georgi markov in the 1960s

Georgi Markov in the 1960sAuthor(s): Charles A. MoserSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 353-377Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4210027 .

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SEER, Vol. 67, No. 3, July 1989

Georgi Markov in the I 60s CHARLES A. MOSER

ON 7 September 1978 the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov, then living in London, was shot in the thigh at the Waterloo Bridge Underground Station with a small pellet containing a very lethal poison. Though Markov fought the poison in his system, in the end it proved too powerful for him, and he succumbed to its effects on i i September in a London hospital. He was buried in a remote English country churchyard.'

At the time of his death the nature and extent ofMarkov's contribution to Bulgarian letters were virtually unknown in the West. There are few enough Western specialists in modern Bulgarian literature to begin with, and in addition Markov's published works had been acquired by only a few major Western research libraries.

After leaving Bulgaria in I 969 and settling in London in 197 1, in the early 1970S Markov had composed substantial memoirs of his life in Bulgaria and broadcast them back to his homeland via the facilities of Radio Free Europe. Those memoirs- especially the portions describing his contacts with Todor Zhivkov and the world of high Bulgarian officialdom - were evidently the proximate cause of his assassination. Published in two volumes in Zurich in I98o-8I under the title Zadochni reportazhiza Bulgariia (Correspondence on Bulgaria), they were abridged and translated into English for publication as The Truth That Killed (London, I983; New York, I984), a project encouraged by his wife, Annabel Markov. The memoirs are an invaluable source of information on Bulgarian cultural life after the war, as well as on Markov's own career.

In the years between his defection and his death, of course, scholars and critics inside Bulgaria could scarcely mention Markov: indeed, in 1972 after he had begun broadcasting his memoirs he was placed on trial in absentia in Sofia and convicted of disseminating hostile propaganda. It is a tribute to the power of Markov's ideas that a young employee of the Bulgarian state security organs charged with preparing the case against Markov found the transcripts of his broadcasts so persuasive that he eventually defected himself, and now resides in the United States.2

Charles Moser is Professor of Slavic and Chairman in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The George Washington University, Washington DC.

1 See Annabel Markov's Introduction to Georgi Markov, The Truth That Killed, New York, I983, pp. vii-xiii; and also, for a more detailed account of the assassination, Kyrill Panoff, 'Murder on Waterloo Bridge', Encounter, November 1979, pp. 522-28.

2 Interview of I 2 July I986 with Konstantin Dobrev, Los Angeles, California.



354 CHARLES A. MOSER

This paper seeks to outline Georgi Markov's contributions to Bul- garian literature and culture during the I 96os. To that end I have read all his major published works of the I96os, those of his unpublished pieces (especially plays) which I could obtain, contemporary criticism of his writing, and his own comments on his work, particularly those included in the memoirs. An article of this scope can hardly exhaust the material available on Markov, but it can provide a good introduction to his literary career.3

Georgi Ivanov Markov was born on I March I 929 in Sofia, the eldest of three sons in a family headed by a member of the Bulgarian military: though stationed in the capital at the time, Ivan Markov would later take his family with him to various other posts throughout the country. In 1943 Ivan Markov contracted tuberculosis and spent some three years at a sanatorium; thereafter he and his wife Rayna worked in the tobacco trade until I 970, when he retired. He died in I 978, and his wife in I986. Georgi had two brothers: Vasil (I943-50), and Nikola (I93I- ), who in I963 emigrated, first to Italy, then to Canada, and finally to the United States.4

Georgi completed his secondary schooling in I946. After an unsuc- cessful attempt to enter Sofia University, he moved to Ruse, where he obtained training as a chemical engineer. In I953-54 he returned to Sofia and employment as an engineer at the Pobeda (Victory) factory, a segment of his life he describes in some detail both in his memoirs and in his published sketches of the I960s. Around I957 he left Sofia for Kazanluk and Bulgaria's famous Rose Valley, where he worked briefly at a factory producing attar of roses. However, he soon gravitated back to the capital, where he taught chemistry at the Ceramic Technical School before abandoning chemistry to devote himself entirely to literature about I 959.

In his memoirs Georgi Markov recalls that he had wanted to write from the very beginning, but his pragmatic father had urged him to go into engineering instead: 'The authorities', he had argued, 'can appoint anybody as a writer even if he is illiterate, but they can't do that for an engineer. Otherwise bridges wouldn't hold Up.'5 Although Georgi followed his father's wishes for a time, he could not forever deny his calling as a writer: by I957 he had published his first literary work, a collection of adventure stories with the rather chemical title Tsezieva nosht (Caesium Night), following that up in I959 with a science-fiction

3 I should like to express my appreciation to Annabel Markov, and also to Georgi Markov's brother, Nikola Markov, for their assistance in the preparation of this article.

4 Biographical details taken from a letter of 25 April I986 to the author from Nikola Markov.

5 Georgi Markov, Zadochni reportazhi za Bulgariia, 2 vols, Zurich, I 980-8 I, i, p. 266.



GEORGI MARKOV IN THE I960S 355

novel, Pobeditelite na Aiaks (The Conquerors of Ajax). Through these publications Markov gained a certain literary reputation before leaving his technical employment. When he did, his first-hand technical experience and his work in industry attuned him to the official spirit of the Bulgarian communist regime, and that gave him a considerable advantage over most of his fellow writers.

The post-war years had been difficult ones for most Bulgarians, and for Georgi Markov too. At that time he had worked in construction brigades making bricks out of damp clay under poor working conditions in the hope thereby of gaining admission to the university. The chief consequence for him was tuberculosis: he was admitted several times to the sanatorium at Vladai between 1950 and 19526 and was in a sanatorium at least as late as I960. The mortality rate there was high: in his memoirs he recalls that he was the only survivor of a group of seven students who once shared a room at Vladai.7 Markov's direct experience of death and life in sanatoria (the 'Republic of Tuberculo- sis', as he called them) left its mark on his writing, for several of his works of the I 96os are set in sanatoria.

Despite his poor health and his teaching duties, Markov must have spent a great deal of time at his writing desk in the late I 95os, for I 961 saw the publication of three books which launched his serious writing career. The first, Anketa (The Inquiry), appeared under the prestigious Bulgarski pisatel (Bulgarian Writer) imprint: it contained two longer works which might be considered novelettes ('Posledniiat patent' [The Last Patent] and the title work, 'Anketa'), and a shorter story of some twenty pages, 'Edinstveniiat den' (The Only Day). The second book, brought out by the Narodna mladezh (People's Youth) publishers and entitled Mezhdu noshtta i denia (Between Night and Day), was more eclectic, consisting of nine short stories running from ten to twenty pages each, most of which apparently had been published previously, and a section entitled 'An Engineer's Sketches: the "Victory" Factory', a series of sketches on the people and problems of a factory producing tins for the export of canned produce. The leading literaryjournal of the day, Septemvri (September), welcomed these two volumes warmly in a joint review. Where Markov had previously worked in science fiction, the reviewer said, now he was exploring the 'richness of our everyday life' for his subjects, taking as his hero the 'new man' the regime sought to create. The reviewer found 'The Inquiry' in particular to be 'quite convincing in its honesty' (pravdivost).8

Despite this, the literary event of the year for Georgi Markov was the serial appearance of his first and only serious full-length published

6 Conversation with Nikola Markov of 29June I986. 7 Markov, Zadochni reportazhi, i, p. 227. 8 Dimitur Popivanov, 'Za nashite dni i noshti', Septemvri, I96I, 6, pp. i68-70.




novel, Muzhe (Men). The book follows the lives of three young men: the ambitious and intelligent Mladen; Sasho, a happy-go-lucky fellow primarily interested in women; and Ivan, a physicist and intellectual currently in the throes of a divorce. At the beginning of the novel all three are serving together in an army unit assigned to guard a factory in a provincial Bulgarian town. After being discharged, all three for a time go their separate ways: Mladen obtains a post at the factory, Sasho returns to his home town, Ivan goes to his research institute in Sofia. At the novel's conclusion the three are reunited for a short while before Mladen dies a heroic death trying to extinguish a fire he has inadver- tently caused at the factory. Sasho marries a woman he had seduced while a soldier, and Ivan sets out to make a new life for himself. Each of them has in his own way become a 'man' after his army experience.

In formal terms within a Bulgarian context, Muzhe was quite an experimental novel. The plot line is schematic, at times difficult to follow as Markov traces the lives and interactions of his major characters. Each chapter bears an epigraph as a rule attributed to the personage who is its principal actor. A sympathetic contemporary critic, Toncho Zhechev, writing in Septemvri for July I962, characterized the book as a 'demonstratively and . . . consistently constructed "antitraditional" novel'.9 It was organized, he said, not around a plot in the usual sense of the word, but according to 'the logic of an idea': that idea was that one should 'search out a path for oneself, but not for one's own sake', as Markov had himselfformulated it in the text.10 And the author was quite willing to affirm his novel's structural originality on appropriate occasions. When in September i962 he was invited to participate in a symposium on the Bulgarian novel in the pages of Septemvri along with three well-established novelists (Dimitur Talev, Stoian Daskalov, and Dragomir Asenov), Markov argued that the twentieth-century novel could no longer employ the artistic devices of the nineteenth century, when everything was clearly expounded for the dullest reader.1' He hoped to find 'active readers', 'reader-co- authors',12 readers willing to work at deciphering the text. To the extent that such works could be published, he said, he preferred 'a novel as plotless and actionless as possible'.13 He by no means rejected the novel's established traditions, he went on, but he believed they should be 'creatively assimilated' rather than slavishly copied. Markov also noted what he considered a remarkable contradiction between political reality and artistic practice in his country:

9 Toncho Zhechev, 'Tvorchesko direne i perspektivi na edin mlad romanist', Septemvri, I962, 7, p. I74. 10 Ibid., p. I 77. 1 Interview with Georgi Markov in 'Nashiiat dialog: Za romana', Septemvri, i962, 9, p. 4I. 12 Ibid., p. 43. 13 Ibid., p. 44.




Here I would like to point up an unpleasant paradox. Our social and political reality is in essence a most innovative phenomenon in world history. But our literature as well as our art, instead of serving as an avant-garde in that innovative reality, are just plodding along somewhere in the rear.14

Markov hoped his book might restore to the novel generally its place in the artistic and political avant-garde. The book's chief 'problem', he went on, was the 'gigantic one of building communism', and that was a problem which by its very nature extended into the future, where the writer should follow it through his imagination. 'Many people think that literature must confine its fighting capacity to a certain ideological and philosophical perimeter defined for its time', as Markov commented,

and are fearful of entrusting the task of intelligence gathering to literature, a role which it should play by its very nature. I think that artistic intelligence gathering about problems extrapolated into the future should be the obli- gation of the serious novel.15

A critic like Septemvri's Toncho Zhechev both understood Markov's artistic objectives and sympathized with them. He agreed with him that a novel could legitimately be structured on the 'logic of an idea', although, as he remarked, in such cases the reader must be prepared to accept the writer's 'convention' or assumptions (uslovnost) .16 Still, Zhechev also felt that Markov had followed that logic too closely, too 'monotonously', and therefore had not been entirely successful in organizing his novel.17 Another critic, Mincho Nikolov, writing in Plamuk (Flame) earlier that year, had arrived at much the same conclusions as Zhechev, though in his hands they displayed a more negative coloration. The logic of the novel, Nikolov thought, was 'more that of the author than the image'; Markov's characters were flat; and the author's 'thought', though energetic, repelled the reader by its 'nakedness, provocativeness, and importunity'.'8 The book, for all its intellectual energy, suffered from 'literariness' (knizhnost) in its struc- ture, in its heroes' characterization, in its very language, and even in the author's attitude toward romance.19 In fact, however, both Nikolov and Zhechev largely agreed in their overall assessment of the novel. Both concurred that Markov suffered from 'wordiness' (slovookhotlivost), a certain lack of artistic measure which a perceptive editor might have corrected. At the end of his review Nikolov emphasized Markov's

14Ibid. pp. 42, 43. 5Ibid., p. 40.

16 Zhechev, 'Tvorchesko direne', p. 176. 17 Ibid., p. I 77- 18 Minko Nikolov, 'Mezhdu tvorcheskoto direne i montazha', Plamuk, 2, I962, p. 6i. 19 Ibid., p. 62.




sensitivity to the great moral problems of the day, and declared that he stood 'in the anteroom of significant literary achievement',20 very much as Zhechev declared that Markov was moving in entirely the right direction, and if he continued 'he would find his place in our fiction'.21 Thus two leading critics promptly recognized the artistic significance of Muzhe, and, while pointing out its shortcomings, encouraged Markov to work further along these same artistic lines.

The budding novelist soon received other forms of recognition as well. In June I962, as Markov recalled with some emotion in his memoirs, the Union of Bulgarian Writers under the presidency of the old-style communist novelist Georgi Karaslavov selected Muzhe as the best novel of the year and elected him to membership directly, without the usual waiting period. Markov was overjoyed at this, and celebrated all over Sofia with a friend that evening.22 And indeed membership of the Writers' Union was not only a symbolic honour: it brought with it distinct material advantages as well. Furthermore, as we have seen, the novel appeared in two editions to very positive reviews. In addition it was translated into several foreign languages, transformed into a radio play and a play for the legitimate theatre, and made into a film, for all of which things Markov was paid very generously.23 Much later Markov realized that there must have been political as well as artistic reasons for his novel's success during the period of the Khrushchev thaw: he saw that in Muzhe he attributed the shortcomings of Bulgarian society to the flaws of individuals rather than to its general political system, an approach quite congruent with the regime's political requirements of the day.24

The publication history of Muzhe is slightly tangled. This novel in three parts appeared first serially in Septemvri during I96I, in the issues forJune, November, and December.25 In I962 the Durzhavno voenno izdatelstvo (State Military Publishing House) published a separate edition with a text identical with the journal text except for a few insignificant alterations - most especially the creation of a final chapter, 3 I, from the two concluding pages of the original chapter 30 in Septemvri and the addition of chapter epigraphs for the first twelve chapters, which were lacking in the journal publication. However, the

20 Ibid., p. 63. 21 Zhechev, 'Tvorchesko direne', p. 176. See also Zhechev, 'Romanut prez I962 godina',

Septemvri, I963, 6, p. 112. 22 Markov, Zadochni reportazhi, I, pp. 308-I i. 23 Ibid., p. 317. 24 Ibid., p.-36. 25 I96I, 6, pp. 22-87 (part one: chapters i-i i, with illustrations by Atanas Neikov, and

with no chapter epigraphs); I96I, i i, pp. i I-8i (chapters 12-20 of part two, with illustrations by V. Vulchev and now with chapter epigraphs); I 96 I, I 2, pp. 37-109 (chapters 2 I-30, the remainder of part two and all of part three, which starts with chapter 26; there are chapter epigraphs throughout, but no illustrations).




I963 edition, brought out by Narodna mladezh (People's Youth), contained some rather substantive changes. The number of chapters was increased from thirty-one to thirty-four, and the division between parts two and three was altered. In the i962 version, Ivan is severely wounded while guarding the factory in an exchange of gunfire with diversanti, which presumably denotes something in the nature of anti- communist guerrillas; while in the I963 version he is wounded during training by an exploding mortar shell while trying to protect his comrades. But the major difference between the two book editions has to do with Mladen. In the I962 version Mladen quarrels with his two friends, then repents and dispatches a note seeking a reconciliation with them before he goes to the factory and accidentally begins a fire in which he dies while trying to extinguish it. In the I963 version, seeing how things are developing, Mladen denounces the Director of the factory, who is his supporter; he is then in turn rejected by his comrades, who depart, leaving him quite alone but still alive. In short, where in the I962 version Mladen is redeemed at the end as a dead hero, in the I963 variant he remains an ambitious but live scoundrel. There are other differences as well between the I 962 and I 963 versions, but a detailed investigation of them is beyond the scope of this paper.

Although as a general rule when faced with variant texts one should accept the author's final revision, in this paper I regard the I962 version of Muzhe as the authoritative one on the grounds that the changes introduced into the I963 edition were probably not made on Markov's initiative.

After the success of Muzhe Markov supported himself largely by editorial work: during much of the I960S he was an editor for the Narodna mladezh publishing house, dealing principally with science fiction. After his burst of publication in I96I, Markov fell publicly silent for some five years. In I965, however, he brought out what was apparently a stage version of 'Posledniiat patent' as a 'comedy', although it is difficult to imagine the work as anything but a tragedy.

October I964 saw the beginning of a series of events which eventually would have grave consequences for Markov: it was then, according to his memoirs, that Todor Zhivkov selected him as one of the first writers to be approached in the First Secretary's campaign to cultivate potential Bulgarian dissidents. Markov received several invitations to meet Zhivkov at his residence, to dine with him and to hunt with him on his estates, as the shrewd communist leader took him and other intellectuals into his confidence, listened to their complaints, offered suggestions to them, and thereby placed them in his debt even if they were not party members, as Markov was not. This contact enabled Markov to appeal to Zhivkov directly when he was in difficulties, although Zhivkov was not always helpful, and also made it possible for




him to dedicate a major segment of his memoirs to an outsider's view of the highest Bulgarian leadership's private behaviour.

In I966 Markov published one of his best books: Portretut na moia dvoinik (Portrait of My Double), a gathering of three works perhaps best classified as novelettes: 'Praznoto prostranstvo' (Empty Space); 'Sanatoriumut na D-r Gospodov' (Dr Gospodov's Sanatorium); and the title story, 'Portretut na moia dvoinik'. As Markov explained in his memoirs, the first work deals, on the social level, with the catastrophic drop in the birth-rate in communist Bulgaria - although most critics, he recalled, refused to see this 'empty space among the Bulgarians' and, on the personal level, with childlessness caused by infertility: the story's hero, a mechanical engineer named Iliev, must adjust to his own infertility despite his wish for children. Iliev recalls one of his high school biology teachers, who used to say that 'man's basic activity is guided by the instinct of occupying empty space',26 and envies a colleague who is not only an inventive engineer but has a wholesome family with children. Markov, as it happens, himself confronted this problem. His first wife conceived by him but underwent an abortion against his wishes; his second wife was barren; and only when he was in emigration did his third wife present him with a daughter, Sasha.27

'Sanatoriumut na D-r Gospodov' is set in a remote mountain tuberculosis sanatorium in I944, as the communist seizure of power approaches. The sanatorium has but seven patients, all male, all evidently dying. The tale delineates the manner in which these men, deprived for so long of feminine companionship, react to the presence among them of a beautiful young woman mortally wounded while fighting nearby on the side of the communist partisans and brought secretly to the sanatorium. One of them betrays her to the police, but she dies of her wounds before the police arrive and the remaining patients, after beating the traitor to death, remove the girl's body for burial in the face of the authorities.

'Portretut na moia dvoinik' is one of Markov's most fascinating and most autobiographical works. The anonymous narrator- he identifies himself as a writer and as a gambler who loves to play poker long into the Sofia night - has concocted a plot with The One on the Right to undo The Hyena, a despicable person but a brilliant poker player. The text is interspersed with the narrator's thoughts and with biographical flashbacks: his work as a sketch-writer and his relations with his supervisor; one of his love affairs; thoughts on death. Tension mounts as the time for the springing of the trap (4 a.m.) approaches: but when the plot is sprung, it turns out to be directed against the narrator instead of The Hyena - and it is entirely successful. 26 Georgi Markov, Portretut na moia dvoinik, Sofia, I 966, p. 46. 27 Letter to the author from Annabel Markov of I3January I986.



GEORGI MARKOV IN THE I960S 36I

Portretut na moia dvoinik apparently received only one important review, by Krasimira Popova, published in Septemvri for August I 967.28 Popova found the title story quite distressing. Terming it a 'psychological study of malice and cynicism', she drew parallels between Markov and Keith Waterhouse (author of Billy Liar), Alan Sillitoe, and J. D. Salinger. But no Bulgarian critic of that time could admit that there was any justification in Bulgarian society of the I 96os for such characters as The Double and The Hyena: they could only exist in bourgeois Western societies. As Popova put it, in the Bulgarian context The Double 'was merely a chance phenomenon, with no essential causes in our social setting, and without any serious consequences'. The story therefore merely left an unpleasant impression on the Bulgarian reader, she said.

'Sanatoriumut na D-r Gospodov', on the other hand, since it was set in the heroic days of 1944, was politically rather more acceptable than the other two stories, and thus it was recast as a play and staged under the title Da se provresh pod dugata (Let's Go Under the Rainbow). Sofia's Military Theatre - which had maintained a liberal tradition from its previous incarnation as 'The People's Stage' - presented it thirteen times beginning in March of I967 under the direction of Asen Shopov and with a first-rate cast. Upon hearing rumours that the play was to be banned, Markov asked Zhivkov himself to read the text. The First Secretary obligingly did so, and found it politically acceptable although also 'very pessimistic and gloomy'. Despite Zhivkov's approbation, the lower authorities soon stopped the play and dispatched Shopov to a two-year artistic exile - perhaps because they were shrewd enough to realize that 'its subject was the betrayal of ideals', as Markov admitted in his memoirs.29 This comment, however, must be understood in the light of the fact that Markov altered the story-line very substantially in adapting the work for the stage: now not only are all seven patients - and not just one - guilty of betraying the wounded girl to the authorities, but six of them are also to blame for hypocritically voicing their indignation and beating to death the one among them who speaks openly of reporting her to the police. Thus the play presents the representatives of the old society as thoroughly corrupt betrayers of their ideals, which most are not at all in the original version of the story.30

Quite early in his career Markov had given indications of a strong interest in the theatre. Thus Toncho Zhechev had remarked as early as I962 that in Muzhe Markov 'does not pretend to dislike cinematic

28 Krasimira Popova, 'Suvremennitsi i dvoinitsi', Septemvri, I967, 8, pp. 242-45. 29 Markov, Zadochni reportazhi, II, pp. 203-05. 30 The play was later translated into English and presented on the English stage to very

positive reviews during Markov's residence in London.




devices'.31 Much later, in I968, a reviewer of his prose collection Zhenite na Varshava (Women of Warsaw) said of his stories: 'Like a good director in the theatre he retires to the shadows, leaving the action in his actors' hands. But his presence is everywhere detectible.'32

Zhenite na Varshava was Markov's last prose collection to appear in Bulgaria. It contained four short stories ranging in length from three to nine pages, and three noveli of varying lengths: 'Asans'orut' (The Elevator), describing a brief potential love affair between a young man and a young woman trapped together for a few hours in a small lift between floors of a deserted building; 'Goliamoto podzemno buchene' (The Great Underground Roaring), which depicts the acute moral dilemma of an engineer whose superior compels him to take actions leading to the nearly catastrophic flooding of a mine by a subterranean river; and the title story, 'Zhenite na Varshava', an interesting narrative experiment which became Markov's final legacy to Bulgarian prose. 'Zhenite na Varshava' is written consistently in the recounting tense, a device through which Markov sets himself apart from the superficially improbable events he is describing; but it also contains a narrative energy unusual even for Markov. The hero, Pavel, after studying geology in Poland for six years, returns to his homeland and is dispatched to a forbidding desert area where his colleagues abandon him and he is left behind with only Yordo, an eighty-two-year-old shepherd, who has never known any life but shepherding, as a com- panion. To pass the time, Pavel recounts tales of his amorous adven- tures with Warsaw women. The stories have a powerful effect on Yordo, who soon assimilates them so thoroughly that he remembers them in even greater detail than Pavel himself. For some reason which is not entirely clear - perhaps because the stories which he has heard and assimilated make him realize how much he has missed in the past - Yordo hangs himself on a branch of the only tree growing in this desert place, and Pavel, horrified, departs. In his memoirs Markov asserts that 'Zhenite na Varshava' was no more than a slight reworking of a true story he had once heard from a friend, and gives a chapter over to the tale in its original version.33 Thus 'Zhenite na Varshava' affirms the power of literature over life. It was an entirely appropriate final statement for Markov to have made.

Although we lack precise information on the subject, it appears that Markov sought in the concluding years of the decade to return to the novel form, but was prevented from publishing by the censorship. In one of the most interesting chapters of his memoirs, 'Velikiiat pokriv' (The Great Roof), Markov tells the story of a tremendous industrial

31 Zhechev, 'Romanut prez I962 godina', p. I 12. 32 Nina Andonova, 'Mnogotsvetnost i zhiznenost', Plamuk, i6, I968, p. 83. 33 Markov, Zadochni reportazhi, II, pp. 84-92.




accident which occurred at a construction site near Sofia in I 959. After the Party has made fruitless appeals to its members to accept the risks involved in righting the situation, a solid non-communist worker steps forward to accomplish the task. In that same chapter Markov comments that 'many years later' he wrote a novel on this subject which was stopped by the censorship; in addition a film on the same topic was planned but soon blocked. Markov knew that it would never have been permitted to see the light of day.34 Nadia Kojouharova dates this novel

presumably its completion - to I968.35 She also mentions still another unpublished novel of I 969 - Otpaduchni vodi (Waste Water)- which may not be extant.

During the last few years of his life in Bulgaria Markov devoted much energy to the theatre, though one of his plays dates from as early as I963: Gospozhata nag. turgovetsa na sirene (The Cheese Merchant's Good Lady). In i966 his play Kafe f pretentsii (Coffee with Pretensions) was staged in Sofia and Plovdiv.36 One of Markov's most fascinating literary efforts is the play Attentat (The Assassination Attempt), staged during the Fourth National Festival of Contemporary Bulgarian Play- writing and Theatre in I 969. In one of the few published contemporary reactions to the play a perceptive critic commented that Markov was here, as always, 'paradoxical, sharp and categorical', and that his play was replete with 'allegories, symbols, and a complex network of metaphors' though weak in psychological analysis.37 Attentat (subtitled 'A Play in Two Parts and an Epilogue with Church Choir and Gunfire') is in the tradition of the theatre of the absurd, with a definite political and philosophical point. None of its twenty-two characters bears a proper name: all are denoted by their professions or characteristics (Lieutenant, Beggar, Student, Chatterbox). The action takes place at an undefined time in an unnamed city on the corner of a street closed by order of the ruling General who lives there and who is the target of an assassination attempt to be carried out that evening by two students, a boy and a girl, who pretend to be lovers embracing on a bench as they wait for the General to pass by. At first the would-be assassins find playing at love distasteful, but when the General is slow in appearing they become almost fond of each other. The boy also has time to think critically about their objectives. He decides he might very well end up a general himself in the future, that there is a certain symbiosis between him and the object of his hatred: 'Since I have dedicated my life to struggling against a General, that means I am one myself. . . he and I

34 Markov, Zadochni reportazhi, I, p. 307. 35 Nadia Kozhukharova, 'Georgi Markov Portret na edin suvremenen bulgarski avtor',

in Georgi Markov, Reifexions littiraires, Malakoff, I 982, p. 98. 36 Letter from Nadia Kojouharova, 9 September i 986. 3 Vladimir Karakashev, 'Dramaturgiia I969-mit i realnost', Plamuk, I7,I969, p. 67.




are one and the same thing'. Toward the end of the play one of the Chatterboxes reaches an analogous conclusion, arguing that 'if there is no slavery, then there is no freedom either', which means that 'the General is our sense of freedom! We can't do without him'. At the end the General finally approaches and the assassins move into action. Unfortunately they shoot, not the General, but a trained monkey in uniform who precedes him, and then the General's guards gun down the two young people before they can make their escape. Just before the play's conclusion, the entire mise-en-scene of its opening is repeated, and two new young lover-assassins take their places on the bench at the street corner to await still another General. A complex philosophical allegory in compact dramatic form, Attentat is altogether one of Markov's most interesting works.38

It is unfortunate that the text of yet another play of apparently great political and philosophical interest dating from the end of the 196os may no longer be extant, except perhaps in the archives of the Bulgarian government. In I968 someone in authority conceived the idea of commissioning a series of plays to be staged to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the communists' seizure of power in Bul- garia on 9 September I 944. Originally Nikolai Khaitov, Nikola Rusev, and Markov were to have written a three-part documentary dramati- zation of the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party from its founding until I 944, with Markov doing the third part, dealing with the Second World War. But Khaitov and Rusev withdrew from the project, and Markov was left alone to work on his play Komunisti (Communists). In preparation for writing he was permitted to see the police dossiers on legendary communist resistance fighters of the Second World War, many quite young, who were executed by the Royal Bulgarian Govern- ment at that time. His reading of these materials enabled Markov to see the executed communists as human beings rather than the disem- bodied figures of communist mythology. One of them, a mere high school student, admitted under interrogation that he had joined the communists because he was 'lonely' (a detail Markov incorporated into Attentat); another's last words, far from being something in the order of 'Long live the Red Army!', were 'Please give me a glass of water'; still others wrote heart-rending letters to their mothers before they gave their lives for the sake of an ideal terribly distant from the reality which those who professed to honour them had created in Bulgaria after I 944.

Markov worked for some six months on what he termed this 'documentary play', even equipping it with historical footnotes. After the Minister of Internal Affairs had approved it, it was given to the director Asen Shopov, who staged it once in a closed performance 38 The text of the play exists in a typescript in Annabel Markov's possession dated London, I 979.




shortly before 9 September I 969. Although it was to have been presented in theatres across the country, at the last moment it was totally removed from the stage 'because of its depressing effect'. And thus the twenty-fifth anniversary passed without any plays written for the occasion at all.39 By this time Markov had left the country without taking a copy of the play with him.

The immediate stimulus for Markov's departure had been provided by yet another play, Az biakh toi (The Man Who Was Me), of which we also lack the text. It was staged for the first time on the morning of I5June I969, at Sofia's Satirical Theatre, with the author in atten- dance. After the first act a colonel of State Security came up to him to denounce his work as a 'Czech play' (the Prague events of August I968 were still very much in people's minds); and when the performance was over a highly placed friend advised Markov to leave immediately since he already had travel documents for Italy, for the play would be banned and his documents no doubt be lifted within a day or two.40 Markov acted on that advice: on the afternoon of I 5June, taking almost nothing with him, he departed by car for Belgrade on the way to Italy. At that hour a summer shower hadjust passed over the capital, and as he left he looked back at the 'sky over Mount Vitosha and the riotous green everywhere', everything that was so 'pitilessly beautiful' in the land he would never see again.41

Georgi Markov was not only a literary artist, but a theoretician as well. He hoped not only to utilize his considerable narrative gift, but also to formulate and express - so far as this was possible under Bulgarian conditions of the I 960s - a personal view of the nature and purpose of literature.

In his theoretical interview published in Septemvri in I962, Markov emphasized two related points. He distinguished between an 'attitude toward reality' (svetootnoshenie), which, he thought, nearly all contemporary writers possessed, and a 'perception of reality' (svetouseshtane), 'that is, a creative artist's ability to react creatively to the phenomena of life, to perceive them with a new sensitivity and to work that perception into their ideological re-evaluation'.42 From there he maintained that the retelling of simple facts did not make a work realistic if those facts were not artistically remoulded, and, conversely, that something which might seem at first glance fantastic could be made realistic under the proper aesthetic conditions.43

39Markov, Zadochni reportazhi, i, pp. 119-29. 40 Ibid., II, pp. 566-69. 41 Ibid., ii, pp- 568-69. 42 Interview with Georgi Markov in 'Nashiiat dialog: Za romana'. 43 Ibid., p. 42.




Markov sought to illustrate these ideas through his writings. He could give powerful literary expression to a story which might seem quite fantastic, as in 'Zhenite na Varshava', but which was in fact true. He could incorporate unrealistic elements into his realistic fictional world, as in 'Posledniiat patent', in which he at one point inserts an imaginary debate between 'two people- him, the essence of [the hero] "Bogdanov", and another person who lived within him under his name, but was not he'.44 Markov made even more extensive use of this device in Muzhe, where on two important occasions he inserts lengthy imaginary conversations between Ivan and the book's general mentor- figure, the Captain, who articulates standards of communist morality for all three of the younger heroes. In these imaginary conversations Ivan works out certain philosophical problems, and they become a genuine part of the novel's fabric, not at all out of place in a work which Markov presents as 'realistic'.

On the other hand, Markov wrote many sketches which might be characterized as literary reportage on actually existing persons and things. In his memoirs Markov remarks that sketches were the most meretricious genre within Bulgarian literature, for sketch-writers, including himself, had to falsify reality directly: the cynicism of the hero of 'Portretut na moia dvoinik', he said, 'stemmed from his profound despair at our reality', that reality which he was compelled to distort in order to earn a living.45 Much of this comes through even in the published text of 'Portretut na moia dvoinik', especially in a lengthy passage describing the narrator's career as a sketch-writer. He began, he says, in his youthful idealism by writing honest protests against unpleasant aspects of life, but soon discovered that many of these sketches never appeared in print. For him the moment of truth arrived when he was assigned to write a sketch about a woman who had become a leading factory worker by transforming herself into a human automaton. The narrator initially saw her as a tragic figure, and when he discussed the matter with his Chief,

from the beginning of the conversation I was screaming that this was the truth of reality, that I couldn't embellish things, that I was an honest man and not afraid of the consequences, that I would rather go hungry than lie.46

Before long, however, he had made his accommodations, and produced the sort of sketch which his Chief expected of him. In time, in fact, the narrator became such an accomplished 'faker' that he did not need even to visit the places he wrote about. He had merely to select one of three basic plot situations:

44 'Posledniiat patent', in Anketa, Sofia, 1 96 I, p. 6 i . 45 Zadochni reportazhi, p. 298. 46 Portretut na moia dvoinik, Sofia, I 966, p. i 6 i.




i. One believes, the other doesn't. At the end both believe. 2. Both believe but others don't believe them. At the end everybody

believes. 3. Both believe and others believe them, but there are some objective

difficulties. A struggle ensues, and in the end the victors sigh in relief and believe.47

Even in his set of sketches on the Victory Factory Markov had a worker-reader express ideas which must have been very much his own: the worker complained about the monotony of contemporary literature, when different works all have 'the same descriptions, the same characters, the same events'.48 And in this same series of sketches, indeed, he had mounted an attack on the 'cliches' of newspaper sketch-writers.49

Just as his 'Double' proudly declares initially to his Chief, Georgi Markov as sketch-writer and fiction-writer was dedicated to represent- ing the truth of reality. The world of nature was part of that reality, and although we do not remember him primarily for his descriptions of place, we do derive a satisfying sense of location from his urban Sofia settings, his evocation of Vitosha at the opening of 'Anketa', for example, or the nature pictures scattered throughout Muzhe. But Markov was most interested in social reality, in the relationships between individuals within particular social settings. Two of his favourite settings, which he knew from first-hand experience, are the factory and the hospital or sanatorium.

Although Markov left engineering, he retained great respect for the profession, and devoted much literary attention to it. A number of his heroes are engineers, as for example Zakharieva, a central figure of 'Anketa', or Stoian, hero of 'Zavrushtaneto na Stoian' (Stoyan's Return, from Mezhdu noshtta i denia), who has returned to his factory as a qualified engineer after five years of study, without forgetting the ordinary workers who look on him with profound respect. One of the three main characters of Muzhe, Ivan, is a physicist with a 'reverence toward mathematics': as the narrator puts it, for him 'there was something sacred, improbable, harmonious and crystalline in that world of various numbers, points, lines, and spaces'.50 In Markov's mind, evidently, mathematics, physics, chemistry, both in the abstract and in their practical application through engineering, dealt directly with the physical world and the production of material things. In that world there was no place for untruth.

47 Ibid., p. i6I . Markov includes this same passage in Zadochni reportazhi, I, p. 295. 48 "'Pobeda". Zapiski na inzhenera', Mezhdu noshtta i denia, Sofia, I96I, p. I92. 49 Ibid., pSi i 6 i. 50 Muzhe, Sofia, i962, P. 236.




Unhappily, in Markov's view, Bulgarian industrial production was so organized as not to permit the proper application of science and technology to reality. In a passage from the Victory Factory sketches he discusses the importance of engineers for production and attributes his country's industrial backwardness in large measure to the fact that engineers are employed as mere 'dispatchers': they assign workers to their positions, order materials, attend meetings, in short do everything but organize the technical side of production, which ought to be their sole responsibility.51 They are not so much to blame for this situation, however, as are top industrial administrators: Markov presents fictional examples of the director of an industrial enterprise who gets away with criminally incompetent management. For example, the factory Director in 'Anketa' issues explicit instructions for substandard oil to be used in making grease in order to meet the goals of the state plan. But when that grease, supplied to the military, proves defective and an official investigation is begun, the Director tries to blame one of his subordinates who had known nothing of his decision. In this story - under considerable duress, to be sure -the Director ultimately accepts the consequences of his error, and the innocent are spared. But things do not end quite so neatly in a later story, 'Goliamoto podzemno buchene'. The hero of this work, Filippov, is the acting chief engineer of a mine who discovers that a large underground river stands in the way of a new tunnel. But the Chief of the mine, like the factory Director in 'Anketa', is a petty despot: he places incompetents in important posts because capable people may be too independent of him; he interferes in his workers' personal lives and relishes idle gossip; he even deliberately lures the local priest away from his church into the factory. In this case the Chief's responsible subordinates plead urgently with him not to continue digging this particular tunnel because of the danger of flooding, but he overrules them. When disaster strikes as a result of his misguided decision, he leaves his subordinates to cope with the situation at considerable risk to their lives. When the day is saved, the Chief will not even admit his error: all progress involves some risk, he proclaims, and all they need do now is shift the tunnel's direction slightly. He has learned nothing from this near-tragedy, nor is there any indication he will be punished for his dictatorial incompetence.

Markov sets several of his stories in a hospital or a tuberculosis sanatorium. In his memoirs he recalls with gratitude the time he spent in sanatoria, for, he says, it made him aware of positive aspects of humanity which he never encountered outside them: the capacity for self-sacrifice, the ability to live for others, the conviction that the only worthwhile things are those which unify people and not those which

51 Mezldu noshtta i denia, p. 143.




divide them.52 The collection Mezhdu noshtta i denia contains several stories dealing with subjects of this type. In 'Roza' (The Rose) an unprepossessing young man falls in love with a beautiful actress who is a patient at the same sanatorium as he. Though she toys callously with his affections, he remains so devoted to her that shortly before he dies he gives her his medicine in the hope of helping her. The title story of the collection is very pessimistic. It is cast in the form of a reminiscence by a young woman sanatorium patient about her girlhood and family life, her resorting to prostitution primarily with foreign clients, and finally her illness, which has shattered her will to live. The story ends on an inconclusive, melancholy note. In 'Maiki i sinove' (Mothers and Sons) seven men in a sanatorium on a winter's night recall their mothers: most of them emerge as little less than saintly in their sons' memories. At the end 'the room is filled with . .. the sweetest warmth on earth' as seven sons speak of seven mothers. Finally, a brief tale from Anketa 'Edinstveniiat den'- has as its protagonist the forty-year-old Astarov, who is dying of cancer. Driven by despair stemming in part from his nihilistic philosophy of existence, he leaves the ward to find some sympathy. He searches for his ex-wife, who has never even visited him, only to learn that she has moved far away to Burgas. When he goes to his office - of which he is, characteristically, the Director - he receives no sympathy from either the guard or the cleaning woman, for he had never displayed any kindness toward them himself. Finally he returns home and looks to his hunting dog as a last resort: but even she fears him as he collapses in death a few yards away because, although 'she had obeyed his orders and borne with his whims, she had never received any affection from him, never'.

Astarov's cynical belief that love is mere 'mutual deception' illus- trates a certain philosophical nihilism which has historically been a common component of the Bulgarian outlook. Some have sought to overcome their sense of the void with such activities as gambling, and particularly card-playing: in his memoirs Markov, who was quite a gambler himself, claimed that on Saturday afternoons three-quarters of Sofia's inhabitants played cards out of a 'feeling of emptiness': he had tried, he said, to convey something of that emptiness through the 'terrible epigraph' to Portretut na moia dvoinik: 'The game is more perfect than life'.53 Sometimes quite real decisions may ride on cards: in 'Portretut na moia dvoinik' the narrator once lost a beautiful woman to a rival on a dishonest draw.54 The very short 'Osmitsa spatiia' (Eight of Spades) deals with fortune-telling with cards. When the narrator sets out to tell a passing worker's fortune, only black cards turn up: the 52 Zadochni reportazhi, I, pp. 228-30. 53 Ibid., I, p. 373. 54 Portretut, pp. I85-88.

13




worker will have no money, no luck, no women in his life. Appalled at what the cards tell him, the narrator claims that the prediction is incorrect because the eight of spades is missing, but the worker responds: on the contrary, you have described my life very accurately (Zhenite na Varshava).

Although Markov understood this Bulgarian inclination toward cynical nihilism, he himself was an idealist who demanded high standards from reality. In the Bulgarian political context of the I96os that standard necessarily had to be presented as a 'communist' ideal, but it was a humane one, recalling the dream of 'communism with a human face' which inspired the Czech intellectuals of I968. Muzhe is the greatest statement of these ideals within the corpus of Markov's work.

There are minor characters in Muzhe who express their belief in an unsullied communist ideal: for example Manush, a leading worker at the plant where Mladen hopes to make his career, emphasizes the difficulties of winning through to the future. 'Some think communism will just be gorging yourself with delicious food', he says to Mladen, 'tooling around in cars and everything great! No, brothers, communism will be work, and hard work at that!'55 These same difficulties are emphasized by a much more central figure in the novel, the Captain, first as the three heroes' military superior and then as a leading figure at the plant toward which they all gravitate. The observant critic Efrem Karanfilov once accurately characterized the Captain as an 'allegori- cal' character, 'something like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, the voice of conscience, a moral compass'.56 Thus the epigraph to chapter 20, attributed to the Captain, reads:

We know that the transition to socialism-is difficult. Period. That it requires immense effort and unshakeable faith. Period. But we don't know who has permitted anyone to use that transition period as an excuse. Question mark.57

The Captain suffers from none of the doubts which beset an intellectual like Ivan, nicknamed The Professor, as he seeks to comprehend the ideal future. Mladen is a careerist, and although he demonstrates a capacity for self-sacrificing heroism at the end, his sacrifice is the result of momentary impulse, and not intellectual conviction. Ivan, on the other hand, has long been engaged in the quest for the ideal. When he completed secondary school, we learn, he thirsted for a 'new life', but new circumstances - such as graduation from the university, his

55 Muzhe, p. 149. 56 Efrem Karanfilov, 'Geroichnoto v zhivota ni i otraziavaneto mu v suvremennata mlada

beletristika', I963, in Karanfilov, Literaturno-kriticheski statii: Izbrano, Sofia, I965, p. 225. 57 Muzhe. first edition, Sofia, I962, p. I96.




marriage - had not created a 'new life' for him. Why? Because a 'new life', according to the narrator,

must rest not upon new circumstances, but upon new ideological and moral principles, must proceed in some new direction, toward some new horizons ... This new life must overcome the deadly inertia of a world which is still very old.58

A short time later, while Ivan is recovering from severe wounds suffered during a military training accident in which he risked his life for others he realizes that he can truly live because he is capable of self-sacrifice. that he is truly free because he is willing to give up his life.59 But only toward the novel's conclusion, in a remarkable imaginary conversation with the Captain, does Ivan formulate his final definition of the future. While he was in the hospital, he says, he realized very clearly that he must live

like a man of the second half of the twentieth century - without the animal instincts of primitive man, without the moral vacuity of slaveholders, without the pompous snobbishness of the people of feudal times, without the self-satisfied happiness of the bourgeoisie. I realized that our wealth does not consist in what we can seize from others, but in that which we givc them. THE CAPTAIN: The wealth of communism! IVAN: Yes. I arrived this way at communism.... When I was studying physics, I was constantly amazed at the harmonious quality of the laws of nature and most especially at the way nature moved constantly in the direction of complete harmony. So in my conception communism is that wondrous, polyphonic, incalculably rich and inexhaustible harmony of society which gives it meaning for the very first time.60

Ivan's ideal is thus cast in Marxist terms, even though it may not be particularly Marxist in its nature. Moreover, it is noteworthy that after leaving the army Ivan is somehow so free of the social structures of a communist society - he has denounced the bureaucrats at the Sofia institute where he worked previously and returned to the provincial factory; his wife has left him and subsequently died; he is not a party member - that he actually is in a good position to pursue his ideals.

In his memoirs Markov distinguishes sharply between a 'genuine communist' and a 'party member',61 entirely to the latter's disadvan- tage. In Muzhe he attempts only once to depict the inner life of the Communist Party, in the chapter in which the factory's party unit accepts Mladen as a member. Here his attitude is ambiguous. Mladen seeks admission to the party for entirely the wrong reasons: he views it

58 Muzhe, p. 74. 59 Ibid., pp. I05-o6. 60 Muzhe, pp. 298-99. 61 Zadochni reportahzi, II, p. 544.




as an 'express train' which men of ambition must board in order to advance in the world. The atmosphere within the party group is depicted as warm and friendly, but while the Party Secretary, a strong supporter of Mladen's candidacy, is reading his biography to the meeting, Mladen reflects woefully on how far short of truth the bare facts of a man's life can fall. Mladen considers himself entirely unworthy of admission to the party, but the party organization declares him most acceptable, and the Captain is the first to welcome him into party ranks after his election.62

In the same novel, however, the party members and responsible officials of Ivan's scientific institute are depicted most unfavourably. One of the book's idealists, Ruzhitski, explicitly denounces the stupid- ity of the Institute's party members, and its Director makes a report in which he employs bombastic cliches to conceal the substantive vacuity of his remarks: for, as the narrator comments elsewhere, there are 'those who think that without bombast our modern world would not be as modern as it is'. Worse than that, some pervert truth itself to evil ends: 'Great demagogues are known for their ability to exploit the truth to the greatest possible degree: the truth about their shortcomings'. But Markov holds that in the final accounting truth will prevail over both falsehood and evil, and so has Ivan take the floor to denounce what he has heard as a 'lie', and argue in his own mind that 'there is nothing more powerful than the truth'.63

It should be remarked that Markov's idealists of the I96os tend to be simple people without authority inside the system, like a young single mother ('Anketa') whom the hero Danailov visits in a journey to the haunts of his youth, and who tells him: 'To experience something dreadful and still to find strength within yourself to serve others - that is something worthy'.64 (Danailov occupies a position of some responsibility and finally lives up to that responsibility, although initially he tells himself that conscience is merely for idiots.) Or like those idealistic socialist teachers of pre-I944 days who could communicate very effectively to their pupils their enthusiasm for the world they envisioned in the future ('Ysekidnevie' [Everyday Reality]). Or, finally, like the young people who during the Second World War gave their lives for an ideal of social brotherhood and justice and to whom Markov vainly sought to pay tribute through his play Komunisti.

In addition to great social ideals, Markov's fiction incorporates two leading personal themes: those of women and of death. His attitude toward both is slightly ironical, however.

62 Muzhe, chapter 24. 63 Ibid., chapter 20. 64 'Anketa', in Anketa, Sofia, I 96 I, p. i i 6.




Some of Markov's characters view woman in a superficial or cynical manner. Engineer Iliev ('Praznoto prostranstvo'), trapped in a child- less, 'endless marriage', regards his wife as a mere 'mannequin'.65 The metaphor is realized in the short story 'Zhena' (Woman), in which three soldiers at the front near the conclusion of the Second World War catch sight of a woman in a distant house and begin talking about women. An engineer goes off alone to claim her for himself. When he fails to return, his colleagues investigate and find him dead, ambushed as he had approached the woman, who turns out to be a genuine mannequin. The cynical hero of'Portretut na moia dvoinik' argues that the fact that he has a wonderful wife whom he loves should not prevent him from loving other women as well.66 And the bachelor hero of 'Asans'orut', when presented with a wondrous opportunity to win the love of a desirable woman, will not risk what he must to obtain her.

On the other hand, it is precisely the women of Warsaw who infuse life with meaning both for the geologist hero of 'Zhenite na Varshava' and the shepherd who has for so long lived solely for his sheep, and extended conversations about women occupy most of the attention of the male patients in Dr Gospodov's sanatorium. It is surely significant that the only one of the three heroes of Muzhe to achieve full happiness at the novel's conclusion is Sasho, who overcomes his promiscuous tendencies and settles down with a woman he has come to love genuinely. He marries her in a beautifully serious ceremony, accepting that 'long-awaited, serene joy which had come to him without deceiv- ing anyone'.67 But perhaps the most positive assessment of woman, as giver of life and continuer of the race, occurs in 'Praznoto prostranstvo' when Iliev visits the home of Somov, with all his children, and with his wife:

She was a woman, a genuine woman, the warm, moist soil which receives the seeds of humankind, calm and confident of their preservation, with joyous foreknowledge of the spring, with the constant giving of her blood and breath, so that an entire world might be filled with content.68

Thus on a human level personal fulfilment is found in the family, in the consciousness that one is contributing to the continuation of humankind. Fertility and creativity to be used for the benefit of others are among the greatest endowments an individual may possess.

And yet, unlike a society, the individual must within a relatively short time confront the prospect of personal extinction in death, a subject on which Markov scattered several meditations throughout his

65 Portretut na moia dvoinik, pp. 9, I I . 66 Ibid., pp. I89-90. 67 Muzhe, p. 322. 68 Portretut na moia dvoinik, p. 39.




writings. 'Vsekidnevie' contains a relatively superficial one: the narrator declares himself one of those 'fantasizers' who decline to believe in their own eventual demise, who reject the notion that death can deprive 'everyday life' of sense. It is 'blasphemy', he says, to think that 'one day all this will be merely ashes'.69 In 'Smurt-zhivot' (Death in Life) an engineer visits his semi-estranged wife who is dying in a sanatorium, to discover that his affection for her is so restored that he dreams of making a new start with her and does not even notice when she dies.70 At the conclusion of Muzhe Ivan attends to his estranged wife, who is dying an agonizing death of cancer. After she is gone, Ivan imagines an exultant death addressing him, saying: 'What are your principles worth in the face of my power? . . . I am absolute equality!' To which Ivan retorts:

You lie! Yesterday Mladen died at the height of his powers. He died in the struggle with you. . .. You cut down all our bodies equally. But only we will establish equality among souls! You who are dead, in the end you shall have no otherjudge but us who are living!71

This, however, is a judgement on death seen in its social context, and not from the individual point of view. This latter perspective emerges most clearly in one of the interpolations in 'Portretut na moia dvoinik', which reads in part:

I am the most timid person in the world.... I am most horribly afraid of death. At the very thought that some day

I'll cease to exist, I get sick, everything loses its meaning for me, and I'm incapable of doing anything at all.

The thought of death, however, also liberates me incredibly. After it's finished frightening me, at the conclusion of my fright I suddenly am freed from my body and start loitering around the universe quite crazily. I try to do everything that comes into my head ... 72

The common element among all these treatments of the theme of death is a refusal at some level to accept its finality, or at least to agree that future non-existence may deprive either social or individual reality of its meaning here and now. Virtually the only one of Markov's fictional creations who succumbs to philosophical nihilism - Astarov, in 'Edinstveniiat den' - dies miserable and lonely, reaping a melancholy reward for a mistaken philosophy. The positive philosophy of death is formulated by one of the tuberculosis patients in Dr Gospodov's sanatorium, who says of the mortally wounded girl

69 Mezhdu noshtta i denia, p. i 8 i. 70 Ibid., pp. 94-103- 71 Muzhe, p. 321. 72 Portretut na moia dvoinik, p. 204.




partisan in their midst: 'A magnificent death is greater than a magnificent life!'73

It remains for us to attempt a general assessment of Georgi Markov's contribution to Bulgarian letters during the I 96os.

Largely because they inhabit a small country, Bulgarian intellectuals have always paid careful attention to cultural developments in larger ones those in the West, and, especially since I 944, the more muted currents within the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries closely allied with it. The latter trends have found considerable resonance within contemporary Bulgaria.

Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956 denouncing Stalin's crimes gave a political impulse to more liberal cultural policies, which in turn found a Bulgarian reflection in the 'April Plenum' (I 956) of the Bulgarian Communist Party and it is appropriate that Markov's first book should have appeared in I 957. The years from I 96 I to I 963, when he achieved prominence, were a time of intensified cultural liberalization within the Soviet bloc, the time when Aleksandr Solzhe- nitsyn published his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and 'Matrena's Home', the time when an entire galaxy of younger prose writers such as Vasilii Aksenov, Iurii Kazakov, Iulii Daniel', and Vladimir Voinovich - many of them now either dead or living in the West - came to the fore in Soviet literature, arousing hopes for a genuine cultural renais- sance within the Soviet sphere.

The trial of Andrei Siniavskii and Julii Daniel' in I966, along with other repressive actions taken by the Soviet government, put a damper on cultural progress without suppressing it entirely: pressures for greater freedom continued, especially in Czechoslovakia, through the Prague spring of I968 and down to the invasion of that country in August, an action which clarified the limits of liberalization permissible within the bloc. Again the coincidence of dates is striking: Markov's last published book appeared in I968, and by mid-I969 he had abandoned the internal struggle and left Bulgaria. Thus from the purely chronological viewpoint Markov was a nearly perfect represen- tative of the 'thaw' period in its Bulgarian version.

The parallel holds in other important respects as well. Many young Bulgarian poets emerged in the early I 960s. They looked to models like Atanas Dalchev, a poet who in his day had refused to bow to Stalinist terror. But they were lyric poets, writers who, however gifted, worked in a genre which did not readily lend itself to the discussion of large social issues. Such a task was more within the purview of novelists, and those appeared too. But some of them preferred to write on historical

73 Ibid., p. I35.




subjects and thus avoid the pitfalls of contemporaneity, as the extraordinarily talented Anton Donchev did in his fine Vreme razdelno (Time of Parting, I964). Markov, however, took his cue from certain Soviet colleagues: he dealt with contemporary reality and its problems, the way people actually lived in the Bulgaria of his day, the moral dilemmas which Bulgarian society forced the individual to confront. Markov never went back further than the Second World War for his material, and that contemporaneity in and of itself made his work a tempting target for critics.

A passage from his memoirs74 illuminates Markov's cultural objectives in his work of the early I96os - his short stories, novelettes, and especially Muzhe. In casting about for the most powerful themes in contemporary Bulgarian society, he writes, he decided that they were: justice 'in the realm of injustice', freedom 'in the realm of slavery', truth in a country where the lie was supreme, and ideals in a society in which the original ideals of the communist movement had been deliberately suppressed. Given the political situation in which he had to work, Markov realized that ideals could only be presented as communist ideals, so he returned to the recent past for the humane goals of socialism which had inspired its adherents before I944, and projected them into the present and the future. Such an approach is at the core of Muzhe and of several other of his prose works. The contrast between an unpleasant contemporary reality and the ideals of those who fought to bring it into being could most easily be overcome if a work were strongly orientated towards the future, if a novelist could resurrect the dreams of past years for the future. By using such a tactic Markov could at least temporarily set aside the cynicism which afflicted him when he had to produce journalistic sketches about current reality and knew he would have to distort the truth unconscionably in order to publish.

At mid-decade, however, a shift seems to have occurred in Markov's literary approach. Although he still wrote novels, it became impossible for him to publish them, and instead he sought to influence his audience more directly, turning to the stage for that purpose. He recast some of his earlier prose works as plays, and took up more explicitly political themes in his new writing - although he protected himself with the screen of allegory (as in Attentat) or of the historical documentary, as in the unstaged Komunisti. There is great poignancy in the remembrance of Georgi Markov at work on Komunisti in which, through a dedication to historical truth, he hoped to revive that intensely human idealism which motivated those who had sacrificed their lives for the communist cause over the decades before it came to power, and who had given the Bulgarian Communist Party what moral legitimacy it possessed in

74 Zadochni reportazhi, I, pp. 27I-73.




I 944. But it has always been difficult for playwrights to have politically sensitive plays staged, and the history of Markov's career as a play- wright is one of repeated frustration and increasing danger, until finally he left the country literally hours after one of his politically most daring plays had first been performed.

Markov by no means abandoned prose during the latter half of the decade, but his inborn cynicism began to assert itself more strongly as his work became more autobiographical. It is no accident that one of his most fascinating semi-autobiographical works, 'Portretut na moia dvoinik', should have aroused complaints that Markov was under the undue influence of popular figures in contemporary Western literature. In examining contemporary Bulgarian life, Markov found much of the same emptiness that a Sillitoe or a Salinger discovered in Western society, and reflected in his writing something of its loneliness and despair. That of course did not sit well with official critics, who could never openly admit to the 'bourgeois' nature of Bulgarian socialist society.

Thus in the social and literary objectives of his writing Georgi Markov was also a very characteristic - perhaps the most characteristic - figure of the thaw period in Bulgarian literature. He dealt with contemporary life and important political and social issues. As a writer with avant-garde tendencies he was sometimes overly schematic, but he still never lost sight of the individual as the fundamental element of society. Moral responsibility lay with the individual, in his view, and not with the larger social order.

Evidently Markov had many overt and covert sympathizers during this time. But by I969 he had realized that he could alter nothing very substantial in the Bulgarian political system by the power of his pen. He could see no way out but departure, even though this meant that he would have to sacrifice his career as a writer, something extraordinarily precious to him. But there were other things which he valued even more highly - among them justice, and freedom, of which he had written during his literary years in the Bulgaria of the I 96os.



georgi markov in the 1960s

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