Understanding

This text is a lecture delivered in the “Forum for justice”, established in 2019 in memoriam to the friend and intellectual ally Christian Takov, a professor in low, who passed away in 2017. The lecture explores the concept of justice with methods unusual for philosophical or juridical inquiry – the interpretative techniques of literary theory. Central is the hypothesis that the various forms of literary imagination are instrumental in awarding a major hermeneutical Good – understanding; a claim, exemplified by a close reading of works by Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Nabokov. Narratology (especially the various patterns of relationship between the omniscient narrator and literary characters, limited in their knowledge), is used as a methodological tool to investigate the forms of uneven distribution of this Good in different historical epochs. The lecture concludes that unlike literature in previous centuries, modern literature is in its very nature utopian enterprise: its mission consists in universalizing understanding up to the limits of human nature.

The article addresses two main issues. The first one relates to the narrative techniques of “outsideness” (Bachtin’s вненаходимость/vnenakhodimost’) and the ability of literature to penetrate the characters’ otherwise inscrutable inner meaning and make it accessible to comprehension. The second analyzed question brings attention to the “opaque” modern institutions and the institutional roles into which they place individuals. The study argues that, in the Bulgarian context, literary representations of institutional roles remain populist and simplistic. Furthermore, it highlights how emerging Bulgarian literature cannot cope with the formalized meaning of the modern institutional system in the country. The examples are literary depictions of the court, the judicial system, and the judicial roles from the period 1880 – 1905.