Lyuben Karavelov

Lyuben Stoychev Karavelov (; – 21 January 1879) was a Bulgarian writer, journalist, revolutionary and an important figure of the Bulgarian National Revival. In his lifetime, he published many literary works. He was a leader of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee.

Life

Karavelov was born in Koprivshtitsa, Ottoman Empire (modern Bulgaria), in 1834, as part of the Rum millet. His father Stoycho Karavelov was a trader, while his mother Nedelya Doganova originated from a rich and educated family. He began his education in a church school, but he moved to the school of Nayden Gerov and Yoakim Gruev. His father sent him to study Greek at a Greek gymnasium in Plovdiv, While living with a Greek family there, he learned about the oppression of the Bulgarians by Greeks and Turks. Karavelov studied weaving in 1853 and worked alongside his father. He became a member of a Bulgarian society in Moscow in 1859, collecting literature, providing financial aid to Bulgarian young intellectuals and issuing the journal Fraternal Labor. He also contributed to the slavophile magazines Den (Day), Moskva (Moscow) and Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow Gazette). In 1869, he settled in Bucharest, working as a journalist. Levski's execution by the Ottomans made him doubt the efficacy of BRCC's tactics. He left BRCC and began publishing Knowledge (Znanie), a literary and cultural magazine. He thought that the Greeks treated Bulgarians like "slaves" or "domesticated animals". There was also strong anti-Turkish sentiment in his fictional works and at one point he wrote: "Anybody who will not agree that a Turk is more inhuman than a mad dog is a Turkophile."

He was also interested in ethnography and numismatics, seeking out old coins. Karavelov had heard about 'the woman question' in the 1850s and 1860s in Russia. In his newspaper Freedom, he advocated that women "needed education like men: human, positive; a real education not a fashionable one." Karavelov has been ranked as the leading prose writer during the 1860s and 1870s in Bulgaria. American literary critic Charles Arthur Moser criticized his writing and style.