Nikola Tesla FBI Files - Page 243

- GEO MILEV

describes only from the standpoint of his art. . . . In his attitude toward various events in the life around him, which impress him strongly, he does not take sides. He does not praise one and hurt the other; he merely describes everything he sees, describes it with the delicate, sweet colors of poetry. . . ."

        Geo was fined 20,000 leva and sentenced to one year in prison. He could not believe that the court could make such a decision. With joking reference to the dullness of "their Honors," he left the courtroom believing that the decision would never be carried out.

        He was right. Unable to enforce their decision legally, the government resorted to illegal means.

        Next day, May 15, 1925, Geo was kidnapped from his home and killed by underlings of Prime Minister Alexander Tzankoff.

        The cultural world of Europe protested Geo's death. Henri Barbusse, of France, visited Bulgaria to investigate the case. In his book "The Murderers" he made reference to the circumstances of Geo's death. Max Reinhardt protested and "regretted the loss of a very gifted theater director." Oskar Kokoshka, in Vienna, recognized the loss of "a precious critic and learned connoisseur of modern art.”

        Many Bulgarian writers were silent. Fearing for their lives, they did not dare to speak a word for Geo Milev or express regret for his death. The more courageous of them stated that "talent such as Geo's is born only once in a hundred years," that "He was the most cultured Bulgarian," "The most honest and courageous.”

THE youth and the common people deeply mourned for Geo. They knew they had lost a sincere friend and inspirer. Unable to use the Bulgarian printing presses, they copied his poem by hand and learned it by heart. Bulgarian students abroad printed it in Paris, and in Belgrade. In Prague it was translated into " his life, he read a paper on the occasion of his 80th birthday on the perfection of a tube for atom smashing. As if that were not enough, he also presented a system of interplanetary communication.

        Thus the fragmentary story of the life and work of a Yugoslav immigrant who, like so many tens of thousands of his fellow countrymen, left their homeland rather than live as subjects within the Austro-Hungarian empire.

        He made a unique contribution to his adopted land, so ideally suited to the full scope of his genius, “the like of which in all history could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.”

        It is to be hoped that just as he brought electrification to the U. S. in the short span of ten years, his adopted country might assist in the full electrification of the Balkans, reversing its present policy toward New Yugoslavia.

Czech and in Russia in Russian.

        A few courageous young people in Bulgaria printed pamphlets about Geo. They were promptly tortured and imprisoned.

        We, his family, searched for him for months, but we never learned exactly where and how he was killed.

        There were rumors that he had been shot in the mountains, that he had been burned in the furnace of "Public Safety." These measures were used by Bulgarian Fascists long before the world knew of Hitler. Both stories, however, avowed that his spirit was not crushed.

        Geo's voice was silenced forever. The murderers triumphed, but they forgot that he who speaks for the freedom of a tormented and deprived people not die. In today’s New Bulgaria, Geo Milev is honored as one of her most cherished sons. Geo's poems are celebrated especially by the youth of today, the heirs of the September Revolution of 1944, which fulfilled his prediction of a decade before that "September will be May."

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