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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.

As often happens in the history of our new culture, we are in a paradoxical situation: we declare ourselves the heirs of the classical Bulgarian culture of the Middle Ages, the center of Slavic culture in general for certain historical periods, but we do not know it well. We are simply proud of the alphabet and old literature, we use catchphrases to prove that in the history of human culture we did not exist yesterday, and in our veins there is something of the blue blood of ancient cultural dynasties. But what do we know about Old Bulgarian literature? At school we learned about Presbyter Kozma, who "delivered some kind of discourse against the Bogomils (he was a reactionary and an obscurantist, because the Bogomils are progressive), and about Chernorizets Hrabar (he wrote something about the features and letters). Scientists argue about him whether he was not Tsar Simeon (this somewhat influenced our imagination - a great king, brilliant like Solomon, ruler of nations, but he puts on black hair and writes some writings in dark cells!). But in general, there is hardly a more boring subject at school. At university we learn the conjugations of verbs, we even try to spell the letters from some gospel (those terrible letters!). That is, so to speak, all our education on Old Bulgarian literature. We are so uninterested in it that we have even thrown out everything that reminds us of the Old Bulgarian language from spelling and orthography. We want to say, what do we care about various Nosovk and Ierov, there is no such thing in our modern language, let's leave them to the priests and philologists; our culture is folk, democratic, everyone should have easy access to it, it would be a manifestation of conservatism to treat a dead language and incomprehensible letters with care, even if our own history is reflected in this language and these letters!