ATANAS SLAVOV
597
I was to read a paper a t the Congress o f the Intern ational Associa–
tion for Compara ti ve Litera ture, but I was no t all owed to attend the
event. Academi c offi cials said they were planning to send me instead
to
Black Afri ca to lecture on esthetics. I am sure tha t many of the people
who made the decisions a bout my life a t tha t time believed tha t I would
be happier travelling for fun to the United Sta tes and Tanzani a rather
than straining my eyes over my manuscripts. The probl em is tha t
show ing vulnerability to bureaucra tic manipula tion s is tantamount to
defecting from the fi ght for the democra tizati on of Bul gari an litera ture.
So I decided that I had to resist defeati sm, committing wha t might seem
to be, a t least in the eyes o f some of myoId fri ends, a mora l sui cide.
T he most tragic fi gure in thi s lin e, though , is Kos ta Pavlov. This
man is so good as a poet tha t fo r years and years he has been trea ted as
an ex tremely dangerous rebel-which he is no t, although he can 't help
being a better poet than the offi cial ones. He has never qua rrell ed with
o ffi cia ls.
" It
is they who are h arassing me," he says. When the turning
of the screw first began making itself felt, he wrote a poem, "Singing
Contes t," whi ch sounded like a swan song . He was bitter, and as he
read the poem to fri ends in hi s a tti c, you could sen se hi s bl ocked
emotion s stirring like "a squirrel rolling a pine cone in hi s throat.
Down and up. Up and down ." But he didn 't grumbl e about wha t was
happening. He had never expected more.
" If
it is not my turn yet, let
him step fo rward whose turn it is now, and start singing."
T hen he bo ught a puppy and took it with him
to
a small hut near
Sofi a to wa tch it grow as the years passed by. He had been in vited to
work in films and as an editor in publishing houses, but he has stuck to
hi s poetry even though tha t has meant that he has had to cut his
penni es in half for more than fifteen years. The trap prepared for him
was script writing - a job he had done from time to time to earn a
li ving. But he wouldn 't do it, and las t year the bureaucra ti c computer
fin all y decided to overturn the horn of pl enty on him. An old rejected
script of hi s was filmed, and the Secreta ry General of the BCP, Zhivkov
himself, anno unced a t a priva te performance tha t thi s was "a grea t
piece of art, dedicated to our heroic past. " Which it was not, o f course.
And Pavlo v knows it. Yet he is being gilded as a result. Some eight
o ther scripts of hi s whi ch had been coll ecting dust for years are being
filmed . He has money now, and so present day Bul gari an literature has
los t its onl y martyr. The official critics are belching with excitement
about his successful abandonment of poetry for script writing. No one
pays an y a ttenti on to what Pavlov insists on in hi s interviews: " I' ve
written scripts for money. I am a poet, and I am not p lanning
to
give
up writing poetry."
