Zdravko Petrov

We simply did not feel when the anxious October rain restlessly pounded on the poetic window of Lyubomir Levchev, we simply did not see when the gentle youth matured into a serious young poet who persistently sought his own style in poetry. L. Levchev's first poems on the pages of the youth press were sprinkled with many stars, with very gentle romance. But he quickly stepped back to earth. He looked around. He saw the restless face of our modernity, he sought new paths to poetic truth. Very soon he turned into a proud contemporary of ours, who is admired by the majestic victories in Space, who is no longer carried away by the sweet, ancient sounds of grandfather's gadulka. He wants to live with the rhythm of a hurried, breathless, dynamic time. He brings something new with his verse, energetic and expressive, punchy and spiteful, he wants to capture the complex diagram of the psyche of the contemporary, the fragmented, impressionistic thinking of the civilized urban man. The lyrical hero of L. Levchev's poetry lives with the disturbing changes on our planet, with the profound changes that are taking place in our socio-economic life. This social unrest is one of the attractive features of Levchev's poetry. Unlike other young poets who waste time on the detailed and insignificant, L. Levchev is looking for a new civic voice in poetry, but expressed already with newer linguistic means. And L. Levchev's new collection of poems is entirely turned towards modernity, towards construction, towards the life of our youth. He wrote some interesting poems about construction. His poetic chronicles of our construction days are not boring protocols, but verses distinguished by a fresh construction romance, a life-affirming feeling, a constructive pathos. L. Levchev manages to poetically elevate our labor construction reality, to poeticize everyday labor, to break the banal framework in its depiction. And in this direction he managed to write a number of interesting poetic works. In the poem "Kremikovsko nacholy" there is a nice atmosphere, a new figurative vision: The picture is not at all beautiful - A field. A brown fallow. Above it the sun - low and foggy. And nothing else. Who dared to sow the seeds of dreams here instead of wheat?... The furrows smoke, smoke mysteriously, like the hearth of a proto-Bulgarian fortune teller.

There is hardly a Bulgarian poet with a more expressive appearance than that of Furnadzhiev. It contains great expressive power. His face resembles some Negro deity, primitive, crude, clumsily carved. There is something very pre-cultural, pagan in him, very much the emanation of pure "nature". A strong, earthly, vital poet, he immediately conquers you with his poetic power. All his poetry is filled with earthly aromas. Especially his early lyrics are filled with a powerful jubilation. Clearly, before us is a poet with enormous energy and great vital reserves. If he were an artist, he would certainly be from the school of Jordaens, if he were a prose writer, he would certainly model images like Rabelais, if he were a poet, he could not but be Furnadzhiev. We do not know how else this brute force of nature could have been poured out, if not in such highly dramatic, powerful, impulsive poems. He resembles a poetic spirit that constantly calls upon the earthly forces of life. Isn't he a kind of continuation of the earth, of the soil, of the stones, of the roots of trees in literature? There are no features in him that would speak of a pure manifestation of the "spiritual." And yet he is not an enemy of air and space, of dreams and reveries. But the spiritual processes in him flow through his dynamic-impulsive nature.

I love to read obituaries, in them you can faintly feel the breath of some foreign, unsuspected, unique life. Once, on a short Sofia street, I read a freshly unzipped obituary. Apparently, my gaze was drawn to the unusual name, the deceased was of Italian origin. Not long after, I encountered this name in a poem by Valeri Petrov, included in his latest book, it is called "Whipped by the Wind". Since I had seen V. Petrov working on his car on that street, I mentally connected these two facts. I simply became an involuntary witness to the birth of one of his poems, or rather, its associative impulse. And as is usually the case in poetry, the most insignificant fact can give rise to emotional reflection. In this case, Valeri Petrov passed by the house, read the obituary, and an emotional idea was born in him, which later grew into a lasting poetic summary. Many passers-by have passed by the mournful inscription about Angelo Ruggeri, but none of them has made poetry out of this fact, has not turned it into a unique emotional experience, into a sad reflection on human destiny.

During his lifetime, no literature was created around him, no scandalous noise was raised, and yet he was at the forefront of the Bulgarian intellectual process. It's not that he wasn't written about (on the contrary, his publications were always met with enthusiastic reception and laudatory reviews in the press), but he didn't like to impose his silhouette. Minko Nikolov had an innate dislike for scandalous fame and noisy appearances in literature. But his insufficient "noticing" was to some extent hindered by the innate myopia of his contemporaries. Many things prevented us from seeing him in his true stature. And here we involuntarily fell into the position of Chekhov's heroine, who had dreamed all her life of seeing the extraordinary man, and he was there for her. The daily routine, the controversial nature of the controversial profession - criticism (or as some writers call it, the "strange profession") prevented us from seeing him in his true scale, from taking into account the seriousness of his intellectual drama. This drama became deeper and deeper day by day, to reach the fatal denouement of the end of December 1966. It was only the black silhouette of the suicide bomber that forced upon the living in an inimitable way the magnitude of the life drama called Minko Nikolov. And now we see in the light of "what has happened" the irreversible, the terrifying. "Nothing, that many ridiculous life circumstances prevented us from seeing behind his kind smile the already maturing skeptical, hopeless smile, which often adorned his spiritualized face. And no matter how much we stared and were insightful, we could not discover the depth of his human tragedy. And he had already been carrying it for years, silently and imperceptibly, like some kind of "sarcoma" that torments the brain, takes away the energy of his nerves, the juice of his human and social enthusiasm. She was, with a kind of malicious pace, preparing the sudden catastrophe, the "cruel collapse" of a valuable and long-built creative personality.