The Letternet man left – Books

The text has been republished by “Culture Portal”.

I’m trying to drown out the pain of losing a friend Georgi Chobanov with words. Even as I write this, I doubt its authenticity.

I remember the time when he was building the literature site. One hot summer, I was reading some abstract linguistic models and offering him crazy ideas. He always accepted or rejected slowly, thoughtfully and extremely realistically. I wondered how such a balanced and down-to-earth man as he could do such a phantasmagoric work. He created the first literary site in Bulgaria and worked around the clock.

For me, Joro Chobanov was an example of perseverance and perseverance. For several years we celebrated Litternet’s birthdays with live gatherings, long masses of enthusiasts, although he was an ascetic by nature and did not like noisy and loud things. But then our times were noisier and a priori we had to prove one position or another with our bodies.

It turned out that with patience and responsibility he managed to gather around himself and the site various groups of writers, to unite them and create a complete space for publishing, reading and searching for books. With Letternet, Bulgarian literature had a center and freedom. Will it be possible now, in memory of Georgi Chobanov, for our literary community not to be more divided than what has already happened to it in the years from the beginning of the 90s until now?

Joro has a stable family and values. He was very proud of his two sons, a mathematician and a programmer who worked in prestigious university positions. He quietly and honestly defended his not very popular moral principles.

Sometimes we met at various literary premieres in Varna and looked at each other from afar, because we knew why we were there. He did not attend most literary events in the city, he chose the cases that would take him out of his quiet study. It really had to be worth a lot to travel. He had taste and a very good judgment of the situation.

I have asked him many times about various political or moral cases. In the news yesterday about his departure from this world, Mira Dushkova and I exchanged almost the same words about his help and support. Georgi Chobanov for me and probably for many literary friends was paternally accurate and responsive. I wanted his opinion in order to find out during the protests and other political and literary misunderstandings, about pseudonyms and pseudo-competitions. He was very brave in the last political year.

I knew that Joro Chobanov was somewhere in his room, and if I had to ask him something, he would answer me immediately. I can already see this coming void. Will I still be able to ask him who is who and if he will answer me, if he has not already started to digitize some heavenly literature. When years ago I changed my apartment from the extreme neighborhood “Vladislav Varnenchik”, where I had gone many times, in the neighborhood “Levski”, he always invited me to visit. I never went. Now he quickly changed his apartment again. Well, one day …

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