Любен

Before us is a biography that, with great detail and accuracy in terms of facts, depicts the life of one of the most deserving sons of the Bulgarian people from the era of the Revival - the writer and revolutionary Lyuben Karavelov. This biography, written by the skilled pen of the authoritative and respected not only in our country expert on the history of the national liberation movement in Bulgaria in the 19th century, Academician Mihail Dimitrov, is the result of the author's own long-term research and what has already been done by Lyuben Karavelov's previous biographers.

The archive of Lyuben Karavelov contains interesting data on the ideology and cyclopedic activity of the great figure of our national revival. Karavelov's extremely illegible handwriting made it difficult to use many valuable documents, written for the most part in Russian, and left unknown interesting conjectures, thoughts, impressions and works of the writer, public figure, and the magazine sta. Reading all the manuscripts, which will be published in the first volume prepared from Karavelov's archival heritage, completes the picture of the overall personality of their creator, while at the same time clarifying some controversial issues surrounding his ideological and creative path. Karavelov's "Memoirs", stored in the Arch. Department at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, contain a lot of information about one of the least studied periods of their author's life - his activities in Serbia. We are reprinting the manuscript authentically, allowing ourselves only to update the spelling, which is necessary for publications of this nature. Written approximately 10 years after Karavelov left Russia, when the new linguistic environment and the daily use of two more languages ​​(Serbian and Romanian) had an impact on the frequent vocabulary and grammatical construction of the previously mastered Russian language, in the mentioned document, as well as in a significant part of the others, we come across incorrectly used case forms, Bulgarianisms and unsuccessful syntactic structure of the sentence. Having become accustomed to the language of the great Slavic country, however, Karavelov used it from the beginning to the end of his life. Since the handwriting of the editor of "Svoboda" is extremely illegible, the ink on some pages has faded from the effects of atmospheric conditions and the edges of several sheets are frayed or torn, some words remained unreadable. We mark them with an ellipsis enclosed in brackets (...) Words whose interpretation we are not completely sure of are placed in square brackets, and those of them that Karavelov used in abbreviation are given in two ways - when only the initial letters of the word are marked, we put the omitted part of it in brackets, and when the abbreviation affects the middle part, we mark the entire word under the line. In many places in the manuscripts we encounter Karavelov's initials LK. He used this as a reminder for barely hinted thoughts, facts and events that he intended to develop in his further work, or in those cases when he knew some names and data.

On October 4 and 15, 1960, the Section of Bulgarian Literature until the Liberation continued the discussion of the materials for the collection dedicated to Lyuben Karavelov. Diverse and rich, still insufficiently studied and illuminated, the creative work of the editor of "Svoboda" provides for study interesting problems in the fields of literature, journalism, folklore, ethnography, linguistics. This to a significant extent predetermines not only the diversity of the topics that will be included in the collection, but also the striving for originality in their development. Svetla Gyurova's article, for example, "Lyuben Karavelov as the 143rd editor of P. Hitova's book "My Journey through the Stara Planina" is a successful attempt to give a true idea of ​​Karavelov's editorial manner through Hitova's memoirs. Comparing the original of the work and its first edition, made by P. Berkovski, with the text printed in 1873, the author comes to the conclusion that Karavelov, without making changes to the content, makes creative corrections” to the language, composition, imagery and social sharpness of the work. Along with tracing the editorial work on the Memoirs, Gyurova also provides an idea of ​​the work as a whole, of the interest shown in it in some Slavic countries and of the place it occupies in Bulgarian Renaissance literature. Highlighting the undeniable merits of the article, which were also pointed out in their statements by Prof. M. Arnaudov and Prof. P. Dinekov, the reviewer Docho Lekov expressed a wish to place more emphasis on those Karavelov’s additions that have a social and political character, to expand the concluding part of the work and to bring unity to the bibliographical notes.

In recent years, much has been written about Karavelov. His work and political activity are examined in the works of Bulgarian and Soviet writers, historians, philosophers, and linguists. A contribution to resolving a number of issues related to the enormous work of the notable Renaissance man is also represented by the studies included in the recently published collection "Studies and Articles on Lyuben Karavelov", published by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, S. 1963. A significant part of the articles are devoted to the ideology of Lyuben Karavelov. This is perhaps due to an effort to finally resolve, albeit in general terms, the question of the nature of Karavelov's ideology, which has already been the subject of very lengthy disputes. It is to be regretted, however, that very little space has been devoted to Karavelov the writer and journalist. Two of the studies prove Karavelov's authorship of articles and other materials that have not been included in his legacy until now. The collection also examines issues related to Karavelov's attitude to the traditions of Bulgarian literature, Karavelov's work as an editor, etc. The subject matter of the collection is clearly too diverse, and this makes it very difficult to group the articles by problem. The authors have touched on different aspects of Karavelov's multifaceted activity, and uniting their studies would be rather arbitrary.

In the lively discussions about Karavelov's worldview and work in recent years, the Soviet philosopher Lev Valentinovich Vorobyov also intervened. His articles appeared in Bulgarian scientific publications, magazines and newspapers, which suggested resourceful and original thought, an open-minded attitude towards facts, controversial concepts and their authors. In 1962, his book "Philosophical and Sociological Views of Lyubena Karavelova" was published. The following year, the monograph "Lyuben Karavelov. Worldview and Work" appeared. The two studies, with certain compositional changes, represent the doctoral dissertation of L. V. Vorobyov, which he defended in June 1962 in Kiev. While in the first book the researcher is exclusively interested in the ideology of the Bulgarian revolutionary, the second study gives a comprehensive idea of ​​Karavelov - the public figure, the writer, the encyclopedist. Without belittling the value of "Philosophical and Sociological Views of Lyubena Karavelova", we will express our opinion on the second book of the Soviet scientist. In it, the author thoroughly presents all his observations and conclusions, which are also the subject of his first study.

As a folklorist, Karavelov followed an interesting path of development. His teachers were primarily Russian and Ukrainian researchers of folk art. Through their works, he also became acquainted with the views of Western scholars, primarily the mythological school of Jacob Grimm and his followers. What is the place of Ukrainian folklore in Karavelov's studies and what impact did Ukrainian folkloristics have on him? It is very difficult to separate the influence of Ukrainian science from that of Russian, because they developed in extremely close unity. Scholars of both nationalities worked in close cooperation, both in Russian and Ukrainian university centers. Often folklorists of Ukrainian origin, such as O. M. Bodyansky, also deal with Russian folk art, and Russians by nationality, such as I. I. Sreznevsky, V. V. Pasek, who lived in Ukraine for a long time, collect and publish its folklore. And within the framework of Karavelov's activity, a more precise distinction of these influences can hardly be achieved even after a comprehensive study of his development as a folklorist.

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.

It has become a tradition for every review of a new book studying Karavelov's work to begin with the statement that with his strong and complex personality the writer still attracts the attention of literary history and criticism today. And this statement does not sound clichéd, because it notes a significant literary-historical fact. Our modernity has precisely realized a complete edition of Karavelov's works and made a decisive contribution to Karavelov studies both with voluminous monographs and with individual studies that pose new and interesting issues. At the same time, the critical eye discovers in contemporary studies of Karavelov a more emphatically pronounced specific literary approach. In place of factual and biographical research, in place of the descriptive approach, there logically comes the aspiration for a more concrete consideration of the aesthetic and theoretical problems posed by Karavelov's work, for the study of his writing skills in relation to the laws of the Literary Process, the peculiarities of his talent, etc. Tsveta Undzhieva's book has its positive significance primarily as a phenomenon that supports this direction in the development of the science of Karavelov. It not only discovers and uses new factual material, not only enriches ideas and specifies accents, but above all seeks a solution to essential literary-historical, theoretical and stylistic problems posed by Karavelov's work. It is precisely this focus of the study that arouses interest in it and gives it its own appearance.