"We live in such a mess here, I don't need to have a message in my stories," says Martin Karbovsky. "They speak for themselves." Karbovsky is one of the most popular writers for Egoist, a provocative monthly magazine that chronicles the harsh realities of life for young Bulgarians. With exposés on sex, drug communes and military service — stories that would have been unthinkable just five years ago — Karbovsky has become a cult figure whose cool cynicism castigates the country's chronic social and economic disarray.

Egoist was started in 1996 as a hip lifestyle magazine aimed predominantly at young men. Its first hard-hitting cover — a stark black-and-white image of former beauty queen Euvgenia Kalkandjieva, showing the scars she received in a near-fatal 1996 gang attack in downtown Sofia — sparked widespread outrage and acclaim. Egoist's reputation for uncompromising journalism took off. Today the magazine has a circulation of 12,000, huge for the Bulgarian market, but it reaches as many as 75,000, with copies changing hands as many as 15 times. According to editor Alexander Zhekov, 31, the readership consists mainly of "the alienated," well-educated people under 30 who want to change society — or simply get out.

Karbovsky himself hopes to leave Bulgaria one day to find a better life in the West. "I am a writer from the world's backyard," he says. "The world doesn't know in what kind of corrosion we live here. There are no extras in our lives besides survival." He also brings his grim perspective to a live two-hour radio talkshow, Radio Pirates, which is shaking up Bulgaria's stodgy media establishment by examining for-merly taboo issues — like aids, homophobia and neo-Nazism — on which the government is seen to have failed. Karbovsky's message is unrelentingly bleak. "I gave this country my youth, my hopes, lots of hard work," he says. "Now all I want is for the material world to stop being a problem for me." An obvious egoist, Karbovsky nevertheless speaks for a generation of disillusioned young Bulgarians.