be rearranged, in the reader’s mind, as to make a single storyline – facts do recur, some confirming prior evidence, some not. Identification is invited – then sidestepped, subtly, as the narrator’s voice changes once again. And yet identification does happen, again and again, as the characters face obstacles that are shared by many and commented upon by few.
The book is also equally turned towards the Eastern and the Western reader. As the life of the narrator unfolds on both sides of the East-West divide, it requires – and provides – the necessary touchstones of understanding for both audiences. Like a mixed-marriage person used to anticipating what one part of her family will not get about the other, the author has provided a buffet of key details that widen the perspective without making you feel you have stepped into alien territory. Some of these are explained in footnotes – the voice of the book is confident enough not to simplify its tune for fear of losing a tone-deaf reader. It’s also confident enough to be opinionated – which brings life and vigor to the reflective pieces, inviting a heated internal argument.
„Еxperience” is a word naturally turned backwards. And yet, it carries the same root as “to experiment”, to attempt, essayer, to step into the unknown. What brings the different layers of “Experience” together is the self, the narrator’s voice unafraid of looking into the future – and standing by the reader against the frightful “maybe”. - Zornitsa Hristova, writer, translator and publisher
This is an impressive – in terms of volume and concept – book which explores time. Time is “narrated” via the personal stories of the characters, set in the grand narrative. It is about the existentialist human time, but as well about the concept of time in physics, philosophy and history. Experience can be read not only as a novel, but as documentary non-fiction, too, as it comprises philosophical essays and science articles. The text explores death, time, economics, love, memory and Cosmos. The reader dives deep into the human experience. The large-scale, absorbing narrative, at times takes the shape of a family epos, to bounce back to post-modern play with genres and themes. Experience brings in one structure everything – a huge world, stuffed to explosion. The book tries to tell about everything, which engages human attention, without discriminating between the big and the small, the important and the insignificant, the main characters and the secondary ones, the book tries to contain the whole world. And Rusana Bardarska manages this material extraordinarily well – she narrates in an engaging and erudite manner. One may consider this novel as a fundamental text about the female viewpoint at history. But as much more, too. - Olya Stoyanova
"In Memory of Memory" by Maria Stepanova, "The Experience" by Rusana Bardarska, "Time Shelter" by Georgi Gospodinov, "The Limit of Oblivion" by Sergey Lebedev, "Everything Is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer – these are books that explore memory from a different angle. All of them are related to the philosophy of memory. The study of memory is a spontaneous cure for humanity, laden with distorted memories and an unhealthy desire to idealize the past. The authors on this list are among the best healers – they know how to cause pain just in time to start the process of rethinking. There is something in common between all of them – the healthy distance from sentiment, the lack of self-centeredness, the feeling of community in memory."– Silvia Nedkova
Rusana Bardarska uses skillfully semantic linkages and kinships, the metaphorical potential of words and diverse phraseology. Mastering other languages allows her to dig into the roots of Bulgarian language and to bring out its somewhat forgotten competencies. Experience demonstrates rich erudition in the area of humanities. The attentive reader will soon realize that the author tries out a conceptual allusion with the original essence of the essayistic genre and Montaigne’s Essays, while highlighting the blood link of the essay genre with the literary instinct in principle. Andrey Zahariev
Very rarely it occurs a novel which would cover many decades and would analyse the changes and developments brought underway. Rusana Bardarska is a peculiar case of an author who is able to speak about her own book, taking distance as literary critic... It's rare for a novel to span decades and, in the process, analyze the changes they bring with them. – Svetoslav Todorov
Experience leans to a novel not only because of its impressive volume. The chapters are tightly packed with fully literary bondages – with loose plot and autobiographical threads, with permanent characters, whom a “classical reader” would enjoy, with reoccurring symbols and leitmotifs, with serene humour, subtle irony and wonderful stylistic experiments in all registers of the comic. Yet, the fundament, holding the text together and making it a novel, is the in-depth, pivotal “story”, in which the (hi)story of the individual, the intimate and the (auto)biographical, entangle with and echo into the (hi)story of human being in general and of the mankind. Personal time and space codes settle down into the universal Time and Space, in Cosmos and beyond. - Mariya Shiryaeva
"The book is huge in concept, quality, execution. There is an awful lot of everything in it, but after closing the last page, the reader understands that every word is in its place. "Experience" is a phenomenon in Bulgarian literature and is not subject to "telling". This is an ambitious literary-philosophical text, a postmodern novel written by an erudite and respectably clever writer."– Tanya Ivanova
"The great literature in this book begins with the little girl in the Prologue. The original concept of androgyny in the modern world is brilliantly protected. This is a delightfully women's book - a contribution to the knowledge of the soul of a smart woman who knows how to free herself from the centuries-old tutelage of the man who invented the world and the words with which she presents it to herself."– Zlatko Angelov
"The Experience" is a large-scale and epic text in spirit and content, offering different approaches to reading. The book can be read as an existential philosophical novel, but it can also be read as a sharp feminist manifesto, or as a novel about our Bulgarian past and capitalist present, as an "attempt" to problematize living in emigration, in search not only of a richer, but also of a more meaningful life. Generous in themes, very playful, subtly ironic, cleverly mystifying, uncompromisingly bold and provocative postmodern literary text that startles, intrigues, excites."– Krasimir Lozanov
This is an attempt to give an authentic voice to the contemporary European, despite the stereotyped history. The author tries to look ahead at the “wonderful new world” (yes, I am ironic, so is the author) in which our children will live. Our children live and think beyond national mythologies and belongings to patriotisms.
This multi-genre text elaborates on human reposals; it tells about authentic existentialist pains and fears, but as well about the trans-human (cf. Luc Ferry) The reader is invited to reflect about our human measures, about those “vague” emotions, about the transcendent – that is to say, about the intrinsic territories of art. But above all, Experience is a novel about our “mellow, inaccurate, quaint and ruthlessly irreversible human time.” Both in narrative chapters, and in those dominated by philosophical reflection, Rusana Bardarska ponders the world beyond human categories, beyond mythologies and civilizational markers.
All and all, the whole book comments and fictionalizes the world with succinct, secular irony. The text bounces boldly away from storyline structure and experiments in philosophical prose, without, however, losing the gravity force to fiction and the fictitious. Ina Ivanova
It has never happened to me before – to read a book for such a long time. But “Experience” is so “delicious”, dense, honest… it is like sharing a life. This is an authentic, multi-genre, experimental readable, brilliantly written, comprehensive novel, which I recommend with great pleasure, because all our life is there, it all its dimensions. - Svetlozar Zhelev
6 тъжни разказа, 1 весел + 1 интерактивен. Bulgarian edition
by Zhannet 45 Publishing House, 2002.
6 smutnych opowiadań 1 wesołe +1 interaktywne. Polish edition by Jagiellonian University Press, Krakow, 2002.
Part of the book was included in an anthology of epistolary prose of the University of Skopje, North Macedonia.
At first glance, this is a selection of short stories, taking place in post-communist Bulgaria in the 90ies. Yet, the last epistolary novelette, in which the mystified author of the preceding stories disappears and the real author Rusana steps in as editor, frames the book as a novel. After the publication of the book, the mystification literary game continued as the text was uploaded online and readers could intervene and change, complete or continue the stories, or write their own replicas. See in “So... what’s this EndlessBook?”
This witty, at some points absurdist and surrealist, post-modern first try of Rusana was received very well by readers and critics alike both in Bulgaria and Poland. (See in News & Reviews)
As you may have noticed, this website is called endlessbook.art. EndlessBook was a literary experiment, started by Rusana in in the distant year 2001. This original online project, related to her first book, pioneered what is now known as "fan fiction."
Here is what Rusana tells:
“In the distant 2001, I thought up, intuitively and unconsciously, what years later would become known as fanfiction. My genre experiment was realized in an exotic language and I gained no world fame. Although my idea was even more conceptual – I offered to the fans and amateur writers-to-be my own text (my first book), not someone else’s, and I withdrew as author. This literary happening was a continuation of the book itself, where in its final chapter, the author of the previous stories disappeared and the editor, who went by my name, had to decide what to do with the text in terms of revision and publication. After the book’s publication, the mystification continued - the text was put on the Internet, on a site created for the purpose, which I named endlessbook.com. Every reader could edit, change, develop the text however they wanted, to become a co-author, after the disappearance of the author. The text became continuous, endless, a living and interactive book.
Now, my continuous essays can be interpreted as fanfiction after Montaigne, Canetti or Knausgård.
The end of the endless book was comic and sobering, though. A few years later, sending my CV through Brussels in search of a job, I decided to look at this site, which I proudly provided a link to on my CV – as an original literary project. I found…hard porn. Obviously, for someone, “The Endless Book” meant something like the Kama Sutra and took over the site after its one year license ran out. I guess, clearing my literary project was instantaneous. Good that I looked and took out the link from my professional autobiography.”
It was an end to only the online dot-com project. For Rusana has developed her bold ideas into the art of her endless books.
https://endlessbook.art/f/so-what-was-endlessbookcom
The New Epic
This is one of Rusana’s ideas, developed theoretically, and even implemented, in her books. Here what it is essentially about:
“In the past, religion and ethics, family, clan and nation, social ideals and ideologies and their projects for the future and designs of history were providing some kind of universal survival kit for the individual, some frames and grand narratives, in which the individual human beings laid their individual time, purpose, sense and aspirations. The victors and the vanquished and their writers wrote the great history and the national mythologies. Religion regulated ethics and promised salvation. The grand narrative of a community cancelled death and brought order to chaos.
Literary theory dictates that epic novel sets the little man in the great history, and vice versa, tells the great history via the life of the little man. But no longer is there a monumental historical narrative, in which typecast personages would figure. The monument has collapsed. The narrative of the community – familial, national, religious, generational, social class, political, has collapsed. From the ruins emerges the concrete, real, ordinary, authentic, little human. No matter at which side of the victory or in what corner of history this human finds themselves, their human’s personal story is an intimate story of someone’s past and time.
The classical epic is quite problematic today. How can anyone create an epic today when there are no grand narratives, no shared ethical and social ideals, when they know that there are no gods above, to manage fate and guarantee proportionality and order, that the very epic cast of characters and poet are the fruit of chaos and the embodiment of the one chance in a billion at I-don’t-know which degree, that lifelike of the characters, and of the author, too, is a string of coincidences, lacking any meaning and eventually full with pleasant and unpleasant things. How can one achieve an epic detachment and historic distancing when the world is changing ever faster?
Yet, the times are, actually, epic, and that, on a global level. It is not a national epic but an epic of humankind. But contemporary literature rarely produces epic narratives. Some key premises for an epic are missing, or at least for an epic in the classical sense. There is no common societal ideal and objective for humanity to unite around and to aspire to. Survival of the planet and mankind is an obvious, noble candidate, but there is no agreement and solidarity as to how and with what resources it should be achieved. There again, what ideal is there in simple survival?
Today, the only possible epic distancing or detachment lies in the awareness of the chaos and randomness, of infinity, of the relativity of human measures, reality and viewpoint as just one of many possible worlds, in the relativization of some basic motifs, which lie at the foundation of all of literature. For me, the distancing of oneself, the observation of self as a human being and making one’s own personality and experience the subject of the literary text is the new epic mode.
The collective and the individual stories are not just parallel and competing. Just as on a biological level, before birth, ontogenesis recapitulates all stages of phylogeny, on a spiritual level, the experienceof the individual human recapitulates the existential experience of humanity in general. The experience of the individual gives birth to what defines us as humans –consciousness with its horizons, death and time and with its home – language, aesthetic drive and love. Thus, the intimate and autobiographical don’t just entangle with and resonate in the (hi)story of humanity, but instantiate it, or materialize it, as narrative. This is a new type of epic and monumentality, which replace the monument of collective epos.
This more unusual measure for aesthetic, and epic in particular, emerged in the Renaissance, when the human being was reborn not only in the shape of a heroic, wise, amorous and beautiful demi-god, but also as an old, sick, petty, doubtful, contradictory little person, called Michel, who essayedto write about the whole pallet of the significant and insignificant, joyful and sorrowful, making up not only his life but that of humanity in general. I am referring of course to Michel de Montaigne and his “essays”, which subsequently were recognized as a genre. This new genre is by definition an attempt at literature, occupying the borders of literature and the aesthetic, and not a self-assured literary work, created in the stream of tradition and canons. Paradoxically, precisely the lack of literary ambition, self-confidence and a pre-defined aesthetic purpose gave freedom to the author. The attempt to write about his own experience as experience of the human being in general, turned the literary canon upside down. “Reader, I myself am the subject of my book,” Montaigne wrote.
This is a new kind of epic, an existential epic, a modern epic, which turns the optics of the classical one – from the individual to the human and humanity. This is a story of an individual person, but also of the human being. The experience of the individual reconstructs humanity in general. The intimately personal is universally human. In the self-portrait, the auto-fiction, the so called confessional prose, the artist depicts and recreates himself as a “generic” human being, without sparing both the genuine “realism” and “authenticity” of his everyday life, the banal and mediocre, while, at the same time, emphasizing overly human sorrows and nightmares, dilemmas and crucifixions, elevations and flights of the spirit. And it’s precisely this, apart of course from all the aesthetic means, that turns an autobiography into a book and a self-portrait into a work of art. And this is the in-depth, the fundamental theme and plot line, which underpin these books and bundles all straits of the narrative into an epos. The new epic is more a story of the human being, not so much of human society.
By definition, immanently and conceptually, the new epic is fragmentary, aesthetically not fully accomplished, imperfect, its genre is not clear cut, the text is wandering on the borderlines of literature, it is an open, continuous texts. As in a happening, the story takes place (for real or in candid mystification) right in front of the eyes of the readers. The narrator writes as he lives. Writing itself is an existential act, an initiation into human condition. The narrator unpacks the boxes and wrappings of fictionality (again, really or pretending). The mere object of the story – the writer him- or herself, the human being in general, the world - change and this leads to changes in the story. Ever speedier changes leave no time for epic distancing, for crystallization of experience, for casting the essay in aesthetically and genre solid mold. Hence, this kind of writing is conceptually and inherently endless, the books suppose “to be continued”, and updated, to be aesthetically unfinished and imperfect (the latter can be entirely “authentic”, but can also be conceptual and deliberate) Genre uncertainty, narrative and stylistic experiments and fragmentation substitute classical narrative. And who knows, perhaps the genre of existential epos encompasses everything – from fragment to total literature,[1] because humanity lives in all genres. For each new edition, Montaigne edited his essays extensively and significantly, adding new observations, which sometimes completely contradicted the original. This was a continuous, living text as the subject and his themes were evolving, living, ageing, approaching death, as world itself was changing, and bringing new subjects, or reshaping, confirming or adding nuances that reinforce or contradict author’s thoughts. [2]
Only the death of the narrator puts an end to these books. Death and the predicted “unhappy end” are the only possible compositional frame and denouement for these existential epics of human experience – death of the individual and of humanity. And art, writing and literature in particular, is the only transcendental hope for salvation.
According to the classical definition, the novel narrative is an alternative to the historical, because it’s concerned with ordinary people and their ordinary lives and does not register only victories, defeats and other historic events, but the experience of the individual. All this sounds very true, only that the experience of the individual is told by somebody else – the writer, and the narrative usually tells us much more about the experience and the spirit of the writer than about his object. The creator leaves a trace, not his/her prototypes. Art immortalized only chosen subjects (usually the artist himself) and very rarely concrete objects. They say that the poet rescues the dead from oblivion. The poet first and foremost rescues himself.
Therefore, not only writers should write auto fiction, but the little, insignificant, ordinary person should leave a trace, in 1st person singular, a trace that is not necessarily an aesthetic artefact, intended to be made public. In my books, I examine a series of such “private narratives”. I have always been interested in the borderlines of literature, those invisible bands in the shifting sands, where a text becomes, or ceases to be, literature. My fascination with this topic seems to stem from a belief of mine that each person, even the most ordinary one, should leave more than transformed chemical elements, genes and a few dumb photographs, that human consciousness should leave a trace of that rage and curse against time, death and its own meaninglessness, drawling out in the cosmic dark and silence, during the short walk under the stars. Even if this trace would be an imperceptible, hopeless scribble in the sky, an invisible signature of the wind-tossed reed. Not only ars poetica is longa. The real, ordinary little human, provincial and global, funny and sad, mundane and existential, can live on not only aesthetically. And not only in the margins of the family bibles or in the footnotes of “proper” literature.
[1] By total literature we mean a compendium of all literary genres, be it reproduced “with due respect” or in ironic travesties.
[2] I feel close to this writer, through five centuries, not only at conceptual and genre level, but as well because we were born on the same date. It also fascinates me that Montaigne was quite wealthy and worked as something that today would be considered as civil service.
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