Vunderkind

de Georgi Tenev

Part I. THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC One evening and one night with the President of the Republic. The Republic here is a small and utterly dependent East European country. In the story, Bulgaria is a wicked version of the fears and ethno-psychological traumas in the minds of Bulgarians. This is the fear of imperial ascendancy and foreign ideological invasion; the fear of military, economic or ‘fraternal’ dependence from Russia. The President runs to extremes but persists in his determination to sell the Republic as profitably as possible. “Lock the millions in those suitcases” as he himself puts it, and leave. He trades in nuclear power stations and invaluable, still unidentified archaeological findings of mystic use. He acts in haste, planning to have facial surgery. But perhaps he rather needs heart surgery as his heart suffers some mysterious and deeply concealed problems. He wants to finally leave the stage once the sets have been plundered or burned down. But he is also the one taking care of the ravage itself. Every night he undergoes a strange werewolf-like transformation: from president, he turns into the leader of a clandestine terrorist-revolutionary organization which subjects the capital city to fierce attacks. The aim: to depose the President himself! The protagonist rambles between the two different roles, those of corrupted politician and romantic rebel, but the antagonist is single and unchangeable. The name of this antagonist is Russia. A fatal annual reception at the renovated Russian embassy and a visit to an exhibition room with an enormous model of the Kremlin turn out to be a trap. An absurd though entirely perceptible passage, through which the Moscow reality draws our hero in, with the clear intention of telling him something. Or why not, even fixing for him an appointment with the best cardiac surgeon, the man with the fabulous Caucasian name of Ranat Syuleimanovich Akchurin – the doctor who had operated on Yeltsin himself. This is the surgeon who, while listening to opera overtures, fixes the hearts of presidents. The meeting takes place in the luxurious bar of a hotel in Moscow. And of course, it doesn’t go without fantastic vicissitudes and surprising love revelations from Russian girls hiding their innocent and fragile souls under the masks of hotel pleasure girls. At the end of this part, the fire-devastated seven-star Russia Hotel becomes the site of a Faustean encounter – not with a doctor, but rather with a demon. Under his red glare, the President is given the right to choose for an unknown price. Reality looses its earthly outlines, among bombings of airports, with a lunatic rewriting of Bulgarian and European history, and rearrangement of the symbols on the Russian imperial coat of arms. There, on the coat of arms, the symbol can be seen (by the way, this is not fiction but a real historical fact!) of a tiny territory annexed: Bolgaria! The President of the Republic takes a step into the emptiness, over the abyss of autonomy lost. The fit, or clinical death, during the demonic operation, is either the beginning or the end of his mental disease. Part II. THE APPARITIONS So far the reader has already understood: the sets of the international conspiracy and the historical complot are in fact just a fracture in the wicked mind of a mental hospital inmate. The second part of the novel is an overcoming attempt of the patient’s will, with which he tries to affix himself to one truth or another about the world and his own self. In the quest for new facts and evidence, a new personage is born. Or perhaps he is the same person, though coming from a different time – the time of sound reason or the time of post-insanity. Whichever the case, the reader has to be prepared for the leap that follows. Because the quest begins to bring forth apparitions from the heart of Russian literature: the Karamazov Brothers. The storylines from Dostoyevsky’s novel are developed further, in the spirit of revolutionary Russian avant-garde, Dovzhenko’s films, and the construction of Belomorkanal by camp inmates. The literary apparitions, evil and nostalgic, collide with their successors a century later, that is, nowadays. The story is entirely forfeited but not totally unthinkable: the Russian Empire and Russian Czarism are restored. Amidst the glamorous post-totalitarian kitsch of the jubilee Karamazovian Festival we see a seemingly casual foreign guest: Mr. Bolgarsky. Author of the scenario for the celebration but also victim of the system. A Bulgarian, meaning Slav and foreigner at once; an orthodox Christian but, at the same time, a disbeliever. There’s just one thing he wants at this point: to get his pay, pack his suitcases, and leave. But where does he want to go? To his homeland? The end of the book, behind the barred heavy doors of the psychiatric hospital, sounds like a sentence with no right to appeal: death or madness. The only chance for reanimation is not