OSA / Guide / RIP / 1956 / RFE/RL Background Reports : Subjects | Browse | Search

The text below might contain errors as it was reproduced by OCR software from the digitized originals,
also available as Scanned original in PDF.

BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 7-5-256
TITLE:             A Major Literary Event: The Novel "Avalanche"
BY:                G. S.
DATE:              1972-5-4
COUNTRY:           Bulgaria
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  Bulgaria/4

--- Begin ---

RADIO FREE EUROPE Research
EAST EUROPE

This material was prepared for the use of the
editors and policy staff of Radio Free Europe.

BULGARIA/4
4 May 1972

A MAJOR LITERARY EVENT: THE NOVEL "AVALANCHE"

Summary: A new literary work has recently appeared in
Bulgaria entitled Avalanche, which its author, the poet Blaga
Dimitrova, calls a "novel-poem." The work is a profoundly
human document reflecting the "emotions, hopes, fears, and
aspirations" of today's Bulgarians, and especially of the
younger generation. However, the honest portrayal of life
in contemporary Bulgaria, and the ethically oriented
metaphysics have come under heavy attack by official critics.

The first part of this paper attempts to analyze the book and
its place in Bulgarian literature, while the second part
offers examples from Avalanche chosen to illustrate the scope
of subjects Dimitrova takes up in her new work.

* * *

A few novels, or plays, or poems . . .are far more
important ... that any number on politics and
economics. ... For it is literature and the arts
that reflect the emotions, the hopes and fears, the
aspirations of human beings.

(Vera Michelson Dean, sociologist, in a UNESCO
Orient-Occident report of 1963)

PART I

Background to "Avalanche" -- The Role of the Writer
in Bulgarian Society

Historically, external circumstances have seldom favored the
development of a purely literary genre in Bulgaria, yet this has not prevented
writers from playing an important role in the development of Bulgarian
society. They have acted as the conscience of the nation and the defenders
of its integrity, not only throughout the five centuries of Turkish
domination, when the Bulgarian cultural heritage was threatene1 with extinction,

[page 2]

but also in the post-liberation period. Moreover, their role has been
important both because of their active involvement in political and social
movements, and because of the quality of their art.

Since the end of World War II, the writers have retained in varying
degrees their political and social involvement in Bulgarian life.  This
involvement, however, was no longer a personal commitment born of existing
circumstances, but was rather a response to the demands and restrictions
placed on their creative media by the BCP's cultural policies. Ever since
the Communist take-over in Bulgaria (9 September 1944.), the party's cultural
policy has been characteriyed by two major trends:  first, an attempt to
strengthen control over the cultural front and its workers;  secondly,
attempts to utilize culture and the arts more efficiently in achieving party
goals. Based on utilitarian themes, the party doctrine of "socialist
realism" -- the only currently valid theory of, and method in, art -- has
confined the imaginative media to social, rather than intellectual, issues.

Despite such restrictions, the tradition of the Bulgarian writer -- the
personal nature of his social and artistic commitment and the attempts to
discover and chart new means of expression -- has continued, if in a 
somewhat circumscribed form.

The Framework

Poetry and fiction have always been the most frequently used forms of
expression in Bulgarian literature. And it is with this in mind that one
should view the latest work, Avalanche, by Blaga Dimitrova. Avalanche is
in the tradition of such contemporary Bulgarian writers as Atanas Dalchev,
Yordan Radichkov, Vera Mutafchieva, and Assen Ignatov. A quick survey of
these writers may perhaps give the reader a better perspective from which
to examine Dimitrova's Avalanche.

The intellectual verse of Atanas Dalchev (born 1904) has exercised
great influence on generations of poets. Dalchev is a poet's poet, the
"secret father of many poets who are our contemporaries." (l) Based on
concrete observation, his verse is almost pure metaphysics. Profoundly
national, Dalchev is at the same time very European, and scarcely at all
socialist;  his work belongs to the world of John Donne, Paul Valéry,
William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Boris Pasternak.

A most unconventional and nonconformist story-teller, Yordan Radichkov
(born 1929), effectively defends an author's right to subjective views
unhampered by inhibitions or literary dogmas;  to illustrate the character of
his work, one must refer to the Russians Olesha (Envy) and Bulgakov
(A Dog's Heart), or to the Americans James Thurber and Ludwig Bemelmans.

Vera Mutafchieva (born 1929) has a highly intellectual approach to
problems of history. Her novel The Djem Case (1967) is a study of the

----------

(1) Septemvri No. 1, 1968.

[page 3]

fate of the exile, the man without a country whose world is disintegrating
(the author is personally involved in a Djem-like case: more than a decade
ago, her own brother escaped to the West). Mutafchieva's play Along the
Great Road (1971) preaches a sermon on the twin texts that a man must think
for himself, and that doubt is the road to truth (the French philosopher
Descartes - cogito ergo sum - is the play's central character).

The essayist Assen Ignatov, a young scholar at Sofia University, admits
without any reservation that alienation does exist in a technologically
developed communist society. The author referred to works by Schopenhauer
(The World as Will and Idea, l8l8, and Will in Nature, 1836); Kierkegaard
(Either/Or, 1843, and Stages on Life's Way, 1845); Heideger (Sein und Zeit,
1927), and Jaspers (The Future of Mankind, 1963). The official critics have
savagely rejected the work of this young philosopher, The Sorrow of the
Epoch (1968), and declared that "this is material completely contradictory
to Marxist-Leninist principles." (2)

Blaga Dimitrova (born 1922) is one of the few (and perhaps the last)
Bulgarian poets whose lines young people know by heart. Her first poem was
published in 1939, when she was in her mid-teens. In 1950- she graduated
from the Maxim Gorki Literary Institute in Moscow. Like all Bulgarian poets,
she has written civic, didactic, rhetorical, and exhortatory poems. It was
not until after the April 1.956 Plenum that Dimitrova began, timidly, to write
lyric poetry (Till Tomorrow, 1959 and 1960; The World in a Hand, .1962;
Reverse Time, 1965; Doomed to Love, 1967; and Moments, 1968).

In 1965. Blaga Dimitrova turned to prose and produced her first novel,
A Trip Toward Oneself, which Cassell of London had the prescience to publish
in an English translation. The Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, The
Guardian, and The Spectator recognized it for what it was: "a major
literary event," In the same year, 1965, John Updike wrote a story called The
Bulgarian Poetess: (3) his model was Blaga Dimitrova. The story was awarded
the first 0. Henry Prize in 1965. (4) Side Track (1967) and The Judgment Day
(1969) are the other prose works preceding Avalanche (1971)- A movie based
on Side Track won a gold medal at the Moscow Film Festival in 1967, and to
this day it is the most internationally sought-after Bulgarian film. The
Judgment, Day is a book of human suffering in today's Vietnam; it was
published in 1,560,000 copies only in the Soviet Union.

----------

(2) See Rabotnichesko Delo, 7 March 1969; and Bulgarian Situation Report/20,
Radio Free Europe Research (EERA), 17 March 1969, Item 7.

(3) The New Yorker, 13 March 1965, PP. 44-51: later, the story was included
in the collection The Music School (1966) published by Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., New York, pp. 211-231: and in the end, the author included it as
a separate chapter in his Bech: A Book (1970), published by André
Deutsch, Ltd., London: pp. 49-70.

(4) See "The Yearbook of the American Short Story, January 1 to December 31,
1965," in the Best American Short Stories 1966, ed. by Martha Foley and
David Burnett, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1966,
pp. 370 and 376.

[page 4]

The road traveled by Dimitrova illustrates the difficulties experienced
by an honest author who loses the conviction that a doctrine, any doctrine,
contains an answer for every question. Her latest poetry (5) and Avalanche
are attempts to communicate some of her most intense, individual experiences
of living and being, together with occasional hints and snatches of
intuitive perception.

The Bulgarian literary scene is too varied to be summarized in a
general review. Moreover, it is in a state of constant development, and any
conclusion would be premature and might even be outdated as it is written
But, against the background of this briefly delineated intellectual world,
one can clearly see that Avalanche is not an isolated phenomenon in modern
Bulgarian literature. Yet, it is unique in more than one way.

The Book

There are books of the same chemical
composition as dynamite.' The difference lies only
in the fact that one stick of dynamite explodes
only once, but one book explodes thousands of
times.

Eugene Zamyatin

Avalanche deals with the lives and deaths of 16 mountain climbers, but
the plot is only secondary. The questions: What, in a world such as this,
can finite beings like ourselves hope to achieve? What are we? What are
we for? How can one live with serenity and fulfillment in a frustrating and
confusing world? How should one live and die? are primary. The road to
death is travel toward one's self. Thus, time becomes a psychological and
social problem: a regret for wasted moments, a protest "against the deserts
of boredom, against the windmills of empty talk, against the pastures of
idleness." Time becomes a thirst for human freedom. Her theory of time is
that it represents the unity between the past, the present, and the future;
she creates the idea of condensed time.

Avalanche is, in a way, a study of an individual's mind and reactions
to the collective's mentality and actions. It conveys the emotional and
speculative temper of today's Bulgarians and, above all, those of the younger
generation; their disillusionments give the novel its historical
perspective. The actual sources are the air Dimitrova breathes, the views she
looks at, and the memories of the thoughts and talks and painful
soul-searching of this brilliant, sensitive, imaginative poet. The authentic presence
of Dimitrova's personality leaves an indelible impression upon the
imagination of the reader. Reality and ideals are conveyed with the simplicity of
an aphoristic style, a style known in all languages.

Hardly any novel about Bulgarian intellectual life evokes to mind so
much of the cultural heritage of its milieu as does Avalanche; or hardly

----------

(5) Vecherni Novini, 30 September 1969; Septemvri Nos. 11, 1969, and 10, 1970.

[page 5]

ever has Dimitrova, in her earlier work, recaptured the same richness of
associations, the ability to make memorable each scene in the transition from
reality to imagination, from light to darkness, from life to death.

Philosophy for Blaga Dimitrova and for some of her main characters
(projections of her own self) is ethical. The author is concerned with
individual conduct within a collective, with individuals who are able to seek
meaningful life and death. She explores the mysterious interplay between the
collective and the individuals who compose it. The role of the collective's
mentality sometimes gives rise to hypocrisy, deep-lying neuroses, and
distortions of truth.

The culmination occurs when the avalanche buries the 16 mountain
climbers. In fact, it occurs many times: 16 times individually, which are
later repeated in the imagination of the Poet (one of the main protagonists),
and, in the end, all these deaths are again lived through in the reader's
mind. The fugal polyphony reaches its perfection in this part. The author
makes the reader not read it, but experience it. Blaga Dimitrova possesses
one of the rarest artistic qualities: she succeeds in involving and turning
the reader into a coauthor of, and a participant in, her story (an intention
suggested in her brief foreword printed on the book's jacket). And she
performs this like a virtuoso.

In Avalanche, ideas do not exist for Dimitrova but are the functions
of her characters. The book is a summing up of a lifetime's experience of
a kind. And though the external form is that of prose, its internal
structure is that of poetry, or rather of the contrapuntal polyphony of a Bach
fugue. It has the power of saying more than prose is required to say, and
says it in the fewest words. This is just one reason why the story
transcends its Bulgarian atmosphere, and becomes the universal story that it is.
It has the kind of universality that makes possible analogies in life, as
well as in literature. Thus, Dimitrova's writing leaps far beyond immediacy

To enter upon that dangerous ground that lies between prose and poetry
is a considerable accomplishment, one that has been achieved by only few
writers. Blaga Dimitrova did not reach that stage without preparation: in
writing her poetry of the late 1960s and her novel The Judgment Day (1969),
she had begun to discover her style. She recorded that discovery in an
interview given to the Soviet literary magazine Voprosy Literatury (6)
which was later reprinted in the Bulgarian bimonthly Literaturna Missal. (7)
The discovery is paraphrased in an artistic manner in Avalanche: she is
able to write only when the impulse to write urgently moves her, and then
"somebody else writes" instead of her.

The fragmentary composition of Avalanche is a flexible medium for
reflecting varying moods. The multidimensional viewpoint is based on the
nature of human psychology. It involves objectivity and subjectivity, the

----------

(6) No. 9, 1969, PP. 84-87.
(7) No. 4, 1969, pp. 31-34.

[page 6]

rational and irrational, the conscious and unconscious. Dimitrova's language
is metaphorical, laconic, and elliptical, and the repetitions achieve the
effect of a strong inner unity. In this respect, her writing bears a slight
resemblance to Rabindranath Tagore's musically worded metaphysical visions.

In the novel as a whole, Blaga Dimitrova. points to no solution. On the
contrary, she is content to make only some indefinite points about certain
aspects of a world in which the most ordinary things are transformed into
new shapes, and stretched to new dimensions and new meanings.

In Dimitrova's vision, the act of defiance turns into a triumph. Once
having rejected death, her protagonists gain a peculiar kind of freedom:
life gains meaning from its inevitable end. The lesson of solidarity is
taught by isolation

The Intellectual Sources

The three epigraphs at the beginning of the book are the clues to the
author's intellectual sources. It is not by chance that Dimotrova used
verses by Federico García Lorca and Emily Dickinson and a paragraph from
Albert Camus's Sisyphus to introduce her story.

Some short references to these divergent elements of literary and
philosophical traditions might help the modern Western mind to aquire a
general idea of the author's intellectual intentions and artistic
performance.

Her bold and unexpected metaphors recall those of the English
metaphisical poets, though hers are sometimes more sensuous. As with Lorca,
Blaga Dimitrova appears to be not so much drawn by her impressionistic
vision as by the marvelous fusion of certain philosophical influences
Lorca might have experienced (Miguel de Unamuno and Jose Ortega y Gasset,
among others). She has the intellectual ethos of an Ortega y Gasset who
defended the "vital values." (8) She also shares Unamuno's belief that
the essence of man lies in his endeavor to be forever. (9)

On the other hand, Dimitrova is looking for the divine in the human
being, and trying to refute the mechanistic materialism, as Christopher
Isherwood attempted to do. (l0) Her elaborations on "little fears" sound
like a continuation and updating of William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech.

Dimitrova's personal interpretation of Zen Buddhism is a point that
deserves our special attention. One of the basic principles of Zen
humanism requires a certain freedom with respect to authority (see Dimitrova's
remarks on the "observer from afar" and on the Philosopher). In Zen, true

----------

(8) Cf. The Modern Theme, and On Love...... Aspects of a Single Theme.

(9) Cf. The Tragic Sense of Life.

(10) Cf. Vedanta for the We stern ,World.

[page 7]

authority is that Self which is itself authority. In addition, "Zen sees the
Void itself as an inexhaustible source of creative dynamism."(11) This is
not nihilism but dialectics of the "great Death" that leads to new life, a
life stripped of myth and naked of illusion (see Dimitrova's notes on
Nothingness, on Defeat and Triumph, on Guilt and Punishment). This is her own
rediscovery of the "dimension of bottomlessness." (12)

It is quite possible that Blaga Dimitrova's interest in Eastern
philosophy came through her deep involvement in, and profound love for, Vietnam
and that country's tragic problems. In actual fact her previous novel,
The Judgment Day (1969), is a book of human suffering set against the
Vietnamese background of today. The philosophy of Tich Nhat Hanh the
Vietnamese monk, poet, and intellectual is very close to her own principles.(13)
Nhat Hanh looks for an answer to man's most urgent question: How to cope
with suffering? The problem of human suffering is insoluble as long as men
are prevented by their collective and individual illusions from getting
directly to grips with suffering at its very root, within themselves. To
set up any institution or philosophy or belief as absolute, is to erect
barriers of illusion that stand between man and himself, and prevent him
from facing his own reality in its naked existential faculty. The various
We1tanschauung en may concur in the error of providing man with a refuge,
and with steterotyped formal answers which substitute for genuine thought,
insight, experience, and love (see Dimitrova's remarks on the Individual
and the Collective). It is generally known that Nhat Hanh is an "intelligent
and ardent reader of Albert Camus." (14)

The dominant feature of Blaga Dimitrova's vision is, however, a
philosophical lyricism whose nearest kinship is to Emily Dickinson's
transcendentalism and Camus's philosophy. Camus's Sisyphus finds some element of
freedom within his restrictions. For him, freedom exists in his mind, and
he adapts. He makes himself a free man by working within the restrictions
of his fate. The analogy with Dimitrova's characters is very strong (see
her remarks on Laughter).

She incorporates her protagonists in a world in which anything may
happen, and often does (cf. the symbol of the Avalanche). In such a world,
dislocation is accepted as normal, disorientation viewed as ordinary. The
surface of the narrative is almost surrealistic, and yet every act is treated
as customary, every confrontation as usual. Everything becomes plausible: in
a world in which few things are real.

----------

(11) Shinichi Hisamatsu: "Zen: It? Meaning for Modern Civilization," The
Eastern. Buddhist, new series, Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 1965).

(12) Keiji Nishitani, "Science and Zen," ibid.

(13) Cf. Tich Nhat Hanh, Aujourd' hui le Bouddhisme, translated from the
Vietnamese by Le Van Boi; Cholon, South Vietnam, Editions La Boi,
1965.

(14) Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, New York, Delta Books, 1967.

[page 8]

Dimitrova's analysis of political power forms a remarkable study of the
irrational elements in human nature, and could be compared, in a certain way,
with the classical book on the subject of another Bulgarian-born writer,
Elias Canetti. (1.5) In this respect., it might be also appropriate to
mention Ortega y Gas set's The Revolt of the Masses.

In short, Dimitrova's "poetic originality is largely an original way of
assembling the most disparate and unlikely material to make a new whole." (l6)

Summa Summarum

The author's immediate point is the meaninglessness of heroism in a
battle where forces other than individual actions will decide the outcome.
The less obvious point is that individual will is virtually useless in a
world that does not respond to heroic actions. The response must come from
within; man is obliged to become worthy of his existence, and his
worthiness derives from his confrontation with his situation, no matter how
disenchanting, no matter how difficult and frustrating (see her notes on "Born
a Human Being").

Avalanche is painful for the very reason that it strips life of its
deceptions, while even the most realistic of us tends to hold to some
illusions or believe them necessary.

Thus, it is no wonder that official criticism -- which can hardly be
qualified as the most realistic in the field of the arts -- opposed
Avalanche and Dimitrova's latest work. (17)

Blaga Dimitrova's ethically-oriented metaphysics expressed in Avalanche
undoubtedly represent a major event in modern Bulgarian literature. In fact,
any literature with great traditions can be proud of producing such an honest,
courageous., and profound book -- a glimpse into the human soul and mind, into
its interrelations and interactions with society. Avalanche is a rare,
clarifying book, it is provocative in its wisdom, it is a brilliant,
reiterative, and uncompromising indictment of a society.

G.S.
Bulgarian Unit

----------

(15) Cf. Crowds and Power: see also his interview in Abendzeitung, 5 April
1972, p. 7.

(16) T.S. Eliot, The Frontier of Criticism.

(17) See also Bulgarian SR/2, RFER (EERA), 15 February 1970, Item 3; G.S.,
"A Bulgarian Poet Gets Out of Line," Bulgarian Background Report/2, RFER
(EERA), 15 January 1970; and Literaturen Front Nos. 1, 6, 18, and 45,
1 January, 4 February, 29 April, and 4 November 1971: Nos. 3, 4, and
10, 2 and 27 January and 9 March 1972.

With all this in mind, one could also add the fact that Blaga Dimitrova
has had her Avalanche published by a provincial publishing house (in
Plovdiv), perhaps to avoid administrative and other complications that
might have arisen in the more watchful institutions of the capital.

[page 9]

PART II
Quotations from "Avalanche" (*)

Writers and Readers

Dear Readers:

My address to you can be composed solely of questions, but not of
answers. The questions, in general, provide far more scope. The answers
set limits. To know how to ask questions means to provoke a myriad of
answers. Truth will be found somewhere in this dialectical,
multidirectional, and all-round searching. To ask questions is the expression of my
confidence in my readers. (A foreword on the book's jacket.)

"Born a Human Being"

The greatest risk you run is when you are born a human being in this
world.

You run the risk of e very tiling.
The most terrible one: to be humiliated.
The most painful one: to have no air to breathe.
The most absurd one: to lose your eyesight.
Yet you were born a human being and you must defend this right of yours
to the end, even at the expense of tortures and death....
The very fact that you were born a human being is your supreme duty.
You must defend your own birth at the expense of your own death.(p. 97),

We are not ourselves when we are confined within our own limits. We
are ourselves when we are turned into our own antipodes. (p. .47).

Personality

To turn aside from a path is in itself [a sign of] character.... A
turning aside from a path is the beginning of a new path. (p. 14).

The Individual

The observer from afar is also a necessary component of a collective,
(p. 66)

He is an observer from afar. Perhaps he is needed in order to serve as a
counterpart to the commitments of all the rest. ... He is outside the

-----------

(*) Note: The subtitles have been added.

[page 10]

innermost structure of the group. It gives him the opportunity to study it
from a remove, to evaluate the manifestations of its nature, which is
inconceivable for us, for those who are inside that structure (p. 60).

His [the Philosopher's] ideal has always been absolutely to free
himself from the momentum of faith and deception. All his life he tried to
produce immunity against all sorts of myths.(p. 216)

His [the Philosopher's] mistake is that he has always been far ahead of
the collective's Way of thinking. . . . The collective thinking is simple,
simplified as a slogan. ... He simply took a further step. And the
collective never forgave that.

One of the most tragic forms of alienation is to be ahead of your
fellow men, (p. 221)

The Leader

The collective of human beings is a strict functional system: the
position determines the behavior and character of each individual member but
not the opposite, ... No matter who you are, once you assume the leading
position, you acquire the hard characteristics of a leader, that person you
replaced, although you had opposed him. (p. 55)

The position of the leader is the most open and most exposed one All
kinds of winds lash you from every direction. If you yield to each one of
them, then you have to make yourself revolve all the time. And instead of
pointing to the right direction, you'd turn yourself into a weather vane.
No! You have to listen to yourself. You have to follow yourself in order
to be followed by the others, (p. 37).

Who leads the group? Or perhaps it is the group which leads the
leader? . . .

We have chosen you, ... We unanimously push you toward the
responsibilities of a leader. ...

WE. Why does this collective being need a. leadership? Isn't the
passion precisely in the opposite group: not in the leader but in the led?
(pp. 196-197)

The word "quarrels" is frightening for each leadership. It discredits
it as incapable (p, 67).

The Collective

The real collective of human beings cannot [live without] some kind of
a Pamirs that will raise them high above the clouds and keep them there,
consolidated in a peak. (p. 33)

[page 11]

When the being WE [the collective] acts, there is no excuse for the
individual. There are no personal reasons. The more personal, the more
blameworthy they are,(p. 43)

Feelings are never planned or co-ordinated. The collective cannot stand
such surprises [as feelings]. (p. 223)

Responsibility is collective
Collective responsibility is no responsibility at all....
Stop that bourgeois diversion, you Philosopher! (p. 196).

Our mistakes come from our victories. We believed we were allowed to do
everything. (p. 87)

Our discords unite us more [strongly].(p. 74).

The common goal unifies more [strongly] than the common origin. (p. 58)

There is no sweeter bait for the rank-and-file members of a collective
than the competition between two leaders. (p. 6l)

Everything is permitted a fool. But we are not allowed to take his
words at their face value.(p. 39)

Taste is a herd feeling (p. 25)

Ethics

You should not leave behind yourself an erroneous track in the
mountain.

Only in the mountain? (p. 63)

Is there a good reputation [combined] with noninterference?

The good reputation should not be "preserved," it should not be kept
locked behind seven keys. It is built up every day, every hour You never
know from which direction you should guard your reputation. You must be
always on guard....

Which is your guilt?

The gravest one: you never wanted to accept your share of guilt.

What-kind of punishment do you choose for yourself?

To remember (pp. 294-295) .

We must remember . . . it is the most important thing that is to be
done in this world of ours. (p. 300)

[page 12]

A second of delay can kill a human being. How many died by a helping
hand stretched out too late, by a kind word said too late, by justice that
came too late (p 123)

Fear of responsibility is more terrible than fear of death,(p. 185)

The Avalanche

An avalanche lies in wait for me no matter where I go; an avalanche
lies in ambush

This is my avalanche . . . .

An avalanche is building up, snowflake upon snowflake, smile upon smile,
insult upon insult, gesture upon gesture, (p. l88),

This is a small [avalanche].… Our [Bulgarian avalanche], . . .
You are not even proud of a great death.... It is a dwarf of an avalanche
But you should not underestimate it. It is extremely dangerous. It is more
dangerous than the big ones.... [This is] a Bulgarian avalanche. Your
avalanche Ant it's enough.

It is a small one, a compact one. A sly one. It lies in wait just
around the corner.... It jumps out when you do not expect it. At the
moment when you do not think of it. It is unforeseeable. It seems
unbelieveable, illogical, impossible . . . .It jumps over you. ... Blinded [by
it], at last you begin to open your eyes. (pp. 92-93).

[The avalanche's aim is] to stop the steps, the cries, the memories, to
put everybody asleep. (p. 94)

The Power of......

Your provincial passion is after the Big.

All your life you've been sorry: you were born in a small country with
little space (p. 253.)

Nikifor [the overseer] feels himself delighted whenever he notes down
somebody's false step. He does not care for our common step, if is it
correct or not. (p. 75)

She began to see the fear ... that everyday fear, unseen, little fear,
like a gray dust that covers [our] words, [our] step, [our] human relations.
Little fear bearing the innocent names of prudence, caution, [political]
reinsurance, co-ordination, consideration, warning, etc. Little fear smeared
over [our] faces and thoughts like an ashen, protective dye.(p. 115)

[page 13]

Laughter Is . . . 

To laugh in this sullen world of ours is a real miracle.(p. 228)

The element of laughter is the greatest miracle.

Man can lose everything along his life's way: youth, health, power,
faith, memory, name. But he will be forever man if he preserves his laugh-? ...
ter. . . .

Laughter is man's inner freedom.
And no oppressive power can ever suppress it. ...
Laughter is self-defense against the forces of the enemy. ...
Laughter is not a character, it is unconscious philosophy. ...
Laughter is freedom.(pp. 231-232).

Nowhere is the need for laughter greater than in a human group, (p. 71)

The Arts -- Theory and Practice

Do you think that art demands sacrifices?
No! Definitely no! If you think that you sacrifice something, then
you are after an ambition: success, glory, money, awards, titles. Art does
not demand of you fragmentary sacrifices. It demands all of you. Art is "
not a sacrifice, it is a vocation. ...

Recently, everybody speaks of innovation. The poets look for something.
What are they looking for? ... What are you, Poet, looking for? ...

I am looking for words that never were; for rhythms that never were;
for images that never were. I am looking for new ways of thinking. It might
happen that I'll never find anything. It's enough for me that I'm looking.

All this sounded as if it were a foreign language., (p. 190)

Art ignores traffic lights! ... He will ignore the traffic lights.
He is used to it. He will run the risk. (p. 151)

Poet, tell us how you write? ...

I don't know, answered the Poet. If I knew, most probably, I would
have stopped writing. . . .

You write, don't you? Then, how's it possible not to know?

Somebody else is writing, it's not I! ... I do not write . . . .
Somebody else writes, a stranger who's unruly. I'm afraid lest I chase him away.
All the time I wait for him: will he return once again? I do. not write.
Somebody else writes for me. ... I do not choose poetry. Poetry has chosen
me, it is the thing that sets me against myself (pp. 192-193)

[page 14 ]

You have to fight a battle on your innermost front to prevent your
thoughts from influencing your steps, (p. 36)

Guardianship is a sign of immaturity.

And you, Poet, you know the most deadening form of guardianship: the
one that is internal. The one that is imposed by your own self. The
control over your own thoughts and feelings. All your ideas, your feelings
lie under the tyranny of this self-imposed self-dictatorship.
How to liberate yourself from your own guardianship? (pp, 178-179)

Experiment must stop short of discovery. This is old age's principle.
And the jury is usually composed of "old" men, regardless of their age.
(p. 152).

The fact that they do not understand me encourages me, it makes me hope
that I do not repeat anybody else's thought and word, that's why they cannot
understand me, the Poet said (p, 189)

To kill a poet is to kill an entire world (p. 94)

Modern Times

All of us are in a hurry More and more in a hurry We are in a hurry
to reach the goal sooner, , , . We are in a hurry to reach [our] death as
soon as possible. . . . Faster! To be in a hurry is already a goal. (p.299)

The slogan says just the opposite. If everything is all right, then
why has one to make declarations? (p. 69)

Too much of politics makes us apolitical.(p, 50)

The fatherland is full of foreigners! (p. 172),

Who will be saved?

Maybe those who throw away the burden of thinking (p, 165)

The Face of Truth

Truth mixed with invention is more convincing, (p. 29).

Truth does not have a single, eternal face. It was born again and again,
and it has the face of its bearer (p. 217)

I understood another, far more terrible, truth: no one is put on trial
for being passive. Just the opposite. . . . But now you have to put
yourself on trial, (p. 311)

[page 15]

Man is that which is left him after he has lost everything (p. 296)

How to put up ourselves with defeat? . . . Defeat is our quiet
victory, . . . It is that cosmic feeling of reassurance coming from the
knowledge that we fought to the end and did not surrender. (pp. 262 and 269).

The Living and the Dead

We do not rely on our dreams and presentiments.

We do rely on our reason.

Which one is the bigger superstition?

We have crossed dreams out of nature's phenomena. (p. 202).

Which is your support in a world that is perishing? . . . The only
stable support at such a moment is within you, in your memories and dreams,
knowledge and hopes, moral strivings. ... Each one of us built his own
support, (p. 96).

The great tenderness is always late. It always comes so slowly to the
best beloved ones that when, at last, it comes they are already dead.(p.199)

The grave of our parents teaches us the lesson of tenderness.(p. l8l).

Death makes guiltless the dead. We, the living, are the guilty ones.
(p. 298)

Nothingness

Everything, no matter how vast, is definite, ergo limited.

The Nothingness is limitless. ... Nothingness keeps the secret that
gives birth to everything. (p. 275)

Selected and translated by:
G.S.
(Bulgarian Unit)

  OSA / Guide / RIP / 1956 / RFE/RL Background Reports : Subjects | Browse | Search