Лилиев

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.

I don't know if it's true now, but once upon a time, high school students had albums, on the colorful covers of which was printed Poesie, or Pour souvenir, or simply Album, and inside were all sorts of wishes, thoughts of great people, sometimes transcribed without indicating the author and directly signed by someone who liked them; they also wrote poems, most often prose poems" and all sorts of confessions or just: "my signature is modest, keep it as a souvenir... The graduates of the Svishtov Commercial High School were businesslike young men. The serious practical work for which they were preparing perhaps protected them from the sentimental passions inherent in their youth. Many of them, as is known, including the sons of wealthy parents, were already thinking about the imperfections of the social order, reading socialist books and newspapers, dreaming about the future, preparing for the struggle that was to come in order to reorganize society. Nikolay Liliev ended up at the commercial high school by chance and by a misunderstanding, which remained fateful in his life, because he was weak to remove it, and it was imposed on him with power later on. In Svishtov he already stood out among his classmates with his penchant for poetry, they remembered him as a reciter of Botev and Polyanov. But he studied his lessons diligently and read not only poetry, but also philosophical and political-economic literature in Bulgarian, Russian and German. We cannot know what part he took in the disputes on the then vexed political issues, especially on the disagreements between narrow and broad socialists. How much he was withdrawn may or may not have manifested himself in them. But it is very indicative that when in January 1903 his friend and classmate Tsonyu Stoyanov Gerganov from the Dryanovo village of Kereka presented him with his album with a request to write something as a souvenir, Nikolay Mihaylov did not use the nice paper to leave some of his own work there, nor did he copy other people's poems, but shared thoughts that really moved him and which it was very appropriate to point out to a student, obviously dedicated to his preparation to become a business activist:

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:

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.

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.

Liliev appeared in our literature at the beginning of the century, almost simultaneously with Debelyanov. At that time, Yavorov was experiencing a tragic collapse of his youthful ideals. His anxious, restless spirit was wandering in the nightmarish abysses of disbelief. He had become very susceptible to the pessimistic worldview of the symbolist aesthetic. Spontaneously, by a necessary inner command, the great poet paved the way for a belated literary fashion, which the poets of the then young generation - Nikolay Liliev, Dimcho Debelyanov, Lyudmil Stoyanov, Theodore Trayanov, Geo Milev, Hristo Yassenov and others - got carried away. In his homeland - France, this school took shape in the 1980s. It is well known that symbolism is based on the most extreme subjectivism, the hopeless philosophy of a tired, already worn-out psyche. It would be, however, a gross vulgarization to consider that the representatives of symbolism are conscious ideologists of the bourgeoisie and supporters of its order. For the most part they are people with high spiritual impulses, horrified and disgusted by the vulgarity and predatoryness surrounding them, who seek salvation in the world of chimeras, of self-absorption. Symbolism, however decadent in its essence, is a negation of guildsmanship, but a negation that is passive and harmless to the dominant system.