What is this book really about?
We are talking about people who have betrayed their communist ideals and under the iron blessing of the Stalinist right, in the name of higher party orders and a utopian future, deprive other people of basic rights, multiply their own kind, surround themselves with lackeys and cops, mess with the national spirit and corrupt it, destroy the national economy and, possessed by a sense of impunity, lead the evil existence of American billionaires.
We are talking about such phenomena in totalitarian society as nemesis and cultism, general suspicion and impersonality, party patriotism and the trampling of national feelings, self-censorship and whistleblowers, the disintegration of the family and the exploitation of the emancipated woman, witchcraft and foreign worship, prostitution and pimping with "intelligence " targets, capital theft and running away from the state.
It is about the parasitic symbiosis between power and culture on the backs of the people, when, in order to appease the party deity, the creator is forced to sacrifice his conscience and his God-given gift, to breathe life into dead doctrines and present reality as it is. as his patrons want to see her, thereby depersonalizing both herself and the people she creates for.
But it is also about the Bulgarian people, whose tough roots cannot be destroyed by socialist chemicals; for his tolerance of races and creeds, and his proverbial indifference to all sorts of deities; for his sense of realism and justice, for his contempt for empty talk and the awareness that only he can help himself; for his natural wisdom and saving humor…
And past the repulsive figures of power-hungry functionaries and literary dignitaries, of fanatical party members and drunken ministers, of sinister majors and treacherous investigators, of waiters and black marketers, you will reach, reader, and the Workers' Republic, where as an "island of old-fashioned honesty" stands the director Manya Encheva or the defiantly breaking presser Lyubka, where the fireman Dimitar climbs the factory chimney with childish recklessness to announce the death of Comrade Stalin with the siren, and the fitter Drago leads his wife to have an abortion because he does not want to create another unfortunate world. You will meet engineer Uzunov, possessed by gloomy determination, and teacher Peev, full of sad dignity. You will catch a glimpse of the merciful Sister Maria and the far-sighted furniture dealer in Knyazevo Goldstein.
"How many wasted themes, how many ruined books!" - will exclaim the one who is used to self-torture in voluptuous wrestling with the word literati.
And he will be right. For Georgi Markov, it was not important how, but what he would say. He was tormented by the thought that his talent would not be eternal, that there would be no one to turn back the hourglass of time. The truths and insights that had ripened in him were already running like electricity through the air, on the tips of tongues. Well, they only whispered them - with hints, with understatements, with winks, with glances. Enough of our practice in metaphors, allegories, symbols. Someone has to tell the truth. Without splitting the basma of fine literature. Without joining the birds of paradise. Without believing the fables of a transitional period, selfless love, positive characters.
The reports thus conceived as a series of broadcasts on radio "Free Europe" began to turn into sharp journalistic articles, critical essays, historical overviews, documentary and humorous stories, sociological studies, sketchy portrait sketches, essays and memories, literary anecdotes, miniatures. They weigh and lighten, shift and adjust, but strangely: they don't fall apart. And no matter how you look at them, no matter where you pick them up, they take bizarre, sometimes strictly geometric, sometimes elusive in their movement forms that irresistibly attract you and you follow them with bated breath.
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In Absence, Reports on Bulgaria | 
