In late 1968, a post office in Sofia, Bulgaria, was swamped with bunches of flowers, envelopes containing small amounts of money and parcels of fruit, nuts, beans and sausages. A rumour had gone round saying that the poet, satirist and playwright Radoi Ralin had been dismissed and was, in good romantic tradition, starving in a garret. He wasn’t. During the Second World War he had fought against the pro-German Government and therefore as “an active fighter against Fascism” enjoyed a reasonable pension. But the incident proved Ralin’s popularity. And he had been dismissed from his post as ditor of the Bulgarian Writers publishing house. He was also confined to house arrest and, for a short period, was exiled to the northern town of Silistra.
The reason for these punishments was Hot Peppers, a small book of epigrams. Ralin was a man of many talents but his epigrams were perhaps his most accessible accomplishment, his most famous probably being, “I am not afraid of the Minister of Culture. I’m afraid of the culture of the minister.”
Hot Peppers was illustrated by his fellow satirist Boris Dimovsky. The epigrams were stingingly critical: “One for all! All for one! You pour the wine — I’ll drink it down” and “If your policy is honesty, your life won’t be easy” are only two examples, but what really caught the public’s attention was “Silent but still heard! You’ll have a full gut , If you keep your mouth shut”, which appeared beneath a cartoon of a pig whose tail bore an uncanny similarity to the signature of the Communist Party boss Todor Zhivkov. The book was due to be published in two tranches of 20,000 each but before the second could appear the police had intervened and confiscated and then burnt the second batch in the publishing house’s furnace, though it was said that pupils from a nearby school reconstructed copies of the work from semi-destroyed pages and then sold the result on the black market where it commanded high prices.
This was not the first time Ralin had displeased the authorities, but 1968 was a dangerous year for dissidents, especially for those, like Ralin, who had close connections with Czechoslovakia. In 1961 he had been dismissed from the satirical weekly Sturshel (Hornet). His offence on this occasion was a play, Improvisation, written with Valeri Petrov. The play was an allegory on the “thaw” in literature brought about by Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and by Zhivkov in Bulgaria. It featured an Eskimo who heard a voice shouting that spring had arrived, and that he should come out of his igloo. When he did he was battered by snow, storms and cold and therefore retreated to where he had come from. This happened a number of times until finally the Eskimo ceased to believe the siren voice calling him to a better future, and when spring finally did arrive he remained in his igloo.
In the words of one critic the play “was an encyclopaedia of dissent and did much harm to (Communist) Party conservatives.” It ran for two years with alterations to the script that were so frequent and rapid that the play almost became a revue. It was closed after Zhivkov had followed his Kremlin master and ended the cultural thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s. By then, however, Ralin was firmly established in the eye of the intelligentsia as a leading poet, playwright, screenwriter and satirist. He was to remain there until the end of his life.
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Radoi Ralin, whose real name was Dimitar Stefanov Stoyanov, was born in Sliven, some 190 miles east of Sofia, in 1923. He came from a literary and artistic background, his father being the owner of the Modern Art printing house and bookshop in Sliven. He was educated in local schools and even in the 1930s began writing poetry and film scripts. In 1941 he founded a newspaper, Anti- Fascist Bulletin, for which the authorities jailed him for a short period.
By 1944 he was in the Army and, after Bulgaria had switched sides, fought against the Germans in Yugoslavia and Hungary. He used his experiences as the basis of Soldier’s Notebook, a volume of poetry published in 1955. He graduated with a law degree from Sofia University in 1946 and, after working with the Youth Brigade Movement in Yugoslavia in the following year, went back to Sliven where he became head of the agitation and propaganda d epartment of the local branch of the Fatherland Front, the communist-dominated umbrella group that controlled all political and cultural activity. He also studied Czech language and literature and from 1949 to 1950 was in Czechoslovakia where he came to know many of the intellectuals who came to prominence before and during 1968.
Ralin was by nature a nonconformist and if he had been a fighter against Fascism he was never a pliable tool of the communists. He belonged to the “Second World War radicals” who used their art to push criticism to the limit of — and sometimes beyond — what the party would tolerate. Ralin served in various editorial posts, most notably that of editor of Sturshel from 1952 to 1961.
In addition to being a playwright he was also active in the theatre world and was a co-founder of Sofia’s Satirical Theatre in 1953. In addition to plays and poetry he wrote many novels and his work has been translated into 37 languages. He himself translated Pushkin, Goethe and Molière into Bulgarian. He wrote the scripts for many films, particularly after 1976 when he worked for Bulgarian Cinematography.
He was reported as saying that “where politics starts, art ends” and he was therefore sceptical of political honours but was nevertheless a recipient of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1973), the Georgi Kirkov National Award for Literature (1981) and the Order of Georgi Dimitrov (1983).
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Nevertheless, Ralin was not politically inert. In January 1989 the French President François Mitterrand paid a visit to Sofia and organised a breakfast with leading intellectuals in the French Embassy. Ralin was a natural choice and at the end of that year, when Zhivkov finally resigned, he was co-founder of the Union of Democratic Forces, which became the main anti-communist alliance in Bulgaria. The other founder was Zhel yu Zhelev, a philosopher who was President of the country from 1990 to 1996.
After the collapse of the totalitarian regime Ralin was urged a number of times to stand for parliament, but he always refused. He preferred to continue criticising from without and in the 1990s became a powerful spokesman for those whom he regarded as the victims of the political transition, particularly pensioners. He refused any preferment or decoration from the post-communist regimes and continued to live as an ordinary citizen of Sofia where his austere, bearded figure was frequently seen on trams and buses, usually talking volubly and loudly to himself or to total strangers, particularly young women.
He is survived by his two sons.
Radoi Ralin, poet and dissident, was born on April 22, 1923. He died on July 21, 2004, aged 81.