Nikola Vaptsarov

Nikola Vaptsarov
Никола Вапцаров
Vaptsarov during his time in the Varna Naval Machinery School
Born(1909-12-07)7 December 1909
Bansko, Ottoman Empire
Died23 July 1942(1942-07-23) (aged 32)
Sofia, Bulgaria
CitizenshipBulgarian[1]
Occupationspoet, activist of the communist resistance
Writing career
Notable workMotor Songs

Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov (Bulgarian: Никола Йонков Вапцаров; Macedonian: Никола Јонков Вапцаров, romanized: Nikola Jonkov Vapcarov; 7 December 1909 – 23 July 1942) was a Bulgarian poet and Communist Party activist.[2][3][4] He worked most of his life as a machinist, and wrote in his spare time. He published the poetry book, Motor Songs.

In the latter part of his life, as a Macedonian nationalist, he was the driving force of the Macedonian Literary Circle until World War II, when it was disbanded and its attempts to awaken Macedonian identity were abandoned.[5][6] Vaptsarov joined the resistance movement and, because of his subversive activities in favor of the Soviet Union and against the Bulgarian government and the German troops in Bulgaria, he was arrested, then tried, sentenced and executed the same day.

Life

Vaptsarov was born in Bansko (then in the Ottoman Empire, today in southwestern Bulgaria), in 1909 into a mixed Bulgarian Exarchist-Protestant family.[7][8] His father was a participant in the anti-Ottoman struggles and member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO); his mother was educated at the American College of Samokov and worked as a teacher.[9]

Vaptsarov was trained as a machine engineer at the Naval Machinery School, which was later named after him, in Varna.[10] His first service was on the Drazki torpedo boat. In this period, he embraced Marxism and spread the communist ideology during the 1930s.[11] In April and May 1932, Vaptsarov visited Istanbul, Famagusta, Alexandria, Beirut, Port Said, and Haifa as a crew member of the Burgas vessel. In 1934, he joined the Bulgarian Communist Party.[2]

Later, Vaptsarov went to work in a factory in the village of Kocherinovo, at first as a stoker and eventually as a mechanic. He was elected chairman of the association protecting worker rights in the factory. During this time, Vaptsarov was devoted to his talent and spent his free time writing and organizing amateur theater pieces. He was fired after a technical failure in 1936. This forced him to move to Sofia, where he worked for the state railway service and the municipal incinerating furnace.[12] He continued writing, and a number of newspapers published his poems. He won a poetry contest with his poem titled "Romantika".

The cover of Motor Songs.

In the late 1930s, Vaptsarov co-founded and directed the procommunist Macedonian Literary Circle, which promoted the idea of a Macedonian nation and language. According to him their aim was to analyse linguistic idioms, folklore, customs in order to stimulate Macedonian literature and to nurture revolutionary romanticism related to the IMRO as part of an artistic realism.[13] Vaptsarov asserted that they needed to affirm the Macedonians as a distinct people in front of the world.[14] He continued, however, writing only in standard Bulgarian.[7][15] His only published poetry collection is Motor Songs (Motorni pesni, 1940).[16][17] According to Canadian-Macedonian historian Andrew Rossos, the cycle "Songs for the Fatherland" in the collection attests to his Macedonian national consciousness.[14]

At the end of 1940, he participated in the so-called "Sobolev action," gathering signatures for a pact of friendship between Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. As a result of this illegal action, he was arrested and interned in the village of Godech.

In September 1940, he enthusiastically welcomed the news of the return of Southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria, while in the Spring of 1941, after the invasion of Macedonia by Bulgarian troops, he declared himself as a Bulgarian in police investigation papers.[18][19][20] The Macedonian Literary Circle disbanded itself in the spring of 1941, and its attempts to awaken Macedonian identity were abandoned.[13]

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the Summer of 1941, Vaptsarov got involved with the Central Military Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party. He contacted the Soviet agent Tsvyatko Radoinov, who had illegally entered the country at the head of several groups of communist saboteurs. Vaptsarov's task was to organize the supply of guns and documents for the Bulgarian resistance. According to the leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization Ivan Mihaylov, at that time Vaptsarov was also his trusted man.[21]

He was arrested in March 1942. On 23 July 1942, he was sentenced to death and shot the same evening along with eleven other men.

Legacy

Post-war Bulgarian communist authorities revered him as an activist and revolutionary poet, presenting his poetry collection as an example of proletarian literature.[2] His work was also widely published in Soviet-bloc countries. In 1949, the Bulgarian Naval Academy was renamed Nikola Vaptsarov Naval Academy. In 1952, museums dedicated to Vaptsarov were opened in Bansko and Sofia.[22][23] In 1953, he received posthumously the International Peace Award.[24] His Selected Poems was published in London in the 1950s, by Lawrence & Wishart, translated into English with a foreword by British poet Peter Tempest.[25] Vaptsarov Peak in eastern Livingston Island, Antarctica, is named after the famous Bulgarian poet. Vaptsarov's childhood home in Bansko and residence in Sofia are both museums. In Bulgaria, a prosecution office, journalists and social activists proposed a repeal of his death sentence.[26]

In 1954, Macedonian students at the Pedagogical Institute in Dupnitsa and Sofia protested against the classification of Vaptsarov as Bulgarian and accused Bulgarian leaders of Macedonian origin of abandoning their heritage. Similar demands arose among students and teachers in Sandanski, which led to a state investigation and expelling of a teacher, and a Communist Party campaign for indoctrination on the Macedonian Question.[27]

In August 1977, the People's Republic of Bulgaria sent a diplomatic note to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, protesting against the exploitation of his image in the Yugoslav media when a documentary about the "Macedonian revolutionary and poet" was broadcast on the first channel of Belgrade television. BCP's leadership condemned such cases as "crude attempts by the Yugoslav side to appropriate the work and image of the Bulgarian poet and revolutionary Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov and to distort the historical truth…" The newspaper of the Union of Bulgarian Writers, Literary Front, was called upon to reject the "Yugoslav forgeries" with an article. In 1977, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party began organizing the "Vaptsarov Literary Days", which were to be held every two years in Bansko. On the anniversary, the Union of Writers introduced the "Vaptsarov Prize". The organizers of the Struga Poetry Festival in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia announced the celebration of the "Macedonian poet" in the official program for 1979. In response, the Union of Bulgarian Writers issued a declaration against the "Macedonization" of the "Bulgarian poet", which led to the refusal of Czechoslovak, Polish, Cuban, East German and Soviet poets to participate in the festival. The poet's brother, Boris Vaptsarov, a member of BCP's leadership, forbade Yugoslav Macedonians from celebrating the anniversary. The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences excessively published papers dedicated to the poet's work, as well as documents and memoirs relating to him. An international scientific seminar on Vaptsarov was also held in Sofia, while literary festivals were organized in Blagoevgrad and other cities.[28] In SR Macedonia, translations in Macedonian of his poetry were published, and he was claimed as an ethnic Macedonian. The Union of Bulgarian Writers condemned the Macedonian authorities and asserted his Bulgarian ethnicity.[1]

His 1938 speech where he asserted that the Macedonians were a distinct people was hidden after 1956 from the public. It did not resurface in Bulgaria until 1995 but in a transcript. Left-wing activists continued to hide the original until 2002. It was only when they handed over parts of the Communist archive to the State Historical Archive that it became clear that the transcript from 1995 has been partially manipulated.[29] In the manipulated version, the text included a claim that Macedonians have Bulgarian identity and would reject unification with FNR Yugoslavia, a state which did not exist or was even planned in 1938.[28]

Vaptsarov is revered in North Macedonia.[7] On 30 October 2022, an office of a cultural club of ethnic Macedonians in Bulgaria was officially opened under the name "Nikola Vapcarov" in Blagoevgrad.[30] On 4 February 2023, the club was subjected to vandalism.[31] On 7 February 2023, members of the club submitted an application to register as an association with the same name, but the registration was denied by the authorities.[32] In August 2023 the club was closed after the Appellation Court in Sofia officially rejected the appeal.[33]

According to slavist Jolanta Sujecka: "(...) Vapcarov/Vaptsarov is part of Bulgarian literature, and not just because of the Bulgarian language of his poems. The Bulgarian dimension of his identity as well as the Macedonian and universal – international dimensions are part of his multi-layer consciousness."[34][35]

References

  1. 1 2 Frederick B. Chary (1981). "Bulgaria: The Solace of History". Current History. 80 (465): 183. JSTOR 45314952.
  2. 1 2 3 Wojciech Roszkowski; Jan Kofman (2016). Biographical Dictionary of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. Routledge. pp. 1080–1081. ISBN 9781317475941.
  3. ↑ Frederick B. Chary (2011). The History of Bulgaria. The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations Series. ABC-CLIO. pp. 143–144. ISBN 0313384460.
  4. ↑ Bhavya Tiwari; David Damrosch, eds. (2023). World Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Brill. p. 190. ISBN 9789004548879.
  5. ↑ Ivo Banac; Katherine Verdery, eds. (1995). National Character and National Ideology in Interwar Eastern Europe. Yale Russian and East European Publications, no. 13. Yale Center for International and Area Studies. pp. 246–247. ISBN 0936586133. Indeed, they took upon themselves the tasks that Misirkov had set before the Macedonian intelligentsia: to create a Macedonian literary language and culture; to enhance the national consciousness of the Macedonians. As Vapcarov declared to the Circle, the last task was to let the world understand that "we are a separate nation, a separate people, with our own particular attributes which distinguish us from the other South Slavs".
  6. ↑ Roumen Dontchev Daskalov; Tchavdar Marinov (2013). Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Volume One: National Ideologies and Language Policies. Brill. p. 448. ISBN 978-9004250765.
  7. 1 2 3 Dimitar Bechev (2009). Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia. Scarecrow Press. pp. 136, 231–232. ISBN 978-0810862951.
  8. ↑ Roland Greene; et al., eds. (2012). The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th ed.). Princeton University Press. p. 169. ISBN 1400841429.
  9. ↑ Petar Galchin (2000). "Dokumentalnoto nasledstvo, tvorchestvoto i zhivotŭt na N. Ĭ. Vaptsarov - svidetelstvo za goreshtoto mu bŭlgarsko rodoliubie" Документалното наследство, творчеството и животът на Н. Й. Вапцаров - свидетелство за горещото му българско родолюбие [N. Y. Vaptsarov's documentary inheritance, works and life as a testimony to his deep love for Bulgaria]. Makedonski pregled (in Bulgarian). 3: 5–41.
  10. ↑ "The Nikola Vaptsarov Museum in Bansko". 21 December 2014. Retrieved 6 May 2020.
  11. ↑ R. J. Crampton (1987). A Short History of Modern Bulgaria. CUP Archive. p. 135. ISBN 9780521273237.
  12. ↑ "БДЖ организира пътуване с парния локомотив Баба Меца". DarikNews.bg. 9 May 2019. Retrieved 6 May 2020.
  13. 1 2 Spyros Sfetas (2007). "Birth of Macedonianism in the Interwar Period". In Ioannis Koliopoulos (ed.). The History of Macedonia. Thessaloniki: Museum of the Macedonian Struggle Foundation. pp. 295–296.
  14. 1 2 Andrew Rossos (2008). Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History. Hoover Institution Press. p. 171. ISBN 978-0817948818.
  15. ↑ Dimitar Bechev (2019). Historical Dictionary of North Macedonia (2nd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. p. 188. ISBN 978-1538119624.
  16. ↑ Liliana Brisby (20 July 1998). "Bulgarian literature". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 6 May 2020.
  17. ↑ Charles A. Moser (2019). A History of Bulgarian Literature 865–1944. Walter de Gruyter. p. 227. ISBN 9783110810608.
  18. ↑ Delo 585/1942 Nikola Jonkov Vapcarov Дело 585/1942 Никола Йонков Вапцаров (in Bulgarian) (2nd, expanded ed.). Iztok-Zapad. 2022. pp. 9–15, 662. ISBN 978-619-01-1088-0.
  19. ↑ Petar Galchin writes, "When in the spring of 1941 the political status quo of the Balkans has been changed and parts of Western Thrace and Macedonia come under Bulgarian administrative government, the members of the circle rejoice in this, seeing in it the national unification of the Bulgarian people. So they start contributing with their writings to the cultural integration of the 'new lands' with Bulgaria as a whole. This is illustrated with analyses, and most of all, by following their participation in the editing and writing of the weekly newspaper Literaturen Kritik (A Literary Critic), with which they were deeply involved for a few months." In its issue of 20 April 1941, the newspaper's editorial board, consisting of members of the Macedonian Literary Circle in Sofia, with editor-in-chief Nikola Vaptsarov, welcomed the defeat of German troops and congratulated the liberation of the Bulgarians in Macedonia, Thrace, Dobrudja and the Western Outlands. The text reads: "For more than a quarter of a century, the Resurrection of Christ rose over the enslaved brothers and sisters in Macedonia, Thrace, Dobrudja and the Western Outlands, hidden in our hearts. For more than a quarter of a century, the Savior of humanity was born and resurrected chained in bloody and rusty chains. For more than a quarter of a century, the freedom-loving and fighting spirit of the Bulgarian was suppressed by the 'brother' Serb. Enough! In just one night, freedom shone over the entire Bulgarian land. The brother rejoices from the Danube to the White Sea and from the Black Sea to the mountains of Albania. The freedom of the enslaved Bulgarians comes together with the greatest Orthodox holiday – the Resurrection of Christ." For more details see Petar Galchin (2002). "The Macedonian literary circle in Sofia (1938 – 1941)". Makedonski pregled (1–2). Summary in English.
  20. ↑ Galchin, "Dokumentalnoto nasledstvo, tvorchestvoto i zhivotŭt na N. Ĭ. Vaptsarov", pp. 38–39: "For a short time (about a year and a half), the poet was under the influence of the Commintern's [sic] nihilistic slogans on the national issue. Due to that fact, in some of his poetic works, and especially in his conversations with the circle's members, Vaptsarov used phrases that are now being interpreted with wrong intentions in order to prove the thesis of the poet's alienation from Bulgaria and the Bulgarian people. A close reading of the literary circle's papers written by Vaptsarov show that he shared the Commintern's theses mainly in a declarative way. Therefore, his poems of the time of his vacillation remain Bulgarian poems of his homeland, they are part of Bulgarian poetry and literature, and reflect and develop Bulgarian poetic tradition. Because of his language, understanding, habits, spiritual life, and sense of historical belonging Vaptsarov remained a Bulgarian at that time as well. As an intelligent and talented man, Vaptsarov could not but sense in time the discord between his essential being and the Commintern's short-term policy that he had started to express. This was the reason for a return to his Bulgarian roots shortly after that. Evidence for that fact was his new poems, journalistic reviews and the preliminary investigation papers written and signed by him."
  21. ↑ Delo 585/1942 Nikola Jonkov, p. 15.
  22. ↑ "Museum "Nikola Vaptsarov", Bansko".
  23. ↑ "Къща музей „Никола Й. Вапцаров"".
  24. ↑ "Bulgaria commemorates poet Nikola Vaptsarov". BGNES. 23 July 2022. Retrieved 6 September 2023.
  25. ↑ Peter France (2000). The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. Oxford University Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-0198183594.
  26. ↑ "Bulgaria Repealing Death Sentence of Great Poet". Sofia News Agency. 22 November 2004.
  27. ↑ Stojko Stojkov (2020). "Persecution of 'Non-Existent': Repression of Macedonians in Bulgaria during the Communist Period (1944–1989)". In Victor Friedman; Goran Janev; George Vlahov (eds.). Macedonia & its Questions: Origins, Margins, Ruptures & Continuity. Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe. Vol. 34. Berlin: Peter Lang. p. 218. doi:10.3726/b17262.
  28. 1 2 Tchavdar Marinov (2020). Makedonskoto prašanje od 1944 do denes: Komunizmot i nacionalizmot na Balkanot Македонското прашање од 1944 до денес: Комунизмот и национализмот на Балканот (in Macedonian). Fondacija Otvoreno opštestvo - Makedonija. pp. 115, 118–119, 144. ISBN 978-608-218-300-8.
  29. ↑ Tsveta Trifonova (9 March 2009). "Vodevilŭt s Vaptsarovite arkhivi" Водевилът с Вапцаровите архиви [Vaudeville from the Vaptsarov archives]. LiterNet. 112 (3).
  30. ↑ "Се отвори македонскиот културен клуб 'Никола Вапцаров' во Благоевград, без поголеми инциденти". SlobodenPecat.mk (in Macedonian). 30 October 2022.
  31. ↑ "Attackers of Macedonian club in Blagoevgrad work in a municipal utility enterprise". MIA News and Magazine. 5 February 2023. Retrieved 20 July 2026.
  32. ↑ "Одбиена регистрацијата на македонскиот клуб 'Никола Вапцаров' во Благоевград, одлуката ќе ја обжалат на суд". SlobodenPecat.mk (in Macedonian). 12 February 2023.
  33. ↑ "Бугарија не ги спроведува одлуките на Стразбур за македонското малцинство уште од 2006" [Bulgaria has not implemented the Strasbourg decisions on the Macedonian minority since 2006]. Nezavisen.mk (in Macedonian). Retrieved 20 July 2026.
  34. ↑ Jolanta Sujecka. "Nikola Vapcarov/Vaptsarov: Between a Bulgarian and a Macedonian Identity" (PDF). MANU. p. 223. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 March 2022.
  35. ↑ Jolanta Sujecka. "Балкански места на паметта. Терминът Македония и образът на Никола Вапцаров в българския и македонския времепространствен континуум" [Balkan places of memory. The term Macedonia and the image of Nikola Vaptsarov in the Bulgarian and Macedonian time-space continuum]. BalkansBg.eu (in Bulgarian).
This page is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.