Лазар Николов: „Разказ за преживяното. Биографични бележки и размисли“
Lazar Nikolov: “An Account of Lived Experience. Biographical Notes and Reflections”

Summary/Abstract: The book was published under the editorship of Yulian Kujumdzhiev (who has already brought out several similar editions with published documents from the archives of composer Lazar Nikolov plus composer and conductor Konstantin Iliev) and with the assistance of Angelina Petrova (the foreword author and a long-time researcher of Lazar Nikolov’s work). Its publication was one of the important events of musical year 2022 in Bulgaria, when the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth was celebrated. This is the largest complete text from Lazar Nikolov’s archive and arguably the innermost description of his life. His notes were made between 1973 and 1988. These memories hold great informative value as they provide detailed and concrete information about the composer’s ancestors, his childhood, and entry into the musical world, about his training and his teachers, about his personal and professional friendships, about the setting and environment in which an artist lived and worked in those years, about many events and processes at the time, about domestic adversities, about the compositions written, about his unpreserved works, the personalities in that milieu, his own views on music, and the development of his composing language. Written without the idea of being published, these memories also contain the author’s personal feelings about the complex relations of the New Music figures in Bulgaria, both with one another and with musicians of the previous generation in the 1950s – 1980s. Thus, for researchers, the manuscript shows an internal picture of these processes in socialist Bulgaria according to which its own dramas and clashes are to a large extent the result of personal relationships and character traits in relation to which communist power appears rather as an instrument or stimulus. For Lazar Nikolov, however, these pages are a kind of “Life and Passions” – their role was to help the author protect himself and resist an environment felt by him as hostile in principle and too often so in practice.

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