Nurie Muratova, Zheni otvad archiva: Nevidimite istorii na zhenite v Bulgaria (Poreditsa ‘Archivi na zheni i maltsinstva’, vol.6) [Women beyond the archive: Invisible histories of women in Bulgaria (Women and Minorities Archives Book Series, vol. 6)], Blagoevgrad: Neofit Rilsky University Press, 2021, 273 pp., 19 BGN (paperback), ISBN: 978-954-00-0259-0.
Zeynep Zafer and Nurie Muratova, Mefkyure Mollova: tyurkologiya v izgnanie, Biografichno izsledvane [Mefküre Mollova: Turkology in exile, A biographical study], Blagoevgrad: Neofit Rilski University Press, 2022, 351 pp., 16 BGN (paperback), ISBN: 978-954-00-0316-0.
In the 1930s, American historian Mary Ritter Beard wrote with concern, “No documents—no history” (about women), and initiated the establishment of the first women's archives. Nurie Muratova often refers to it in her monograph, which is focused on archives for and of women.
Dedicated to the presence of women in the literary and documentary heritage preserved in Bulgarian archival institutions, the book is conceived as a multidisciplinary study combining the approaches of archival theory and history, and specifically of social history, women's history, history of minorities (marginal groups), oral history, memory studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. The author applies methods from these fields to explore the place of (minority) women as marginalized social actors in the classical (traditional) historical archives and the so-called nonclassical archives, meaning those established on the background of new social approaches (identity archives), having alternative owners and ways of use (private, secret, or closed archives), or based on IT (oral, visual, and digital archives). Through an intersectional approach, she analyzes their visibility and invisibility, accessibility and hiddenness, significance and underestimation, presences and absences, dependence on certain archival policies, conditioning by social context, and framing by permanent negative stereotypes and prejudices.
Muratova emphasizes the importance of the interdisciplinary approach and the diversification of research methods and technologies for researching her topic. She provides a historical-typological review of the establishment and existence of specialized archives of women in the USA, Western Europe, and Southeastern Europe, comments on the fact that they are still absent in Bulgaria, and presents best practices for the functioning of nonclassical archives. Using her own empirical research, the author outlines the quantitative parameters of the so-called women's archival collections in the network of the Bulgarian State Archives and some of the institutional archives in the country. She analyzes the practical dimensions of their insufficiency, dispersion, their mechanical inclusion in the composition of family collections, as well as the small number or even absence of women's archival collections in the regional branches of the Bulgarian State Archives. Muratova summarizes the guidelines and results of the implementation of various archival policies, reflecting on the process of scholarly search and research.
The final chapter presents a successful application of the case study approach to examine whether, how, to what extent, and why traditional and nonclassical archives can (or cannot) serve as a source for social history, the history of women, and the history of minority groups. Arranged next to each other, the stories about the marginalization of Muslim women in the 1960s and 1970s, the lives of three figures imprisoned in communist concentration camps—the interrupted careers of scholars Mefküre Mollova and Khairie Memova and the writer Zlatka Cholakova—apparently look like a “puzzle.” Indeed, they provide a diverse, dense, and socially representative picture of both the existence and (cost of) survival of doubly and triply marginalized groups in the communist state (women, minority women, women scholars, women writers, non-party women, dissident or repressed women), and they also present the almost standard fate of their archival heritage: destroyed, disappeared, confiscated, stolen, dissipated, appropriated, “hidden,” (still) concealed, inaccessible, falsified, (personally) reformatted, and adapted according to political normativity. The author suggests ways to compensate for this through oral histories and field research, with the searching of personal (private) archival collections, with the policies for opening inaccessible/closed archives, and for the digitization of literary and documentary heritage.
The book also contains valuable appendices visualizing the topography of institutional, personal, and family archival collections by and for women in the Bulgarian national archives. The appendices not only provide an example of the current insufficient socialization by the public institutions responsible for preserving and protecting them, but also undoubtedly could motivate professional archivists to conduct new research.
The theoretical conclusions about the invisibility of women in the archives and about their practical “silence” as historical subjects is further developed by Nurie Muratova in the collective monograph Mefküre Mollova: tyurkologiya v izgnanie, Biografichno izsledvane, written in collaboration with Zeynep Zafer, Professor at Ankara University in Turkey.
The book is the result of long-term searches for archival sources, most of them newly identified in state, institutional, and private archives and collections in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Azerbaijan, and mostly used for the first time. It is also based on seventeen oral history interviews, on data from periodicals, and on a large number of secondary sources. This diverse empirical material is processed through the perspectives of history, archival studies, literary studies, and anthropology.
Dedicated to Mefküre Abdulova-Mollova (1927–2009), the monograph traces her background and education, her career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Turkish (Oriental) Studies at Sofia University from 1953 to 1960, and her contacts with foreign scholars. Authors examine the confrontation of Mefküre and Riza Mollov with the academic authorities between 1957 and 1960, their dismissal from the university, and the long-term efforts of Mefküre to work as an independent scholar. The authors analyze Mollova's scholarly legacy and her poetry, as she was the first Turkish woman in Bulgaria to publish poems, including her own collection of poems, in her native language, and she was a pioneer in the study of travel writings in the literature of Bulgarian Turks. The monograph provides a complete list of Mollova's publications as well as original photos, most of which are published for the first time.
The book is primarily a story about the career of a distinguished female scholar in the second half of the twentieth century. Although there are two books by Hristo Kyuchukov dedicated to Mollova's contribution to dialectology, this study is the first comprehensive narrative of her personality and her merits in Turkish literature and scholarship. The biographical method combined with the biographical case study allows the authors to analyze women's access to the scientific field and their encounter with the “glass ceiling” of networks of power, to reflect on the (im)possibility of doubly marginalized gender and ethnic groups to achieve vertical social mobility, and they draw conclusions about the existence of gender segregation in science (including in Mollova's own family). In addition, the Mollova case raises many more questions that are discussed in detail in the text: about the visibility of independent scholars and their creativity; about the meaning of doing science without any prospect of scholarly realization and promotion, and about manuscripts “in a drawer”; for the signs of the so-called Matilda effect (the ignoring of women's contributions to science and their appropriation by male scientists); and about the “absence” of women scholars from the national collective memory.
The monograph also contributes to the field of women's history. It deals with Mollova's life path for almost a century (from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century), reconstructing her image as a young woman, a Turkish woman, a highly educated woman, a poet, and a woman scholar. In each of these statuses, she faced negative stereotypes and social resistance, but at the same time profited from the support of various social networks: family, colleagues from abroad, and even her readers. Typical of the “second sex” is her now-missing private archive, as well as the absence of any ego documents (diaries, personal notes, memoirs, correspondence, etc.).
The book also deals with the history of Bulgarian scholarship between the 1940s and the 1990s, and in particular with Turkish studies. The study examines the career of the Mollov family not only in the context of the emergence of Turkish studies as a scientific field and university major in Bulgaria, but also in the sociocultural framework of isolationism, suspicion, and espionage during the Cold War, of Stalinist models, of totalitarian censorship, control, and searches for the “ideological enemy.” Based on primary documents, the authors outline the destructive processes in the culture that occurred after 1944 and grade the means of upward scientific growth: loyalty to communism and the party-state; belonging to the ethnic majority; not being young, having limited knowledge, or lacking in talent. They also focus on the polarity between the “scientific periphery” (Bulgarian oriental studies) and the “scientific center,” complicated by the dynamic change of “centers” depending on the political situation (USSR, Western Europe, or Turkey). The text also discusses the greater degree of recognition of scholars outside their own country, their role as insiders (accepted as internal) in the “center” at the expense of their status as outsiders (marginals, rejected) in the “periphery.”
The collective monograph presents a broad historical and cultural panorama of the ethnonational policies of the communist regime from the 1950s to the 1980s and their echoes during the postcommunist transition. Their actions are traced at the microlevel (the comparison of the emancipation of Turkish women within the preserved patriarchy of the Mollov family), at the national level (the comparison of the cultural autonomy of Turks and its liquidation due to assimilation plans), and in the field of education and science (the tension between the new Turkish educated elites and the state, requiring them to serve communist rule to the detriment of their own ethnicity). Using rich documentary material, the authors reflect on the moral choices of intellectuals, and specifically scientists, under pressure or placed in a crisis situation. They debate the alternatives as conformity or preservation of autonomy, as accommodation or marginalization.
The two monographs are topical and interdisciplinary reads, pioneering attempts in the study of women's archives and of doubly and triply marginalized female groups in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe. By using a comparative approach based on rich documentary materials, the studies offer valuable contributions to the fields of the social history of the recent past, minority history, and history of science, and could attract a wider reading public interested in Cold War Eastern and Southeastern Europe.