Radoi Ralin

Radoi Ralin is the penname of Dimitar Stoyanov. Born in Sliven, South-Eastern Bulgaria on 23 April 1923, he started his poetic career with a collection entitled "Soldier's Notebook", inspired by his own World War II experience. Ralin joined the anti-fascist opposition at a very early age, but once the communists took power he was among their most outspoken critics, using Aesopian language.

The work that won Radoi Ralin the people's true love and admiration was "Lyuti Chushki" (Hot Peppers), a collection of epigrams illustrated by equally famous Bulgarian cartoonist Boris Dimovski.

At party meetings across the country, the book was condemned as a political crime, an instrument for destroying political morale and discipline, a display of blatant disrespect for law and order, the Communist Party leadership, and a distorted picture of the socialist economy.

The Communist Party Central Committee decided to punish anyone who had anything to do with the publication of "Hot Peppers". The illustrator Dimovski lost his job at Sturshel (Hornet) newspaper, and so did the director of the publishing house Tashev.

Ralin became synonymous with political wit, and attribution reached such proportions that he was reportedly provoked to write an epigram on the subject: "My folk, write on your lore, but credit not Radoi for this galore!"

Ralin also wrote aphorisms, satirical parables, serious verse, scripts for stage performances, film comedies and documentaries, and translated Pushkin, Goethe and Moliere. His own works have been translated in 37 languages.

Ralin was among the founders of the opposition movement that finally ousted communist rule in 1989. In January 1989, he was one of 12 most prominent dissidents invited by visiting French President Francois Mitterrand to a breakfast at the French Embassy in Sofia. Ralin was urged to run for Parliament in the first and then in the second general elections after 1989, but he adamantly refused. He has been quoted saying that where politics starts, art ends.

Radoi Ralin declined any awards and privileges offered to him in the post-communist years. His belief was that art is created in absolute poverty. He saw himself as a mouthpiece of the destitute, and in recent years took up the cause of what he saw was an army of wronged Bulgarian pensioners.

Radoi Ralin died in hospital on July 22, 2004 at the age of 81.

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