“Truth Rises in Silence”

In the novel, we repeatedly find ourselves asking: What is truth?Let us begin there. Is Maestro and Tidldibab a true story?

Author: If it were true in a documentary sense, I could not have written it.

In reality, I did not know the person from whom the fictional Maestro emerged well enough. Although we recorded many conversations between 2014 and 2015, this would still be far too little for a biography.

There is much about him that I simply do not know.Later, when I spoke with his friends, their accounts differed so profoundly that I had to choose the novel as a form—one that allows freedom in shaping both character and events as they unfold in the book.

The novel begins precisely with this discomfort: with the awareness that truth is often not found where we habitually look for it. At one point in the novel I write that truth is like a stream—if you try to capture it in a container, it disappears.

But if you allow it to carry you, you remain within it.

And yes, much in the novel is true.

But nowhere near as much as the reader believes.

And that, I think, is quite a good achievement.

The reader quickly senses that Maestro is not entirely fictional. He exists as a person, as a historical figure, as someone who truly lived.

Author: Of course.

And precisely for that reason, this novel is not a biography.

A biography would require approximation to factual truth, order, chronology, explanation.

Truly good biographies are rare.

Maestro, as he appears in the novel, resists explanation. Already in the opening chapter, I do not introduce him as a person with a date of birth, but as a phenomenon: “a man born once every hundred, perhaps even every thousand years.”

This is not a description of a person. It is a mythological entrance. Ljuben Dimkaroski was a public figure—there are few people in the public sphere who did not encounter him. He was extraordinarily popular, with a wide circle of friends. I often wonder whether reading the novel is easier or more difficult for those who knew him personally than for those who did not.

So far, the responses have been radically different—from the belief that only a person as great as Maestro himself could inspire such a portrait, to objections that a certain event did not happen in the way or at the time I depict it in the novel.

Why did you choose the novel, rather than a documentary or essayistic form?

Author: Because I was not interested in what happened, but in what happened inside a human being. I was searching for the spirit of the time. For the inner experience of someone sitting beside Maestro as he moves through life, already standing on the threshold of a death sentence. The novel allows doubt.

Silence.

Unresolvedness.

In the novel, scientists doubt, the narrator doubts, the reader doubts.

Even Maestro doubts—although he never admits it directly.

A document cannot bear this.

Literature needs it.

Dialogue is the dominant form of the novel. Almost the entire text unfolds as conversation. Why?

Author: Because in this novel, truth does not arise through explanation, but through relationship—through looking at the other.

Maestro and the narrator are two poles: he is absolutely devoted to his vision; she is torn between admiration and resistance. She did not choose this fate. She does not want to write; she wants to withdraw; the subject does not interest her.

The novel constantly unfolds within the tension between them.

Dialogue is not a stylistic choice—it is an ontological one.

Truth is born between sentences, not within them.

And it is right that the reader shapes it in their own way.

Maestro is an esoteric figure, but the reader may be entirely grounded.

The narrator oscillates somewhere in between—at least, that was the intention while writing.

Throughout the novel, you emphasize that the flute can be “just a bone”—or something more. Why is this ambiguity so important?

Author: For many people, this is still exactly the case today.

That sentence reveals our need for validation. If science declares it a bone, it is a bone. If it declares it an instrument, it becomes an instrument.

But Maestro insists on something else: what matters is not what is written in academic proceedings, but what happens when you play it. He says repeatedly that the flute has something to tell us.

The novel asks: does art need permission to exist?

What is the message of this flute?

What does the Neanderthal, as a traveler through time, tell us?

At one point, the narrator openly admits resistance to the story—even a desire not to speak about the flute at all. Why this inner rebellion?

Author: Because the flute opens something dangerous.

Not only historically, but existentially.

If the Neanderthal created music, then the linear story of progress collapses.

We are no longer the pinnacle of evolution, but merely one branch among others.

The narrator feels something deeply personal begin to tremble—an idea of meaning, order, security.

That is why she wants to flee to the kitchen, away from the conversation.

This is profoundly human.

Maestro is portrayed as both visionary and obsessive. Is this ambivalence deliberate?

Author: Yes. Without it, the character would be dangerously one-dimensional.

Maestro risks everything: reputation, health, relationships.

The novel does not idealize him.

At one point, the narrator explicitly considers that his obsession may be destructive.

But without that obsession, the flute would never have sounded.

The novel does not judge.

It leaves space.

The comparison of Maestro with Stradivari, Tchaikovsky, Nureyev, and others is deliberate. All of them—including Maestro—went far beyond what was expected, human, predictable.

Let us touch upon ethics. Writing about a real person is always sensitive. How did you approach this?

Author: With one clear internal rule: the character is not the person.

Everything intimate is literarily transformed.

The dialogues are not transcriptions.

The scenes are compositions.

The emotions may be real; the events are invented. The people are invented, adapted.

That is why it is clearly stated at the beginning that this is a work of fiction.

Not to protect the author—but to protect the space of literature.

The novel is rich with references—from Orpheus to Stradivari, from archaeology to contemporary science. What role do they play?

Author: Maestro himself thinks in long arcs of time. His world is not linear, but layered—interstitial.

That is why the novel is not confined to a single discipline.

Music, myth, science, illness, the politics of history—all of these intertwine, because human experience itself intertwines this way.

The flute is a bridge.

Not a theme.

Final question. Who is this novel for?

Author: First of all: this is not an easy book.

It is for a reader who is not disturbed by the absence of answers.

For a reader willing to enter a spiritual, transformative journey.

And certainly for one who enters that journey as a blank page—without expectations.

In practice, however, I am receiving the most beautiful responses from male readers. I do not know why.