Gencho Stoev in the preface to God’s Crumbs


Georgi Grozdev is an interesting phenomenon on the Bulgarian literary scene. Even as a young journalist he succeeded in breaking the canon of the totalitarian editions. Thus for instance, in the Pogled, a newspaper of the Bulgarian Journalists’ Union, his persistence gave birth to the only at the time eccentrically rebellious column, “Uninvited Thoughts”. Even then a flock of rebellious pens gathered around him to tell the public what they could not tell anywhere else. We have been friends since then; I have written for the column more than 30 times; and it was more for the sake of Grozdev’s personality, than for the sake of the newspaper itself.
During the years of change he established his own publishing house, Balkani, and continued to select interesting texts and people around himself. When the Bulgarian book market was drowned in the cheap subculture of the rich countries, and when native book publishing was believed to be agonizing, he ventured into a noble and daring enterprise of publishing a series of newly-born Bulgarian works. The series became known as the “White Library” and all worthy writers wished to partake in it. There is no other act like that in Bulgaria. Thus he made his copper coins gold.
Undoubtedly, in order to gather people around yourself you need to have the necessary magnetism; besides, writers are a fastidious tribe: they would not gather around a person they do not recognize as one of kin. Yes, undoubtedly Georgi Grozdev has the well-tried blood of the writers’ clan. He has already proven it with a few collections of good stories, some of which are included in the book.
His subjects come from several directions. For instance, we will see the humble man, confused at the crossroads of two epochs, searching for his new place before the social quakes have calmed down. We will see the hero, wandering the Balkan countries, led by the thirst for new human spaces (the author himself has traveled over the peninsular with the dream of publishing a multilingual magazine, Balkans. Some issues have remained, as well as much experience, much love to share.) There is another, third source of inspiration: nature. The land of the hunter, the man with the rifle. And if in the first two directions he is one of the pioneers, with all the problems and risks of path-makers, in the third case, the hunting plots, the author develops and works on an old tradition in the Bulgarian literature.
I can already see the Greek reader, who is yet to turn these mature pages. He will be transported to the beautiful Bulgarian forests, rivers and lakes, he will feel how full of life they are – passionate, subdued, resonant, vivid – perceived through the strong, primary senses of the wandering man, the man with the rifle… Here is one of my biggest joys: he pretends to be fierce but he smiles gratefully when the shot misses the duck! It seems to me he does not wander to kill but to sing the victory of life, the beauty of life. This is not the man hunting for meat; this is the pantheist essayist, landed in the bosom of his temple.
So let these words introduce one more Bulgarian to the Greek readers and they may find him a kindred spirit.

Gencho Stoev, 77, is the first winner of the big all-Balkan literary award Hemus, the Balkan Nobel Prize, presented to him by the Minister of Culture of Greece personally on December 16, 2000 in Thessalonike, for his novel The Price of Gold.