Milen Ruszkov - Felmagasztosulás

Translated by PÉTER KRASZTEV, with an afterword by LAJOS PARTI NAGY

"The death of the deed is the death" - this could be the motto of the famous subversives of the revolutionary era, and the heroes of this novel do not think much either: they kill, rob, and extort under the pretext of serving the people. The novel's characters are partly fictional mountain robbers, and partly real historical figures of the Bulgarian national enlightenment, as well as the people themselves, which these romantic geniuses are trying to invent. The inner story of the Bulgarian national rebirth is narrated by Gicso, an aspiring local witch-doctor, the addressee of the narrative is "ecsém", who is probably none other than the lord himself, and this Gicso formulates it in the normative, i.e. pre-language language, at least ironically, but his views of the world, sometimes tinged with cynicism.

According to authoritative opinions, the European literary award-winning Ascension is the best Bulgarian novel of all time. However, this is his first appearance abroad. On the one hand, there are linguistic reasons for this: hardly anywhere else does artificial Szekely offer itself so strongly as a language of translation; and on the other hand, what other cultural milieu could be more receptive to the following definition: "Being Bulgarian is a complete struggle. It's like not having a national name, but a disease. A Bulgarian is someone who fails." In short: this 19th-century quasi-picaresque novel is at least as much about our common Central and Eastern European issues - nation and people, freedom and solidarity, rebellion and calculation, heroes and runaways - as it is about Bulgarian history, which, after all, why would it hurt to get to know him? Especially when you offer yourself in such a fun way.

MILEN RUSZKOV (1966) is a Bulgarian writer and translator who lives in Sofia. In 1995, he graduated in Bulgarian literature at the University of Sofia, then worked on his PhD dissertation at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. His novel Upliftment was published in 2011, and he immediately received the Golden Century Award of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture, the National Hristo G. Danov Award, and the Elias Canetti Award. In 2014, his novel also won the European Union Prize for Literature. His previous novel was published in Hungarian in 2016 under the title Up to the Neck in Nature.