Николай

More than fifty years ago, in "Democratic Review", "Contemporary", "Osa", "Bulgarian" and other newspapers and magazines, the exquisite poems of N. Mihaylov, who began to sign himself Nikolay Liliev, appeared. There is truly something lily-like graceful in them - they are as if white, with the color of virginity, untouched by the sultry fingers of life. These are songs about the sun, about the morning, about the even Sunrise, hymns to spring. How much intoxication, how much rapture there is in this "Sun, Sun". Who today does not know "Bright Morning", "Dawn in the Dreamy Gardens", "Silent Spring Rain"? From them we can smell the serene cloudlessness of the summer morning and the blue boundlessness of the azures above Thrace.

Several areas of our national culture and literature are associated with the name of Nikolay Liliev, in which the late man worked silently and apostolically for decades. One of our great poets, Liliev has embedded his name in the pantheon of prominent masters of Bulgarian verse. Despite the symbolism, under his human, noble and sophisticated pen, songs of beauty and humanity rang out. In them, the Bulgarian language revealed its musical and sound magic, and our verse became a more flexible, more elegant and more reliable instrument for expressing subtle states of mind. Academician Liliev has special merits for the founding of the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He was one of its first organizers and for years took the most active part in the work of the Institute with his extensive literary knowledge and linguistic culture. Death found the poet as a playwright at the Sofia National Theater, where his great art of translation was unfolded. Having mastered several European languages ​​to perfection, Liliev gave a series of brilliant translations of famous works of classical and contemporary dramaturgy. Thanks to his subtle artistic feeling, foreign works sounded on our native stage with all their richness. His articles and statements on the issues of artistic translation contained many accurate and subtle observations. Until his last days, he did not leave his post as a playwright, bent over the text of new plays or guiding young playwrights with his competent word.

In September 1920, Yordan Yovkov was appointed by order of Prime Minister Alexander Stamboliyski as a clerk at the Bulgarian legation in Bucharest, where he spent about six years holding various positions: "press assistant", "secretary", and finally, as a "reward" for his conscientious work, due to the "lack" of the necessary qualifications, he had to fulfill the duties of... Dragoman". Despite his official employment and his difficult financial situation, in the Romanian capital he worked with true inspiration and for the joy of Bulgarian culture - he completed "The Song of the Wheels", wrote "Stara Planina Legends" and began "Evenings at the Antimov Inn". Yovkov's life in Bucharest, as his letters and the memories of his friends testify, was difficult and joyless. The plenipotentiary ministers at that time were Todor Nedkov, General Iv. Fichev, Georgi Kyoseivanov and Svetoslav Pomenov, who treated the writer with disdain and looked at him almost as an ordinary official, something more - as an imbecile. On various occasions, the writer wrote letters to his friends in his homeland, shared with them his difficult fate and rewarded them for small favors. Some of these letters were published in books and magazines and are known to the Bulgarian reader. (See Grigor Vassilev, "Yordan Yovkov", 1940 and "Unpublished Letters of Yordan Yovkov" magazine "Literary Thought", vol. 5, 1957).

The letters of Geo Milev to Nikolay Liliev, which are printed here, were written in the period between 1915 and 1919. They were taken from Liliev's personal archive. Of the 7 preserved letters, one was published as a preface to Geo Milev's translated poems by H. Heine - "Selected Songs and Romances". This letter is dated June 20, 1919 and is entirely dedicated to Heine. It is also included in volume II of Selected Works of Geo Milev edited by Mila Geo Mileva, S., 1940. Nikolay Liliev and Geo Milev were very close, cordial friends. Although Liliev is ten years older, the two feel like they are from the same generation, completely understand each other in life and literary problems, and live with the same joys and sorrows. They are related by their common cultural interests, love of art, and affection for their hometown of Stara Zagora. Geo Milev was born in the village of Radnevo in Stara Zagora, but he considers Stara Zagora his hometown, because he grew up there both physically and spiritually. During their youth, Stara Zagora held one of the first places in the country as a vibrant cultural center, as the birthplace of other contemporary writers and poets: Georgi Bakalov, Dimitar Podvarzachov, Ivan Kh. Hristov, Ivan Mirchev, Kiril Hristov. ..

The work of Georgi Konstantinov comes to satisfy the growing interest in the personality of the poet Liliev. Liliev's poetry - gentle and ethereal, musical and airy, graceful and timid, died down along with the decline and overcoming of symbolism in our literature. New problems have emerged in modern times, and manly and strong artists have grown up. Who today reads "Hymns for the Superman" by Pencho Slaveykov, "Bulgarian Ballads" by Teodor Trayanov? Who is excited by "Regina Mortois"? In these works, the poets failed to find the key, they did not see "the truth that makes sense to write about", as B. Brecht expressed it in his essay on "The Five Difficulties". At the beginning of the century, our literature suffered heavy losses. Many artists were prisoners of a decadent aesthetics and philosophy hostile to realistic art. Liliev's talent also wandered in the labyrinths of symbolism. He closed himself in his own gloomy poetic tower. He burned the last bridges to hope and became a Sad Loner. Today we cannot help but be aware of the pessimistic beginning in Liliev's poetry. Through the mists and with difficulty the dawns of his native Thrace, the silver rays and the bright morning of life shine. But through the vague and semi-airy outlines of this symbolic Lyric, the virtuoso perfection of Liliev's verse is visible, transformed into a sonorous, expressive and gentle instrument. With its imagery and melody, with its virgin purity and snowy whiteness, this verse occupies a certain place in Bulgarian lyric poetry. The modern socialist reader finds in the poetry of the pale lilies hidden treasures of humanity and sublime ethics, a reverence for beauty and nobility, which still excite today.

Every time I look up at the bookshelf where I keep everything without which it is difficult for me to imagine my everyday life, my gaze involuntarily falls on a small collection of poems in dove color, already faded by the years, which bears the familiar title "Birds in the Night". Miraculously surviving the bombings and the endless journeys from apartment to apartment, this collection of poems with an Art Nouveau cover, on which the bird of wisdom stands with calm self-confidence on a large letter P, contrasts somewhat unusually with its colorful young sisters and hides among them with a slightly old-fashioned shyness, not particularly characteristic of our time. Born in another era, very different from the current one, it comes with its presence not only to resurrect in my mind a bygone stage of our literature, but also to remind me of my first contact with Nikolay Liliev - one of the poets who had a certain influence on the spiritual biography of my generation.

There are writers who play a major role in public and literary life, but remain alien to the "noisy fame". Their activity resembles those deep water currents that change the climate, enable flowers and trees to grow in distant northern countries, while they themselves are inconspicuous, invisible, unknown. Such a creator in our communist anti-fascist literature is Nikolay Khrelkov. His charm as a person and a poet, his role as a communist-teacher are perfectly understood by those who had the opportunity to be in personal contact with the writer, to be friends with him, to experience his beneficial influence. "Visiting Khrelkov - shared the heroine of the RMS Lilyana Dimitrova - is a holiday for me. He seems to be a person from another world." Many writers such as Goncho Belev, Lyudmil Stoyanov, etc. To a large extent, they grew up as socialist realist artists, taking the decisive step from the general democratic anti-fascist positions to the positions of Marxism-Leninism thanks to the personal friendship and the influence that Nikolay Khrelkov had on them.

I met him for the first time in the fall of 1928. The descendant of Lyuben Karavelov had just returned from abroad, from emigration. Tall, with his head slightly bowed between his asymmetrically raised shoulders, the figure of this man radiated intransigence, the valor of the unyielding. When he spoke calmly, a bribing childish gullibility and kindness flowed from his gaze. But if he happened to switch to polemics and defend his faith in the people and their right to freedom and human happiness, arrows of his revolutionary conviction would fly from his eyes. His gesture was angular and dramatic, saturated with a hidden inner tragedy, intertwined with boundless feeling for the poor, for the suffering. The sonority of his voice carried the excitement of his noble heart, the impulses of his impetuous thoughts, the accent of his charming devotion as a faithful proletarian son... A sworn devotion that consciously and unwaveringly came true over time in that tragic end of Nikolai Khrelkov, which became a measure of his moral and political stature as a communist citizen.

I saw him for the first time when I started working at the Institute of Literature. He was a member of the Scientific Council of the institute. He had come with Konstantin Petkanov to a meeting. I was impressed by the poet's spiritualized face, his sad gaze, which radiated such tenderness and nobility. At that time, the collection of studies on Ivan Vazov was being prepared intensively, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Nikolay Liliev participated in the editorial board. And a year before that, a collection of memories of Vazov was published, edited only by Liliev. He had to search for and collect the materials, constantly urging the authors to submit them. This task was not at all easy. Later, from the archive of Elin Pelin at the Institute of Literature, a postcard written in humorous verses came across, in which Liliev asks the great writer to send him his memories of Vazov. This witty parody of Vaz's poem "Kings Mark" shows how much the collection of memories tormented him. Since the letter has been lost, I will quote it approximately, from memory:

It was one morning in the first days of September, we had breakfasted at one of the coastal hotels of Montreux, where we had happened to be at night, and after taking a short walk through the park to enjoy the Swiss nature, we set off again. We had a long journey to Paris ahead of us, but at the same time we did not want to miss a happy opportunity - to visit the famous Chillon Castle, which we had passed the night before. We had no time to waste, so we had to choose quickly. And, of course, we chose what could turn out to be unique. So instead of heading for Lausanne, as prudence dictated, we turned in the opposite direction and headed for Chillon. And suddenly we were once again immersed in the Swiss landscape: on the right the calm azure expanse of Leman, on the left the foothills of the Swiss Alps, and in the far southeast the feminine cones of the Danne-du-Midi, slightly gilded by the September sun. I looked at this picture, full of picturesque grandeur, and imperceptibly the visible began to give way to an excitement that the night's sleep had interrupted. As at the first meeting with the snow-capped mountains, I felt myself once again in the spiritual and emotional atmosphere of one of my poets, who had once passed through here and had populated the Alpine landscape with the shadows of his imagination. But instead of the gloomy ghosts of the previous evening, now, under the influence of the morning clarity, I had involuntarily sought in it that which foreshadowed the end of a nightmarish night. And I had found it in these two verses that unexpectedly floated into my mind:

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.

Unexpectedly for myself, about a month or a month and a half after the meeting at the Royal aperitif, a not very pleasant change occurred in my life. Since I had to prepare for a state exam, which more than any other exam implies better working conditions and less occupation with side pursuits, I thought about what to do and, finding no other way out, decided to return temporarily to the province. Thus, no matter how unpleasant it was for me, I distanced myself from literary circles and for a while lost track of Khrelkov. However, what I learned later alarmed me. It turned out that Khrelkov had suffered a hemorrhage and, at the insistence of the doctors and people close to him, had finally agreed to be admitted to a sanatorium. And indeed, I heard afterwards that he had gone for treatment in Iskrets, later, I think, in Plovdiv and some other places, and in the summer of 1937 I quite unexpectedly found him in Chepino-Banya at the home of my classmate and friend Vasil Sotirov - an unusually kind-hearted and generous man, with whom he had come into contact through some unspeakable means. As a result of these efforts, the acute attacks of the disease were stopped, but his health still remained irreparable. There was no way he could even think of returning to normal life, so with the help of close people Khrelkov had settled in Gorna Banya - at first only for treatment, and then as a permanent residence. It was here, precisely with his behavior and his intransigence, that he moved from literature, where he had already made a name for himself, to another field, which I would call a literary legend.

Dimcho Debelyanov and Nikolay Liliev met in the summer of 1907 in the village of Dolna Banya, Ihtiman region. There, Liliev worked at the Srebarnikovi sawmill - he kept the commercial books. Dimcho Debelyanov - a young man, almost a teenager, who had just graduated from high school, arrived during the holidays to visit his sister Maria Grigorova. He had already read several of Nikolay Mihaylov's printed poems and immediately became friends with him.

One of the first translators of Soviet literature in our country, from the time of its penetration in the 1920s, was Nikolai Khrelkov. A close friend of G. Milev, Khrelkov collaborated in his magazines, Libra (1919-1922) and Flame (1924-1925), mainly with articles and translations from Russian Soviet poetry. This activity of N. Khrelkov, which at that period completely absorbed the attention of our poet, was not appreciated in its merits - it was either ignored or considered as part of his fascination with the Russian symbolists. In fact, the author of Midnight Congress, like Geo Milev, turned his gaze to the young Soviet art. It attracted him with its revolutionary call, with its ideas and innovation.