Georgi Markov - Life in Bulgaria

Life in Bulgaria

Georgi Markov was born on 1 March 1929, in Knyazhevo, a Sofia neighbourhood. In 1946 he graduated from the Gymnasium (high school) and began university studies in industrial chemistry. Initially Markov worked as a chemical engineer and a teacher in a technical school. At the age of 19 years old he became ill with tuberculosis which forced him to attend various hospitals. His first literary attempts occurred during that time. In 1957 a novel The Night of Celsius appeared. Soon another novel The Ajax Winners (1959) and two collections of short stories (1961) were published. In 1962 Markov published the novel Men which won the annual award of the Union of Bulgarian Writers and he was subsequently accepted as a member of the Union, a prerequisite for a professional career in literature. Georgi Markov started working at the Narodna Mladezh publishing house. The story collections A Portrait of My Double (1966) and The Women of Warsaw (1968) secured his place as one of the most talented young writers of Bulgaria. Markov also wrote a number of plays but most of them were never staged or were removed from theatre repertoire by the Communist censors: To Crawl Under the Rainbow, The Elevator, Assassination in the Cul-de-Sac, Stalinists, and I Was Him. The novel The Roof was halted in mid-printing since it described as a fact and in allegorical terms the collapse of the roof of the Lenin steel mill. Markov was one of the authors of the popular TV series At Every Milestone which created the character of the Second World War detective Velinsky and his nemesis the Resistance fighter Deyanov.

Despite the ban of some of his works, Georgi Markov had become an acclaimed author. He was one of several writers and poets that Zhivkov tried to co-opt and coerce into serving the regime with their works. During this period Markov had a bohemian lifestyle which was unknown to most Bulgarians.