📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 7 August
Most British expats will not have heard of Stefan Tsanev. Most Bulgarians over forty have, rather a lot, and today is the day to close that gap: one of the most widely staged Bulgarian playwrights of the modern era was born on this date in 1936, in a village near Ruse, which makes this his 90th birthday.
What happened on this day
Stefan Nedelchev Tsanev was born on 7 August 1936 in Chervena Voda (Червена вода, cher-VEH-na VO-da), a village in the Ruse district of northeastern Bulgaria, when the country was still a kingdom. He finished the Baba Tonka secondary school in Ruse in 1954, took a journalism degree at Sofia University in 1959, and spent a year filing dispatches for the Narodna Mladezh newspaper from the Rhodope mountains and Pernik before heading to Moscow, where he studied dramaturgy at the state film institute from 1960 to 1965. I have lived here 13 years and I only recently grasped how many names on Bulgarian theatre posters trace back to this one man from a Danubian village.
His first play did what first plays in a one-party state were not supposed to do. "The True Ivaylo" (1962), about the peasant rebel who briefly seized the Bulgarian throne in the 1270s, was banned for alleged parallels between the feudal hierarchy on stage and the socialist regime off it. The censors looked at a thirteenth-century peasant king and recognised, entirely correctly, themselves. A lesser career might have ended there. Tsanev instead became house dramaturg at the State Satirical Theatre in Sofia from 1967 to 1970, then worked at Theatre Sofia, the Plovdiv Drama Theatre and the Army Theatre, before returning to Theatre Sofia from 1996 to 2008, writing around 30 plays along the way.
Two of those plays travelled far beyond Bulgaria. "The Last Night of Socrates" (1986) and "The Other Death of Joan of Arc" (1990) have been staged in more than 200 theatres at home and around the world: Paris, Athens, Prague, Montreal, Moscow, Pittsburgh, The Hague, Istanbul. His poetry has been translated into most European languages plus Chinese, Mongolian, Arabic and Hebrew. He co-wrote early cabaret miniatures with Konstantin Pavlov, a defining poet of their "April generation" of 1960s Bulgarian literature, and later put Vasil Levski on stage in "The Secret Supper of Deacon Levski" (1987). In Bulgaria he occupies roughly the place a Tom Stoppard or David Hare holds in British theatre: the serious playwright whose name on the poster tells you the evening will have some heft.
Then, after 1989, he changed gear entirely. Between 2006 and 2009 he published the four volumes of the "Bulgarian Chronicles", a door-stopping saga retelling the entire national story from 2137 BC to 2007, billed unapologetically as a novelist's retelling rather than a historian's, which is precisely why ordinary Bulgarians actually read it. Add the novel "Ants and Gods" (2000), a shelf of essays including "The Killers Are Among Us", and a twelve-volume collected works issued in 2013 and 2014. The honours followed: the Ivan Vazov national literature prize in 2004, the Order of Stara Planina first class in 2006, the Hristo G. Danov award for the Chronicles in 2011, and the Ikar and Askeer theatre awards in 2019 and 2021.
Why this matters for British expats
Partly this is cultural literacy. If you ever take Bulgarian-language theatre seriously, Tsanev is the name you will keep meeting, and The Last Night of Socrates is the modern classic to start with. If your Bulgarian is not there yet, the Chronicles are his other gift to you: the closest thing the country has to a standard popular history of itself, four fat volumes, the last of them covering 1943 to 2007, the stretch that explains the Bulgaria you actually live in rather than the one on the postcards.
And he is, almost, a local boy. Chervena Voda lies barely ninety minutes up the road from Shumen, through Razgrad, on the way to the Danube, so today's birthday belongs to our corner of the country as much as to Sofia. Worth a quiet line in your mental Bulgarian cultural calendar: ninety years old today, translated from Hebrew to Mongolian, and still the writer Bulgaria's censors once read far too carefully.
Sources and further reading
Biographical details, the theatre chronology and the bibliography in this piece draw on Tsanev's entry in the English Wikipedia, which also records the banning of his first play. The richer source, with the complete list of plays, poetry collections and awards, is his Bulgarian Wikipedia biography.