592
PARTISAN REVIEW
line calling for " the restoration of Lenin 's principl es," accelera ted the
process of democratiza tion to a level we never expected. Stalin 's victims
were out of jail , homewriuen manuscripts and informa ti on from
abroad started circula ting through Samizda t channels, new literary
weeklies went out of control in the printing of young radi cals and o ld
di ssident writers. The epigrams of Radoy Ralin , on e of the wartime
radi cals, hit the streets of Sofia like machine gun fire, leading scores of
young poets to devote th eir efforts to satire.
In a miraculous way the politi cal " thaw" brought in a rich literary
crop : critics like Minko Niko lo v evalua ted domes ti c literary p roduc–
tions according to the standards of world literature- standards with
which he was bo th conversant and comfortable. And the emergence of
surrealistic novelists like Radichkov and achingly sharp imagisti c
poets like Kon stantin Pavlov was reall y more than an yone could have
expected. Even less talented sho rt story writers like N. Hay tov brough t
something new of their own to our literary life: his melodramatic
specul a tions about fate and tragedy in everyday country life struck the
longing, sincerity-seeking, broad public in such a way tha t for a whil e
it looked as tho ugh the old lost contact between the mass reader and
contemporary Bulgarian litera ture was on its way to bein g restored.
But it was Kosta Pavl ov who p roduced the bes t work in the
Bulgari an di ssident litera ture of tha t time. H e was abl e to express the
difficulties we were facing with such extraordinary lucidity that hi s
readers could no t fail to be engaged . His very first free-verse poem,
" Flota tion ," opened o ur eyes to the dangers
I
urking in the destruction
of human identity long before we were wi se enough even to think
about what our identity was. Onl y a few years la ter, he was with
Levchev and Tzanev reading hi s poetry before crowds o f studen ts in the
street. Then in Universities. Then in Workers' clubs.
For some time the fi ght fo r democra ti zation continued on quite a
large scale. While the newcomers read in the streets, the official
Writers' Union cleared the way for old, established bourgeo is writers
comin g straight out of jail or simpl y out of oblivion . Yet in 1960 (when
most of us celebra ted our thirtieth birthday) we call ed the coming
decade " the either
l or
decade." We were aware that the freedom we were
experiencing then wouldn 't las t forever, so we engaged in feveri sh
discussions of tactics-in the cafes as well as in the literary press. We
were trying to find a way to go as far as possibl e, so as to leave at least
some "gained ground" behind us after the inevitable retrea t began.
