FEB 11 - Famous Bulgarian poet, scholar and politician Edvin Sugarev visited AUBG last Monday, on the invitation of the English professor Vladimir Levchev.

Edvin Sugarev was born in 1953 in Sofia. He graduated from the Sofia University in 1979 and worked at the Institute of Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Science. In 1991, Sugarev was elected a member of the parliament. He was also a member of the Great National Assembly that fathered the present Constitution of Bulgaria. Sugarev’s political career continued as ambassador in Mongolia and India until in 2002 he withdrew from politics.

Sugarev read poems from his bilingual book “Secret Senses.” Levchev and junior Valeria Lozeva read in English and helped with the translation into Bulgarian.

Sugarev’s poems carry the sarcastic spirit of the disappointed former political activist, but the very word “politics” is absent. His characters are animals, plants, and rarely people. The homeland is compared simultaneously with “fate,” an “ax,” and a “mother’s lap.” Sugarev’s sharp tongue makes the dark tone of his poems stronger, and he reads his work with an underlying passion.

When asked about his political career, Sugarev said, “I am one of the last active social figures from the beginning of the nineties who withdrew from politics. I did it late and it is at my account. I do not regret anything I have done. […] The mistake of all democratically thinking people [in Bulgaria] was that they made way too many compromises.”