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.