pt alive the language and culture of the Bulgarians
during the five centuries of Turkish rule. Much of the interest in folk
literature came from outside the country from other Slavs in Serbia,
Croatia, Czechoslovakia, and Russia, who were going through their own
national awakening and had a kindred feeling for the Bulgarians.

The early modern literature was nationalistic and didactic. Its authors
were educators involved in the spread of education and in the
modernization of the language and revolutionaries fighting for an
independent Bulgaria. Modernization and social reform were other strong
currents permeating the literature of that time and later. Such poets as
Petko Slaveikov, Lyuben Karavelov, and Khristo Botev were strongly
influenced by the Russian social reformers and revolutionaries of the
second half of the nineteenth century. Botev was the most outstanding
poet of this era. His short, intense, and fiery poems continue to arouse
patriotic feelings of Bulgarians everywhere. Botev's revolutionary
fervor and heroism have been identified by the present-day regime with
its own revolutionary movement, and he has been accorded great honor.

In the postindependence period the dominant literary figure was Ivan
Vazov, whose influence on subsequent generations of writers has been
tremendous. Known as the national poet and father of modern Bulgarian
literature, Vazov was primarily a writer and not a crusader or
revolutionary as were his predecessors. He was steeped in the great
literature of Europe and Russia and used the Bulgarian setting and
traditions to write about universal ideas. Vazov's greatest novel,
_Under the Yoke_, describing Bulgarian life under the Turks, has been
widely translated.

Vazov and his contemporaries Yordan Yovkov and Pencho Slaveikov (son of
Petko Slaveikov) sought to direct Bulgarian literature away from its
confines of national politics and reform into a more general artistic
and philosophical outlook. They were joined in this effort by the
somewhat younger Elin Pelin, whose stories have also been widely
translated. Although these writers continued to draw much of their
inspiration from native scenery, folk themes, and village life, they
were writers of universal quality and appeal.

Later, rival literary groups, each with its journal, laid the basis for
marked development in poetry, the short story, and the novel between the
two world wars. No outstanding literary figure emerged, but writ