Axiomatically, tobacco is addictive and blamed for causing some cancers, so smoking is banned indoors on public premises, which happens to be a major blow to a heavily smoking nation. On its brighter side, Nicotiana tabacum is still grown as a crop in a few regions of Bulgaria and provides livelihood to the locals. In another development, since 1951 Tobacco has been a great read, an admirable epic and best-seller written by Dimitar Dimov.

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Born in 1909 Dimitar Dimov was a rum bird: an introvert man, a chain smoker, left-handed and fond of pencils when it came to writing. In times when wedlock was still a widely respected institution, he went through three marriages.

His first wife famous translator of Charles Dickens, Nelly Dospevska once used an apt symbol to capture Dimov’s personality: 

“Indisputably, the first thing that struck me about him was something like a thick glass wall rising between him and the rest of the world. (…) It sometimes got thinner but would never break down. It let no one touch his inner self while at the same time it kept him away from others even when they were close to him and he loved them. However, through this wall of glass he could see much more than the rest of us. It served him as both a shield and a magnifying glass.”

(audio by courtesy of the Bulgarian National Radio Golden Archives)

Apart from being one of Bulgaria’s top novelists of all time, Dimitar Dimov was also professor of anatomy, histology and embryology. No wonder then that his masterful prose provides meticulous dissections of human psychology and society. Looking at his famous photograph, his heavily bespectacled glance is one loaded with sharp scrutiny. Deep into this seemingly super-rational man, however there was a deeply buried romantic streak, and it prospered after a visit to Spain: Spain, things Spanish, and more widely, things foreign bore great fascination to the great writer. His novel Doomed Souls is about a tragic love affair between a Jesuit priest and an Englishwoman.

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Dimitar Dimov’s greatest work in terms of volume and impact is Tobacco. The robust piece is the culmination of his style: his strong interest in the exceptional and the catastrophic, his taste for cosmopolitan characters with tragic fates. The epic goes across Bulgaria’s urban life from 1920s to 1940s. His characters’ path is one of destruction: starting from the robust traditional values of love, loyalty, hard work and modesty on to the world of big business, alienation and perished love. The novel’s main character Boris has an insatiable appetite for wealth and success and begins from poverty to emerge as a tycoon in the tobacco business whose symbol is the Nicotiana concern. It is also a metaphor of how greed and ambition kill love and human happiness. Lovely Irina’s love for Boris and his for her too, falls prey to their sham business and social success.

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Literary critic Galin Tihanov points to Dimitar Dimov’s innovative contribution into Bulgarian literature: notably, a mix of the high and low culture in fiction. Dimov often selected his plots from what is typically claimed by pulp fiction (like a love affair bordering on melodrama). In the meantime, his novels boldly depart from low culture displaying depths of conflict and richness of language, but not only. His characters are heavily psychologized, determined not so much by nurture but by some sort of a dark, incomprehensive power in their subconscious, and one they cannot manage properly. In this way Dimitar Dimov breaks away from the Bulgarian tradition of plasticity. In fact he took a major detour to give more observation and analysis instead. 

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Tobacco is also famous for having become an epicenter of a major literary row. When it was released in 1951, the communist censors ruled that the novel was inconsistent with communist ideology as it had no communist characters in it to reflect the so-called progressive forces in society. A veritable storm erupted at the Union of Bulgarian Writers all about Tobacco. Dimitar Dimov came under massive fire and was forced to rework his novel. This resulted in the epic’s second edition as the writer added about 250 pages to the original: enough to develop an all new second line with a communist couple of characters to offset the original ones. The great writer conceded – he otherwise would have faced a ban on his work, and possibly persecution. Luckily, he reworked the novel so masterfully that it was not hurt much by the supplementary storyline. The colossal row however is often blamed for his untimely death at age 56, in 1966 when he suffered a massive stroke at Bucharest Airport. The writer fascinated with the foreign died on foreign soil.

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Dimitar Dimov’s family is a good example of how fast things sometimes change in Bulgarian literature. His daughter, Theodora, born in the early 1960s, is a renowned writer today.

“At first, I was trying not to write and not to embark on my father’s road to avoid the comparison, but I knew this was not my way. I was trying to do journalism, to translate and to teach the English language but only after I started writing my first play Fyuri and once I wrote it, I suddenly felt happy in professional terms – I had been happy writing it. Clearly, nothing else could bring me professional satisfaction. So, now I even dread to imagine what would have happened had I stopped writing.”

(audio by courtesy of the Bulgarian National Radio Golden Archives)

Theodora Dimova takes after her father strikingly: her lovely, intelligent face strongly reminds of her father’s, and she is both a novelist and playwright – just like him. Overall, genetic and creative similarities end here, because she is a woman-writer with a distinct style. Besides, she – unlike her scientifically-minded father has deep Christian faith in her guiding the journeys of her characters deep into their inner selves.

 “I believe that there are two realities – one of them visible, physical, clear, the one we clash with. The other reality is invisible which doesn’t mean it does not exist – it is invisible for our plain senses; we learn to perceive it, grasp it and see into it. I am a very religious person and I think that the other reality that we are discussing is awareness of God. To me this is a cardinal issue. My novel Emine is dealing with this path of awareness of these things and in this sense the message is to come to terms with ourselves and feel the soul’s longing for God. After all, once we have more clarity, there is only a single step left to awareness of God and to that other reality.”

(audio by courtesy of the Bulgarian National Radio Golden Archives)

Theodora Dimova contributes to a literary scene that has changed dramatically since her father’s time. Today reading fiction has become an almost elitist occupation, an outdated knack; writers’ voices are no longer widely heard; they no longer have much influence where social affairs are concerned, as they try to address a society given to consumerism and a young generation glued to computer screens.