Yordan Radichkov - 'Slingshot' (to Countryside Magic)

Originally published on 10 September 2021

Where do stories come from? A question as legitimate and overlooked as 'why stories are written?' is a certified weak spot of every parent who has possibly revised and scripted the most adequate answers to 'where do babies come from?'. Luckily for frantic parents, there are roughly 20k Bulgarian women each year to assure them that stories and babies can be designed in likewise fashion - by accident.

(Insert unwanted pregnancy stat)

Yordan Radichkov's writing functions as old sayings or jokes the progenitor of you always wonder. His voice emerges out of thin air, anonymous and coincidental. In his collection of later short stories titled Slingshot, questions on the factuality and origins of events are in hyperinflation. It takes a good Lit scholar to console you with theories on narrative and good media to convince you that writers forcibly push stories on the page after you had a crack at Radichkov's literature. Perhaps in an attempt to counterbalance the already-nebulous character of tales and fables.

In Slingshot, it is as though words are not Radichkov's own. His style, just like wandering by a creek, sprawls into accounts of quotidian and delightfully dull errands of country life. He lets you wander on for miles, even though you've run the creeks' course some time ago. At his worst, Radichkov will play an intermediary for someone else's adventure. And at his best, you'll be part of a seamless reconciliation of folk wisdom with his poetic imagination, holding many candles to the folkloric tapestries of Tolstoy. Inventions out of touch with the basic realities of his cast intersect their minds in daydreams and fears. Everything outside the barriers of day-to-day life - high-voltage power stations, cars, planes - appears as a flight of fancy generated by our main narrator, Levashko.

The countryside is by no accident Radichkov's main venue for the mishaps of Levashko. The rustic universe we are given is, in each one of its nook and crannies, unashamedly boring. You wouldn't be in the mood for a two-page mechanical explanation of a carriage or an instruction manual on hand laundering... unless Radichkov rewards you with his staple Magically Realist twist that made him a force to be reckoned with.

MR's (our shorthand for Magical Realism) visual format was first diagnosed as an art form in Germany and later got finalised in South America under the management of blokes like Borges and Marquez. The latter medium, I think, progressed into a respected style practiced even today, and the former got washed away by the merciless but plentiful stream of 20th century art styles. This week was tense and didn't give me the time to become an expert on MR for the purpose of this blog. However, there's one in-your-face hint that I've made the gist of this article: stories as well as the "Magic" part of MR are a crack on the wall. 

A quick look at Wikipedia will tell you MR's bedding was created in the Lit hubs of Paris, transported to South America, and encoded into the post-colonial air of the continent. Today, MR is intuitively attached to South America with no further questions on why the movement fits so uncannily like a glove. One out of many reasons I found has to do with the cape of Western culture South America got quickly veiled in.

Allow me to envision it on your behalf: tenths of mid-size ships with cargo of organised religion, fleshed-out culture, values, economy etc. anchor on both sides of this terra incognita; conquistadors open settlements and begin to ward off defensive natives. Defence turns into offence and some 300 or so years later we arrive at a complete overhaul of the continent. Everything in contrast with the new establishment got jettisoned in the periphery or probably smothered by South America's new cultural veneer. While South America's ex imperial magnificence has been for long decaying before the arrival of Magellan, no-one, even settlers back then, can pronounce these societies culturally dead. It's here when the "Magic" bit of Magical Realism begins. Beneath the sheet of Western order bobs and wrestles the past life of South America and, in rare cases, cuts through a sliver in hopes of freedom. It's not statistically uncommon for fables, myths, and superstitions to escape their hideouts and manifest themselves before the public as totally alien and unreal.

It turns out the "M" in MR is not so much an unanticipated turn of events in seemingly ordinary circumstances, but a breakthrough of voices no longer heard. Levashko's amish-like world can be snuggling not too far away from your own city. And your home metropolis enjoying corporate entertainment, airline travel, and industrialised medicine might even be brushing the world of a Levashko-like character. The magic bit is the result of a calculated collision between two 'normals'.

What Radichkov has done with the genre of MR entirely separates it from its supposed homeland. Not only Slingshot, but the rest of his output proves MR is not to be confined to the otherwise-mystic land of South America. Going beyond the picaresque and the inexplicable, Radichkov unfolds every square inch of MR to prove that magic is simply a faded reality pigeonholed as irrelevant.

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