Lyuben Karavelov: the Bulgarian narrator, journalist and revolutionary

The article is about Lyuben Karavelov (1834–79), the preeminent Bulgarian writer who worked in the era of the Bulgarian national revival, an author of tales, short stories, ethnographic essays and political articles. Almost all of his creative life was spent in exile: he lived in Russia, the Serbian Principality, Austria-Hungary and Romania and published his works not only in Bulgarian, but also in Russian and Serbian, influencing the development of literary movements wherever he was located. In his creative evolution, he moved towards a realistic representation of life, overcoming the tendency typical of Bulgarian writers at that time to write with elements of sentimentalism and revolutionary romanticism. He wrote the best Bulgarian story of that era, “Bulgarians of Old times”. Many of his works reflected the influence of N.V. Gogol, N.G. Chernyshevsky and M. Vovchok, and contributed to the formation of realism not only in Bulgarian but also in Serbian literature. His influence would have been much greater if he had not died at the age of 45 from tuberculоsis immediately after the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke.