Memories of Nikolay Khrelkov

I met him for the first time in the fall of 1928. The descendant of Lyuben Karavelov had just returned from abroad, from emigration. Tall, with his head slightly bowed between his asymmetrically raised shoulders, the figure of this man radiated intransigence, the valor of the unyielding. When he spoke calmly, a bribing childish gullibility and kindness flowed from his gaze. But if he happened to switch to polemics and defend his faith in the people and their right to freedom and human happiness, arrows of his revolutionary conviction would fly from his eyes. His gesture was angular and dramatic, saturated with a hidden inner tragedy, intertwined with boundless feeling for the poor, for the suffering. The sonority of his voice carried the excitement of his noble heart, the impulses of his impetuous thoughts, the accent of his charming devotion as a faithful proletarian son... A sworn devotion that consciously and unwaveringly came true over time in that tragic end of Nikolai Khrelkov, which became a measure of his moral and political stature as a communist citizen.