Georgi Grozdev, 46, graduated from St Klimen Ohridski University, Sofia, majoring in journalism. He is founder of the Balkani publishing house (1991). Author of eight books of novelettes, stories, essays and itnerviews with renowned Bulgarian writers of the past decade.
He was awarded the 2002 Elin Pelin short story prize.
His stories have been translated in Greek, Montenegrin and English.

Vera Mutafchieva about I Passed by Last Night
First, I envied the author the title, which says so much. Indeed, the author passes by incidents (not events, thank God!) and characters chosen by him. And looks favorably on them. Though he does not distinctly reveal his attitude, they sound moralizing to me – I see nothing bad in such a definition, our time really lacks morality.
Georgi Grozdev’s is a truly Balkan book. No quotes. Today the Balkans are not what they used to be.
For the first time in decades we are no longer enemies to our neighbors but we are trying to know them, their mentality and stereotype, and last but not least, their idea of ourselves. It is important because much depends on this, especially in perspective. Anyway, we are unlikely to have other neighbors. In this light, I Passed by Last Night has an informative value.
It is as a counterpoint to “Press Report” that the stories about the exiled Bulgarian ethnic Turks sound, especially “Adile” and “Redjeb”: a breath of humanity, in spite of the recent cruel events in Bulgaria. Do we recognize we care about the fate of the Bulgarian exiles?
It is a question of guilty conscience, it seems.
Strange as it is, our vaguest idea was about the Macedonian brothers – steady and hostile bilateral ignorance. Without pathos nor affect, without demonstrative patriotism, Georgi Grozdev depicts not only dramas but tragedies as well, caused by the borders and their frequent redrawing on the map. Borders, roads, bridges: three realia which the author dresses into artistic but frugal verbal clothes. And the unuttered conclusion comes on us: this must be put an end to! As if it is uttered by his characters, who are specially selected from the lower strata of the Balkan societies. And it is illustrated by their fates, unhappy as a whole. Life… World…, as the Turks say with resignation.
A book that will be of use.

November 11, 2000, Sofia

Gencho Stoev in the preface to God’s Crumbs

Georgi Grozdev is an interesting phenomenon on the Bulgarian literary scene. Even as a young journalist he succeeded in breaking the canon of the totalitarian editions. Thus for instance, in the Pogled, a newspaper of the Bulgarian Journalists’ Union, his persistence gave birth to the only at the time eccentrically rebellious column, “Uninvited Thoughts”. Even then a flock of rebellious pens gathered around him to tell the public what they could not tell anywhere else. We have been friends since then; I have written for the column more than 30 times; and it was more for the sake of Grozdev’s personality, than for the sake of the newspaper itself.
During the years of change he established his own publishing house, Balkani, and continued to select interesting texts and people around himself. When the Bulgarian book market was drowned in the cheap subculture of the rich countries, and when native book publishing was believed to be agonizing, he ventured into a noble and daring enterprise of publishing a series of newly-born Bulgarian works. The series became known as the “White Library” and all worthy writers wished to partake in it. There is no other act like that in Bulgaria. Thus he made his copper coins gold.
Undoubtedly, in order to gather people around yourself you need to have the necessary magnetism; besides, writers are a fastidious tribe: they would not gather around a person they do not recognize as one of kin. Yes, undoubtedly Georgi Grozdev has the well-tried blood of the writers’ clan. He has already proven it with a few collections of good stories, some of which are included in the book.
His subjects come from several directions. For instance, we will see the humble man, confused at the crossroads of two epochs, searching for his new place before the social quakes have calmed down. We will see the hero, wandering the Balkan countries, led by the thirst for new human spaces (the author himself has traveled over the peninsular with the dream of publishing a multilingual magazine, Balkans. Some issues have remained, as well as much experience, much love to share.) There is another, third source of inspiration: nature. The land of the hunter, the man with the rifle. And if in the first two directions he is one of the pioneers, with all the problems and risks of path-makers, in the third case, the hunting plots, the author develops and works on an old tradition in the Bulgarian literature.
I can already see the Greek reader, who is yet to turn these mature pages. He will be transported to the beautiful Bulgarian forests, rivers and lakes, he will feel how full of life they are – passionate, subdued, resonant, vivid – perceived through the strong, primary senses of the wandering man, the man with the rifle… Here is one of my biggest joys: he pretends to be fierce but he smiles gratefully when the shot misses the duck! It seems to me he does not wander to kill but to sing the victory of life, the beauty of life. This is not the man hunting for meat; this is the pantheist essayist, landed in the bosom of his temple.
So let these words introduce one more Bulgarian to the Greek readers and they may find him a kindred spirit.

Gencho Stoev, 77, is the first winner of the big all-Balkan literary award Hemus, the Balkan Nobel Prize, presented to him by the Minister of Culture of Greece personally on December 16, 2000 in Thessalonike, for his novel The Price of Gold.

Epilogue to God’s Crumbs, by Vihren Chernokozhev

Before I discovered Georgi Grozdev’s books I only knew a thing or two about his publishing wanderings and his journalistic life. Journalistic ability does not always guarantee good fiction. But the stories of Georgi Grozdev, which came with the wave of new Bulgarian prose in the 90s of the past century, surprised me. They were written with love and intensity, with hope. Not just for the sake of literary recognition but for the sake of “something that will raise our eyes to the human roots in the heaven”. If it is there.
Traversing the roads – both Bulgarian and Balkan – Georgi Grozdev does not tire of throwing bridges between men and peoples. He is led by the conviction that without bridges man loses himself and the others, life goes wild and his roots go wild. Especially here, on the Balkans, where it often happens for a bridge “to be there and standing on your way out and not be there on your way back”.
Old as the world is this saying: since times immemorial, in order not to lose himself, man has sought his heavenly roots but he has always missed something to save him from his atavistic passions, so that he does not feel fallen. The Biblical “Game for lions are the wild asses in the desert, so are the poor a pasture for the rich,” contains the comfort that so are we destined: some are hunters, others are victims. But in the novelette Wild Roots – a brilliant, thickly woven piece of prose – the Biblical proverb has an apostrophe: Man is alone with his rifle, cold as death, while birds always fly together (“Game of Chance”). Who is the victim here, and who the hunter?
The wild boar – unlike its chasers – does not play unhappy or a hero in the face of death. Its only dying effort is to eject its seed, not leave it in the dying body. But how much does its cosmicality cost before the blind muzzles of the meat hunters… Who is the victim here, and who the hunter?
Georgi Grozdev’s stories aim at reconciling man with the rest of the world: forests and mountains, deer, does, partridges. How, they ask, are we people better and wiser than them, which bend down the heavenly roots, the heavenly mercy to us. The answer seems clear: we are not. In the tear of the dying dog (“A Dog’s Life”) Kerezata suddenly sees himself, “small, flattened, a nobody”. No, it is not just a dog’s story, if it awakens the other in us.
Georgi Grozdev’s stories sometimes seem almost documentary but there is some indefinable detachment in them, some ghostly, untamed beauty. Nature has taught him to read the trails of the game as something beyond words; it has taught him silence. The clear starry sky is tinkling above the heavy ears; frogs are jumping on the dirt road; a ladybird is sleeping and dreaming about the dewdrop in which it will look at itself in the morning. Man is not here, he is only allowed to be a silent observer.
More and more I believe that Georgi Grozdev wrote God’s Crumbs to save some of the everyday crumbs. Grozdev’s stories have the noble illusion that they can save man from himself. I will be honest: I prefer those of his characters who have succeeded to break free from the trap of daily routine. Having overcome their misaccomplishments, they set out on a journey to find out what is it far there. Some get stuck in the abyss between the worlds: neither here, nor beyond, caught in the tight, dark grip of life. Few, like Pasko (“A Drowning Man”), will reach other worlds, or like Ancho (“Adile”), despite their skinned and bleeding knees, will crawl into the light.
For ages, the Balkans have been (and how much longer will they be?) synonymous with divisions, ethnic conflicts, political instability. A constant throbbing pain is felt in the Balkan stories of Georgi Grozdev; not only in Bulgaria but everywhere in the world the soul of the Balkans remains unknown. Probably this is because of our constant flights back into history, where the other, the different is often thought of as an enemy. “Adile”, “Redjeb”, “Border”, “The Red Lanterns”, “Karavelov’s Duty”, “Samuil”, “Ohrid” are not just fragments of the infinity of life and death, good and evil, power and justice at the Balkan intersections. Georgi Grozdev’s stories diligently fill the gaps we have opened ourselves in the Balkan foundations and bridges. They herald the time of the all-Balkan community, when the people from all the different parts of the Balkan peninsular will stand together in their own power, gift and goodness, not against each other, arguing which nation is greater. If we overcome the borders of our divided thinking in the traditional national categories, the borders of division will fall by themselves and the soul of the Balkans will be complete.

Vihren Chernokozhev

Vihren Chernokozhev, 50, is a literary historian and critic, deputy director of the Institute for Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
The epilogue is taken from the Greek edition of the book.


OUR DEBT TO THE FUTURE IS BIGGER THAN THE ONE TO THE PAST


Georgi Grozdev, writer and publisher


Today we meet writers whose books were published, or are still in press, by BALKANI Publishing House , the publishing house I founded in 1991 and continue to work in until this very moment. These names are its authority and the prestige of it publication series. What bonds us is either mutual liking or friendship. Some of them, unfortunately, have gone to the better world. They probably keep watch over us to uphold their intellectual work here, on Earth. I wish to believe they also protect us from up there where they are – in Heaven.

We are in the process of building useful humane and professional relationships with other writers. We hope to find new names from the Peninsula, and from Bulgaria, who are yet to become known. Yet to be read.

BALKANI survived month by month, year by year. With it survived the hope that at least a tiny piece of the writers’ works will endure. Such individual work as the writer’s, this loner over the empty sheet of paper, has also its common aspects. Not all opinions must coincide, nor all values need be shared. There is one shared oxygen environment, without which not only the writer, but any other artist would be impossible. I would like to think that throughout all these years of uncertainty, BALKANI has been a small oasis, a hospitable host to interesting, talented and different Bulgarian and Balkan writers.

Together we walked through the last decade of the past century: the troubled Bulgarian and Balkan, South-European times. Many parted with their old illusions. Many conceived new ones. Money was little. Hope, too. What if man has money but has lost hope? What will save him then? We never had enough money, but made it through having hope.

Together, we also turned the first pages of the new millennium, of the new century.

April 1999 saw the publication of the so-called White Series – An Autographed Book. The 13 authors participating in it, some of the most respected modern Bulgarian writers, answered 13 questions regarding the future of the book, Bulgaria and the Balkans.

Again April, but of 2004, saw the publication of the Balkan Library Series. It comprised 11 Balkan authors and 10 more are still under print. The Series opened in 2002 with the Balkan Nobel Prize winners Ivo Andric, Giorgos Seferis and Odysseas Elytis. All the writers in the series answered those 13 questions whose answers were sought after by their Bulgarian fellow-writers back in 1999. What a coincidence! Some of them, like the Balkan Nobel Prize winners Miroslav Krleza and Izet Sarailic who passed away just before we had a chance to meet, participate remotely in the conversation. I added new questions. Time demanded it. Unfortunately, they can no longer be addressed by some of the Bulgarian authors. Blaga Dimitrova, Gencho Stoev, Yordan Radichkov, Toncho Zhechev are no longer with us.

Are dinosaurs disappearing? Great Bulgarian and Balkan writers leave us one by one, their pride intact, without mutating into a new breed of authors – “omnivorous mammals” created by the political and cultural conjuncture. Will the ones who come after manage to preserve their souls, their creative work, or will they, under the sign of profitable omnivorousness, become servants of commonplaceness and pseudoculture? Will they become mass-media heroes instead of writers of artistic novelties, creators of aesthetic values, whose readership is smaller but more enlightened and of independent thinking? Will they cash in their dignity or will they endure it? Where and how to find the lost cultural insight of today’s world, the one mentioned as far as back as the 40s of the last century by the unforgettable Charlie Chaplin after his exile from America?

Ever since its very beginning, BALKANI publishing house has had one dream – to be a bridge, an extended hand. How could I miss such an opportunity, which we have worked for years to make possible?
We published two pilot issues of the Literary Balkans magazine – one in 2002 and one in 2003 – as a result of the contacts we had established through the Balkan Library Series. As of 2004, the publishing house has the financial support of the Bulgarian fund “Thirteen Centuries Bulgaria” for that part of the expenses related to printing. That means for three years ahead, God willing, four issues per year. I have been asked many a time on my travels abroad who backs me up and why I have taken on such a venture. The question has always made me think and look over my shoulder to see if there is someone there after all.

I am grateful to the famous, not only on the Balkans, Bulgarian novelist and professor on Ottoman history Vera Mutafchieva. Without her solidarity and friendship there probably wouldn’t be the 13 centuries (she is on the fund’s board of managers), which have in fact always been behind us, whether we realize it or not, and which are not only Bulgarian but also common, Balkan.

The idea of BALKANI is precisely an adventure of the mind which doesn’t stay with the homebred and the homebody. The authors of today’s issue, with their special participation, prove this as well. The magazine is a challenge to everyone who wants to discover the foreign and compare themselves to it. Thus we learn much more and unexpected things about our home and ourselves. BALKANI is a way to get to know each other through writers, through literature. It does not exclude competition.

Vast spaces, cultural and economic, lie in store for this competition. This is the language of the future, not the rusty sound of horns, which as if in a dream draws borders, captures cities, assimilates ethnicities, conquers mountains and plains. The afflicted by the contagious snooze conduct the process of annihilation invariably in the past, but in fact many want to crawl out of there. I am talking about the sleeping Monsters of the Balkans. They dwell in each one of us. Every time we publish a new author in the Balkan Library Series, we publish the same text on the cover of the book saying the language of the Monster is doomed.

This is my idea of our debt to the future. It is a greater debt than the one to the past. It will too disappear if tomorrow we are no more. Why do the ones whose eyes are fixed backwards always forget this, and always look the opposite way of where we’re going? If we wait for the perfect conditions, we’ll probably never see them. Let us make our furrow in the field now. God willing, there will be a second and a third.

The Balkan view is neither elementary nor deliberate as we have often been led to believe. The Balkan person doesn’t understand, they say, he has to be instructed how to behave, they say, what to do, what is good, what is bad. I definitely do not refer only to the Bulgarian.

Writers are the first and authentic ambassadors of tolerance and humaneness. They are loyal to the spirit of the Ancient Greeks, the creators of the modern civilization. Oftentimes, statesmen and politicians have been driven by self-interest. They need customs offices, secret police, armies, bureaucracy. They thrive on suspicion. That’s why future eludes them. The Balkans also have their perspicacious politicians. They don’t bribe the future. They are honest with it. Because the future is our children’s children…
Writers breed trust. Protect the writers! The books of the Balkan poets and novelists, translated for the first time in Bulgarian, say much more than all the newspapers stuffed with untruth, outright lies or hatred. Trust and lies cannot stand each other.
With the Balkan Library Series we did not lie. The Balkans are a world belonging to every one of us!
This publishing series gave birth to the Literary Balkans magazine. One of the Macedonian writers says in the following pages, “Please, just don’t stop!”
I have always been thrilled when from different parts of the peninsula, the most ordinary people have uttered deeply cherished words in respect to our humble efforts, calling our work “temel”* . The digging of the temels is the dirtiest and hardest part of the building process. Later on, the temel remains deep in the ground, but its size and strength determine the durability of the roof.
The first steps are the most difficult, says a Greek friend of ours, half-Bulgarian, Christos Katsanis. We were not alone in these first steps. We won’t be in the next, I hope. The books of the BALKAN LIBRARY were partially sponsored by the United Bulgarian Bank, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Macedonia, the National Center of the Book with the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Bulgaria, the Pro Helvetia Foundation – Switzerland, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Cyprus, the Slovenian Primos Trubar Foundation, the Ministry of Culture and Information of Serbia and Montenegro, and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Greece. The attention given to the projects of a private Bulgarian publishing house by so many authoritative organizations, some of which state institutions, gives us more courage.
And last but not least, I have to mention at least part of the team of fellow-thinkers, translators, editors, assistants: Svetlozar Igov, Gancho Savov, Zdravka Mihailova, Alexandra Liven, Marina Marinova, Valeri Petrov, Dragomira Vulcheva, Hristina Shtereva, , Zhela Georgieva, Rumiana Stancheva, Siyka Racheva, Stoyna Poromanska, Zdravka Evtimova, Stefka Paunova, Hussein Mevsim, as well the artistic designer of the Literary Balkans magazine and the Balkan Library series, Zahari Glavchovski. I also want to mention the young people who found time amidst their student obligations to come and work for BALKANI – Vihra Mutafchieva, Nadezhda Toromanova, Anton Grozdev, Vassil Grozdev, as well as my wife, Zhenya Grozdeva, who is directly involved in the publication of this series as my partner.
I don’t see a reason to hide the fact that to a certain extent the publishing house is a family responsibility, just like the small and medium-sized business in many countries around the world. This definitely helps our work and past years bear witness to it. I should not omit the names of the late famous Bulgarian translators whose texts we published – Stefan Gechev, Liliya Katskova, Mihail Berberov, Marin Zhechev.