Райчев

The author of the present had a conversation in December 1943 with Georgi Raichev in order to print my conversation along with a dozen others in a book under the title "Meetings and Conversations", published by Hr. Cholchev. However, the Anglo-American bombings on January 10, 1944 buried the book in the "Economic Development" printing house on Bacho Kiro Street. The conversation with Georgi Raichev has been preserved thanks to a proofreading. We are transmitting it without any changes.

In literature, as in ordinary life, one has casual acquaintances, very often people of considerable cultural value, whom, either due to a lack of spiritual affinity or due to an unfavorable combination of circumstances, one has not been able to get to know, appreciate and include in the circle of one's relatives and friends. For many years, Georgi Raichev was just such a casual acquaintance for me. Of course, like all young people of my generation who were interested in fiction, I heard this name very early - back in the blissful times of my adolescence, when it seemed to me that I held the world in my hands. Even then, I had the opportunity more than once to read what Raichev published in periodicals and to leaf through his books - "The Little World", "Queen Neranza", and that "Song of the Forest", which gave rise to talk about him once again. However, these meetings were random in nature and I don't know why they didn't arouse in me a more lasting interest in the writer's personality and work.

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.

The First World War and the October Revolutions changed the entire course of world history and inevitably gave a new direction to art. The blow that shook and changed the world fell on the bourgeois-aesthetic thought of the pre-war decade and cleared the way for new ideological and artistic searches. In Bulgarian literature, a new, deeply reviving process of returning to real life, to the fighting cries of the street, to the baked soil of the black earth, to the life-giving juices of the earth began to mature. The October Revolution, which pushed the spiritual development of the peoples along a new path, played a fateful role for the Bulgarian people as well, determining to a large extent their further economic and cultural development. It is enough to glance at our literature of those years to feel the irresistible power of the revolution, to feel the reviving power of the new and spiritual engines.

On May 29, 1969, the defense of the dissertation on the topic "Georgi of Elka Konstantinova Raychev. Life and Creativity" took place. The scientific supervisor was our late literary historian and critic Minko Nikolov, and the reviewers were Prof. Stoyan Karolev and Assoc. Prof. Zdravko Petrov. The members of the scientific council, literary workers and many citizens were present. The director of the Institute of Literature, Stoyko Bozhkov, who chaired the discussion, introduced those present to the content of the presented documents and gave a characteristic of the scientific achievements of the graduate student. The head of the section at the institute, Prof. Georgi Tsanev, presented the work of Elka Konstantinova, and the two reviewers read their reviews. Both emphasized the seriousness of the work done, the penetration into the world of the writer and the difficult time of its formation and creative realization.