ATANAS SLAVOV
595
officials control the money and the press, and they are able to arrange
things so that the slamming of a door in someone's face is always
accompanied by the opening of another one through which the victim
may discharge whatever creative energy he still has left. And, of course,
once you've given up your distinctive creative identity you become a
passive "good conductor" for their manipulations: just another copper
wire in the State machine.
Svintilla didn't hesitate
to
act in accordance with his own predic–
tion. From being a first-class translator, literary critic, and essayist, he
became a second-rate art critic. In this way he would not be able to
make compromises, and would be able to earn his money in a field
which he doesn't really care how the officials manipulate. He's all
through now. A year ago he gave evidence against his friend, the
literary historian Lazar Tzvetkov, who was accused of counter–
revolutionary activity because of the illegal circulation of manuscripts
by Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents.
Vassil Popov didn't exactly "go into linguistics," he stuck to his
job as an editor of foreign language short stories in official weeklies
and finally achieved the honor of being included as a juror for some
Cuban Latin-American Literature award precisely in his capacity as a
Bulgarian foreign language speaking celebrity.
A great majority of these people do not regard their present
activities as representing some kind of moral degradation. They are not
even aware of the fact that they have lost their creative identity, for the
officially manipulated critiques, and the national prizes and awards
keep assuring them they are doing quite well. Even those of the former
"Bamboo" cafe heroes who traded their antidogmatism for high state
and party posts, like the poets Djagarov (now the vice-president of the
State Council) and the brilliant Levchev (now the vice-president of the
Fatherland Front mass organization), probably still believe that deep
down, in spite of the rotten political manipulations which they are
conducting through their offices, they are the old, honest radicals of the
sixties. Levchev at least openly stated just that in a poem which he
published this past spring.
So the "either/ or" decade ended by turning "Thaw Period"
dissenters il1lo copper wire for the State machine. But not all of them,
of course. Some of us desperately sought new forms in which to
preserve ourselves. Desperately! I'll give just one example. A group of
young poets argued, in front of Writers' Union officials in favor of the
