/ world today news/ In the last week of 2015, in the excitement of the big holidays – Christmas and New Year and along with the epic stories about the heroic Bulgarian DPS and about the patriotism of its great leader, the date December 25, 1848 – the date of birth (according to old style) of Bulgaria’s only universally recognized genius – poetically and politically – Hristo Botev, disoriented by age-old clichés and timeless ideologies, finally buried by the neoliberal panacea for the end of history.
On this particular occasion – a few abstract reflections against oblivion
FOR BOTEV – BEYOND THE CONCEPTUAL
In Botev’s poetry, journalism and life, with all the clarity and visibility as in the palm of his hand, for everything said and done by him, both with his mind and with his senses, one touches something incomprehensible, something incomprehensible, something perhaps unknowable at all, but powerfully irremovable.
All labels of Botev and his poetry, apart from their own approximation to the Botev phenomenon, continuously and insistently prove their impossibility to fully encompass Botev; they all tell some truth, which is never the whole truth, especially in terms of his axiology, where it is simply a lie.
Botev in everything is contrary to everything we think of him.
A revivalist, who would dare to claim that he is expressive with the revivalist?
Having abandoned poetry, family and life for the Bulgarian, who will not admit that in poetry, family and life, he did not hate anything more than the Bulgarian, as it was?
That is, the unworthy, that is, the slavish.
Now, when some self-styled teachers want to teach us to give up our slavery to be free in our current senselessness, only we feel deep down why we cannot do it.
Because we will lose Botev in that over-meaning of his words, his actions and his whole life, just as we would also lose Levski in his sanctity, just as we would lose dozens of our lesser, but no less worthy, predecessors who invested themselves in the ideal Bulgaria.
Like we’ll probably lose everything we’re still for.
In Botev’s poetry and journalism out of context, he could be perceived as a commoner, even naive, while our reason in the sense of his words is shaken by insights into transparent, even ghostly depths that take your breath away as if before the unknown.
And these are not the words at all, but some kind of atavism of ours, some kind of foreword – howl.
The gigantic cry of the Bulgarian soul, born in eternal silence and dying in our eternal silence.
I am sure that people born in Bulgaria who learned the language as natives would not understand this.
Neither the Armenian, nor the Jew, nor the Turk.
Even we ourselves – we most often do not hear it, and when we hear it – we are speechless.
Otherwise, in the songs and words left by Botev, there is a layer of obsolescence related to the vocabulary of the language. And this confuses today’s reader even more, especially if he feels underneath that every thought is today’s thought, every idea – today’s idea and every feeling the strongest expression of feelings of today’s man.
Really – how is it possible, how was it possible in that – as we think – simplified, not yet developed, but transparently comprehensible, language of ours at that time to express such profound, so imperceptible soul movements!
This man seems to have lived in some value system of his own; some new axiology, which even today we have not yet reached, and if we follow it for a century and a half in vain without understanding it, perhaps it will remain inaccessible to us.
When I say a new axiology, I mean not the continuation of those values that the Renaissance realized and created – the coming out of the shell of personal virtue of the Christian type, the development of the sense of obligation to others as the supreme expression of responsibility to oneself, the transition from a sense of family to a sense of country and people and the inner readiness to risk one’s life for them….
All these virtues, which are the face of the Revival and are magnificently expressed in the poetry of ordinary poets such as Slaveykov and Chintulov, and in the prose of Drumev and Karavelov, and in the texts of the revivalists in general. they cannot describe either life or journalism, and even less Botev’s poetry.
In Botev’s life, in Botev’s journalism, and especially in his poetry, values that are of a categorically different order are embedded. And the misunderstanding of this order has created disorder, excesses, scandals around his name for nearly one hundred and forty years.
The botanic ambiguity is constantly labeled to be explained; he was at first for the moderate public opinion (i.e. for the normal of his time) a scandalmonger and an atheist, even a thief, then a nihilist, then a socialist and finally even the founder of the communist idea in Bulgaria, as he is in our neo-liberal time “poet of panic”, “narcissistic Botev”, whose poetry is obsessed with “narcissistic pleasure” and other profaneness of pseudo-Freudian thinking, elevated to an absolute.
Among his commentators, Botev now becomes an icon, then a vagabond, a “narcissist or a panicked subject”, and among the most mediocre “an unconscious subject”, who, instead of sitting in his study and weaving his pearly poetry, performs the first grandiose in Europe , a terrorist act.
The truth about Botev has so far been achieved more by writers and poets than by critics and commentators.
Zahariy Stoyanov is closer to this truth than Dimitar Blagoev and Dr. Krastev, not to mention Georgi Bakalov and Todor Pavlov.
Even Boyan Penev and Vladimir Vassilev reduce their brilliant insights to one labeled and schematized Botev.
Without being able to wrap around the Botev phenomenon, it is at least possible to see that it should not be derived either from Renaissance axiology, or from post-liberation pragmatics, or from today’s New Age skepticism – even less from our current sheepish despair.
What is categorically different in Botev’s axeology is that his values are not built upon, nor are they embedded, in anyone else’s revival or Russian-anarchist or bourgeois-liberal, but are opposed to all others precisely as personal values, as values in which personality is a supreme value, but not indifferent and irresponsible – quite the opposite! -to the social and national burdens of others.
In Botev, even God is not the clichéd image of centuries, but the inner God, torn out and yet related to the clichéd idea that power is not only a necessity of a higher order, but also crime and violence.
And so on, and so on…
Botev’s poetry is like lightning in the world’s poetic sky for one who can read it in the post-sensual.
Vazov, to whom we owe the iconostasis of Bulgarian awareness and who in the “Epic of the Forgotten” seems to have surpassed himself in depicting the sacred, did not allocate a place for Botev there.
It has been asked many times why.
Actually a redundant question. Vazov knew very well why. Built for the ideal, bowing to the heroic in man, he is
wrote the march-hymn “Silent White Danube”.
And this is one of the most beautiful, and most Bulgarian, Bulgarian songs about the self-sacrificing proud march of men who go to death as if at a wedding.
Some idiots in the new times called the seizure of Radetsky a terrorist act despite the blinding openness, solemnity and ostentatiousness of the action: – with the message to the European powers, with the peaceful disembarkation from the ship, with everything that won the amazement and admiration of the captain and sailors.
The national television, called Bulgarian, then publicized this idiocy and itself went into tune with it, at least in relation to those who manage it with taxpayers’ money.
Vazov himself expressed in a hymn-march only what he understood. He did the same in his other poem about Botev “He does not die”.
Vazov never reached for the incomprehensible, the otherworldly in Botev, for what is not for the crowds, or for the narrow intellectual chests and the croaking souls inside them.
And which only Zaharii Stoyanov touched in all our literature (albeit quite superficially) with his genius shepherd’s audacity and unfathomable simplicity.
Today we have no opportunity to make an icon out of Botev, behind which to hide our today’s and yesterday’s soulless nothingness.
But we shall have no chance of removing him from our lives until we are gone, while we are here with all his and with that love curse of his, which we never understand for a hundred and fifty years:
“I don’t have a sweetheart anymore,
and viy – viy ste idioti.”
What we can only do (yesterday and today) is to be constantly aware:
ours, he was not one of us.
#Botev #comprehension
