The question of Bulgarian national character was always bound to the problem of statehood. This is mainly due to the fact that, as the prominent Bulgarian intellectual historian, Ivan Elenkov, put it, the state was perceived as "the only source of modernizatory initiative, the only means to catch up with the structures of modernity," and it also constituted the principal horizon of expectations concerning the future. Furthermore, the state-centeredness of the political culture also explains the relative compactness of the intelligentsia in the first decades of independent Bulgaria. This feature entailed that the cultural elite did not become polarized according to alternative traditions, which led to a constant oscillation between different political and meta-political positions....
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