📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Sunday 13 September
Some days the calendar hands you a household name. Today it hands you a Russian professor most Bulgarians under forty would not recognise either, which is a pity, because his life is the whole twentieth century compressed into one curriculum vitae: Odessa, exile, a chair at Sofia University, and a dismissal for being the wrong sort of person.
What happened on this day
Pyotr Mikhailovich Bitsilli, Petar Bitsilli to Bulgarians (Бицилли, bee-TSEE-lee), was born in Odessa on 13 September 1879. He went through the Second Odessa Gymnasium and the philology faculty of the Novorossiysk University in his home city, and then the Russian Civil War happened. He left in 1920 for Serbia, and in 1924 moved on to Bulgaria, where he took the chair of modern and contemporary history at Sofia University. The circumstances are almost too neat: the post came free because its holder, Ervin Grin, had been given permission to return to Russia. One man had permission to go back to the country the other had just fled, and they swapped places at the same lectern.
What followed was an output that would embarrass most departments: 27 monographs, 144 articles and 118 reviews, drifting steadily away from straight history towards art and literature. He wrote for Философски преглед, the Philosophical Review edited by Dimitar Mihalchev, and the titles alone tell you what he was watching happen around him: "The Role of the Individual in History" in 1929, "The End of the European Cultural World" in 1931, "People, Nationhood and National Consciousness" in 1933, "The Crisis of Democracy" in 1936. Then the other end of the century caught up with him. At the close of 1948, his contract expired and the university let him go as a "bourgeois specialist", with no right to a pension; the Bulgarian entry dates the dismissal to 1949 and offers no reason at all. He died on 25 August 1953. His books started coming back into print there in the 1990s and were still being reissued into the 2000s.
Why this matters for British expats
Bitsilli arrived on the wave that most British readers have only met through novels. Russians fleeing the civil war in the south went out through Turkey and then on into the Slavic countries, Bulgaria among them, and that generation is a large part of why the Russian layer here runs as deep as it does, in the churches, the bookshops and the older university faculties. The sharper point is the one anyone who has moved countries will recognise. He came on a contract, filled a chair a Bulgarian institution needed filling, wrote a working life's worth of scholarship in his adopted country, and when the politics turned he was dismissed with a label and no pension. Foreigners have been building careers in Bulgaria for a century, and settling in is a good deal more secure now than it was for him, which is worth remembering on the days the paperwork feels personal. No Shumen connection today: this is an Odessa man who spent his working life in Sofia.
Sources and further reading
The Sofia years, the count of his publications and the list of essays come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Petar Bitsilli, which has no English counterpart. The birth and death dates, the flight to Serbia and the wording of his dismissal are from the Russian entry, and the note on where the émigrés went is from Wikipedia's article on the White emigration.