War is not the subject here. It is merely the backdrop against which a far deeper, existential drama unfolds; one of total alienation and self-preservation through an imagined world.
Before the Ivan Milev we know came into being, there existed a bared, vulnerable spirit, forced to turn his inner refuge into a final sanctuary. His early creative period, the subject of this exhibition, is not a record of the everyday but a cry for the survival of the spirit. At the point of greatest psychological strain during the Great War, he did not document outward suffering, but confessed it, through the rawness of his diary, poetic longing and quiet attempts at painting.
While his watercolours preserve the familiar world of his homeland with its dusty fields, stone walls and silent village houses, an entirely unfamiliar geography inhabits his words. The boundless sea appears, along with ice, shipwrecks and the piercing cry of seagulls. For the young Milev the expanse of open water is a lifeline – a protest against loneliness and an escape from harsh reality.
In this verbal cosmos, the image of the seagull undergoes a shattering metamorphosis: from a tender sign of shared yearning in love to the cry of dying hope, and finally a companion in total alienation. The wreck is irreversible. The refusal of the burial mantle is a final rejection of vanity and falsehood. Milev chooses to remain bared before the forces of nature, where the seagulls, the sea and the sand remain the sole keepers of his memory.
Sand is the very crumbling nature of existence itself. The more feverishly he closes his fist, trying to hold on to the slipping grains of happiness, the faster they run through his fingers. Art here is not a professional choice, but a curse.
Ivan Milev strips away every protective mask and stands before eternity with the clear knowledge that there is no lifeboat to rescue him. And that the only thing left to him is to set down, with fanatical devotion, his collision with existence: in words, in colour, in silence.
IVAN MILEV. ONLY SEAGULLS, SAND and CURSES…
Or towards a possible aesthetics of absence
Plamen V. Petrov
The history of Bulgarian art in the first decades of the twentieth century has rarely encountered a creative path as dramatic and inwardly riven as that of Ivan Milev (1897–1927). Before he became one of the central figures of our national artistic heritage, the young author passed through extreme trials of life and existence. His early period, spanning the dramatic years of the First World War and those immediately after, is not merely an account of the birth of a new visual language. It is, above all, the story of the physical and spiritual survival of an exceptionally fragile, hypersensitive personality.
Before enrolling at the State Academy of Art in Sofia in the autumn of 1920, the young man from Kazanlak passed through the harsh reality of military service on the Northern Front. Raised in poverty and constant privation, he found himself amid the cold, the mud and the endless waiting in the trenches of Dobrudzha. In this reality of scarcity and physical exhaustion, any prospect of artistic self-realisation seemed utterly lost.
It is precisely at this point of psychological strain that Milev seems to begin building his inner world as a strategy of self-preservation. He achieves this not through outward documentation of soldierly life, but through three quite different confessional forms: the raw diary entry, poetic longing, and quiet, almost hopeless attempts at painting.
Here a deeply human and cultural paradox surfaces. At the front, Milev refuses to be a battle painter. He paints neither the clash of armies nor the concrete suffering and blood of the trenches. Yet while his watercolours encapsulate the familiar world of his homeland with its dusty fields, stone walls and silent village houses, an entirely unfamiliar, exotic geography floods into his pages of poetry and prose. The boundless sea appears, along with ice, shipwrecks and the piercing cry of seagulls.
For the young man, who had probably never before seen the sea with his own eyes, the open water is not a geographical given but a psychological refuge and a lifeline. Within this imagined space, the sea becomes a calling gesture of a spirit rescued from solitude; a protest against the suffocating grip of the soldier’s greatcoat and the senselessness of trench warfare.
To understand the genesis of this closed and vulnerable subject in the artist’s work, we must return to the starting point of his visual path – the early watercolour self portrait, probably created around 1912–1914. It is one of the few moments in which the artist faces us directly: a young boy from Kazanlak, whose deep, fixed gaze seems to carry a prophetic foreboding of all he was to suffer. In his later landscapes, human figures vanish, leaving behind only abandoned carts and empty yards. In this early self portrait, however, Milev is still here; bared, searching, looking into himself with that anxious stillness and hidden dignity of poverty that would later fill the whole of his work.
In the European cultural tradition, the image of the gull carries a rich and often dramatic symbolism. In the Middle Ages, and among the Celtic poets, it is a heavenly messenger, an embodiment of absolute, untamed freedom flying above human boundaries. In Shakespeare, the word carries a bitter tinge of naivety and credulity – of a deceived victim. In more recent times, through Chekhov’s dramatic transformation, the seagull becomes a metaphor for an innocent life senselessly destroyed. In nineteenth-century marine painting, it is simply a marker of the scale of the watery wilderness.
In Ivan Milev’s verbal world, however, the seagull undergoes a shattering, deeply personal metamorphosis. At first, in his early diary entries and in the collection Songs in Prose (1917), the bird appears as a sign of intimacy, embrace and shared longing in love. On 6 November 1917, he writes in his diary: She loves seagulls too, loves them as do I; and I saw many orphaned gulls. Elena and I are two seagulls. Here the bird is a quiet, touching double of two separated souls, trying to preserve their tenderness amid the world’s mounting ugliness. In Songs in Prose (March 1917), the image carries a similarly elegiac tinge: you will hold your breath, and with head bowed like a weary seagull, drift to sleep upon my restless breast…
Yet this intimate harmony has its own moments of collapse under the pressure of harsh reality. Near Tulcea, in Letters from the Steppe (October 1917), amid the endless, cold Dobrudzha plain, the seagull is transformed into the cry of dying hope. On 5 October he notes: Far off there to the north, where the emptiness of centuries lies in melancholy over myriad solitary lakes, mournful sounds drift, torn out like the shrieks of a dying seagull. The landscape around him is a true No Man’s Land. He describes the abandoned lighthouse by the river: The lighthouse stands on the line, neither ours, not the enemy’s, and no man enters there; only seagulls roost, worn out from their play with the waves. The lighthouse, removed from combat and from human use, becomes the only possible refuge for the exhausted birds. A day later, on 6 October, Ivan Milev records the bitter summation: And the black curse is carried on the distant drift / of lonely seagulls lost among the waves.
This tragic line reaches its culmination in the poetic text of 1918, in the collection Northern Songs:
A fishing boat’s splintered mast ascends alone over the ice, and above it hovers
an orphaned seagull, shriek carried across the cold blue sky.
The innocent eyes of a gull beguiled me
The innocent eyes of a northern soul.
They left me –
my strength, my youth – forever
for that soul…
– Does death not sing ominous, far off there?
Do not the crows caw about her, greedy for the kill?
– Drink up, drink up, my turtle-dove,
of my last blood drink your fill…
Lonely the shore, the sand’s a glare
beneath the sun’s fierce rays.
And no vessel shall fly anywhere
above the waves’ own hymn of praise.
Far off, in cherished dreams of home,
he perished, so they’ll say.
And one, perhaps, will shed a tear,
while another will only leer, and who’s to say,
why he’ll go to the tavern, and all night long
he’ll drink and sing, he’ll drink and sing…
I do not want a mantle to bury me in –
scraped out, perhaps, from the doors that poison
the peace of countless dead –
flapping beneath the earth.
Only seagulls, sand and curses
drift across the deathly waste.
The sea moans, and my gaze beholds
Nothing but its embrace.
The seagull now ceases to be merely a memory of the beloved and becomes a companion of total existential alienation. Falling in love with the innocent eyes of a northern soul is paid for in blood and youth. In the landscape the author describes, the “varka” —the boat that might have sailed across the waves and brought salvation—is absent. The wreck is irrevocable. Deeply affecting, too, is the final gesture of rejecting the ‘mantle’ – the official burial clothing embodying the vanity of the city and the falseness of institutions. Milev chooses to remain bared before the forces of nature. While the people in the tavern greet death with everyday indifference and cynicism, only the seagulls, the sea and the sand remain the keepers of his memory and his sacrifice.
Sand here is not merely a topographical detail along the waterline. It becomes a shattering metaphor for the very elusiveness and crumbling nature of human existence. The young artist’s life, torn apart by war, cold and privation, resembles a fistful of parched grains of sand. The more feverishly and desperately he closes his hand, trying to hold on to the crumbling remnants of fleeting happiness, love, warmth and youth, the faster they slip between his fingers. Sand is the shore of misfortune, the desert of orphanhood, upon which Milev, with almost fanatical persistence, nonetheless builds his invisible, imagined temple of colour and words.
For Ivan Milev, the full, full-blooded devotion to this art was never merely a professional choice, nor a vain pursuit of recognition. It is a curse to which he chooses, of his own will, to give himself. A kind of fate, a destined mark demanding absolute, merciless self-sacrifice; a burning down to the last fibre of the body, and a complete renunciation of comfortable domestic peace. For him, art is a heavy, inescapable cross, a destiny that condemns him to constant poverty, misunderstanding, and a consuming inner fire. Yet at the same time, it remains the only possible way to stand against the world disintegrating around him.
Yet when we turn from these verbal confessions to the surviving paintings of that time, we find a wholly different, remarkably restrained and disciplined way of expressing this same human pain. Milev does not paint seas or birds in flight. In his architectural views of 1916 (from Pavel Banya, Kran, Kazanlak), he builds a world of dense, heavy geometric masses – stone walls, emptied yards and deserted streets. Man is absent here. His interrupted existence is hinted at only through the marks of abandoned labour – empty carts, wooden stakes driven into the ground, farm implements. It is as though the soldier-artist seeks the stability of stone to hold together the world disintegrating around him. The earthy ochres and violet shadows fix the lasting petrification of form, turning the village into a visual analogue of silence.
In the pastels of 1918 and the watercolour water compositions, nature undergoes a similarly conditional, closed transformation. Trees and hills are outlined in pencil ovals and spirals, and roads curve like solitary, empty ribbons through the fields. In the water landscapes with weeping willows by the water’s mirror, the falling branches form a natural curtain. The empty boat, moored by the shallows, and the stakes jutting from the water function as quiet marks of interrupted action and abandonment. Without ever painting the sea, Ivan Milev achieves with his brush that same “lonely shore” he writes of in his notebooks.
All this makes Ivan Milev’s early period (1916–1918) far more than an introductory chapter to his later modernist artistic ambitions. It is not merely a time of tentative attempts, of accumulating skill, or of academic mastery of form. In these years of trial, the very core of his tragic fate is born; the tension between the harsh soldier’s greatcoat, the damp of the trenches, the ceaseless hunger, and the curse of his unquenchable gift for rendering this painful, immensely powerful collision into images. In him, the young man seems always to have been forced to live his whole short life at once – as in a single, wrenching breath.
Thus the line Only seagulls, sand and curses ceases to be a mere metaphor and reveals itself as the quintessence of his human drama. The seagulls are the cry of a soul that refuses to be caught and crushed by the brutality of existence. The sand is the crumbling, elusive ground of happiness, on which he stubbornly tries to leave a trace before it is too late. And the curse is his choice to be an artist.
Milev does not merely paint, nor merely set down words on paper. He strips away every protective mask, rejects the ‘mantle’ of public vanity, and stands utterly bared, sincere and defenceless before eternity. His art from these early years is a cry from the lonely shore – the gesture of a man who knows there is no lifeboat to save him, that the shipwreck is inevitable, yet who goes on setting down his truth regardless. And it is precisely because of this extreme, unreserved readiness for sacrifice that his art continues to wound us today. For beyond the closed village yards, beyond the silent watercolours and the faded manuscripts, that single, eternal cry of the seagull above the ice can still be heard, piercing as ever.
Did you hear it?
Come !
Here, it is dark… Gloom hangs eternal over the damp earth, and black clouds drift like fearsome spectres across the grey sky.
Here, it is eternal Autumn… Autumn yellow and ominous.
Come, far away, with me!
Far away, where azure blooms in an ever-rose sky.
There, it is eternal May… There, stands a forest of lonely poplars, and deep within, a clear lake sings a song never sung. Above it tender swans bend necks like white lilies. Round the lake stretch evergreen meadows, thick with lush grass and blood-red peonies.
Come, child, with me!
When the west heralds the dying day, when a quiet zephyr breathes and rocks the mournful boughs of the lonely poplars, you will be with me.
On the fair bench woven of ivy and bay we will sit and listen to the melody of the lake.
Come with me!
When the day wrings out its last sighs, its last echoes, when the night, solemn and still, inches forward with silent steps, you will hold your breath, and with head bowed like a weary seagull, drift to sleep upon my restless breast…
The poplars will whisper enviously, the lake take up the poem of its bygone love, and the moon, majestic and proud, will freeze, jealous, beneath some lonely cloud…
Come, come with me!…
Ivan Milev, Chaika [Seagull] Magazine, November 1917
footnote: We find the poem Come! [Ela!] in manuscript form in the documentary archive of Ivan Milev held by Art Gallery Kazanlak, part of the body of work named by him as Songs in Prose. In its entirety, Come was finished on 15 March 1917 in Sofia.
THE WORD BEFORE THE BRUSH
Plamen V. Petrov
In November 1917, on the pages of the magazine Chaika [Seagull], a short literary work titled Ela! [Come!], signed by Ivan Milev, appeared. For the history of Bulgarian modernism, this document holds particular importance. In the biographical path of the Kazanlak-born artist, literary attempts generally remained confined to the intimate space of the personal notebook, the soldier’s diary or a letter to those closest to him. His literary wanderings, written at the front or in pauses between military trials, were above all an emergency shelter for the spirit – intimate confessions in which he sought to hold onto his human dignity and inner peace amid the surrounding devastation. This is precisely why the appearance of Ela! in a periodical marks a rare moment of conscious public declaration. Milev crosses the threshold of purely private writing and decides to expose his inner longing to the public eye. In the context of 1917—a time when the world war had turned everyday life into raw survival—the publication of such poetic prose is an emphatic refusal of that brutal reality. This publication reveals that even before enrolling at the State Academy of Art in Sofia, and before being recognised as a decorative artist, Ivan Milev already carried within him the awareness of an author seeking his own voice through the inner resonance between word and image.
In itself, the text is built on a sharp, almost dramatic clash between two mutually exclusive worlds. Everything in its composition rests on an extreme sensory division. The first world is marked out from its very first words: Here, it is dark… Gloom hangs eternal over the damp earth, and black clouds drift like fearsome spectres across the grey sky. Here, it is eternal Autumn… Autumn yellow and ominous. This “here” is the topos of immediate, physical existence. Within it, everything is heavy, damp and cold, and the formula “eternal Autumn” carries a sense of inevitable dying and confinement. For the soldier Milev, this is the direct experience of the front line, of the mud around Dobrich, and of the hopelessness of the trenches. “Here” is the space of the pit, where man is pinned down by the harsh weight of historical time.
Against this crushing matter, he raises up a saving, imagined space, accessible only through the calling appeal Come, far away, with me! In it, azure blooms in an ever-rose sky and there it is eternal May… There, stands a forest of lonely poplars, and deep within, a clear lake sings a song never sung. If eternal Autumn rules in the one world, eternal May reigns in the other. Milev sets the damp mud against blood-red peonies, the grey sky against azure and a rose-coloured horizon. When the outer world collapses, human consciousness creates its own saving nature. The lake, the poplars, the swans and the ivy bench are not merely sentimental decor drawn from the arsenal of Symbolism, but the architectural plan of a spirit that refuses to capitulate before fear.
Stylistically, the text draws on the aesthetics of turn-of-the-century Symbolism, refracted through an exceptionally pure, unaffected sensuousness. Milev’s poplar is a solitary vertical, marking isolation even within the most ideal of spaces. The water’s mirror sings a “song never sung” – a longing that can never be fully consumed by reality, while the red peonies remind us that even within the reverie lies the mark of pain and potential sacrifice. The culmination of this verbal picture comes with the introduction of the female figure, where the beloved, head bowed like a weary seagull, will drift to sleep upon my restless breast… The seagull is not merely a detail of the described landscape. She is “weary”, seeking a haven. In this brief image, Milev fuses the notion of the beloved with the notion of his own orphanhood. Two beings, exhausted by the storm of life, trying to preserve their tenderness in one another. The ending turns this scene into a quiet drama in which nature comes alive – the poplars grow envious, the lake reminisces, and the moon freezes with jealousy.
All this allows us to see that Ivan Milev thinks in visual images even when working solely with the power of words. The text is built like a true composition in colour, in which the darkness and grey of the first part function as a dark ground, over which the light, dense patches of pink, green and blood-red are laid in the second part. The west, proclaiming the dying day, introduces that twilight moment so dear to Milev – the passage between light and shadow in which contours soften and reality slips into reverie. It is hardly an exaggeration, then, to say that the miniature Ela!—this modest printed fragment from the autumn of 1917—fixes the exact transition in which an intimate soldier’s groan changes its addressee and becomes a public artistic intention. Its publication in the pages of Chaika magazine stands as an early, until now unrecognised, guiding light within his body of work, proof that for Milev, art was never a vain play of forms, but the only possible cry against the darkness, the only ivy bench upon which the spirit finds peace amid the ruin of the world.
125 YEARS OF ART GALLERY KAZANLAK
Memory and the present
For 125 years, Art Gallery Kazanlak has captured and preserved the invisible threads of time. Its rich collection, begun in 1901 by Ivan Enchev – Vidyu, comprises more than 5,000 works. Behind them lie not merely canvases and inventory numbers, but living human destinies. This is a chronicle of the shared ground between past and present; an ever-open dialogue.
The great story of art is always written in the quiet of everyday life before being recorded ashistory. Heritage is a living tissue, regenerated through the nervous system of the present day. And it is for this reason that the gallery team long ago stepped beyond the role of dispassionate custodians to become contemporary translators of memory.
Today, taking its place on prestigious national stages such as the Apollonia Festival of Arts, the gallery proves that a museum is not a static location but a continuous movement. Through innovative initiatives, large-scale curatorial projects and the digitisation of its archives, Art Gallery Kazanlak does not merely display art – it creates a living environment in which past and present speak the same language.