Petko Todorov and the others

There is a portrait of him, painted by the artist Nikola Mihaylov, which has always attracted my attention and brought me face to face with the "dilemma" of Petko Todorov. I would not say that it is the most accurate pictorial interpretation of his image. But it achieves a kind of balance between our current assessment and the enthusiastic ideas about him of contemporaries and admirers from the past. On the canvas, Petko Todorov, the "meek" Petko Todorov, sits with his hand resting on the back of his chair, focused, lost in his thoughts. This ascetic profile of a hermit perhaps hides the secrets of a late-born fanatic, whom new circumstances and other character traits have prevented from recognizing the extremes of spirit and thought. Perhaps. But everything else - from the kind, half-hidden gaze, to the long, relaxed, artistic fingers, speak of the soft character of a born intellectual. This is a man who, for all his ambitions, may never have been completely confident in himself, but who has always taken his work seriously - with that seriousness that is more like inner conscientiousness and dedication. Entangled in a web of greenish half-shadows that crawl over his arms and beard, growing into the surrounding landscape, in the painting, he seems to be a spiritualized and civilized Dragon from the world of his own idylls. The warm range of butter-green tones flows over his face, overflowing into the environment as a continuation of his thoughts, as a plastic symbol of his thirst for an eternal connection with his native nature. This is how he remained in the minds of his best connoisseurs from the past - with his eternal striving to penetrate the soul of his people and merge with their nature. This is how we can perceive him today, with all the sobriety and all the reservations that the obvious weaknesses of his work impose on us. The artist himself was apparently not unaware of their awareness, because he found a way to hint at them and balance his image with a few sure strokes: in the upper right corner of the painting, a landscape detail somehow imperceptibly creeps in, like a projection of the writer's thoughts, which irritates, "disturbs" the impression, because it carries something of the bad German taste from the time of the Secession. And this is Petko Todorov again, seen from a different side.