Blaga Nikolova Dimitrova (2 January 1922 鈥� 2 May 2003) was a Bulgarian poetess and Vice President of Bulgaria from 1992 until 1993.
Born to a mother teacher and a father lawyer, Blaga Dimitrova was raised in Veliko Tarnovo and then moved to Sofia. She finished High School in 1942, and Slavic Philology at the University of Sofia in 1945.
In the 1970s, her works became more critical of the communist government, and she received reprimands for not being politically correct. Four of the poetry books Dimitrova wrote in the 1970s- "Fireflies Fading", "Rubber Plant", "Questions", and "Hobbyada"- were all rejected by state publishing houses with no specific reason given.
Blaga Dimitrova was the inspiration behind John Updike's short story "The Bulgarian Poetess".
During the Vietnam War, Dimitrova visited the country several times as a journalist, and in 1967 adopted a Vietnamese girl. Dimitrova was married to literary critic Jordan Vasilev.
It鈥檚 a popular opinion that travelling will help you find yourself. Exploring new places, getting to know different cultures, expanding your horizon will inevitably lead to that dreamed of self-discovery. People travel from India to Cuba and back looking for themselves, thinking maybe that if they go to a new place, they can leave behind all of their mistakes and past problems and start a new. This rarely works.
I have traveled a lot. Three continents, numerous countries and cities, hundreds of people have crossed my path as I was trying to find myself or escape from myself. Either way, a journey to oneself seems like a different kind of trip. You can travel thousands of miles and come no closer to who you really are. Or you can stay in one place and discover everything you have every looked for.
Journey to Oneself by Blaga Dimitrova is about a girl on the quest of discovering her identity in communist times, when society is doing all it can to suppress individuality and establish the collective team as the ultimate virtuous organism. Rayna has been at disadvantage since her birth. A daughter of a man convicted for crimes against the Party, she is handicapped by her name. Rayna pays for the choices of her father by abandoning her dream to attend a university (at communist times in Bulgaria if someone from your family was opposing the party, most of your privileges were taken away) and by moving to a remove village in the Rodopi mountains. Here, as the only girl in a team of climbers, she hopes to earn back the right to be an equal part of society, despite of her father.
God, it took me a year to finish this book! You can tell I hadn't read Bulgarian literature in a while. It was quite difficult to go through many of the descriptions in the beginning as they felt tedious and unnecessary. But boy, am I happy I did not leave this book unfinished. It was a true journey to oneself that filled many pages with quotations in my notebook. I recommend this book warmly as it is a true lesson in self-reflection. I have hardly gotten to know any other character in any other book that well. You need to brace yourself with patience though, as it takes quite a while until you begin to grasp the mystery around the main character and start liking them.
The book shows us that knowing yourself means being true to oneself, following your conscience. Blaga Dimitrova has written a timeless book about facing life's compromises against the background of 1950s communist Bulgaria. We learn from the inner struggles of both the rigid ideologues and free spirits. And it is beautifully written, reads like poetry at times. I kept rereading certain paragraphs to savor the language, only to discover new layers of meaning.