2081-3309

“Global Dissident”: Georgi Markov as a Cold War Playwright and Exile

Warner

Vessela S.

author

University of Alabama at Birmingham

008s83205

Correspondence to: Vessela S. Warner warnerv@uab.edu

24 07 2014

Tom 5 (2014) 2014 73 94

2014

Georgi Markov (1929–1978) was a prominent Bulgarian writer and, after 1968, a dissident and political exile, who ultimately broadcasted some of the most insightful and incriminatory depictions of totalitarian communism on Radio Free Europe and radio Deutsche Welle. His compelling presence in the emigration media became the reason for his political assassination in London, widely known as the “Bulgarian umbrella murder.” This article examines Markov’s thrilling journey from being a part of the Bulgarian top intelligentsia in the 1960s to becoming the “heavy artillery” in the East European emigration behind the Iron Curtain. The case study presents, through a varietyof documentary evidence as well as analyses of his most important plays, the writer’s internal and external exiles. Markov’s allegorical drama manifests his social skepticism as well as painful realization of the relativity of ideological propaganda and enforcement of political oppositions during the Cold War. Drawing on his personal experience in the totalitarian East as well as the egalitarian West, the playwright exhibits the moral engagement, integrity, and freewill of an existentialist and “global dissident” in the exilic space of his late dramatic works.

Blumenfeld J., Seesaw: Cultural Life in Eastern Europe, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,New York 1968.

Cummings R. H., Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950–1989, McFarland and Company, Jefferson, NC −London 2009.

Gawlikowski L., Neisser Moreno Y., “Appendix C: Weekly Listening Rates for Major Western Broadcasters to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and the USSR During the Cold War,”[ in:] Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, eds. A. Ross Johnson, R. Eugene Parta, Central European University Press, Budapest−New York 2010, pp.142–144.

Hristov H., Ubijte “Skitnik”: Bulgarskata i britanskata politika po sluchaia Georgi Markov (Kill the Wanderer: The Bulgarian and British State Politics on Georgi Markov’s Case), Sofia 2006.

“Hronologia 1944–1989,” Decommunization, http://www.decommunization.org/Communism/Bulgaria/1956–70.htm.

Jankova Z., “Belezhki za piesite na Georgi Markov,” Piesite na Georgi Markov, ed. Zinovia (Zunka) Yankova, Litavra, Sofia 2001, pp. 383–394.

Markov G., “Arakhangel Mikhail,” trans. from English by K. Kostov, [in:] Piesite na Georgi Markov, ed. Zinovia (Zunka) Yankova, Litavra, Sofia 2001, pp . 345–383.

Markov G., “Asansiorut,” Piesite na Georgi Markov, ed. Zinovia (Zunka) Yankova, Litavra, Sofia: 2001.

Markov L., ed., 121 Dokumenta za i ot Georgi Markov: Az Bjah Toi, Litavra, Sofia 1999.

Markov G., “Komunisti,” Piesite na Georgi Markov, ed. Zinovia (Zunka) Yankova, Litavra,Sofia 2001, pp. 259–303.

Markov G., “Otvun ili Kogato grum udari kak ehoto polepva,” Kultura, 16 (2001), http://www.kultura.bg/bg/article/view/5381.

Markov G., Zadochni Reportazhi za Bulgaria, Profizdat, Sofia 1990.

Neubauer J., Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, eds., The Exile and Return of Writers from East‑Central Europe. A Compendium, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin−New York 2009.

Sartre J.P., “From Being and Nothingness,” Reality, Man, and Existence: Essential Works of Existentialism, ed. H. J. Blackham, Bantam Books, New York−Toronto−London 1978..

Styan J. L., Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge−New York 1981.

Yankova E., “Kak be sprjana edna ‘cheshka’ piesa na Georgi Markov,” Democratzia, 1 July 1993, p. 10.