“Моторни песни” / Motor songs
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Autor:
Nikola Vapcarov
Country:
Bulgaria (BG)
Book Theme:
Poets representing your country poetry
Publisher:
September
Publishing Year:
Nikola Vaptsarov is a Bulgarian poet whose work is mainly on social and humanistic themes. He studied at the Naval Engineering School in Varna. During his internship, he visited many exotic places. After graduating from the Naval School, Vaptsarov worked as a technician in a factory, then went to Sofia. In 1940, he collected signatures for the so-called “Sobolev action”. For his participation in this action, he was arrested in 1942 and sentenced to death, being shot that same evening. Vaptsarov’s only poetry collection published during his lifetime, entitled “Motor Songs”, was published in 1940. It has been translated into a number of languages. He received a posthumous honorary International Peace Prize in 1952.
National Award for Children’s and Young People’s
Abstract
“Motor Songs” is divided into four cycles: “Songs for Man”, “Songs for the Homeland”, “Songs” and “Songs for a Country”. As we can see, in the titles of the book and the individual cycles, the main designation of poetry is “song”. The main idea of proletarian poetry can be expressed as follows: the life of the majority of people is “heavy and boring,” as a result of which they accumulate anger, which at some point will explode and destroy the old world in order to build a new, more just one. This idea really comes through in Vaptsarov’s lyrics. For Vaptsarov, the hero is an earthly, concrete and individualized person. The image of the world constructed by Vaptsar’s poetry is objective. The usual symbolic images of apocalypse and revolution, represented as waves of fire or the eruption of a volcano are gone. In their place come the everyday efforts of man to struggle with life. For Vaptsarov, faith is the only way for a person to take responsibility for both their own life and the life of the community. Faith must become an everyday moral guide, which alone is capable of transforming “this subject” into a person. All these features of Vaptsar’s lyrics build the innovative charge of his only poetry collection published during his lifetime, “Motor Songs”.
