Dimo Minev

We have received your letter, together with the material. We are glad that our youth, although in foreign countries they are busy with the difficult science of courses, do not forget the great and sacred duty to the dear and dear fatherland, and this phenomenon shows that our people want to live a long and lasting life - God willing! Work, brother, work, while your strength is fresh, your energy strong and your imagination ardent: do not let this fiery and winged time fly away uselessly into the irretrievable eternity of eternity. We are glad of this phenomenon and we will place your works in Trud with great pleasure. Polish literature is rich in stories, and you are there among it: from it, from German and etc. choose the color and that which is in accordance with our reviving our young literature - things that will bring tangible benefit to our people. From the letter itself and from the material it is clear that you work conscientiously and accurately. May your example serve as an example to other young people! Even though we do not know each other personally, we see that you have spirit and talent: do not let your talent go to waste - reveal it to the world and, God forbid, may it take refuge and fly over Bulgarian life, inspiring it and leading it to the beautiful and morally useful.

In the District State Archives - V. Tarnovo there is a "Diary of Panayot Vassilev Typographov" (Fund 65, archive unit 221), in which we find interesting information about the public figure and teacher Petko R. Slaveykov. The author of this diary briefly described his life and intended what was written for his heirs. He was born in Tarnovo in March 1854. He studied until the first grade and in 1866, when his father died, he left school. His mother sent him to learn the abadji craft, to which he apprenticed for 4-5 months. Then he met P. R. Slaveykov and the following excerpt from his diary tells about the connections of Panayot V. Typographov with Slaveykov in Constantinople and Edirne.

Georgi P. Stamatov, born in Russia and spending the first thirteen years of his childhood there, then lived in Bulgaria for 55 years, to which are added another five years as a student in Switzerland. After studying at the Military School, his short service as an officer and his studies in law, from 1902 onwards Stamatov became a judge and then more fruitfully displayed his writing talent. He served in Sofia, Plovdiv, Tran and for the longest time in Kyustendil. His official career as a judge in the Kyustendil District Court, extracted from the court archives, is as follows: from August 1, 1905 to September 31, 1907, from February 1, 1908 to January 31, 1911, from March 1, 1914 to July 31, 1919, and from October 1, 1919 to May 31, 1921.

After the end of the First World War (1914-1918), from which Bulgaria emerged defeated, crippled and with shattered national ideals, a desire for renewal through education and moral improvement arose in the bosom of the intelligentsia. Then the ideological currents manifested themselves and flourished: communism, anarchism, Tolstoyism, temperance and tourism. One of its apostles expressed this newness very well: "an awakening to spiritual life, a longing for something higher than that in which cares, everyday vanities and struggles oppress the soul." Invited by the board of trustees of the "Nadezhda" community center in Tarnovo to give several talks on my specialty, I accepted the invitation with some embarrassment; It seemed to me that the times were not at all suitable for lectures on biology and chemistry, and that the words of a laboratory worker would not resonate in hearts dried up by the current events of political disputes and worries about livelihood.

The name of one writer almost always points us to the name of the other - so much so that we feel connected in time and in the nature of their work. Elin Pelin and Yovkov are almost the same age: the former is three years older than the latter and lived twelve years after him. Both were born and raised in a village, but in different Bulgarian regions that are not similar. Elin Pelin is from Western Bulgaria, a child of a stubborn Shopian environment, among which he built his basic worldview and character, although after his twenty-third year (1900) he lived only in the capital, while Yovkov has longer and stronger roots in the village. The latter was nursed and spent his childhood in the wilderness of the Balkans - Zheravna; - and his adulthood - in flat Dobrudzha, near the border, where he taught until the Balkan War, so that he spent about thirty years of village life.