Geo Milev

Biography

On the morning of 15 May 1925 Geo Milev was summoned to the Sofia police for a “short inquiry”. He did not come home, and for thirty years nothing was known of his fate.

The day before, a court had sentenced him to a year in prison and a fine of 20,000 leva for his poem “September”.

He was born on 15 January 1895 in Radne mahale, now Radnevo, into a family of teachers; his legal name was Georgi Milev Kasabov. The family moved to Stara Zagora, where in 1907 his father opened a bookshop and publishing house. That same year Milev’s first poem appeared in the children’s magazine Slaveiche. At secondary school (1907–1911) he produced handwritten magazines and collections and illustrated them himself, and read the Russian classics in the original. Then came Romance philology at Sofia University (1911–1912) and Leipzig (1912–1914), where he attended lectures on philosophy and wrote a thesis on the poetry of Richard Dehmel. He did not obtain a degree. In July 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, Milev went to London and met the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, whom he later translated. Back in Germany, he was arrested in Hamburg on suspicion of spying for England and, after some time, released for lack of evidence. In 1915 he found himself in Bulgaria. His father had been called up, and Milev took over his press: he brought out, as separate sheets and small books, poems by Mallarmé, Dehmel, Verlaine and Verhaeren in his own translations, with his own essays, and dedicated each issue to one of the Bulgarian Symbolist poets, Nikolai Liliev among them. In the winter of 1915–1916, together with Nikola Ikonomov, he put together a theatre company in Stara Zagora.

In March 1916 he was mobilised, and after officers’ courses he found himself at the front near Doiran. In the spring of 1917 the position where he served came under English shelling; Milev was gravely wounded in the head and lost his right eye. According to accounts, he wore his hair all his life in a way that hid the eye. He was sent to Berlin for treatment and lived there from early 1918 until March 1919. Despite numerous operations, he went to libraries, exhibitions and theatres, saw the revolutionary ferment in Germany, grew close to German writers and artists, and translated and published in the Expressionist magazines Die Aktion and Der Sturm.

In Sofia he married the actress Mila Keranova; the family, with two daughters, lived in one room for lack of money. From 1919 to 1922 Milev published the magazine Scales (Vezni), which carried Symbolists and Expressionists, and from 1920 to 1923 he staged plays at the Bulgarian National Theatre. The collections “The Cruel Ring” (1920) and “The Icons Sleep” (1922), “A Little Expressionist Calendar for the Year 1921” and “The Commemoration Ceremony for the Poet Yavorov” (1922) belong to these years. To my mind, the most striking thing about him in this period is that he translated not the classics but writers who had only just been published: among them Johannes Becher, Mayakovsky and Ernst Toller.

By 1922 his work, previously remote from politics, had become political, and in that same year he joined the Bulgarian Communist Party. From January 1924 he published the magazine Flame (Plamak), with a sharply left-wing line. It carried the articles “Ugly Proses”, the beginning of the poem “Hell”, and “September”, devoted to the September Uprising of 1923. The double issue 7–8 was confiscated, the author was put on trial, and in January 1925 the magazine was banned. On 14 May 1925 the court sentenced Milev to a year in prison, a fine, and deprivation of civil and political rights for two years. He intended to appeal.

After the bombing of St Nedelya Church the government began mass reprisals against the left. Milev was killed in police custody: he was strangled with wire, and his body was buried in a mass grave at Ilientsi near Sofia. In 1954, at the trial of General Ivan Valkov and former police and military officers, one of the defendants described the executions of 1925 and the burial site. The remains were identified by a glass eye.

His daughter Leda Mileva (1920–2013) became a poet. His house in Stara Zagora has been turned into a museum, and a district of Sofia and rocks in the South Shetland Islands are named after him.