📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Monday 2 November
Assen Razcvetnikov, born on 2 November 1897, started out as a left-wing poet, fell foul of his own Communist Party comrades after a poetry reading, and went on to fill a good part of his career with children's riddles, rhymes and tales. I find that a rather satisfying arc, and for anyone here wrestling with Cyrillic it comes with a practical use.
What happened on this day
He was born Assen Petkov Kolarov, and the Russian and German Wikipedia pages place his birth in Draganovo, a village in Gorna Oryahovitsa municipality, and his death in Moscow on 30 July 1951; the English and Bulgarian pages name neither place. His father taught, the family also kept a farm, and his mother sang folk songs she had learned from his grandfather Petar, a fiddler. After high school in Veliko Tarnovo in 1916 he worked as a telegraphist there and at Gorna Oryahovitsa station, read Slavic philology in Sofia, heard lectures on aesthetics in Vienna and Berlin in 1921 and 1922, and took a law degree in 1926. Teaching followed in Gabrovo, then Bulgarian lessons at Sofia's Third Men's Gymnasium, and from 1934 a librarian's post at the posts directorate.
His first collection, "Жертвени клади" (roughly "Sacrificial Pyres"), appeared in 1924, shaped by the left-wing circles he wrote for. That year he took part in a Sofia University reading marking ten years since Peyo Yavorov's death, and Party colleagues afterwards accused him, together with Georgi Tsanev, Nikola Furnadzhiev and Angel Karaliichev, of making common cause with the bourgeoisie, which seems a heavy charge to hang on a poetry reading. In time Razcvetnikov distanced himself from the leftist line, ended his work for the magazine "Nov Put" and began writing for Vladimir Vassilev's "Zlatorog". In the 1930s he put most of his effort into writing for children, with books such as "От нищо нещо" (1932), "Хороводец Патаран" (1936) and "Гатанки", which simply means riddles (ga-TAN-kee). From 1938 to 1944 he was an editor-publisher of "Весела дружина", the "Merry Band", a Sofia weekly for children and young people that ran from 1933 to 1947 and printed riddles and picture serials beside work by Erich Kästner, Karel Čapek and Rudyard Kipling. He also translated from Ancient Greek, French and German, including Schiller's "Ode to Joy". Bulgarian Wikipedia links that poem to the EU's anthem, but English Wikipedia is stricter: the Council of Europe took Beethoven's melody, not Schiller's text, as the Anthem of Europe in 1972, and the EU followed in 1985. Razcvetnikov's translation is of the poem behind the anthem, not a part of it.
Why this matters for British expats
Our integration guide tells adult learners to start with children's books, since the vocabulary is about right, and riddles fit that advice neatly. Bulgarian Wikipedia lists an edition of "Що е то?" ("What is it?") from 1956 with 220 riddles, an answer key and an alphabetical index, so a learner can guess, check and look words up, and its bibliography carries his titles through to 2007. I have not read these editions, so treat them as a lead rather than a recommendation, and I cannot say what is in the shops today. I looked for a Shumen thread and came back empty-handed: his life runs through Veliko Tarnovo, Gabrovo and Sofia, all to the west of us. A street in Sofia's Vitosha quarter carries his name.
Sources and further reading
The biography draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Assen Razcvetnikov and its English counterpart, which spells his surname Raztsvetnikov in the text, with the weekly taken from Bulgarian Wikipedia's page on "Весела дружина" and the anthem history from English Wikipedia's page on Ode to Joy. His birthplace and death place come from the Russian and German Wikipedia pages, since the English and Bulgarian entries leave both out.