REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Vladimir DONEV: Bulgarian Labour Camp Literature Genre and Memory 47
a famous socialist author of criminal and spy novels in Bulgaria Bogomil Rainov) and others.
In the genre mixture of Bochev’s text there is a series of feuilletons that reach the best
examples of Bulgarian antitotalitarian journalism - "What if Abracadabra is wrong?",
"Enraged hen", "Russian salad". Bochev uses the language of satire and feuilleton in the
worst periods of his life - in the brief release of the two stays on the island of Persin. The
political repression on him and his parents is so strong that reality is perceived as a
schizophrenic split. He recognizes that under the weight of experience, his subconscious
gives birth to allegorical dream-feuilletons in order to be able to withstand the
immensurable psychological burden.
The allegory is unfolded also in the diary of the island of Persin, which has a special
function in the genre of the memoirs (Persin Island is the largest Bulgarian island in the
Danube River, which was built one of the first concentration camps in Bulgaria in 1949.
There are gathered politicians, officers, employees, diplomats, peasants - all who
disagreed with the Communist dictatorship of the new government. The camp was
officially closed in 1953 after Stalin's death, but in practice was used until 1985-1989,
when Todor Zhivkov's regime expelled the Bulgarian Turks. On the island there was a
farm and the inmates dig strengthening dikes along the river around the town of Belene).
Humor and irony compare human and animal features in a space with a divine nature,
which at the same time represents the labour camp hell. On one hand the life in the camp
is filled with funny scenes of bull fights between citizens and calves, while citizens are
learn how to raise cattle. The analogy between human and animal herd is unfolded in
different definitions of "hegemony of the big stick" named as the "centralism", "ordinary
tsarism" for the "four-leg cousins" that the inmates herdsmen try to appease. On the other
hand, the nature awakens a sense of lyrical beauty and majesty of creation, even in hellish
conditions of life there is tendency to confessions, essay fragments and philosophical
attitude to the world. In chapters such as "The talking bush" and "God of the frogs and
worms" can be seen similarities with the stories of the famous Bulgarian narrator
Radichkov as "The fragile ax". These fragments expresses philosophy of equality
between man and animal, the fragile harmony in the natural world, questions of the
microcosm of worms, frogs and place of "their god" - the man in the universe.
An expanded metaphor of the Danube River and Island Persin has been used in a similar
way as Solzhenitsyn expand his basic fictional analogies - the metaphor of the
archipelago of camps and cancer metastases in Soviet society. Bochev expresses also a
religious sense of the world as Solzhenitsyn (Bochev was a Protestant and his father
Petko Bochev suffered from the measures of State security, not only because he was
chairman of the Chamber of Commerce before 9. IX. 1944, but because of the cases
against the Bulgarian Protestants). Similarities are found in the role of narrator, who is not
just a witness, but an analyst and polemicist, seeking higher meaning in the ordeal. The
island as a topos awakes mythological and literary reminiscences of different levels.
In the whole text the infernal space of the camp is actually structured by expanded
metaphors in the architectonics of the whole Belene. The Story of Concentration Camp
Bulgaria - "Barn along the Danube" (first part), "Danube near the barn" (Part Two) "Barn
with trams" (Part Three ). The titles of three parts play with different points of views of
the socialist camp reality. The part "Barn along the Danube" compares the great river and
camp on the island of Persin (the word "barn" gradually associated in the story with
Orwell’s Animal Farm, Bulgaria becomes "animal farm"). The second part "Danube near
the barn" looks at the whole country, the third part "Barn with trams" sarcastically refers
to the capital city as a mixture of apparently modern, but in essence unclean living space.
Several metaphorical meanings can be identified in the group of images river-island-time