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De Bulgaarse schrijver Yordan Radichkov werd geboren op 24 oktober 1929 in het dorp Kalimanitza, in de provincie Montana. Sommige literaire critici noemen hem de belangrijkste figuur in de Bulgaarse literatuur in het laatste derde van de 20e eeuw en zijn werk is vergeleken met dat van Kafka of Gogol.
Hij begon zijn carrière als regionale correspondent voor de krant Národná mladezh (Nationale Jeugd) en nam later ook redactionele taken over. Radichkov begon met het schrijven van korte verhalen voor de krant Vecherni novini (Avond Nieuws) en zijn vroege collecties trokken de aandacht van de lezers en critici door hun lyrische beschrijvingen en hun directheid. In 1959 publiceerde hij zijn eerste volledige boek, Sarczeto Bie za horata (Het hart klopt voor het Volk), gevolgd door Prosti rutse (Eenvoudige handen, 1961) en Oburnato nebe (Eng: A Sky Turned Upside Down, 1962), allemaal geschreven in de officiële socialistisch-realistische stijl. Deze stijl werd geleidelijk vervangen door een stijl van parodie en van het groteske, met een toename van folkloristische elementen, waaronder volkse fantasie en humor.
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Uit: The Bowler-Hat
Before I go on with the Bowler-hat, I would like to share some explanations to his majesty reader.
The question why I have to write about the Bowler-hat, but not for man, arise fairly!
Of course, I also thought about man at first, but the more I learnt about him, the more he was getting old and became colourless. It seems to me that one day he died. The man did not wanted to die at all and in order to protect himself from this unpleasant experience or to put it away from himself at the first chance, he slept very carefully, he ate very carefully, also he was very carefully in conference, he sneezed, traveled and sometimes he expressed himself extremely in a vivid style, in the sense that we bear big responsibilities and we have to be conscious about these responsibilities. But although his vivid style of expression, and although he ate, slept, shaved or reproduced himself, it seems to me that the man died.
And the Bowler-hat stayed!
It did not shave; neither ate, nor sneezed did not even know the alphabet, and stayed. The world is full of similar injustices. Is it possible that everything around us, which did not suffer, did not eat, did not deliver speeches and did not bear responsibilities, will stay, and we will not stay. The why we have been creeping on the rough surface of life! Is it just left a hillock, just one overgrown with grass similarity of a bowler-hat and with Hats down!" to end our earthly way? Have we ever thought sometimes that at the end of our lives we turn to our hats again and the hats are the ones, which pay tribute to us?
But lets go on!
The Bowler-hat in question came to Bulgaria thanks to one Bulgarian. During his visit to Italy in the World War II the Bulgarian bought the Bowler-hat, because only a stupid man would enter Italy, without going out of it without a bowler-hat. Italy was at that time a nice place. Mussolini has not started yet sewing seeds in town parks and thrashing it on the squares of Rome.
The Bowler-hat was Borsallino" and we have to notice, that then it was the Mount Everest of the bowler-hats (Europeans called the Mount Everest the highest peak in the world, Chomolungma; it has not been climbed by Tensing and Hillary yet and engulfed many expeditions in its glaciers). Italians kept the secret about the way the material for the producing of bowler-hats was made, that is why their bowler-hats were the lightest in the world."
Yordan Radichkov (24 oktober 1929 - 21 januari 2004)
De Engelse dichter , dramaturg en schrijver Adrian Christopher William Mitchell werd geboren in Hampstead Heath op 24 oktober 1932. Zie ook mijn blog van 24 oktober 2009.
Remembrance Days
I can remember the love in my mothers blue eyes
as she told us about her brothers Sydney and Stanley
and how they were lost in the Great War
and how I thought I would one day go and find
my soldier uncles and I am still searching for them.
I can remember how my dark-eyed father
stared at the floor as he tried to tell me about
his four years in the dead mud of the trenches,
four years in which all his friends were killed.
I can remember when the German bombers came booming over Bath
and my mother took us down to hide in the cellar in our pyjamas..
I can remember when our family friend Major Patterson, so
handsome and three times taller than me, a six-year-old,
staggered back in shreds to eat with us after being rescued from
the chilly madness of Dunkirk.
I can remember being trained by fascist corporals
and sergeants in the RAF to march like a robot
and think like a gun.
Yes, Ive seen enough war at a distance to make me
hate war more than anything.
And thanks to my mother and my father and my wife and my
children and my grandchildren and my dogs and my cats - I have
seen enough peace to know that only peace can satisfy my heart.
Adrian Mitchell (24 oktober 1932 20 december 2008)
De Engelse schrijfster en journaliste Marghanita Laski werd geboren op 24 oktober 1915 in Manchester in een prominente familie van joodse intellectuelen (Neville Laski was haar vader, Mozes Gaster haar grootvader en Harold Laski haar oom), ze werd opgeleid aan Lady Barn House School en St Paul's Girls 'School in Hammersmith, werkte in de mode-industrie, maar studeerde later Engels aan Somerville College, Oxford. Zij trouwde met uitgever John Howard (in Parijs), en werkte een tijd in de journalistiek. Nadat haar zoon en dochter waren geboren begon Laski serieus te schrijven. Ook was zij een omnivoor lezer en vanaf 1958 werd ze een vruchtbare en haast dwangmatige leverancier van bijdragen aan de Oxford English Dictionary. Laski schreef ook literaire biografie, toneelstukken en korte verhalen.
Uit: Little Boy Lost
For insensibly a picture of his son had been forming in his mind. He did not know this; if he tried consciously to imagine a boy who might be his, his conscious mind gave no response. But his unconscious mind retained as the image of his son the child in the snapshot that he had refused send to Pierre, the five-year-old English boy in his grey flannel shorts and blazer, short grey socks, neat brown walking shoes, wide laughing eyes under the grey felt hat, and a cheerful confident grin. In his memory of this picture his deepest expectation of recognition were founded.
But facing him was a thin little boy in a black sateen overall. Its sleeves were too short and from them dangled red swollen hands too big for the frail wrists. Hilary looked from these painful hands to the little boy's long thin grubby legs, to the crude coarse socks falling over shabby black boots that were surly several sizes too large. It's a foreign child, he thought numbly, and then he let himself look at the small white face turned towards him, a lock of black hair failing from a travesty of a parting over enormous dark eyes that stared imploringly into his.
He knew that he should have moved towards the child, greeted him naturally and with friendliness. But he could only stand and stare with horror and repulsion, saying wildly to himself, "Why does he look at me like that? He doesn't know why I'm here. Why does he look at me like that?"
He suddenly remembered as he stood there, trying desperately to move forward to the casual greeting, his Aunt Jessie telling him that in his early childhood, whenever she used to visit him at his home, he would stand by her chair and she would know that he was saying "Please take me back to the farm with you; please take me back to the farm." But he doesn't know who I am," he repeated to himself, and then the door opened behind the child and the Mother Superior came in, a child's coat over her arm.
Marghanita Laski (24 oktober 1915 - 6 februari 1988)
De Duitse schrijfster Dorothea von Schlegel werd geboren op 24 oktober 1764 in Berlijn. Zie ook mijn blog van 24 oktober 2008 en ook mijn blog van 24 oktober 2009.
Uit: Florentin
»Laß dich umarmen, Schimmel«, sagte er, »du bist ein königliches Tier! ein Tier für Könige! Was fehlt uns beiden, um in der Geschichte verewigt zu werden, du als ein Muster der Treue und Unterwürfigkeit, ich als ein Beispiel von menschenfreundlicher Herablassung, als daß ich einen Thron besäße, und du wärest mein Untertan? Gewiß bist du ganz verwundert und froh, und ohne Zweifel fühlst du dich überaus glücklich, gerade von mir und von niemand anders bis ans Ende deines treuen Lebens geritten zu werden! Ahndest du etwa, daß ich deine Last bloß deswegen etwas leichter machte, damit du mir nicht völlig unterlägst, und darüber zugrunde gingest, ehe ich dich missen kann? Ich weiß es freilich, aber du sollst es nie erfahren, denn du sollst glücklich sein; du sollst, verlaß dich auf meine Wachsamkeit, gewiß nie in dem klugen Glauben gestört werden, daß du in deiner Unvernunft und demütigen Genügsamkeit ein glückliches Tier bist.«
Er ließ den Kopf des Schimmels, und stand gedankenvoll eine Weile an ihn gelehnt. Sein Auge schweifte umher, bald beschaute es die ihn noch umgebenden Gegenstände mit dem innigsten Vergnügen, bald drang es mit Sehnsucht in die Ferne. Es gab für ihn Momente, wo er sich keines drückenden und keines vergangnen Verhältnisses bewußt war. Ihm war, besonders in der Einsamkeit und im Freien, als hätte er alles, was ihm jemals weh getan, zurückgelassen, und ginge nun einer heitern Aussicht entgegen. Er konnte sich einbilden, vor einem Augenblicke gestorben und mit dieser bessern Empfindung in ein schöneres Dasein übergegangen zu sein.
»Welche sehnende, ahndende Hoffnung treibt mich wieder zu euch Menschen? Warum ergebe ich mich denn aufs neue euren unsinnigen Anstalten? Ist es mir denn nicht bekannt, daß ich dessen, was ich bei euch suche, schon längst überdrüssig bin?...
Dorothea von Schlegel (24 oktober 1764 3 augustus 1839)
De Amerikaanse dichteres en schrijfster Sarah Josepha Buell Hale werd geboren op 24 oktober 1788 in Newport, New Hampshire. Zie ook mijn blog van 24 oktober 2008.
Uit: Northwood. A Tale Of new England
Sidney Romelee, the eldest of a numerous family, was a native of New Hampshire. The local situation of the little village in which he was born, offered few temptations to the speculator, and the soil promised no indulgence to the idle; but it abundantly repaid the industrious cultivator. It was therefore inhabited, almost exclusively, by husbandmen, who tilled their own farms with their own hands, laboring actively six days in the week, and on the seventh, offering, to that Being who alone could crown their labors with success, the unfeigned homage of contented minds and grateful hearts. In short, some twenty or thirty years since, the inhabitants of this retired place displayed, in the simplicity and purity of their manners and morals, a model, which Jeremiah Belknap, when describing so admirably what constituted a " happy society," might have quoted as an illustration of his "picture."Among this unsophisticated people, where men are esteemed more for merit and usefulness, than rank and wealth, James Romelee, Esq. the father of our hero, was a very honorable man; yet it was not wealth which gave him consideration, for he was only what is called in middling circumstances, and the deference with which he was treated was the more gratifying as he knew it to be an unpurchasable tribute paid by freemen to his abilities . and integrity. He, like almost all the New England yeomanry, married young, and lived most happily with his wife; for she was the woman of his choice, and truly and faithfully a helpmate in his labors, and a tried and discreet friend, in whose sympathy and counsels he found he might always -fely. When they first came to reside on their farm, it was almost a wilderness; but unremitting industry soon altered its appearancethe thrifty orchard occupied the place of the maple forest, the garden bloomed where the wild briar had sprung, and a comfortable house quite eclipsed the log hut, which had, at first, afforded them shelter.
Sarah Josepha Hale (24 oktober 1788 30 april 1879)
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