Synopsys of “Adriana”

My father, Dimitar Dimov, is considered a classic of Bulgarian literature. His work is studied at school and loved by all reading people in Bulgaria. After his death in 1966, a manuscript of Untitled Novel was found in his desk, written halfway, unfinished and ending abruptly – almost in the middle of a sentence. I have reread my father’s novels many times – Tobacco, Doomed Souls and Lieutenant Benz – and each time I discover something new. When I reread Untitled Novel for the fifth or sixth time, I saw his heroine Adriana, 29-year-old beautiful rich, educated and bored young woman. It was impossible to know what was happening to her, how the plot and action of the novel were unfolding. I imagined that if she were alive, she would be 93 years old today. If she were alive, she would have lived through three eras – bourgeois Bulgaria until 1944, the totalitarian period and the so-called transition or democracy. And suddenly this 93-year-old woman came alive before my eyes. I could hear her voice, I could hear her stories from three eras, she was telling me about the vicissitudes of her fate, about her sins, she was confessing to me! I must write it all down, I said to myself, I owe it to her. And so, like a confession, the novel “Adriana” was born.