''Fakel'' (; ''The Torch'') was founded as a literary journal for

Soviet literature Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia, its émigrés, and to Russian-language literature. Major contributors to Russian literature, as well as English for instance, are authors of different ethnic origins, including bilingual ...

in translation in Bulgaria in 1981. Although intended as one of several publications which flooded the country with official works approved by the Soviet authorities, from the very beginning, the idea of the editors was to turn it unobtrusively into a journal for anti-Soviet literature. The name of the journal may have been a play on the famous Soviet journal ''

Ogonek The tail or ( ; Polish: , "little tail", diminutive of ) is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European languages, and directly under a vowel in several Native American langu ...

'' (the little flame).

History and profile

''Fakel'' was launched in 1981. The

Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...

n poet Georgi Borissov was first appointed as its vice editor-in-chief before becoming editor-in-chief in 1990. He is the founder and director of the publishing houses Fakel (1991–1995) and Fakel Express (1995). He has been the editor-in-chief of the magazine since 1990. Poet and translator Rumen Leonidov is another co-founder of ''Fakel'' magazine. Quite unexpectedly, the journal became very popular for it started publishing authors such as

Mikhail Bulgakov Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov ( ; rus, links=no, Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков, p=mʲɪxɐˈil ɐfɐˈnasʲjɪvʲɪdʑ bʊlˈɡakəf; – 10 March 1940) was a Russian and Soviet novelist and playwright. His novel ''The M ...

Yevgeny Zamyatin Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin ( rus, Евге́ний Ива́нович Замя́тин, p=jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪdʑ zɐˈmʲætʲɪn; – 10 March 1937), sometimes anglicized as Eugene Zamyatin, was a Russian author of science fictio ...

Andrei Platonov Andrei Platonovich Platonov ( rus, Андрей Платонович Платонов, , ɐnˈdrʲej plɐˈtonəvʲɪtɕ plɐˈtonəf; []; – 5 January 1951) was a Soviet Russian people, Russian novelist, short story writer, philosopher, play ...

, Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Vasily Grossman, Varlam Shalamov, Venedikt Erofeev,

Vladimir Voinovich Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich (; 26 September 1932 – 27 July 2018) was a Russian writer and former Soviet dissident, and the "first genuine comic writer" produced by the Soviet system. Among his most well-known works are the satirical epic ' ...

, as well as poems and essays by

Velimir Khlebnikov Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov, better known by the pen name ( rus, Велими́р Хле́бников, p=vʲɪlʲɪˈmʲir ˈxlʲɛbnʲɪkəf; – 28 June 1922), was a Russian poet and playwright, a central part of the Russian Futurist ...

Osip Mandelstam Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (, ; – 27 December 1938) was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school. Osip Mandelstam was arrested during the repressions of the 1930s and sent into internal exile wi ...

Marina Tsvetaeva Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva ( rus, Марина Ивановна Цветаева, p=mɐˈrʲinə ɪˈvanəvnə tsvʲɪˈta(j)ɪvə, links=yes; 31 August 1941) was a Russian poet. Her work is some of the most well-known in twentieth-century Russ ...

, Akhmatova,

Joseph Brodsky Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (; ; 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian and American poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in the Soviet Union, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled ("strongly ...

and

Vladimir Vysotsky Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky (25 January 193825 July 1980) was a Soviet singer-songwriter, poet, and actor who had an immense and enduring effect on Soviet culture. He became widely known for his unique singing style and for his lyrics, which ...

. With the fall of communism in Bulgaria, ''Fakel'', due to its previous notoriety, served as a natural intellectual catalyst in what is widely described as the "transition period" in the countries of Central and

Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is a subregion of the Europe, European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic connotations. Its eastern boundary is marked by the Ural Mountain ...

. The journal published along the works of

, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Daniil Kharms, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Tatyana Tolstaya,

Dmitri Prigov Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov (, 5 November 1940 in Moscow – 16 July 2007 in Moscow Eduard Uspensky Eduard Nikolayevich Uspensky (; 22 December 193714 August 2018) was a Soviet and Russian children's writer and poet, author of over 70 books, as well as a playwright, screenwriter and TV presenter. His works have been translated into 25 languages ...

Eduard Limonov Eduard Veniaminovich Limonov (né Savenko; , ; 22 February 1943 – 17 March 2020) was a Russians, Russian writer, poet, publicist, political dissident and politician. He emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1991 ...

Alexander Genis Alexander Genis (born February 11, 1953) is a Russian–American writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic. He has written more than a dozen non-fiction books. Genis, an American citizen, resides in the New York City area. He is the father of Da ...

Vladimir Bukovsky Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky (; 30 December 1942 – 27 October 2019) was a Soviet and Russian Human rights activists, human rights activist and writer. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, he was a prominent figure in the Soviet dissid ...

etc., works by authors such as

Marquis de Custine Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine (18 March 1790 – 25 September 1857) was a French aristocrat and writer who is best known for his travel writing, in particular his account of his visit to Russia, '' La Russie en 1839''. This work ...

G. K. Chesterton Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English author, philosopher, Christian apologist, journalist and magazine editor, and literary and art critic. Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brow ...

George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to a ...

, C. G. Jung,

Jaroslav Hašek Jaroslav Hašek (; 1883–1923) was a Czechs, Czech writer, Humorism, humorist, Satire, satirist, journalist, Bohemianism, bohemian, first anarchist and then communist, and commissar of the Red Army against the Czechoslovak Legion. He is best k ...

Zbigniew Herbert Zbigniew Herbert (; 29 October 1924 – 28 July 1998) was a Polish poet, essayist, drama writer and moralist. He is one of the best known and the most translated post-war Polish writers. While he was first published in the 1950s (a volume tit ...

Czesław Miłosz Czesław Miłosz ( , , ; 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish Americans, Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. He primarily wrote his poetry in Polish language, Polish. Regarded as one of the great poets of the ...

Arthur Miller Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are '' All My Sons'' (1947), '' Death of a Salesman'' (1 ...

Harold Pinter Harold Pinter (; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A List of Nobel laureates in Literature, Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramat ...

Václav Havel Václav Havel (; 5 October 193618 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident. Havel served as the last List of presidents of Czechoslovakia, president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissol ...

Günter Grass Günter Wilhelm Grass (; 16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gda ...

Robert Conquest George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 19173 August 2015) was a British and American historian, poet, novelist, and propagandist. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain but later wrote several books condemning commun ...

Mircea Dinescu Mircea Dinescu (; born November 11, 1950) is a Romanian poet, journalist, and editor. Biography Early life and poetry He was born in Slobozia, the son of Ștefan Dinescu, a metalworker, and Aurelia (born Badea). Dinescu studied at the Faculty ...

Milan Kundera Milan Kundera ( ; ; 1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship ...

Milorad Pavić Milorad Pavić ( sr-Cyrl, Милорад Павић, ; 15 October 1929 – 30 November 2009) was a Serbian writer, university professor, translator, literary historian and academic. Born in Belgrade in 1929, he published a number of poems, ...

Danilo Kiš Danilo Kiš (; born Dániel Kiss; 22 February 1935 – 15 October 1989) was a Yugoslav and Serbian novelist, short story writer, essayist and translator. His best known works include ''Hourglass'', '' A Tomb for Boris Davidovich'' and '' The En ...

Dubravka Ugrešić Dubravka Ugrešić (; 27 March 1949 – 17 March 2023) was a Yugoslav- Croatian and Dutch writer. A graduate of University of Zagreb, she was based in Amsterdam from 1996 and continued to identify as a Yugoslav writer. Early life and education ...

, etc., related in many different ways to the origins and the disintegration of totalitarian societies. In 2015 Georgi Borissov received the "Russian Award" at the International Literature Competition for publishing ''Fakel''.

References

External links

Official website
1981 establishments in Bulgaria Bulgarian-language magazines Literary magazines published in Bulgaria Literary translation magazines Magazines established in 1981 {{italic title