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"Tears of Lily" - pale and in many cases clumsy imitations of the sentimental direction in Heine's lyrics - Pencho Slaveykov wrote in his hospital bed in 1886-87. He himself repeatedly pointed out the weakness of this poetry of his, in order to highlight "Epic Songs" as the mature beginning of his work. But in Slaveykov, as in our poetry at its beginning (until Karavelov and Botev), we can notice that where this beginning is in the spirit and form of written poetry, it is still clumsy and inept - and once the poet has touched the living source of all poetry, folk poetry, his verses resonate with the power of a fresh artistic image. Thus, even before he had modeled his literary experiments ("Momini Salzi") on a book model, Slaveykov in 1885 was inspired by folk-poetic images and wrote his poem "Lud Gidiya". It is no coincidence that when he later collected his poems for "Epic Songs", he put "Lud Gidiya" in the first place in this collection... For several centuries, the people have created the image of the cheerful man of art, who plays the tambourine with intoxication from aesthetic pleasure. This image is picturesque: the young Stoyan hung this empty tambourine on his belt" and as he played, "the brides broke the robbery - the old hurks crushed" - and even the judge, to whom the people complained that they could not do their work because of the "empty tambourine", was carried away by the power of art. Instead of judging the young gypsy, "they became kadiyas to play - you're a furley binish in a chamber - you're a furley hat on beams"....With such a relief-shaped and elaborate folklore image, the young poet, barely 19 years old, wrote a poem inspired by it. The verse, close to the folk-syllabic, easily succumbed to him.

Even during her lifetime, Svetoslava Slaveykova managed to find and collect memories from numerous relatives, friends, writers, artists and public figures with whom Pencho Slaveykov was in contact. Most of these people are now deceased and their memories, which seemed insufficiently interesting to us ten years ago, today far from correspond to our then-present view. On the contrary. Although not written quite "literarily", the spirit of the times lives in them, they speak the language of the era. Particularly interesting are those of them that concern the native environment and atmosphere in which the poet lived, the interesting image of his mother - Irina Slaveykova, the last years of his father's life, the house and their everyday life in Tryavna, Tarnovo and Sofia. What was left by Ekaterina Karavelova, who characterizes the poet's mother with only one word - a good Bulgarian woman, is irreplaceable. And this really seems to be her most typical quality. She is Bulgarian in everything - in her proud patience, in her persistent work capacity, and in her unyielding character. Unfortunately, however, the memories that we are publishing here from Karavelova are only a draft excerpt from one of her articles, intended for the collection that was to be published on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the death of Pencho Slaveykov. The collection never saw the light of day. The memories were lost. After some time, when Svetoslava Slaveykova visited Karavelova with a request to tell her something about her grandmother's life, she, who was already nearing the end of her life, replied: "I can't remember anything anymore, I wrote everything back then." We report this, in the hope that it is still possible that Ekaterina Karavelova's memories may be found accidentally forgotten in some archive or editorial office.