Elin Pelin

(pseudonym of Dimitr Ivanov Stoianov). Born July 18, 1877, in the village of Bailovo, Sofia Province; died Dec. 3, 1949, in Sofia. Bulgarian writer; member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (1940).

Elin Pelin, who grew up in a peasant family, was a teacher, a librarian, and the director of the museum of I. Vazov. He began publishing in the mid-1890’s. In 1902 and 1903 he edited the magazine Selska rezgovorka. Elin Pelin experienced the impact of socialist ideas early in his literary career. Popularity came to him with the appearance of two collections of Stories (1904 and 1911; 2nd ed., A Summer Day and Nests of the Stork). His short stories and his best novellas, The Gemkovs (1911) and Earth (1922), depict life in the Bulgarian countryside in the late 19th century and early 20th, the social contradictions, the breakdown of the patriarchal way of life, and the dramatic intensity of moral conflicts. His heroes, the working people of the village, are proud and dignified, but at the same time gentle of heart and given to lyric reverie.

Elin Pelin is an acknowledged master of the short prose genre, in which he took his stand as a humanist and enemy of inertia and the hypocrisy of religious morality. He was the author of the prose poem Black Roses (1928), the collection of legends Under Monastery Osiers (1936), and the satirical tales I, You, He (1936). A demanding literary artist who continued the realistic traditions of I. Vazov, Elin Pelin hailed the popular democratic revolution of 1944 and sought to further the development of popular Bulgarian culture and literature.