The Guardian about Radichkov: a Bulgarian writer full of subversive insight
Hrel Vylk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1135839,00.html
Yordan Radichkov
Renowned Bulgarian writer full of subversive insight
Adelina Angusheva and Galin Tihanov
Saturday January 31, 2004
The Guardian
Yordan Radichkov, who has died aged 74, was arguably the most
significant voice of Bulgarian literature in the last third of the 20th
century. Written predominantly before the collapse of communism in 1989,
his works dramatically deviated from the rigid canon of socialist
realism that dominated the period. Strange and grotesque, often on the
verge of the nonsensical and yet full of subversive insight, his prose
led critics abroad to describe him as the Bulgarian Gogol or Kafka.
He is best known for his short stories, novellas, parables and
children's books, which have been translated into more than 30
languages. He also left an indelible mark on modern Bulgarian drama and
wrote the scripts of several classic Bulgarian films.
Radichkov was born into a poor family in the village of Kalimanitsa, in
northwest Bulgaria. After an early bout of tuberculosis, he started out
as a local news reporter in 1951, then worked as an editor for Narodna
Mladezh [People's Youth], the official Young Communist newspaper
(1952-55), and as a journalist on Vecherni Novini [Evening News] in
Sofia (1955-59). He also contributed to several other newspapers, and
Bulgarian Cinematography magazine.
Although his earliest works, Surtseto bie za khorata (The Heart Beats
For The People, 1959), Prosti rutse (Simple Hands, 1961) and Oburnato
nebe (A Sky Turned Upside Down, 1962), were written in the
socialist-realist tradition, Radichkov soon adopted a new parabolic
style. This was initially met with official animosity, and he was
accused of escapism, primitivism, dark agnosticism and intellectual
emptiness. But he persisted, and it was eventually accepted that the
allegedly distorted picture of reality in his books was a sophisticated
metaphor of disillusionment, and a form of restrained dissent that
worked against the banality and bureaucratic routine of life under
socialism.
Despite being a member of the Communist party, in his prose Radichkov
drew a subtle parody of the communist regime. The politics of his
writing, however, was perhaps less significant than its warmth and
casual wisdom, with its fear of dehumanisation and the shattered
intimacy between man and nature, where one could no longer "recognise
the voices of the birds".
A mixture of the fantastic and the real, Radichkov's works combined
images of industrial civilisation with those of a remote mythical past,
and were sometimes defined as a Balkan magic realism. His novel Baruten
bukvar (Gunpowder Primer, 1969) was the first in Bulgaria to talk about
the socialist revolution, not in the spirit of simplistic idealisation,
but through the powerful blend of profanity, fantasy and folkloric
wisdom.
H is script for the socialist-realist film Goreshto pladne (Hot Noon,
1966), a simple story about a community's efforts to save a boy from a
fast running train, was a success. The award-winning Posledno liato (The
Last Summer, 1974) is possibly his most psychologically dramatic work -
a parable of a man trying desperately to stay faithful to his own
identity in a dynamically changing world.
His children's books, sometimes illustrated with his own abstract
drawings, attracted readers all over the world. Malki zhabeshki istorii
(Little Frogs' Stories) won the 1996 Hans Christian Andersen award for
children's literature. In addition to the highest Bulgarian awards for
literature, theatre, and film, Radichkov also received the prestigious
Italian prize Grinzane Cavour (1984) and the prize of the International
Academy of the Arts in Paris (1993). A founding member, and first
president (1984-91) of the Bulgarian-Swedish Association for Friendship,
in 1988 he received the Swedish national Polar star award. In 2001, he
was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature.
In the early 1970s, Radichkov became a government adviser in the
council for cultural values. Early in 1989, President Mitterrand of
France invited him, along with other Bulgarian intellectuals, to
breakfast at the French embassy in Sofia, in a gesture seen as a signal
of support for the dissident movement in the country.
The following year, in the first freely elected Bulgarian parliament,
Radichkov became an MP for the Socialist (formerly Communist) party, but
soon afterwards resigned in silent disagreement. In his last years, he
was increasingly withdrawn from politics.
His wife, and their son and a daughter, survive him.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1135839,00.html
--
Peace