Following the awarding of the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ 2025 National Literary Prize for Bulgarian Novel of the Year, въпреки.com offered its readers a comprehensive article presenting the winning novel and its author, written by Rositza Chernokozheva and accompanied by photos by Stefan Markov. The Fund publishes it in full here.
Critical View: The Silences That Surround Us
This is an unusual book: unusual in subject, style, orthography, and messages. They entrance us from the very first lines and pages. A peculiar monologue and a narrative strangely imbued with passion and eroticism. With a naturalism close to the earth that we would crumble in our palm. Rositza Chernokozheva, a literary critic and psychoanalyst, wrote about the novel by Krasimir Dimovski (in the photo), ‘Theseus in his Labyrinth. Diary of a P’, Hermes Publishing House, 2024, awarded the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ 2025 National Literary Prize for Bulgarian Novel of the Year.
A naturalism that brings back down to earth the pretentiousness of the ‘scented and powdered’, patched-up sentences of another prose. It’s like finding yourself amid Chagall’s paintings. The hero looks at the dome of the little church and sees a woman straddling it, as if waiting for it to impregnate her. A crucified woman—a female Jesus. And from there on, all our perceptions and our lives are turned upside down—if life, as Krasimir Dimovski says, is masculine. Because, in this book, there is also the word ‘love’, but in the masculine gender. Is this masculinisation of feminine words not an attempt to master ‘our instinctual desires’ (the latter being Freud’s expression).
Above all are these silences. The opening lines set the philosophical, existential and God-like paraphrase: ‘But, Theseus proposes, the silences dispose. Those dense silences, from which we have all emerged crying and to which we then return, pursued by cries.’
Throughout the book, we frequently encounter this blending of odour, taste, sound, tactility. If we think about it, they really intertwine and intermix. A heroine in the novel says that words have a different smell and so a person’s breath is also different. Dimovski’s prose possesses such subtle nuances that enrich our perception of the world.
This novel by Dimovski received the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ 2025 National Literary Prize for Bulgarian Novel of the Year a few days ago (19 May) and is yet to be further evaluated. I do not favour comparisons between authors, but such tough yet fragrant prose was composed by classics such as Ivaylo Petrov and Yordan Radichkov. Petrov was a Dobrudzhan, and dried-up earth breathed in his prose; here, with Krasimir Dimovski, the fog between two mountains, Mogila and Mogilchitsa, creates these drowsy mornings. They are like Freudian daydreams and like the Shakespearean dawn in ‘King Lear’ with the witches’ prophecies.
The consciously exploited primitivism of the hero’s speech and actions corresponds in a peculiar way to his original logic and perception of the universe; or, as he calls it—‘priroditsa’ [nature-ess]. This primitivism, deliberately sought in the expression and narration, is not the primary ‘holy simplicity’ (sancta simplicitas), but a purity and unity at a higher point up the spiral. Here everything is simple, earthly, and welded together. As if, at first glance, these are two layers that do not meet—the essence of the main character and reality. They create a peculiar optic, one I should call bipolar, dual. Which in turn gives rise to a specific philosophy of the internal duel, but also two-in-oneness.
In his primacy, the protagonist is one of the possible options of creation. A man with a particularly vulnerable honour. This mental and existential labyrinth of Theseus is the quintessence of the world’s duality.
The novel’s alternating narratives also contribute to this duality. Strange essayistic parables about the universe and the planetary community run alongside the plot. This ambiguity and tension created by the parallel narrative—the description of different planets—about what is happening in another, unearthly dimension and aliens, brings an even more enigmatic quality to the text. Throughout the development of the story, there is a mystery that we may understand only at the end, where even matter and antimatter will be discussed.
Another layer in Dimovski’s narrative poetics is a delicately implied, humorous nuance that invariably accompanies the hero’s speech and actions. And a meaningful, but overpowering self-irony, revealing the innate natural intelligence of the hero: ‘истилигентност’ [a blending of truth and intelligence], as he understood it for himself.
Dimovski creates a polyphonic novel, where the word ‘dozlo’ [good-evil] bequeathed by the protagonist‘s father comes to show us that good does not combine with good, or evil with evil, but good and evil mix and occur together. His hero will pose many questions about the way we rush to save people, without even knowing if they want to be saved. Perhaps they want to stay there in the ‘good-evil’? Perhaps Theseus too may want to wander in his own labyrinth? And perhaps, most importantly: can we rescue the wicked through love?
A quotation generally attributed to Freud claims that: ‘Man, in both good and evil, is capable of more than he thinks.’
The main character—this young man, nescient of letters and the word, so for whom reading is not his forte, can, for example, discourse at length for over for more than a page on how every different animal dies under his seven knives, which are perhaps his entire bequeathal and possessions. Then he will say: ‘Only a deer sheds tears.’ And, as if in passing, as something not particularly important, he will add: ‘While a man cries about anything.’
In Dimovski’s prose, there are no important or unimportant expressions. Here, every sentence, although not necessarily expressed according to orthoepic and orthographic rules, tells us something significant. It says something taken from real life, something that we have experienced, but could not vest in such words. In the text, we encounter expressions that would never have occurred to us to sense—nonsensical, neologisms, oxymorons: ‘A crowing pierced my languor and I jumped’; ‘To such an extent had he come to hate her that he could no longer live without her’; or ‘Goodness is a disease; you must treat it. Although they have not yet invented a cure for this disease’.
The speech of this supposedly illiterate man sounds wise, like maxims: ‘Every man ticks along to his own time, but when you are in some kind of anxiety, you tick like a Geiger counter… and why did they invent a clock to measure our common time…’. Or: ‘Fear rejuvenates, I say to myself. The frightened one begins to look like a kid. As soon as the apocalypse comes, all of humankind will return to childhood a moment before dying. And that’s some consolation…’
On birth and life, Theseus has the following ironic philosophy: ‘They pull you into this world by force and then they force you back in again—you’ve only just got used to it. Enter, exit! It will turn out, then, that the one who commands us from above is like a company sergeant major.’
I quote Dimovski at length, so that the power of his word may be felt. That is why I say that, with his virginal mind and body, the main character is closest to childhood when, most of the time, we are in the Unconsciousness. Above all hovers a kind of love of mankind that transcends loneliness.
This book is also rewarding from a psychoanalytic perspective, for, throughout the story, it is our libidinal invocations that are our driving force. Even the fact that there is a girl with a violin here is an opportunity to interpret the way these manifestations sublimate into art. How this girl, with a God-given gift, can sing and play everything: the sound of the sea, a mother’s weeping, the meowing of the cats hanged by the evildoer. It is no coincidence that the girl is called Ariadne.
There are magnificent, erotically coloured scenes in the novel that are equal in power to an Italian neorealistic film. We shall discover another thread in this world, simultaneously harsh and tender—how tenderness is in many cases silent, not needing many words; and yet we carry it in our hearts.
This book of Krasimir Dimovski’s is indeed strange. It enchants and exhilarates with its ideas, stylistics, and lexis. One falls into a world of real and unreal, which obsesses and sweeps one away, as if running amok. If in the first part, the action unfolds in his native valley, while, later, the plot moves to Germany. Theseus will refer to Goethe and ‘Faust’, and to Beethoven and the Ninth Symphony, as information. Everything native and foreign will elevate readers to some timeless, cosmic sensations that will again direct them to Chagall’s flying people.
Urges, passion, psychic constitution and wicked inclination will unite in a single cry, from fear or passion. Again, this is the sublimation of our libidinal raids through the art of the violin-playing Aria(d)na, also known as Pagane. As will become clear in a moment, her Diary is written only in notes. Dimovski talentedly masters the combination of exoticism and psychologism in an unconventional novel.
Pagane, who—wherever she goes, whoever she meets—illuminates with her vicious, voluptuous, but also, in her own way, lofty rosiness, leaving behind a scorching love.
Here, Freud again comes to our aid. The ending of his study on femininity is also a faithful conclusion to my text. Freud admitted that even at the end of his life he had not learned what female nature was. This is how he put it, somewhat ironically: ‘If you want to know more about femininity, enquire about your own experiences of life, or turn to poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information.’
Krasimir Dimovski proffers a novel that enriches with even more fresh senses, giving us new knowledge about the labyrinths of the human soul, about good and evil, and making us more human.
Text: Rositza Chernokozheva
In 2023, at the 10th edition of the Portal Culture Awards, Krasimir Dimovski won Second Prize in the Fiction Category for ‘The Mermaid Hunter’ (Hermes, 2022) for ‘the power of artistic suggestion in which his trilogy about love and rage is immersed in the ‘big time’ of the story’.
Thirty-three novels, all published in 2024, were submitted to the 2025 competition for Bulgarian Novel of the Year, organised by the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund. Unlike previous occasions, after a change in the status of the award, the jury was announced in advance. Chaired by Acad. Vladimir Zarev; with members Prof. Valeri Stefanov, DPhil; Zdravka Evtimova; Assoc. Prof. Ani Burova, DPhil; and Assoc. Prof. Maurice Fadel, DSc., it selected six nominees and their novels (listed below in alphabetical order of the authors). The въпреки.com website has published articles and features on most of them.
‘You, My Likeness’, by Radoslav Bimbalov, Ciela Norma AD;
‘Theseus in His Labyrinth. The Diary of a P’, by Krasimir Dimovski, Hermes Publishing House;
‘The Gardener and Death’, by Georgi Gospodinov, Janet-45 Print and Publishing;
‘Tangerines at Marienplatz’, by Tea Moneva, Janet-45 Print and Publishing;
‘Lateral Lighting’, by Yuriy Rahnev, Janet-45 Print and Publishing;
‘Murder on Stamboliyski Boulevard’, by Chavdar Tsenov, RIVA Publishers.
The ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund awards the annual prize with the aim of supporting, promoting and stimulating the development of Bulgarian fiction. The literary contest was set up in 2011 on the initiative of Prof. Grady Assa, the then executive director of the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, and artist and lecturer at the National Academy of Arts.
въпреки.com
Photos by Stefan Markov
Translated by Nigrita Davies