Николов

For the first time, our magazine encloses the name of its editor in a mourning frame. Tragic circumstances dictated that this should be the name of the youngest member of the management of "Literary Thought", who with unusual conscientiousness and skill contributed to the development of the magazine for years. For all of us who shared our workdays with him, it was unbearably hard to lose the person on whose responsiveness and principle we had always relied so much. But even heavier is the loss for Bulgarian literary knowledge, of which Minko Nikolov was the most significant hope. Born in 1929 in the vibrant mountain town of Troyan, Minko Nikolov showed his literary talents at a very early age. At first, readers are introduced to the enthusiastic, somewhat clumsy, but completely in tune with his time and age poems of the provincial youth, who later, during the first years of his studies at the Philological Faculty of Sofia University, also showed his true gift - the rare gift of a literary critic and researcher. When in 1955 Minko Nikolov stood at the desk to defend his PhD thesis on the work of Hristo Smirnenski, he was already an established scholar with enviable achievements for his age. Years of hard and fruitful work followed for him as an editor, associate professor of Bulgarian literature at the Humboldt University - Berlin and senior research associate at the Institute of Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The years during which Minko Nikolov attained his creative maturity coincided with the time in which our literary studies, having shaken off the petty tutelage of dogmatism and administrativeism, took its first not very big, but decisive steps forward towards the actual scientific understanding of our national literary experience. And when we ask ourselves how the younger generation of literary critics and researchers helped to achieve the success of these renewal efforts, our answer will refer first and foremost to the creative work of Minko Nikolov. An inexplicable death for us took him away on the eve of the New Year, when people are so indulgent towards their hopes. It took him away from ours when it needed him most.

His star seemed to be happy. Clever, talented, ethical, he made an impression everywhere, was respected and loved. His creative path was one of continuous ascent. He was harsh towards his first critical works, which inevitably bore the imprint of another time that limited creative individuality, but we, the older ones who printed as editors, remember that we hardly noticed in them the mistakes of early youth. This young man, almost a teenager, was not only unusually clever, but, strangely enough, he was already wise. How and when he had acquired this wisdom at such an early age remained a mystery to his richly gifted nature.