In his favorite January eight years ago, Radichkov sighed and breathed his last. It flew up the invisible chimney like a flame, like the soul of a flame that has found its smoking spirit. It flew to our space haven.
It’s January. The favorite month of the good magician Radichkov. Not only because he wrote “January” on the frozen window of Bulgarian drama with his prophetic pointer, but because his verbal drawings and frozen letters are divine particles with which he evokes the strangest memories in our country.
For example, for those dark, inky mornings cut by the glare of the roaring mouth of the stove, the smell of pine kindling and the scents wafting over the pot of giddy milk. Sleep still kisses your eyelashes, but your eyes are already a nose’s distance from the icy patterns of Grandma Winter, who at night painted them on the glass above your bed.
The domestic cats read the hieroglyphs of the city sparrows, the chain of our yard dog tugs, the feathered rooster cuts the winter bed of silence, the dead go to bed, and the living get up from their beds. And what we call life begins to warm. To make noise, to stomp, to moan, to bleat. A baby cries, a man coughs, my grandmother ties her black scarf.
Tenets in the saivan quietly watches, camels in the attic coo like doves and make love in love, the cats are tame, the ax will play, in the spring the wedding is coming.
Lord, he who has not read Radichkov was born in vain. A Bulgarian was born in vain. During his beloved January, Radichkov sighed and breathed his last. It flew up the invisible chimney like a flame, like the soul of a flame that has found its smoking spirit. It flew to our space haven.
Now, without him, it is cold in our literary abode. Let’s find out about it.
He who has never learned from Radichkov does not know what God is.
Life is accumulating snow. Making snowmen. A game, an unconscious game, in image and likeness. After every snowman, something remains. Something small. Something small and sad. Something like extinguished coals – the eyes of a melted person.
And after the Writer of Snow Tales, there remains the living fire in the cabin of the soul, the crackling of logs in the stove, the low murmur of the enameled teapot, a silent, tall vessel called a tumbler, the sanctity of the ashes we will turn into to return to the dirt, the soot, in which the house devils hide…
He who does not know how to think Radichkov, how to keep it quiet, he does not know how to pray, how to be still, he does not know what enlightenment or forgiveness is. He knows nothing.
Radichkov is a secret. The secret soul of a Bulgarian. This soul has seen a living lone diva, heard the strums of the lone diva dance, the beat of the drum, and the dance of the lone diva maidens, dressed in chenar shirts, circling the full moon.
Radichkov’s secret is immortal. Only the living prophet is mortal…
The mortal prophet
Rumen Leonidov
He was not a noisy person and did not like noise. Especially around his name – anniversaries, celebrations, holiday shows, public and non-public intrusion, he didn’t want to be at the epicenter of verbal storms in glasses of media water… He had gently but firmly stepped on the tail of his own white vanity and as much as she she chirped and begged him to let her go, to walk among the big rat-like vanities that had slipped into the bustle of the capital, Radichkov kept her close to him. And she, at least for me, remained invisible, disembodied, absent, non-existent until his last breath…
His modesty was matched only by the wisdom of a man much loved and capable of much love. The love of his readers was enough like a loaf of bread and a glass of spring water. Once on the street I met an unknown woman who asked me how her beloved writer Radichkov was doing, she heard that he was not well. She didn’t know him personally, but she wanted to know if he was recovering from another life-threatening illness. I answered her something vague, I am ashamed to lie to her, he was not well at all, but I told her – I believe that God is not disgusted by all Bulgarians and will not punish us all. And those of us who love Radichkov, taking him away without time… The woman looked at me with bright eyes and whispered, looking straight into my pupils: “Every night before I go to sleep I pray to him! May the prayers help him!” “They help, they help, I know they help!” I told her and walked away.
I told him this incident, and he quietly smiled to himself, and in his incredible eyes shone the flame of his kind and noble soul. In order to leave him alone with what he heard and to get him out of his discomfort – to break the sanctity of our silence, I continued to think aloud in front of him: “Imagine, Mr. Radichkov, without even suspecting, how much positive energy every evening people send to you. And turning with pure words to the Supremacy of the Universe, their love is reflected in the Most High and returns as a benevolent thought in your dream, in you…”
This happened a long time before January 21, 2004, when the soul of Yordan Radichkov flew away into the simplicity of God… In this reincarnation, she had completed her mission – the Bulgarian nation received a huge gift not made by hands, which will give it a path and light through the coming years of suffering, wandering, moral decay and longing for unity… Bulgaria lost a very extraordinary Bulgarian, who is born once every 100 years, but he forever left her a huge fortune – he bequeathed her his world fame. He made Bulgaria a country of the spirit and already ranked next to its most readable sons – educators, awakeners, revivalists…
Not only in the name itself – Jordan – there is something biblical. It was also there in his demeanor of a mere mortal prophet, in the recognized natural presence. The wisdom of an icon and the light of a living lamp radiated from his anxious bird’s eyes – quivering and warm, curious and remembering, knowing and helpless.
He loved the extraordinary in ordinary people, he preferred Cheshits, because he himself was an exceptional Cheshit – he looked at the world through the iris of the ironic, of the incomprehensible. His writing logic seemed absurd to us, because he possessed the secret of paradox, the magic of parable, and he himself was an exquisite allegory.
And absorbed the world with the wonder of a child. He had respect for the oddities of life and studied it in his own way, not from the school primer, but from the gunpowder primer of the time. It is strange that he did not write anything down, did not keep notes, notes, diaries – everything he needed, he left forever in the living hive of consciousness. But as soon as he needed a bell, he woke up the necessary, gentle and priceless bee.
I didn’t bother him until the end to correct mankind’s spelling mistakes – the longest sentence the Creator ever composed. And in his haste he missed the punctuation marks, those tracks on the snow from the paws of the carnivores and the other footprints, from the step of the sparrows, also creatures of God.
In recent years, Radichkov spoke with his silence, called only when asked, sparingly drained the already devalued words of our language. In which concepts such as good, readable, cordial, dignified, respectable seemed to completely disappear and other, hostile words, foreign ideas and contrary concepts took their place, which did not scare him personally, but insulted him to the point of silence.
Now, a long time since we laid his sparrow body in the mortuary, we cannot help but tell him that we, together with his sparrows, grieve, terribly grieve, that we are even more orphaned in the emptiness of the city and in the depopulation of the countryside. Because there are neither warm chimneys nor crumbs on the windowsills. Because people hate each other here. And their hatred is the fire on which they warm the oily tenderness of their tired everyday life.
His feathered troupe, called “We Sparrows,” who have circled the globe like the “Little Prince” created by the aviator Exupery, have reached as far as the Great Wall of China, while we here chirp aloud phrases from his readings and chase the stray wandering words barking on the citizens as the unprofitable friends of man.
Yordan Radichkov was undoubtedly the most magical magician in our literature. He made readers in the four corners of the world read it with undisguised admiration in their native, diverse and multiracial languages.
Only the Nobel committee didn’t understand it, even when they recited it in Swedish. Although we, as a nation, as our pride and inferiority complex, needed this unfulfilled token reward more than his blessed being, who outlived all vanity, all material realm…
As long as there are many Bulgarians, the name of this kind person will flicker in our national memory with the own light of a small, modest, but unique Bulgarian church… Which, however, is more valuable than the largest iconographic church.
I am sure that the spirit of Yordan Radichkov has taken his assigned place of honor next to the throne of the Holy Father.
If God is still available.
In the last few years, Radichkov has closely resembled Dante Alighieri. But in an improved version – the stranger from the Turlak country did not lead his readers to hell, to purgatory and heaven, but untied the balloon of their dream of freedom, made an attempt to fly, suggested to the Bulgarian how to rise above himself, helped him to seen from a bird’s eye view, opened his eyes to the sky and to the other constellations in the other distant skies above the planet. The audience enjoyed him without fully understanding it, because they felt that they were flying, that Radichkov was giving them the opportunity to elevate themselves. But the audience was not destined to do it, it was not ready for such a breakthrough in its consciousness. And in his life behavior.
For a long time the soul of Bai Jordan was sick. He was not enjoying life. He bit nothing but clean water, pecking at one or another crumb like a tired and very lonely big sparrow. And it quietly went out, it went out almost like a candle whose owner has already left, and the philosophy of the wick continues to shine… In that flame playing in his eyes was reflected all the ardor of the world’s good, conceived for the tomorrow of humanity… I was incredibly lucky to be one of his younger friends. And he entered not only my life, but also my silent prayers that I said to myself in the evening for health before falling asleep.
I don’t seem to have prayed earnestly and hard enough. Or simply the soul of Radichkova also prayed – for peace… And the Lord heard and moved his request with priority. He flew away as a writer accomplished to the top of his essence, a rare specimen, a unique poet in our prose and drama, a poet who did not write poems, but narrated them in such a way that his words dripped with honey, milk and dew, oil and myrrh… Radichkov is not just a popular writer, a popular teacher of love and mercy, of ferocious moods, but also a preacher on the additions to the Law for the Protection of Kindness!
There is hardly an entire Bulgarian home in which at least his book “We, the sparrows” has not landed. If you leaf through its unusual worlds again, you will feel how your soul, with rolled up legs, will hesitantly step into the stream of tranquility and timidly begin to look at itself in the watery mirror of memory. And he will start looking for colorful river pebbles on its bottom. And finally, quite like a child, he will squat down to pick and collect them.
This is exactly what is called full communion between creator and creation. There’s no action, psycho or showmanship here – but there is the mortal prophet. In his enchanting lyrics, he smoothly introduces us to his evenly breathing world and examines it in the most detailed way through the magnifying glass of his heart. He looks at it and tells it to us – by magnifying the tiny things so that we see, not to remain blind to them, but seeing also the invisible.
The sage lived through the elegy of causeless grief, especially inexplicable to those who rarely grieve. Close your eyes and look sideways through the pupils of the present, aren’t we just like those frogs of his trying to cross the highway of life without getting run over by a huge jeep? Is this the direction to our healing and redemption? Remember and read again the purifying readings of our mortal prophet. Because the shadow of our little life can also be big…
#read #Radichkov #born #vain..
