Maria Todorova's latest book, Imagining Utopia: The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins, 1870s–1920s, reflects (on) a prodigious academic career across distinct settings: the ideological rigidity of communist Bulgaria, American triumphalism after the Cold War, Eastern Europe's unease with its “postcommunist transition,” and a malaise in the “West” in the current century. It is also an intellectual's longing to exhume and reanimate the optimism and the strife toward utopia that propelled fin-de-siècle socialist men and women in one corner of Europe.
Imagining Utopia can be viewed as the prologue to the international project “Remembering Communism” Todorova codirected in the early 2000s. The edited volumes it produced explored communism's meaning, memory, and legacies in Southeastern Europe after 1989. With her new book, Todorova goes back a century earlier, to the time before socialism and communism became associated with the violent, flawed Bolshevik utopia and Soviet tyranny. She recaptures the hopes and motivations of early socialists in Bulgaria, a new state born in 1878, with a fledging parliamentary democracy and a transforming agricultural society. The study's nucleus is a set of recollections Todorova accidentally discovered in the Bulgarian archives. It germinated a database of 3,500 self-identified leftists (socialists, communists, anarchists, narodniks, and agrarians) born between 1850 and 1900. This wide source base has yielded a book with three levels of historical analysis: a bird's eye exploration of socialism as a movement and a range of ideas (part I), a profile of a political generation (part II), and tales of individual lives (part III). Each section highlights at its start the distinct methodology and conceptual tools applicable to the specific scale of discussion and narrative approach.
The first part explores how ideas are transferred and translated back and forth between the European core and the periphery. Todorova positions the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party (f. 1891) in the broader history of the Second International (1889–1916) to subvert a common typology that bifurcates this period's socialism in Western (democratic) and Eastern (Russian in origin, oppressive) varieties. Peeling away layers of prior uncritical and ideologically motivated reading of sources, Todorova forensically demonstrates that both Western and communist historians exaggerated Russian influences on early Bulgarian socialists, obscuring their actual German, Austrian, and Swiss ties. Indeed, until 1919, when the international movement split over Bolshevism (locally birthing the Bulgarian Communist Party), Bulgarian socialists were like most other European social democrats. Operating in a democratic if imperfect system, they believed that not violence but “parliamentarism allowed for a fundamental social transformation, a belief that was irretrievably lost in most of the world in the interwar period” (47). At the same time, chapter 2 shows that socialists from the former Ottoman realm brought their own experience of postimperial space to international socialism. For instance, they apprised socialist leaders such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky on the realities behind the “Eastern Question” and ultimately swayed the Second International to adopt their idea of a Balkan federation as a solution to the region's nationalist conflicts.
The next three chapters bring a generational lens to the people who defined Bulgarian socialism. Todorova provisionally divides them into two political generations, born on each side of 1900. The generation of 1850–1900 was shaped by “a peaceful existence and an intense political life defined by a general feeling of the possibility of progress,” while the next one was radicalized by wars, defeat, and revolution (85). Chapter 3 is a prosopography of the pre-1900 left-wingers, looking at their social background, education, and networks. It captures a society in transition, whose population initially ridiculed but gradually appreciated the message of early socialists, even if the latter fought over membership, goals, and tactics. Yet the prewar clashes could not compare to the early 1920s, when the post-1900 “Bolshevized” generation took over. Eager for militant action and goaded on by the Moscow-led Comintern, it embraced a confrontation with the authorities from 1923 to 1925 that led to the decimation of the pre-1900 cohorts.
“Tales of formation” introduce men and women from the generation of 1850–1900 in some detail. In chapter 5, individual stories of social, spatial, and ideological meanderings prove the impossible task before any historian to sketch neat genealogies of ideas. Chapter 6 explores women's independent paths toward socialism. Todorova reveals the fallacy of interpreting socialist women simply as socialist wives and insists that women's “invisibility in the sources does not correspond to factual invisibility at the time” (162).
This point is affirmed in the last part of the book, which reconstructs the lives of two men and two women. Todorova deliberately eschews linear narratives and embraces a “postmodern approach to biography” that presents people from multiple perspectives (177). We get to know Angelina Boneva, a private woman of dignity, a patriot, a teacher, and a socialist fondly remembered by those around her (chapter 6). Then there is lawyer and journalist Todor Tsekov (chapter 7), whose 1,100-page memoirs tell of his youthful Macedonian patriotism, love life, and two sojourns in the United States, where he and his wife first studied and then organized immigrant labor. Chapter 8 follows the bifurcating paths of a feminist couple brought together by socialism in Berlin as students but divorced by 1911. Koika Tineva, niece of prominent socialist Christian Rakovski, exemplified the tribulations of many communists: exile to the Soviet Union after 1923, Stalinist persecution, and self-censorship. In contrast, her former husband Nikola Sakarov, who stayed in Bulgaria, could document his life and activities with honesty and insight, having abandoned party affiliation after 1923 and dying in 1943, before everything changed.
Imagining Utopia brings to life many an “extraordinary ‘ordinary’ person,” with admiration for the social democracy they championed tinged with premonition of lost lives and betrayed dreams (189). At points, the sheer number of characters can overwhelm even those familiar with the history of European and Bulgarian socialism. Yet it serves Todorova's argument that empirical “grounding in individuals … is a methodology that provides a constant reminder against inference and terminological slippage” (252). Specialists will be drawn to Todorova's uncanny ability to question established interpretations and offer fresh perspectives from the “periphery.” Advanced students will profit as Todorova walks readers through the process of making sense of data, archival fragments, and varied theoretical approaches to connect personal dramas to national and continental developments.
