Yet the 1960s saw the first breakthrough into modernity in Bulgaria at a time fraught with ideological mythology. 1967 saw the release of works like Peaks by Konstantin Konstantinov, Fragments by Atanas Dalchev and Wild Tales by Nikolay Haitov. A breakthrough that did not go unnoticed. Reviews of the Wild Tales describe the collection as imparting an “overpowering and heady vibrancy”, an “unsuppressed Bulgarian spirit, a “deep and compelling purity.”

When Nikolay Haitov took his first steps in literature it was more by force of circumstance than anything else. He was a trained forest engineer. Having been dismissed from work for breach of discipline and expelled from the communist party, sentenced to 8 years of solitary confinement, a sentence that was only repealed after two years of appeals, he had to find a way to put food on the table. He started out with articles and features then came his first short story, his second and third… The idea underlying his best-loved book took years to mature. It first appeared in his diaries in 1960: “I came up with a “production plan”… “Rhodope legends”. Short stories after the fashion of Yovkov’s Balkan Legends, though not as good (Yordan Yovkov is a classic of Bulgarian literature). I haven’t thought the legends through yet – there must be something that is legendary in them – love or a satanic power, or a heroic deed done for the sake of the children.”

But how did the author create his masterpiece? Here is Nikoay Haitov himself telling the story, a recording from the Bulgarian National Radio Golden Fund audio archives:

“This is the way I work: when I am on my travels I talk to people about different things that have happened there, about different events. Especially with the village monographs I have written – about the village where I was born, about the monastery, about Smolyan. Events and happenings I have caught snatches of here and there. I put them down in a notebook and then leave them be. I don’t touch them – one year, two years, three. But there are things I have recorded that come back to haunt me. Obviously there is some kind of energy in them. And little by little that is what gives me the emotional push. I get my imagination going, thinking them over, putting them in order, arranging them, looking for an ending, for a meaning. And so in time the story takes shape, writing it down is then a matter of 5-6 days. It took me five months to write the collection Wild Tales. But these stories were churning in my heart and my mind long before that. Writing them down is a matter of technicality. This is how I write – something from the outside touches me, sets off a spark. But there is always an idea – something that is beautiful, something I admire. That is what usually awakens my sensibility. Then the idea takes shape and I sit down to write. The interesting thing is that I always come up with an ending. A short story can be started from just about any point. But this has to be done so that the underlying idea takes on the form of art. It is the same in architecture with the fashioning of the dome. When a church is built, there are sheer walls going straight up. The difficult thing is to fashion the dome – that is the final stretch. This process is much the same as the way I write my works.”

Wild Tales present “customs and morals on the verge of extinction, vanishing outbursts of human passion and human relationships”, writes literary critic Yordan Vassilev. Lauded by readers and the press, the book was a marked success and Nikolay Haitov was bestowed a Dimitrov prize in 1969. But seven years after it was published the book found itself in the eye of a stormy controversy over a belated and unexpected allegation by orthodox critics that “the book’s moral principles were dubious”. Be as it may, in the years that followed the polemics abated and the Wild Tales were left more or less untainted. And it is perhaps for this very reason that they are considered the best of modern Bulgarian literature.

English version: Milena Daynova