Svoboda Bachvarova(1925-2012)

Renowned Bulgarian author and screenwriter, Bachvarova is the screenwriter for some of the all-time Bulgarian hit movies and the TV series "On Every Kilometer". She has written the famous novels "Ilinden Mass," and "Target Land," which have also become the basis of two film scripts - "Measure According to Measure" and "The Lot". The writer was born on January 11 1925, in the family of leftist intellectuals, who immigrated to Austria the same year and in 1926 moved to France to be extradited later to Belgium. After Bulgaria declared amnesty in 1930 for expatriate mothers, Bachvarova and her mother returned to the homeland while the father remained in Belgium to join the Resistance and was killed in 1943. In her youth, she followed her parents' leftist ideology and was even arrested in high school. After September 9 1944, when the Communist regime was established in Bulgaria, Bachvarova enrolled in the University of Leningrad (now Sankt Petersburg). There she became first hand witness of the repressions of the Stalin regime against the country's intellectuals, and began reading Russian authors such as Sergey Bulgakov, Lev Shestov, and Nikolay Berdyaev. As she shared, this is when she started having doubts in the Marxist ideology. Bachvarova was married to Dr. Lyuben Bachvarov. She has one daughter, who is married in Brazil. In 2005, the President bestowed her highest order of Bulgaria "Stara Planina." Svoboda Bachvarova has passed away at the age of 87 in Brazil, where she lived with her daughter Elitza for the last 23 years.