Atanas Slavov

Slavov was born in Sliven on July 25, 1930 to Vasil Atanasov Slavov (1889–1980) and Penka Ruseva Slavova. Slavov was the youngest of three children, growing up alongside his older sisters Maria and Lilliana. Slavov was named after his paternal grandfather, Atanas Slavov (1860–1932), who was a lawyer and mayor of Sliven, as well as head of the Bulgarian Winemakers Association; his house in Sliven, built in 1930, is currently a landmarked building.

Slavov's father, Vasil, studied law in Belgrade and practiced in Sliven, before dedicating his time to co-found a Masonic lodge in the city; his interests spanned from Theosophy to Transcendentalism. In 1938, Vasil moved to Sofia and built his house in the Izgrev, Sofia district, popular with followers of the esoteric spiritualist Peter Deunov. The Slavov family were close to the spiritual leader Deunov and he often visited their home in the Izgrev district.

Vasil worked as legal counsel to his brother Kiril for the latter's varnishing factory (which was one of the first Bulgarian industrial enterprises to export to England) and alongside his brother-in-law Vladimir Atanasov, Vasil founded а flooring textiles factory in Omurtag (town). During the postwar hysteria and the establishment of the communist regime in Bulgaria, Vasil was wrongly accused of being an English intelligence officer and starting in 1953, he spent six years in jail as an enemy of the state. Meanwhile, his brother Kiril was arrested by Stalinists in 1948 for his efforts, alongside Traicho Kostov, to keep Bulgarian industrialism and export entrepreneurialism independent of the communist grasp. Kiril was also accused of working for English intelligence and in 1949, during an interrogation, he was killed by the Bulgarian State Security Service.[4]

Vasil's personal library is now housed in New Bulgarian University in Sofia and includes over 3,000 tomes in English, Russian, French, German, and Esperanto.[5]

Atanas Slavov initially enrolled at the American College of Sofia and attended until its closure in 1941. In 1953, he graduated from St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia with a specialization in English Philology.

From 1953 to 1965, Slavov worked various jobs. First, as an instructor of Russian linguistics for a set of courses organized by the United Committee for Bulgaro-Soviet Cooperation; second, as a librarian at the SS. Cyril and Methodius National Library; third, getting involved in various programmes on Radio Sofia; and finally, as a cartographer in the Rhodope Mountains.

From 1961 to 1971, Slavov taught English literature at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, where he delivered an assortment of lectures to his students – from seminars on the poetry and drama of the English Renaissance and England in the Middle Ages to courses on the British prose of the 19th and 20th centuries. During this time, Slavov successfully defended his doctoral degree at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences on the dissertation topic of "Functions of Rhythm in Artistic Poetic Speech" (1965).

From 1966 to 1976, Slavov dedicated his time to working at the Institute of Art History at Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. While there, he established departments for design, informatics, and co-founded a group which focused on the study of Bulgarian Applied arts. Slavov also became a fellow specializing in Folklore and folkloric Art theory from 1974 onward.

From 1971 to 1976, Slavov co-founded and chaired as a member of the international group for comparative Slavic metrics at the Institute for Literary Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

In 1975, while at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Slavov acted as executive on the project "Guidelines of World Culture Until 2000", in connection with which he went to the United States, which at the time was unprecedented for anyone in the Eastern Bloc. While in the US, and de facto labeled a Defection case by the Communist regime in Bulgaria, Slavov provided his expertise as it related to the "Guidelines" project at the International Research & Exchanges Board until 1976 in New York City.

Once in the West, Slavov's work took on many interesting forms. He spent time as a freelance author and speaker at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the BBC (London) in 1978. Then, in 1979, he consulted on Eastern European cultures at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. While in DC, Slavov also worked as a Bulgarian language instructor at the United States Department of State and at the Center for Linguistic Research in Maryland (1980–1983). Slavov's longest tenure proved to be his decade-long association with Voice of America in Washington, D.C. from 1980 to 1990, where he worked as a radio content writer, editor and broadcaster.

After 1990 and at the End of Communism in Bulgaria (1989), Slavov returned to his birthplace Sliven, where he remained for the rest of his life, taking on an active and much-loved role in the local community.

Slavov died aged 80 from complications during a routine operation on December 4, 2010 in a Plovdiv hospital.[6]

After leaving Bulgaria in 1976, Slavov began to write his memoirs, to which he owed much of his fame and notoriety in the West. The memoirs were written in English, but originally read out in Bulgarian (read by the author himself) in 52 weekly broadcasts on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty under the title Paths Under the Highways (1978–79). Later in 1983, the memoirs were published in Bulgarian under the title Overgrown with Grass by the Paris-based publishing house "Peev & Popov".

In 1986, the full version of the memoirs appeared in English (Occidental Press, Washington, DC) under the title With the Precision of Bats. Slavov's book, in which the particular political and cultural atmosphere of Bulgaria is recreated through the prism of autobiography and rich anecdote, won the Legerete International Writers Union Book award for best autobiography in 1986. The fate of the anti-communist and contra-Marxist memoirs in Bulgaria was radically different than their fate abroad, unfortunately. An investigation was launched against Slavov in 1978 by the Bulgarian government (investigation case No. 178) after the resumption of which in 1981 the author was sentenced to nine years in prison as an enemy of the state and political agitator. On February 1, 1991, the criminal case against Slavov was finally terminated, as the communist regime collapsed in Bulgaria.

Slavov first published poems in 1962 in Literary News newspaper, which received public denunciation in Communist leader Todor Zhivkov's speech targeted at intellectuals on April 15, 1963. Slavov's poetic work after leaving Bulgaria found expression in the collections Poems 1962. Pornographic poem 1968 (published in Bulgarian in Munich, Germany), Mr. Lampedusa Has Vanished, and The Dough of America is Rising Me. In 1988, under the pseudonym Al Santana, Slavov published a grotesque parody called Handling Vegetables.

A return to the Bulgarian political and cultural reality came with the book The Thaw in Bulgarian Literature, which corresponded to the memoirs read earlier on Radio Free Europe. The 'thawing' of Bulgarian literature acquaints the English-speaking reader with the true nature of the processes in Bulgarian literary life, as seen by a public intellectual who provides an "insider's look".

Due to his family's upbringing in the Izgrev, Sofia quarter and his father's interest in and relationship with Peter Deunov, Slavov is the greatest researcher of the life and teachings of Deunov. In the US, Slavov toured and documented all the places where Deunov had lived during his studies there.[8]