Under the Yoke Read online

  UNDER THE YOKE, 1912.

  A New and Revised Edition.

  LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN

  21 Bedford Street, W.C.

  LONDON MCMXII

  WILLIAM HEINEMANN

  First published {Heinemanrs International Library) December 1893

  2ND Edition November 1912

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Translator's Note

  Under the Yoke

  FOREWORD

  If there is a certain gratification in presenting to the English public.

  public the first specimen of the literature of a new people,

  that gratification is lifted above triviality, and grounded

  upon a serious critical basis, when the book so presented is

  in itself a masterpiece. I do not think that it will be

  questioned that Under the Yoke is a romance of modern

  history of a very high class indeed. That it should be the

  earliest representation of Bulgarian belles-lettres translated

  into a Western tongue may be curious and interesting, but

  the book rests its claim upon English readers on no such

  accidental quality. Tji any language, however hackneyed,

  the extreme beauty of this heroic novel, so simple and yet so

  artfully constructed, so full of ideal charm, permeated with

  so pure and fiery a passion, so human and tender, so modem

  and yet so direct and primitive, must have been assured

  among all imaginative readers.

  The story is one of false dawn before the sunrise. The

  action proceeds, as may gradually be discovered, in the

  years 1875 and 1876, and the scene is laid in that comer of

  Bulgaria which was not until 1886 completely freed from

  Turkish rule — the north-west part of Thrace — overshadowed

  by the Balkan on the north, and then forming part of

  the anomalous suzerainty of Eastern Roumelia. Pod Igoto

  is the title of the book, and I am instructed that in Bulgarian

  the three words Pod Igo-to mean, literally translated, Under

  the Yoke. The whole story is the chronicle of one of those

  abortive attempts which were made throughout Bulgaria

  and Roumelia forty years ago, under the hope of help from

  Russia, to throw off the intolerable Turkish yoke of

  tyranny. The tale ends tragically, with the failure of the

  particular and partial insurrection described, and the

  martyrdom of the leading patriots who took a part in

  it ; but the reader is preserved from finding this failure

  INTRODUCTION

  depressing by the consciousness that relief was at hand, and

  that an end was soon afterwards to be put to all the

  horrors of bondage, to the incessant zaptie at the door, to the

  hateful Turkish rapine, to the misery of Christian servitude

  under a horde of Oriental officials.

  For particulars as to the career of the author of Under the

  Yoke I am indebted to the kindness of Professor J. E.

  Gueshoff of Sofia, whose enthusiasm for English institutions

  is well known in this country. Ivan Vazoff, by far the most

  distinguished writer of modern Bulgaria, was bom in

  August 1850, at Sopot, a large South Bulgarian village in

  what was later known as Eastern Roumelia, at the foot of

  the Balkan, and about forty miles to the north of Philippopolis.

  The locality indicated is identical with the centre

  of the district obviously described in Under the Yoke, and I

  should not be surprised to learn that Bela Cherkva, the

  little toAvn so lovingly and so picturesquely pictured by M.

  Vazoff as the centre of his novel, was Sopot under a disguise.

  The other scenes of action — Klissoura, Karlovo, Koprivshtitsa,

  and the rest — ^appear in the course of this

  romance under their real names, and are the towns of a

  lovely pastoral district. The story passes in the heart of

  the famous Valley of Roses, where the attar is made ; and

  over those billowy meadows, heavy with the redundant

  rose, over the hurrying water-courses, the groves of walnut

  and pear trees, the white cupolas ringed about with poplars,

  the little sparkling cities — over all this foreground of rich

  fertility there rises the huge bulwark of the inaccessible

  Balkan, snow-clad all though the tropic summer, and feeding

  the flowery plain with the wealth of its cascades and

  torrents.

  M. Ivan Vazoff was educated at the school of his native

  village. Prom Sopot his father, a small trader, sent him to

  Kalofer and then to Philippopolis. At that time, so Professor

  Gueshoff assures me, Bulgarian literature consisted

  of nothing but a few school-books and pohtical pamphlets,

  INTRODUCTION vii

  possessed of no literary pretensions. Like all other Bulgarians

  who have made their mark in new Bulgaria, M.

  Vazoff was driven to seek his facts and his ideas from foreign

  sources. None but works written in alien languages were

  worthy to be read. He set himself to study Russian and

  then French, taking advantage of the school libraries existing

  in the chief centres of population. When the budding

  spirit of Bulgaria put forth that first tender leaf. The Periodic

  Review, published at Braila, over the frontiers of friendly

  Roumania, he was one of the first to contribute poems to it.

  From 1870 to 1872 M. Vazoff resided, like so many educated

  Bulgarians of that time, in Roumania. But in the latter

  year he went back to Sopot, hesitating between the only

  two employments open to such men as he, teaching and

  trade. He chose the latter, and entered his father's business*

  He was not very successful, attending to it, we may believe,

  not much more closely than his hero, Ognianoff, does to

  school-work. No doubt, not a little of M. Vazoff's personal

  history is here mingled with his fiction, for we find that he

  grew more and more an object of suspicion to the Turkish

  authorities, until in 1876, the year of smouldering and

  futile insurrection, he had to fly north across the Balkan

  for his life. He reached Roumania in safety, and at

  Bucharest joined the Bulgarian Revolutionary Committee.

  The three stormy years that followed saw the final development

  of his genius, and the publication of three volumes of

  his patriotic lyrical poetry. The Banner and the Ouzla, The

  Sorrows of Bulgaria, The Delivera
nce, in which the progressive

  story of Bulgarian emancipation may be read in

  admirable verse.

  He returned in 1878 to find Sopot destroyed, and his

  father murdered by the Bashi-bozouks. The impression

  made upon his imagination by the horrors of his bleeding

  country may be clearly marked in the later chapters of

  Under the Yoke. M. Vazoff accepted from the Russians,

  who^^were then in occupation of Bulgaria, a judicial

  viii" INTRODUCTION

  appointment. In 1879 he was elected a member of the Permanent

  Committee of the Provincial Assembly in the new

  and anomalous country of Eastern Roumelia. He settled

  in the new capital, Philippopolis, and here he published his

  earliest prose works, his stories of Not Long Ago, Mitrofan,

  Hadji Akhil, and The Outcast, his comedy of Mikhalaki, and

  issued, besides, two new collections of poetry, entitled Fields

  and Woods and Italy respectively. The last-mentioned

  was published in 1884, after the author had been travelling

  in the country it celebrated.

  During the Serbo-Bulgarian war of 1885, M. Vazoif

  visited the battle-fields of Slivnitza, Tsaribrod, and Pirot,

  sang the valour of his countrymen in dithyrambic strains,

  and inveighed — in a volume entitled Slivnitza — against the

  fratricidal madness of King Milan. Dissatisfied with the

  turn taken by aiiairs in the peninsula after the abdication

  of Prince Alexander of Battenberg, M. Vazoff in 1886 left

  for Russia. It was while residing in Odessa that he wrote

  the romance of Pod Igoto (" Under the Yoke "), which is

  generally admitted to be his masterpiece. In 1889 he

  returned to Bulgaria, and settled in Sofia, where he had

  inherited some property from an uncle. Pod Igoto first

  appeared, in serial form, in the excellent Sbornik (or

  Miscellany) published by the Bulgarian Ministry of Public

  Instruction. The same review issued in 1892 a book by

  M. Vazoff entitled The Great Desert of Rilo, and in 1893

  another, called In the Heart of the Rhodope. In 1891-92

  our author undertook the editorial management of the

  monthly periodical Dennitsa (" The Morning Star "). He

  is now, without a rival, the leading writer of Bulgaria,

  and actively engaged in the production of prose and

  verse.

  The poems of Vazoff enjoy a great popularity in his own

  country, and selections from them have been translated

  into Russian, Czech, Slovenian, and Servian. The Bohemians

  may read him in a version by Voracek, published at

  INTRODUCTION '

  ix

  Prague in 1891, which is recommended to me as particularly

  admirable. But alas ! Bohemia is itself remote, and a

  poet to whom a translation into Czech appears to be an

  introduction to the Western world seems to us inaccessible

  indeed. Professor Gueshoff considers that VazofE will

  hold in the history of Bulgarian literature a place analogous

  to that of Chaucer in our otvti. Having no Bulgarian

  models to follow, and no native traditions of poetical

  style, Vazoff has had to invent the very forms of versification

  that he uses. His success has already led to the creation

  of a school of young Bulgarian poets, but, though

  many have imitated Vazoff with talent, not one approaches

  him in the melody of his metrical effects or in his magical

  command of the resources of the Bulgarian language.

  Written during an epoch of intense national excitement,

  in a language quite unused before, Vazoff's poems are

  described to me as reflecting with extraordinary directness

  and simple passion the woes and burdens, the hopes and

  the pleasures, of a pastoral people, long held in servitude

  but at length released. Most of the figures celebrated in

  his ballads and his odes are the heroes of contemporary

  patriotism — ^men, unknown till yesterday, who rose into

  momentary fame by fighting and dying for their country.

  They live crystallised in this beautiful verse, already

  classical, already the food and inspiration of Bulgarian

  youth — verse written by a son of the new country, one

  who suffered and struggled with her through her worst

  years of hope deferred. How tantalising it is that we

  cannot read such poetry, with the dew of the morning of a

  nation upon it ! It is almost enough to tempt the busiest

  of us to turn aside to the study of Bulgarian.

  We may regret our wider loss the less, since it is now

  practicable to read in English what all Bulgarians seem to

  admit is the leading prose product of their nation. In Pod

  Igoto (" Under the Yoke ") Vazoff is understood to have

  concentrated in riper form than elsewhere the peculiar gifts

  X INTRODUCTION

  of his mind and style. The first quality which strikes the

  critic in reading this very remarkable book is its freshness.

  It is not difficult to realise that, in its original form, this

  must be the earliest work of genius written in an unexhausted

  language. Nor, if Vazoff should live eighty years, and

  should write with unabated zeal and volume, is it very likely

  that he will ever recapture this first fine careless rapture.

  Under the Yoke is a historical romance, not constructed by

  an antiquary or imagined by a poet out of vague and insufficient

  materials accidentally saved from a distant past,

  but recorded by one who lived and fought and suffered

  through the scenes that he sets himself to chronicle. It is

  like seeing Old Mortality written by Morton, or finding the

  autobiography of Ivanhoe. It is history seen through a

  powerful telescope, with mediaeval figures crossing and

  recrossing the seventies of our own discoloured nineteenth

  century.

  When the passion which animates it is taken into consideration,

  the moderate and artistic tone of Under the Yoke

  is worthy of great praise. In an episode out of the epic of an

  intoxicated nation, great extravagance, great violence might

  have been expected and excused. But this tale of forlorn

  Bulgarian patriotism is constructed with delicate consideration,

  and passes nowhere into bombast. The author writes

  out of his heart things which he has seen and felt, but the

  moment of frenzy has gone by, and his pulse as an observer

  has recovered its precision. The passion is there still, the

  intense conviction of intolerable wrongs, scarcely to be

  wiped out with blood. He reverts to the immediate past —

&n
bsp; Seeing how with covered face and plumeless wings.

  With unreverted head

  Veiled, as who mourns his dead,

  Lay Freedom, couched between the thrones of kings,

  A wearied lion without lair,

  And bleeding from base wounds, and vexed with alien air —

  INTRODUCTION xi

  but already the image is settled, and has taken the monumental

  and marmoreal aspect of past history.

  The strenuous political fervour of this romance is relieved

  by a multitude of delicate, touching, and humorous episodes.

  The scene in the theatre, where, in the presence of the indulgent

  and indolent Turkish Bey, songs of Bulgarian insurrection

  are boldly introduced into a sentimental farce, a

  spurious running translation being supplied to the unsuspecting

  governor ; the thrilling slaughter of the bandits at

  the Mill ; the construction of the hollow cherry-tree cannon^

  which bursts so ignominiously at the moment of trial ; the

  beautiful and heroic love-scenes between Ognianoff and

  Rada, cunningly devised and prepared as the very food of

  patriotism for youthful native readers ; the copious and

  recurrent, but never needless or wire-drawn, descriptions of

  the scenery of the Balkan valleys ; the vignettes of life in

  Bulgarian farmsteads, and cafes, and monasteries, and

  water-mills — all these are but the embroidery of a noble

  piece of imaginative texture, unquestionably one of the

  finest romances that Eastern Europe has sent into the

  West.

  Edmund Gosse

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

  Apart from the difficulty of rendering into English a work

  written in Bulgarian, a language which may be said to be as

  yet uncultivated and in a state of transition, which possesses

  no dictionary worthy of the name, and which, at all events in

  peasant mouths and in certain districts, is a strange jumble,

  — where Turkish words, and sometimes even Greek, predominate it is no easy task to bring before the English reader a more

  or less accurate picture of village life in the Balkans, where

  so much must appear strange and inexplicable. It has been