New data on the creative biography of Lyuben Karavelov

Lyuben Karavelov is one of the few Bulgarian nationalists who collected and carefully preserved documents about his diverse social and writing activities. Unfortunately, his uncertain emigrant fate, and after his death - irresponsibility and negligence, became the reason for the dispersion and, for the most part, destruction of this Karavelov collection, so valuable for the history of our cultural life. Little and mostly fragmentary materials have reached us - heart-wrenching fragments of a rich and multifaceted comprehensive work. The preserved manuscripts from Karavelov's archive are today kept in the Bulgarian Historical Archive at the Cyril and Methodius National Library and in the Boyan Penev Archive at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Difficult to read, they have remained almost unused to this day. It was not until 1964 that three collaborators from the Institute of Literature - Docho Lekov, Lilyana Minkova and Tsveta Undzhieva - published the most significant of them in one solid volume: "From the Archive of Lyuben Karavelov. Manuscripts, Materials and Documents". The publication includes primarily Karavelov's manuscripts and some manuscripts of his collaborators, closely related to the writings of Karavelov himself. Abandoned are copies of foreign artistic or scientific works, known translations of his, or manuscripts of his famous works. The compilers present us with a volume composed almost entirely of new materials, reflecting the diverse creative activity of the great Bulgarian Renaissance public figure and writer.