ATANAS SLAVOV
593
Some of us were overoptimistic about the influence "The Thaw"
would have upon the whole thrust of Bulgarian Culture. Others like
Kosta Pavlov were, it seemed, overpessimistic, for they couldn't see
lasting support coming from any stratum of that society.
It
was Pavlov
who turned out to be right, but the situation at that time seemed to
favor our line of argument. Newspapers like
Literaturni Novini
and
magazin es like M
ladezh
were publishing criticism of high officials,
political poems dedicated to the memory of one of Stalin's victims, to
Kostov, experimenta l poetry-anything! Reading unpublished poetry
in th e streets was just the beginning. Soon literary clubs started
publishing without the permission of the authorities. In December
1962 a group of students boarded the train which carried me and a
number of other young writers to Moscow. They distributed by hand
among the passengers an unauthorized coll ection of poetry prefaced by
a manifesto proclaiming "how nice it is to be angry" with our society.
"We are poisoned with optimism," declared one of the poets repre–
sented. And the fans for poetry of that kind seemed rather wild and out
of control. When Writers' Union officials ordered the cancell ation of a
reading by Pavlov and Levchev at the Performing Arts School , the
students rioted.
I wrote several articles and tried to convince Kosta of the need for a
tighter connection between poets and audience. I was convi nced at the
time that the technical and most of the humanistic intelligentsia were
with us, so that there was no need to reproach them for their moral
faults and spiritual shortcomings at the public readings which they
atlended with such enthusiasm. Kosta was opposed
to
this view. He
was afraid to lower his moral standards, and he was right again, for
that was the only source of his strength. My God, we were just a tiny,
lonely bunch of people, in a tiny and lonely country, and our tactics
were just a mess. First we allied ourselves with the Soviet Union
because Khrushchev was attacking Stalinism and helping our fight
against the conservatives at home, then we were against the USSR, for
it was our long term suppressor; now we would support nationalistic
feelings to help us against Soviet imperialism; then we would take a
position against the brutal ideological ultra-conservatism which
seemed to be associated with such feelings; now we would express our
support for the avant-garde in art, for it was opposed to dogmatism;
then we would find ourselves at odds with the snobbish shifting of
fashion that went along with it and threatened to wipe away any
esthetic standard we were trying to defend against that very same
political dogmatism!
