site.btaRadoi Ralin: Lantern-Lit Journey 100 Years On

I remember seeing him occasionally in the streets of Sofia in the 1990s. Tall, largely-built, long grey hair and crescent beard. Large aquiline nose, irresistibly cartoonable. Dressed casually, not to say carelessly. Always in a skipper cap. Pacing deliberately. And talking - loudly - in a deep voice, with the soft accent of his native Sliven. Talking to himself, to good-looking women, to other total strangers, to bus drivers during a ride, and even to stray cats and dogs. Crazy? Not at all. Eccentric? On the face of it. Extraordinary? By all means.

With the benefit of hindsight, a striking resemblance comes to mind: Diogenes, the ancient Greek philosopher, who famously walked around, carrying a lantern in broad daylight and looking for “an honest man”.

Just like the Greek, Radoi Ralin used his simple lifestyle and behaviour to shed light on the flaws of a society that never lived up to his moral standards. Merciless to the people at the top, he was kind and forgiving to the underlings.

Lifelong Non-conformist

Born Dimitar Hadjivalchanov in Sliven (Southeastern Bulgaria) on April 23, 1922, he was adopted as a 40-day-old baby by the family of his mother’s brother, bookseller and printer Stefan Stoyanov, who gave him his surname. In his early teens, Dimitar found out about his adoption by accident and never recovered from this traumatic experience.

It even influenced the choice of his best known penname. As a secondary school pupil he signed his poems “Dimitar Radin”, using the forename of his biological mother, Rada, as a surname. Due to a misprint, this appeared as “Ralin” in a literary magazine. Meanwhile, prominent writer Elin Pelin suggested that he change the first part of his penname to avoid the jarring closeness of two “r” sounds. The young poet agreed and came up with “Radoi Ralin”, Radoi being the male version of Rada.

Non-conformism was his lifelong hallmark. At the tender age of 13, Dimitar Stoyanov got involved in the communist movement. In 1942 he was briefly arrested while studying law at Sofia University (he graduated in 1945). Even though he was granted a medical excuse from conscription, he joined the army to fight against Germany as a volunteer during WW II. Ralin was surveilled by the authorities both before and after the September 9, 1944 communist takeover in Bulgaria: before - for reading leftist poetry; after - because of his open dissent from the late 1940s onwards, when his euphoric enthusiasm about communism was soon dampened by the excesses of the Stalinist regime. Curiously, the communist State Security did not keep a file on him and did not try to recruit him - they obviously wrote him off as uncontrollable.

An incorrigible rebel, he was either fired or resigned from several editor positions at literary print media (most prominently at the satirical weekly Starshel). His works were suppressed and censored. He was left jobless for eight years and earned a living by translations. At the worst point of his fall into disfavour, he was about to be sent to a forced labour camp or into internal exile, but a BBC report claiming that he had already been punished forced the regime to cancel these plans just to prove wrong the “enemy radio station”.

His detractors tried to dismiss him as “pampered by the regime”, a “harmless jester”, a “safety valve” used to let out the steam of popular discontent. The truth is that his impeccable background as a resistance fighter and the immense authority he commanded with the Communist Party rank and file spared him harsher repression.

The only way the totalitarian authorities could counter his criticism was to spread the rumour that he was mad. In reality, though, “banging his head against a stonewall was near madness in the eyes of socialist philistines who’d rather carry on their petty existence,” says former Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov, a long-time friend of Ralin’s. “The civic courage that he projected largely encouraged all members of Bulgarian society, reassuring them that in this country, too, there were people bold enough to speak out the truth that Bulgarians so badly needed to hear.”

Pigtail Polemic

An ingenious punster, Ralin would effortlessly add, expand or destroy the sense of a word, invent an unexpected association by changing a single sound or syllable, or coin a unique hybrid word. He thus pushed the polemical potential of satirical exchange to the limit. Ralin pioneered or revived brief satirical genres: the epigram, the apostrophe, the aphorism, the parable.

As a satirist, he found every form of dictatorship and violence repugnant.

In 1968 Hot Peppers, a small book of epigrams written by Ralin and illustrated by cartoonist Boris Dimovsky, propelled the author’s popularity and infuriated the regime. The most scandalous item was entitled “Silent but Still Heard” and read: “You’ll have a full gut/If you keep your mouth shut”. It appeared beneath a cartoon of a pig whose tail bore an uncanny similarity to the signature of communist dictator Todor Zhivkov. Ironically, the authors did intend to mimic a signature, however it was not Zhivkov’s but that of a lower-ranking party functionary, Todor Pavlov. They were nevertheless accused of “gross sabotage” and purged. Half of the book’s 40,000 print run had sold out within a fortnight. The remaining half was seized and used to stoke the heating furnaces of a building where the party organs were edited and printed. In an ultimate irony, some half-burnt sheets flew out of the chimney and landed across the street in Sofia’s central park - then called Freedom Park.

Ralin’s next satire collection, Epigrams so Cute in Little Frames to Suit (1983), never even made it to the bookshops. It was literally imprisoned, as the whole printed quantity was locked in a building that previously housed the Sliven Prison.

The 140 pieces in Hot Peppers were actually adapted rhymed folk proverbs and sayings. Ralin’s own satirical works, so easy to perceive because of their brevity and resonance, naturally blended back into folklore - they were avidly copied by hand and circulated in countless versions, and many new ones appeared, ascribed to him. Inevitably, this phenomenon itself prompted an epigram (needless to say, of unknown authorship): “My people, cease this ploy/Write on, don’t sign it all ‘Radoi’.”

“Where Politics Starts, Art Ends”

Having said that, Ralin was never indifferent to politics. His caustic humour was far from disarming - on the contrary, it equipped Bulgarians with a survival tool in dead serious times. “Satire is entitled to a place under the sun but, more than that, to be an essential defensive power in human life,” he said. One of his most famous paradoxes reads: “I am not afraid of the Minister of Culture. I am afraid of the culture of the minister.”

Small wonder that he was among the founding members of the Club for Support of Glasnost and Perestroika in November 1988, that he was one of 12 leading Bulgarian dissidents invited to a famous breakfast with visiting President François Mitterrand at the French Ambassador’s Residence in Sofia on January 19, 1989, and that he co-founded Bulgaria’s main anti-communist alliance, the Union of Democratic Forces, at the end of 1989.

The democratic changes in Bulgaria, though, brought new hopes - and new disappointments to Ralin. Branded as a traitor by dogmatic Communists, he refused to stand for parliament and decided against joining any party. He preferred to keep his stature as opposition to any powerholders and a spokesman for the victims of the political transition, “the walking vigilant conscience of the nation,” in the words of historian Natalia Hristova.

The Material Is Immaterial

To Ralin, freedom was a paramount value. Under communism, he distanced himself from the majority of artists and intellectuals who enjoyed generous material privileges in exchange for extolling the regime. Under democracy, he consistently declined all honours, bonuses and cash rewards despite his meagre pension.

As he himself put it, his only wealth and “capital” was his circle of friends: poets Atanas Dalchev, Alexander Gerov and Nikola Furnadjiev, artist Iliya Beshkov, and historian Nikolay Genchev. He would not hesitate to abandon everything and occupy himself with the concerns and anguishes of others. He is remembered as a very kind and cordial person, socially sensitive, and a great communicator. Younger-generation poets Boris Hristov, Lyubomir Levchev, Vladimir Bashev, Nedyalko Yordanov and Konstantin Pavlov owe Ralin the discovery of their talent. Addressing an election campaign rally, he called for the flourishing of “our humanocracy”.

In spite of all persecutions, he was always in good spirits, singing and alert.

His son, journalist Kin Stoyanov, describes his father as “one of the most ardent admirers of women. He had romantic involvements until quite late in life but, being a fiercely independent person, he regarded even the most emotional affair as a sort of fetters.” Ralin and his wife divorced in 1961, soon after the birth of their second son, writer Stefan Stoyanov.

Creative Pursuits

Ralin’s scathing satire unfairly obscures the rest of his creative pursuits. He wrote “serious” poems, plays, scripts for feature films, documentaries and cartoons, an opera libretto, short and long stories and essays. Literary critic Bozhidar Kunchev describes his poetry as “an expression of his impulses, anxieties and illusions, reflecting the whole tense and dramatic time of his life.” He endeavoured to share his emotions stirred by the human predicament in a world of lies and coercion, seeking to make sense of a senseless reality around him.

Ralin translated poems by Pushkin, Goethe and Brecht, plays by Alarcon and Moliere, and satirical works by 100 authors. His own poems, epigrams and other writings have been translated into nearly 40 foreign languages.

His last book of poetry, Resurrections I Won’t Live to See, came out on July 21, 2004, the day on which he lost his battle with cancer.

On August 24, 2004, The Times of London ran a 1,197-word obituary for Ralin subtitled “Much-loved Bulgarian satirist who gave expression to his dissidence in epigrams, novels, poems and plays”. That was the most prominent feature about a Bulgarian in the entire history of the flagship of the British press.

Ralin’s life-size bronze statue stands in a small square bearing his name in Sofia, not far from the apartment building where he lived for 44 years. Young passers-by rarely miss the opportunity for a high five with his raised palm. The statue stands right on the pavement, without any pedestal. Down to earth, like the subject himself.

His lantern-lit journey is still on, 100 years after his birth.

 Radoi Ralin wrote all his works on an Erika manual typewriter which he bought on the money that his father paid him for helping in the bookshop during two summer holidays when he was 13. The typewriter is now on display at the Museum of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo. The satirist devised the motto of that unique institution: “The World Lasts Because It Laughs”