“Blood of a Mole”: Compassion and cruelty in Zdravka Evtimova’s Bulgaria5 min read
“Few customers come into my shop. They look at the animals in their cages and usually buy nothing.”
A miracle in a pet shop
From its very first sentence, Blood of a Mole, 2019 (Кръв от къртица, 2003) introduces the reader to one of those small, dark and seemingly insignificant worlds that Zdravka Evtimova transforms into great literature. The pet shop is cramped, unprofitable and filled with the smell of formalin. Its owner lives almost as inconspicuously as the animals in the cages. But the arrival of a poor elderly woman, who is looking for mole’s blood to cure her sick son, changes everything. Since there is no mole in the shop, the owner cuts her own hand and gives the woman some of her blood. The “miracle” that follows turns the shop into a place to which desperate people begin to flock and the owner cannot refuse to give them some of the “miraculous” blood.
The story is short, but it raises remarkably difficult questions. What happens when kindness becomes a commodity? Is there a limit to self-sacrifice? Can a lie be morally justified when it gives someone hope? The shopkeeper possesses no supernatural power. Her blood is not a medicine in the medical sense. Nevertheless, people begin to believe in it because they need a miracle. In this way, Blood of a Mole becomes both a story about compassion and a warning about the way human suffering can be exploited.
The invisible people of Bulgaria
The collection Blood of a Mole brings together stories about poor, lonely, humiliated, neglected and largely forgotten people – the “invisible” people in Bulgaria. Evtimova’s characters are rarely winners according to conventional ideas of success. They work hard, live in small towns and peripheral neighbourhoods, lack money and are frequently confronted with the brutality of society. They include workers, shopkeepers, unemployed people, elderly women, abandoned wives and individuals struggling to preserve their dignity in an environment that constantly humiliates them.
One of the central themes of the stories in this collection is poverty. In Evtimova’s work, poverty is not simply a lack of money, but a force that transforms relationships between people. It produces envy, fear, cruelty and dependence, but it can also awaken unexpected generosity. The writer does not idealise the poor or automatically present them as morally good. Her characters can be greedy, vindictive, petty or merciless. Yet even when they behave badly, the reader can understand the origins of their anger and despair and relate to them.
Another central theme in her stories is human dignity. Evtimova’s characters may possess almost nothing, but they continue to struggle for recognition, love and respect. Sometimes this struggle appears absurd; at other times, it ends tragically. Yet her stories always preserve the possibility of a small moral choice – to give someone food, to defend a weaker person or to sacrifice something of one’s own for a stranger. It is precisely these brief acts of compassion that prevent the world from becoming completely unbearable.
The stories appeal to readers because they combine realism, dark humour, grotesque elements and almost fairy-tale-like twists. The language is clear and direct, but complex moral conflicts lie behind its apparent simplicity. Evtimova does not overexplain and does not tell the reader what to think. She creates a situation that initially seems strange or even amusing, but gradually reveals its cruelty. That is what makes her stories so captivating.
From Pernik to the world
Zdravka Evtimova was born in Pernik, a city that occupies an important place in her writing. In addition to being a writer, Evtimova is an established translator from English, French and German. She has translated more than twenty-five novels by British, American and Canadian authors into Bulgarian.
In Bulgaria, she is known for both her novels and short-story collections, but also for her particular ability to transform Pernik and provincial Bulgaria into literary spaces of universal significance. Her Pernik is not merely a real industrial city. It is a place of hard labour, social inequality, rough humour and stubborn vitality. Evtimova portrays a Bulgaria that rarely appears in the country’s official narratives.
In 2019, Bulgaria’s Ministry of Education clarified that works by Zdravka Evtimova, including Blood of a Mole, had been included in the literature curriculum for specialised studies in the eleventh and twelfth grades. This means that they are primarily intended for students with a deeper interest in literature and the humanities, rather than necessarily being studied by every Bulgarian secondary-school pupil.
The story’s international educational journey began earlier. In 2015, Blood of a Mole was included in English-language textbooks for upper-secondary students in Denmark. In 2019, it also became part of a teaching resource for middle-school students in the United States. This is a rare achievement for a contemporary Bulgarian short story and demonstrates that its moral conflict can be understood far beyond the Bulgarian context.
Evtimova’s works have been translated into 25 languages. Her stories and books have appeared in English, French, German, Italian, Greek, Serbian, Macedonian, Chinese and Hebrew. Her international publications include short-story collections and novels that have been published in 31 countries around the world, including the USA, China, the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, Vietnam, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Norway, Denmark, North Macedonia, Austria, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Serbia, Romania, and Greece.
Understanding Bulgaria through fiction
Zdravka Evtimova is important to Bulgarian literature because she writes about people and places that often remain invisible. She neither beautifies Bulgaria nor reduces it to poverty and hopelessness. Instead, she reveals its cruelty, absurdity, warmth and remarkable capacity for survival. For international readers, her stories are especially valuable because they offer a perspective beyond tourist images and historical clichés. Anyone who wishes to understand contemporary Bulgaria – not only its institutions and politics, but also the language, fears and humour of ordinary people – would struggle to find a more powerful literary guide than Zdravka Evtimova.
