Minkov, Svetoslav Konstantinov

Born Feb. 14, 1902, in Radomir, Pernik District; died Nov. 22, 1966, in Sofia. Bulgarian writer. Honored Cultural Worker of Bulgaria (1963). Member of the Bulgarian Communist Party (1944).

Minkov was the son of a soldier. He studied literature at the University of Sofia (1921) and commerce in Munich (1922–23). Minkov’s first short-story collections, including The Blue Chrysanthemum (1922), were influenced by modernism. A transition to realism is evident in the collections The House at the Last Street Lamp (1931), Automatons (1932), and Short Stories in Hedgehog Skin (1936), which portrayed the tragic fate of the little man in bourgeois society. Minkov’s book of essays Madrid Is Burning (1936) and the collections of satirical works A Parcel From America (1950) and US Patent (1963) were written from an antifascist, anti-imperialist standpoint.