GEORGI GROZDEV

I recently reread the correspondent reports, his plays and novels. His reports seem to have been written for today too, not only the 70s of last century. The events Georgi Markov foresaw are still as vigorously developing; only the past 17 years have gone under “the ragged hat of democracy” (a phrase coined by Markov) rather than the cap of neo-Stalinism.

Bulgaria’s great drama, yet to be felt, is that our country, our culture at the moment has no individuals, a modern cultural elite, who can express her authentic voice in the company of 27 other different national communities. Folklore and Thracian treasures just won’t do it.

We need an elite who don’t think in terms of folklore, who are politically and financially independent. Where and how, and how many such people can appear and persevere here? Aren’t such names even in the most developed and richest European countries (let’s remember the Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter) also artificially marginalized? Georgi Markov saw real socialism in its entire spiritual and humane misery. He also, however, called the conscience of the West “a pile of shit”, such are his words literally. By which I mean to say that there’s been, for some time and beyond our borders as well, a deficiency of “an elite” who do not falsify dilemmas and are not servants to the status quo. Joseph Brodsky wrote it when he became an American citizen – the devil has taken on the image of money. The lost cultural insight is today’s global challenge. This challenge is to become ever more intense on the Bulgarian horizon too. Georgi Markov emancipated himself from the powers that be in his time and spoke out. His words still resound, even though some conveniently claim Markov is worn-out. We live in the circumstance of outright spiritual decadence accompanied by years of plunder. Freedom is dying right before our eyes.

Georgi Markov saw up close and personal the face of the mafia as a combination of official and illegal power. He publicly identified it and paid for it. How come one of the most European names has no published collected essays and compositions today? Why is he regularly passed over in silence and cast aside? Why is he not in schoolbooks? What’s more – his murder has no executors, no state to find out the truth, since Georgi Markov’s truth, in ten or more volumes, is supposedly stolen and hidden.

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Soon it will hardly be of such importance who killed him and who is vilifying and removing his name and work. Just as today it doesn’t matter that much who killed Hristo Botev, for example. It will become ever more fateful that it was Bulgaria that gave birth to him. When you reread Georgi Markov carefully, you understand words were his greatest hope and biggest comfort.

His words are not in the past, they are coming to us from the future now!

The commemoration including reading texts by Georgi Markov was held in Sofia’s “Vuzrazhdane” (Renaissance) theater. The dozens of attending fans and friends of the writer’s heard speeches delivered by Georgi Mishev, Antoaneta Voynikova (wife to Tsvetan Stoyanov), Svetlozar Igov, Georgi Grozdev.