Atanas Siavov
"THE THAW" AND THE FATE
OF BULGARIAN DISSENT
The death of Stalin in the 1950s marked a turning point in
Bulgaria, heralding a process of democratization which had a signifi–
cant effect on literary life. Until then, life had been a matter of black
and white extremes. The radicals of varied hues who had made up the
literary community during World War II had split apart after Stalin's
suppression of the attempt by Kostov and Dimitrov to achieve com–
munist self-rule. Those intellectuals who worked for State institutions
(the radio or the official Party press) were hastened to high posts in the
Writers', Artists ' and Composers' Unions, while the rest passed
through the Labor Camps, and upon returning, were doomed to suffer
as the underdogs of the home intelligentsia forever. But then in the
mid-fifties literary cafes began coming back to life, and here they were,
Party poets (like Valeri Petrov) and underdogs (like Vlado Svintilla)
side by side once again around sidewalk tables where they sat with
boisterous newcomers from radicalized Soviet Universities-like
Djagarov-all of them dreaming of bringing back the shades of life to
the faded tapestry of Bulgarian Culture.
I belonged to a group of home-educated newcomers. Some of us
(like Tzvetan Stoyanov and myself) had been active for a couple of years
before "The Thaw" in attempting to rebuild the shattered bridges with
the West by introducing new authors in translation and new ideas in
literary criticism. Others (like Levchev and Vassil Popov) were striving
to reintroduce human values in their poetry and fiction. We were
perfectly aware that perfecting a literature read by only a handful of
people might be doing no more than creating a tempest in a teapot. But
then we believed that just as a small cup may reflect the whole sky, so
too we could make it clear that our position reflected the whole process
of antidogmatism that was gathering speed in Eastern Europe.
Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin at the twentieth Congress of
the CPSU and the April Plenum of the BCP, which established the new
