“Art can blossom only when it is planted in freedom.
If you censor the writer, you would be killing art itself.”
—Geo Milev
Hemingway, in writing about Bulgaria for Toronto’s Daily Star in 1922, said of the country, “There are no internal problems in Bulgaria, there are no troublesome minorities . . .” And of its leader, Alexander Stamboliyski, he said “[He] is chunky, red-brown-faced, has a black mustache that turns up like a sergeant major’s, understands not a word of any language except Bulgarian, once made a speech of fifteen hours’ duration in that guttural tongue, and is the strongest premier in Europe, bar none.”
Caught between Germany and Russia’s titanic post-First World War appetites, the tiny Eastern European country of Bulgaria suffered many internal struggles for power financed by external interests, and within a year of Hemingway’s dispatch, fascist forces would descend onto Bulgaria and Stamboliyski, the leader of the Agrarian Union, would be dead—brutally tortured and then murdered by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) following the military coup of June, 1923, which brought down his democratically-elected government and inserted a fascist one in its place.
Hristo Karastoyanov’s novel opens eighteen months later, in May of 1925, with the brutal murders, imagined here on the same night, of two key Bulgarian figures: the erudite, exquisite poet Geo Milev, and the notorious anarchist Georgi Sheytanov. Karastoyanov then rewinds and takes us back to the year and a half leading up to the men’s deaths, bookending the narrative on one side with the aftermath of the September Uprising in 1923 (the hastily organized and brutally suppressed response to the June coup, which claimed as many as 30,000 lives and effectively led to the communist party being outlawed), and on the other end with the unprecedented terrorist attack in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, on the St. Nedelya Church in April 1925, which took the lives of 150 and injured 500, and is still considered one of the bloodiest terrorist acts in Europe. The attack was planned and executed by the communists in an attempt to eradicate high-standing members of the police force. The attack resulted in violent repressions led by the Military Union with the fascist government’s implicit consent. In the aftermath, nearly 450 people were executed without trial, including the poet Geo Milev.
In 1923, we see a Bulgaria on the verge of tyranny, amid an identity crisis, a nation still reeling from the five-century Ottoman yoke. And we see anarchists whom today we’d hardly hesitate to call terrorists. And yet, it is precisely an anarchist, Georgi Sheytanov, who sponsors Geo Milev’s magazine.
It is perhaps very natural to frame the book around the question “Who killed Geo Milev?” It’s a loaded question, raising many more with it in regard to Bulgarian and European early twentieth-century history, politics, and culture. But perhaps before attempting to answer who killed Geo Milev, we need to know who Geo Milev was and what he died for.
Despite losing part of his skull and with it his right eye while fighting for his country in the First World War, in early 1920s Bulgaria the international literary promise of this young visionary poet—German-educated, avant-garde writer, multilingual translator, and magazine publisher—was unbound. Contrarian, brilliant, and erudite, he worked fanatically and almost obsessively in a race against time to expand the horizons of the Bulgarian literary landscape. A fierce apologist of modernism and expressionism, he authored potent poetry and sweeping political commentary, and translated into Bulgarian no less than Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, John Keats, Browning, and de Musset, to name some. In turn, he was despised by the conformist literary circles, the pseudo-intellectuals, and, of course, the government.
Georgi Sheytanov was only a year younger than the poet and one of the most famous anarchists in Bulgaria in the 1920s—the single most wanted man by the police, in fact. Like Geo Milev, he too was a bright and extraordinarily erudite political commentator, and, repulsed by Lenin’s communism, the world traveler, anarchist, and perpetual escape artist left Russia for Bulgaria, where he inspired and became a patron to Geo Milev’s cause: to awaken the sleeping people at any cost.
The two created the magazine Plamuk (Flame), which was not only excellent, but also incredibly successful, and somewhat leftist. Plamuk, after only a year of existence, fell prey to the censorship of the authorities, who, after the September Uprising, and especially after the attack on St. Nedelya, persecuted both dissidents and anybody else who dared to think with equal fervor.
Karastoyanov brings Geo Milev and Georgi Sheytanov back to life in a lush, dark, and “true fictional” account that is, as the author himself notes, “maybe not all true, but certainly faithful to the truth.”
It wasn’t until 1954 that Geo Milev’s remains were uncovered in a mass grave at the outskirts of Sofia, nearly thirty years after his secret execution. He was recognized only by the blue glass eye in the right socket of his skull.
It’s difficult to overstate the parallels of the Bulgaria—even of the world—of today with the Bulgaria—and the world—of a century ago. Karastoyanov employs a diary construct with the precise goal of disintegrating the distance of the ostensibly faraway dates he chronicles, drawing unabashed parallels with the culture and politics of today: press monopolies concerned more with entertainment and selling papers rather than with ascertaining facts; weak, pusillanimous politicians; ruthless cops with ruthless ambitions; even the fundamental pandering of literary awards and the eternal struggle between real intellectuals and politics. He dares to ask: What has changed, if anything?
“The ivory tower, the refuge of poetry and hiding place of poets, lies crumbled in ruins. From the dust of dreams, from the ruin of fantasies the poet emerges—stunned, astounded, no longer blind—and confronts the bloodstained face of the people, his people . . .”
—From Geo Milev’s manifesto in Plamuk, which included the poem “September,” about the September Uprising
—Izidora Angel