Letters from Georgi Raichev to Nikolay Liliev

A warm friendship has connected Georgi Raichev and Nikolay Liliev since 1908. Then the twenty-six-year-old Raichev left the dusty provincial offices forever and arrived in Sofia with the foolish thought of becoming a "great writer". But the capital did not welcome him with open arms, but with complete indifference and unemployment. With seventy-four leva in his pocket, a large suitcase full of manuscripts and a head clouded by the vague ideas of modernism, he wandered helplessly through the cold city, quickly running out of money and starving for several months. The only people he knew and cared about him were the two poets from Stara Zagora, Nikolay Liliev and Dimitar Podvarzachov. They diligently looked for work for him and finally managed to appoint him as a clerk at 111 Sofia Boys' High School "Gladstone", where Liliev was a teacher in the commercial department and Podvarzachov was a secretary. Raichev deeply valued their friendship until the end of his life. From the remote province, he suddenly found himself in the very whirlpool of cultural life in our country, among the elite of our then spiritual intelligentsia.