by DIMITER KENAROV
Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov (1929-1978). PHOTO/Wikipedia
Nine years later, Georgi was dead. A dissident writer and radio journalist living in London whose weekly broadcast, In Absentia: Reports About Bulgaria, had gained a dedicated following in his native land, Markov was assassinated in broad daylight, shot in the thigh with a miniature poisonous pellet by an agent of the Bulgarian State Security Service (SSS). At the time, it was assumed that the murder weapon had been a modified umbrella gun, and the case became known worldwide as “the Bulgarian Umbrella.” It was one of the most lurid and mysterious assassinations of the Cold War era.
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Beneath the patina of public success and official recognition, Markov always maintained a critical stance. The thread running through much of his early fiction, including Men, is the moral conflict between the idealistic, conscientious person—“the true communist”—and the indifferent, inefficient, corrupt system, which tries to mask its flaws behind the cant of communist ideology. But the system itself is never at fault; rather, failure is presented as an aberration, the product of wayward individual irresponsibility and petty—often still bourgeois—personal ambition overriding the public interest. In Men, Ivan, a skilled engineer and committed communist, tries to reform his institute by standing up to its incompetent management: “I believe in our time, with all of its faults,” he declares. It was an attitude prevalent among many of the progressive writers in the Soviet bloc—most notably, the East German novelist Christa Wolf, an exact contemporary of Markov’s, whose heroes and heroines staunchly persevere in their socialist beliefs in spite of all.
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It was a delicate balancing act involving a lot of compromise. Officially, there was no censorship in Bulgaria, no single bureau or bureaucrat responsible for enforcing the party line—yet writers had to tread lightly and engage in subtle forms of self-censorship. In Markov’s early fiction, though his prose is never careless or clichéd, the plots often seem contrived, and the characters rarely rise above their socialist-realist types. As Markov wrote several years after leaving Bulgaria: “We had to, figuratively speaking, mutilate our characters—the receptacles of our ideas—by pulling their teeth out, clipping their nails, cutting their hair, poking out their eyes, and all too often removing their brains as well, so that they could begin resembling creatures acceptable to the Party.” The socialist hero was “a clinical idiot…the rejection of everything human.” Despite Markov’s best efforts, the ideological demands of the regime were gradually corrupting his literary ambitions.
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