Inspired poet and citizen

The name of Nikolai Khrelkov was very popular in the 1930s among progressive students, who revered the writer as a consistent proletarian poet. Back then, we collected donations for him and dreamed of seeing him one day. For me, this came true in 1946, when for four years I had the opportunity to visit the poet in Gorna Banya as a collaborator on the cultural page of the weekly "Fighting Tuberculosis" that he edited. Himself suffering from tuberculosis, Khrelkov waged a stubborn battle with the "heavy social capitalist legacy," as he jokingly put it.