📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Wednesday 4 November
Veselin Hanchev died in Sofia on 4 November 1966, aged 47, having fitted in more careers than many people manage in a long life: poet, playwright, translator and cultural counsellor at two embassies. I knew him mainly as the name on a poetry competition, which turns out to be a rather modest way to meet a man who won a state prize twice.
What happened on this day
He was born in Stara Zagora on 4 April 1919, the son of two doctors. His mother, Nevena Azmanova, a gynaecologist and paediatrician, studied medicine in Lausanne from 1894 and qualified in Nancy in 1899, and she and her husband, Dr Simeon Hanchev, opened their own clinic in 1910. Veselin read law at Sofia University (1941), but he first appeared in print in 1934, and his first collection, "Испания на кръст" ("Spain on the Cross", 1937), took the Spanish Civil War as its subject, with a pacifist protest running through it. Orwell readers know that war from Homage to Catalonia; for a young Bulgarian poet it was a war far from home.
He joined the Communist Party in 1944 and served in the Second World War in 1944 and 1945, and his collection "Стихове в паласките" (1954) is described as a lyrical diary of the Bulgarian soldier. He headed the literature and arts department at Radio Sofia in 1945, then worked as a dramaturg at the National Opera (1949 to 1951) and at the Satirical Theatre in Sofia. Stefan Gechev's page says Gechev, Stefan Sarchadzhiev and Hanchev founded that theatre in 1957, while the theatre's own page credits Sarchadzhiev alone, so I will leave the credit where the sources split it. He translated Rostand's "Героична комедия" (1961) and poems by Jacques Prévert, won the Dimitrov Prize in 1960 and 1962, and was named an Honoured Figure of Culture in 1963. From 1962 to 1964 he was counsellor for cultural affairs at the Bulgarian embassy in Warsaw, then held the same post in Paris from 1964 to 1966. His poem "Посвещение" ("Dedication") contains the line "О, трябва този свят да се изстрада", roughly "Oh, this world must be suffered through".
Why this matters for British expats
The Dimitrov Prize is the bit worth knowing. Bulgarian Wikipedia calls it the highest state honour of the People's Republic for science, the arts and culture, named after the communist leader Georgi Dimitrov and given, for art, to works "in the spirit of socialist realism", which is quite a brief for a poet; it was discontinued in 1990. So when a book jacket or plaque says laureate of the Dimitrov Prize, read it as an honour of its era rather than a verdict on the work. The theatre he worked for is still a Sofia institution that locals call "Сатирата" (sa-TEE-ra-ta), on Stefan Karadzha street. I looked for a Shumen thread and found none, and Stara Zagora lies south-west of us. There, the Rodina library, with the municipality and the Geo Milev house-museum, runs a national youth poetry competition named after him.
Sources and further reading
The biography draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Veselin Hanchev, with his mother's career from Bulgarian Wikipedia's page on Nevena Azmanova-Hancheva and the prize from its page on the Dimitrov Prize. The theatre and competition details come from Bulgarian Wikipedia's pages on the Satirical Theatre, Stefan Gechev and the Rodina library in Stara Zagora.