I first came across Julia Kristeva’s name in the late nineties, when I was a teen-ager, on the masthead of a small Bulgarian newspaper, Literaturen Vestnik, to which I had just begun contributing. She had joined the editorial board in 1995, in a purely symbolic capacity: her name was meant to lend cachet to the obscure cultural weekly, published in Sofia, where Kristeva and I grew up. Kristeva had moved thirty years before to Paris, where she became internationally celebrated as a literary theorist and psychoanalyst, shaping Continental philosophy alongside Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault. A striking and glamorous figure, she was increasingly prominent as a public intellectual, writing and lecturing on nationalism, the meaning of revolt, and the female genius, among other subjects. Kristeva did not get much involved in the cultural or political life of her homeland. Still, her position on that little masthead made her subject to the purview of an organization created in 2006, shortly before Bulgaria joined the European Union: the Committee for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing the Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army—more popularly known, in Bulgaria, as the Dossier Committee.

During the Cold War, Bulgaria was the Soviet Union’s closest and most obedient satellite, a quiet backwater unperturbed by protests or dissident movements. When the Communist government collapsed, the country spiralled into poverty: factories closed, unemployment spiked, hyperinflation ate through people’s savings. Amid the chaos, many Party members held onto power. Erstwhile officers of State Security, the Bulgarian counterpart to the K.G.B., loaded old agency materials onto trucks at night and incinerated them at a metallurgical plant near Sofia, destroying an estimated forty per cent of the archive. The Dossier Committee has succeeded in gathering, in one place, everything that remains: more than eight miles of documents, which have so far been used to identify more than fifteen thousand people who worked with State Security during the forty-five years of Soviet-imposed rule. (About seven million people live in Bulgaria, down from nine million when the Berlin Wall fell.) The committee is obliged to run background checks on anyone who seeks political office or works in a public field—such as education, journalism, or the law—and to reveal any links between those people and the repressive apparatus of the former regime. Evidence of affiliation does not carry legal penalties; the process is meant to strengthen public trust, and to give Bulgarians a greater understanding of their past.

Many of the country’s most prominent political and cultural figures—including Georgi Parvanov, the President from 2002 to 2012—have been revealed as collaborators. (Parvanov first denied the charges, then said that he thought he was working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but his file indicates that he was eager to collaborate with State Security.) Recently, the committee began to comb through the staffs of literary journals, including Literaturen Vestnik. In late March, the committee announced that Kristeva had been “a secret collaborator,” working in France, in the early seventies, with the foreign-intelligence arm of State Security, the First Chief Directorate, under the code name Sabina.

Kristeva is almost certainly the most famous living intellectual from Bulgaria, and the announcement caused a minor national crisis. The committee took the rare step of putting her entire dossier online, so that everyone could read it. Kristeva took to Twitter, where she issued a “communiqué,” in French. “The report that I may have been a member of the Bulgarian secret services under the name of Sabina is not only untrue and grotesque,” she wrote. “It damages my honor and reputation and is damaging for my work as well.” Her lawyer, she added, would pursue legal action against publications that dared to “complacently spread this allegation.” She has since, nonetheless, been assailed, as well as defended, in the press and on TV. “This Morning,” a talk show on Bulgaria’s most popular TV channel, aired a segment featuring Ekaterina Boncheva—who, with her bright red hair and large round glasses, has become the most recognizable face of the Dossier Committee—and Miglena Nikolchina, the professor at Sofia University who invited Kristeva to join the editorial board of Literaturen Vestnik. Nikolchina said that the Dossier Committee was wrong to focus on collaborators, many of whom were coerced, rather than on the high-ranking officers who did the coercing. It was “as if the actresses were to blame and not the directors,” she said, invoking the #MeToo movement.

The “Sabina” affair has become a major case in Bulgaria’s ongoing public debate about how to deal with the dark legacy of State Security, whom to blame and how much—a debate that has taken on a new urgency as totalitarian ideologies rise again in Europe and elsewhere. Kristeva’s critics argue that her collaboration undermines her moral authority as a public intellectual; one prominent Bulgarian journalist condemned her affiliation as “a link in a whole chain of complex dependencies with the former regime.” Her defenders maintain that Kristeva’s word carries more weight than old documents written by spies working for a totalitarian state. Perhaps those secret agents invented their conversations with her, or maybe they spoke to her on some pretext and then falsely claimed that she had collaborated with them. There are indications that Kristeva’s dossier, like many State Security files, may have been partially cleansed in the nineties: some administrative documents appear to be missing. A few commentators have called for shutting down the Dossier Committee altogether.

The debate has also resurrected old arguments about the intellectual’s relationship with the state, particularly in Europe. Martin Heidegger notoriously supported the Nazi regime for a time; Paul de Man was discovered, after his death, to have written anti-Semitic articles during the Second World War. A closer analogy for Kristeva might be found in the life of the East German writer Christa Wolf, who, in 1993, was revealed as a former Stasi collaborator: between 1959 and 1962, she reported on fellow-writers under the codename Margarete. The reports that she provided were mostly harmless, but Wolf professed shock at the revelation, claiming that she must have repressed the memory. Then, in her last book, an autobiographical novel called “City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud,” she openly confronted her past. A few years ago, the French novelist Laurent Binet wrote a satirical postmodern novel called “The Seventh Function of Language,” in which Roland Barthes is mysteriously murdered by thugs, who are trying to obtain a manuscript that holds the secret to unlimited powers of persuasion. Foucault and Derrida make appearances, as do de Man and John Searle. The character in the book named Julia Kristeva works undercover for the Bulgarian intelligence services, headed by her own father. (Binet told me, in an e-mail, that he had no inkling of Kristeva’s contacts with State Security when he wrote it.)

Kristeva insists that the State Security reports made public by the Dossier Committee are equally fictional. She has called the dossier, and the reporting on it, “imaginary information,” “post-factual politics,” and “fake news.” In July, the French edition of Vanity Fair devoted several pages to an interview with her, in which she said that drunken, “Kafkaesque bureaucrats” had invented the material in the dossier in order to justify their salaries. Sure, she had gone, a few times, to the Bulgarian consulate, and exchanged “a few polite words” with the employees behind the counters there—but nothing more. “It’s quite enough for anyone to read the dossier to realize it’s fake, but the media have no desire to go into details,” she said. “It’s long and it’s in Cyrillic.”