Pencho Slaveykov – popularizer of Russian literature in the magazine "St. Clement Library"

After Stambolov came to power, the former head of the liberal government, Petko Karavelov, who had been expelled from the political arena, was forced to engage in cultural and educational activities. He founded a society in Sofia for the dissemination of useful knowledge among the people and the development of their taste, which began publishing in 1888 the magazine "St. Clement Library", named in honor of the oldest enlightener, Kliment Ohridski. During the period of acute book famine in Bulgaria and the flooding of the book market with low-quality literature, the magazine sought to provide the general reader with exemplary works of world literature. Russian writers occupied a predominant place in the magazine. Its pages were dotted with the names of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Lermontov, Tolstoy. Readers get acquainted with little-known or completely unknown authors: with the poems of Batyushkov, Koltsov, Pleshcheev, I. Kozlov, with the stories of Shchedrin, Korolenko, Garshin, Karonin-Petropavlovsky. "The St. Kliment Library managed to become a conduit of Russian socio-literary influence in Bulgaria during the developing Stambolov reaction, when the official newspaper Svoboda carried out unbridled Russophobic propaganda and insisted on selecting special literature by Western authors for the younger generation. The populist writer T. G. Vlaikov, in his memoirs of the 1980s and 1990s, spoke of the magazine as very good and valuable for its time. "1