We associate the name of Elin Pelin with stories such as "On the Groove" and "The Windmill". It is as if he has been accepted as the author of only a handful of works and does not exist outside of certain genre forms and specific thematic cores. Thus, in the shadows of his more familiar texts are publications and books that no one pays attention to.
"Black Roses" is among those forgotten pages of Elin Pelin, covered in dust, found space in various editions of his collected works. As far back as 1928, when it appeared, this book showed critics another Elin Pelin, different and unknown.
We will not emphasize the values of Black Roses here, we will not analyze it. We will only remind her, since we cannot answer the question why she does not know today, why she is sunk in the dark gap between the towering towers of literature.
Thirty stories combined by one idea lead to comparisons with authors such as Baudelaire and Turgenev in 1928. Apparently this is how critics have tried to acknowledge Elin Pelin's ability to use different feathers and different ink when writing - in other words, to translate.
An example of such a work, other than Andreshko or Herats, is the Eagle's Feather - in the foreground here is the writer as a hero, a dreamer who wants to create and create. So is the Chuchuliga - the bird that wants to sing and be heard. Black Roses also features Summer, Lonely Trees, Nightmare, and more.
We reiterate that Elin Pelin is the storyteller of the village, without realizing that this village is a whole world whose integrity includes more than the texts studied in the Bulgarian school. It turns out that this village is not just a village. We pass “Under the Monastery Vine” and go through the vast streets of the “Old Town” (a product of “Black Roses”), look at the lonely books in the bookstores. We see the titanic novels strangling an Anemic Book. The fate of the book in this story is reminiscent of the fate of the Black Roses, which remained behind the window and shifted from a time not favored by many others.
Ever since its release, Black Roses has been called a diary. Some reviewers have described her works as poems in prose. Let's say this is a kind of diary, a diary of a deserving author. Then these short confessions should introduce us to the classics, to expand our knowledge, to supplement his portrait.
The formulas lead to one-sided conclusions for more than one author. We forget about the works for children of Elin Pelin, we forget about his poems, about the collaboration in magazines, we forget… and in the end one of our classics stands as a formula in our minds without realizing it.
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