Svetoslav Minkov

Svetoslav Konstantinov Minkov (12 February 1902 – 22 November 1966) was a Bulgarian absurdist fiction writer.

Biography Minkov was born in Radomir in 1902 in a military family. His older brother Asen died in the Second Balkan War, while his other brother Ivan, a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party, committed suicide in 1925 to evade arrest after his involvement in the St. Nedelya Church bombing. Minkov received his primary education in Radomir, and graduated from a high school in the capital Sofia.

His sister Teodora introduced him to the Bulgarian literary circles of the 1920s. He published his first work - Newton's binomial in the "Bulgaran" magazine in 1920. He was later enrolled in a military college in Austria, where he studied the works of Goethe, Nietzsche, Edgar Allan Poe, Henrik Ibsen and the Russian classical authors. Minkov was known for his eccentric character and suffered from bizarre, paranoid phobias, pervasive obsessive thoughts and nightmares. He was a unique figure in Bulgarian literature – his talent and style were largely isolated from the local literary tendencies of the 1920s and 1930s, and he had no followers.

His works primarily concern the loss of identity in the technocratic world, social uniformity under the influence of technology, the uncertainty of morality and values and the existential aspects of boredom. Minkov vividly expresses his ideas by means of parody, diabolism, sarcasm and absurdism.

He also wrote numerous tales for children, studies on Japanese culture, and translated the tales of Scheherazade into Bulgarian.

Selected works The Blue Chrysanthemum, 1922 Clock, 1924 Firebird, 1927 Shadow play, 1928 The House at the Last Lantern, 1931 Automatons, 1932 Heart in a Cardboard Box, 1933 The Lady With the X-Ray Eyes, 1934 Madrid is On Fire, 1936 Tales in a Hedgehog Skin, 1936 Guest, 1938 The Iron House, 1941 Youth of the Ape, 1942 Empire of Starvation, 1950 Panopticum, 1966