In the 1950s while communism was still a toddler and childishly cruel in this country, Bulgarian prose fiction suddenly grew up to veritable adulthood. Following the brilliant start of the novel with Ivan Vazov’s Under the Yoke in 1888, and his successors, superb storytellers Elin Pelin and Yordan Yovkov, the local narrative talent flourished again in the 1950s with the great – both in terms of mastery and volume - novels by Dimitar Talev and Dimitar Dimov, the country’s most prominent novelists of 20 c. who incidentally or not, shared the same Christian name.
For Dimitar Talev (1898-1966), Ivan Vazov’s Under the Yoke was a guiding light. He humbly described himself as a writer of historical novels and this shows in this excerpt from an interview for the BNR kept by the Radio’s Golden Archives.
“I do not mean to show any bias here, but as author of mostly historical novels, I must tell you that a historical novel is in no way inferior to any other novel in terms of the totality of features that it is expected to showcase as a work of art. The same requirements apply to historical novels as to any other novel. The writer of historical novels should look for greater perfection and a higher quality with a view to the enhancement of the cultural level of readers.”
In reality, the cream of Talev’s work, his robust tetralogy including The Iron Candlestick, The Bells of Prespa, Ilinden and I Hear Your Voices, is a true saga that begins to unfold majestically in the second half of 19 c. in a Bulgarian town in present-day Macedonia. Dimitar Talev himself was born in that Bulgarian ethnic territory, though he lived his adult life in Bulgaria. His creative mind however was preoccupied with the bitter history of Macedonia, one of the most contested regions in Europe. His great saga and other novels explored the anguish of that land often termed “an open wound”.
In his masterpiece The Iron Candlestick, the opening piece from the tetralogy, Dimitar Talev focuses his narration on an average Bulgarian family, the Glaoushevs, driven by a powerful matriarch, a woman called Sultana. Her name derives from the Arabic word sultan (with original meaning strength, authority, rulership). Transformation is ongoing both in the family that she manages with an iron hand and in the town’s community. It slowly awakens and braces for its struggles for emancipation from the attempts of Greek teachers and priests to assimilate Bulgarians, and from the sluggish, oppressive and corrupt Ottoman administration.
Here is next an excerpt from the novel that describes the loving care of the community of Prespa as it is building its new, Bulgarian church:
“The new church was a wonder and a talking point. Of pink honeycombed rock and with toasted bricks, each row of stones was followed by two of thin red bricks, the edifice mottled and ornamental as if from way back when; it had rounded windows and vaults, and three doors. Only towards the end of the third year was the large iron cross installed on the high roof. It took three years for the people of Prespa to build, exacting anguish and ardent faith, the works forced to stop and re-start time after time – each stone, each tree was transported and set in place by hand, with love and the intention that it should remain there, intact, until kingdom come. Finally the people of Prespa came month after month to gaze at the new church, and to rejoice in its beauty and in their achievement, the product of sweat and tears. Then they laboured to decorate the church, bringing all manner of gifts: gold, silver and silk. The poorest brought a pair of socks or a shirt, or olive oil and wax, and whatever the church couldn’t use was turned into money. They brought icons, candlesticks, icon lamps and tables from which to sell the church’s wares; each of the guilds donated an icon depicting their own patron saint to feature in the iconostasis, and the richer families made sure that they put on a good show.”
Translation by Christopher Pavis
Sultana’s family too sees the rise of modern time, as her brightest children slip out of her control to stray from the security and calm of the collective mainstream. Her son Lazar comes to lead a group of young Prespa Bulgarians fighting against the double Greek and Ottoman oppression. More tragically, her lovely daughter Katerina boldly falls in love with stranger artist Rafe Klinche, the man who has arrived to carve beauty into the iconostasis of the new Prespa church. She becomes pregnant by him, out of wedlock, and her mother practically kills her lovely daughter by giving her strong herbs meant to cause a miscarriage. The family’s reputation is saved, but the matriarch has sacrificed a daughter and an unborn baby.
In the novels from the tetralogy that follow The Iron Candlestick Dimitar Talev drives the Glaoushev family story further in time from the 19th into the 20th century.
As it often happens in art, Talev’s recognition as a writer of substance did not come easily. He was one in a breed of Macedonian Bulgarian patriots, and the question of Macedonia has always been strongly politicized. In the wartime years Dimitar Talev was an influential journalist who supported the pro-German government of Bulgaria because it intended to annex the Bulgarian ethnic parts of Macedonia. Things went wrong for him in 1944 when the communist regime took over, as it was generally hostile to any Bulgarian claims on Macedonia. The same year Talev was arrested by the communist authorities for his patriotic position, sent to the Sofia Central Prison and later to the labour Bobov Dol and Kutsian camps. He was expelled from the Bulgarian Writers' Union and exiled in the western town of Lukovit. In the 1950s, the communist regime, amid a new international context, changed its policy to Macedonia and things began to improve for the great writer. In 1966 he was elected as MP in the 31st Bulgarian Parliament, however, his health was already too frail after such horrible ordeals and he died that same year.
In the 1970s, fellow writer and another 20 c. classic Emilian Stanev revisited his memories of Dimitar Talev, his personality and great novels:
“Dimitar Talev was by birth and generally speaking a physiologically clean man. I used to crack a joke with him that the sleeves of his pyjamas had grown tattered from hard work. He was not cross with me, neither was he cross when I sometimes was curious to know what he was writing. Until the very last moment he was hiding his work. Only after a book was finished he could start talking about it. I remember the pleasure and joy I felt while reading his Iron Candlestick. Without doubt this is a masterpiece and I would be embittered to find out that young people do not read his books. His prose is a must-read for the patriotic education of Bulgarians. His books, and I mean The Iron Candlestick, The Bells of Prespa and Ilinden, are books that will remain forever on the bookshelves of Bulgarian literature, and on the highest ones in fact.”
