Култура

With his new, newly released book, Dr. Alexander Popov invites his readers to a "discourse". The fine Bulgarian word has become the title of the collection, which includes stories, essays and publicistics.
What kind of talk comes from the eponymous story, whose main character Vasko is deaf-mute, but on the bench next to him every day sit and rinse their souls neighbor grandmother Kera, grandfather Licho, widow Genoveva, accountant Palechev and many more like them with heavy problems everyday. For each of them, the deaf-mute Vasco is: "One of his own, a close person among the hectic, hasty, nervous people. A person who is always ready to make room for you. Where will you find more understanding and more responsive than him?". There are few people like Vasco, especially in this time of alienation. But the human need to share the pain and joy, to bring out the bitterness of your soul, to seek support in another person is still alive.
Many of the stories in "Discourse" are a special kind of sharing. Dr. Alexander Popov is a frugal storyteller, faithful to the established Bulgarian tradition of the classical short story. Each of the stories recreates a human story - sometimes seemingly everyday and ordinary, but actually from those stories that are the fabric of real life. Part of the explanation for the rich gallery of so many images, characters, events is probably in the profession of Dr. Popov: "My professional life as a doctor started in the remote Rhodope villages and ended in the Seventh Grand National Assembly. Always among people and dedicated to them, I never experienced boredom, boredom, despondency. that's why I'm grateful to them. These stories are my humble reward."
Today these stories are also interesting in that some of them were written before the changes in 1989 and reflect the then reality. Older readers can compare their memories of that time, younger ones can learn a lot from Dr. Popov's point of view. There is also a "bread" for literary analysts who are constantly arguing about the presence or absence of dissident literature in our country.
In "Discourse" Dr. Popov has included 20 essays of his own. Some of them were written on specific occasions - for example, the Easter Word of the summer of 1990, in which the energy and faith of thousands of people was gathered then: "The truth will rise in our tortured homeland! It will resurrect splendour! Free will will rise again!". True to the truth, Dr. Popov also wrote about the scattered trust, whose symbol for him was the littered with sacks of unopened mail with complaints of ordinary people room in the National Assembly: "These forgotten sacks under the roof of the parliament, heavy with requests, human anguish and pains, were an explosive mixture... This was the beginning of the dashed hopes, of the deceived trust, of the unanswered complaints of a long-suffering, confused and unfortunate people." We should also note especially the essay "The Lost Generation" about the German writer Erich Maria Remark, for which Dr. Popov won a prize from Deutsche Welle.
The third part of the collection "Discourse"is publicistic. Here are the articles that Velingradians read in the "Shared" section of the pages of the newspaper "Tempo" from August 2002 to August 2003. Even then, the author had the idea that they would be collected between the covers of a book. I am glad that the idea is already a fact and I use the occasion to thank Dr. Popov for the cooperation, which for me is a valuable school for the respect of speech and the point of view of the other.
Elena Baeva