87 years ago, shortly before he turned 57, on October 15, 1937, one of the best Bulgarian writers – Yordan Yovkov – fell ill. He died in Plovdiv after an operation at the Catholic Hospital. His funeral became a mass public tribute – something the writer probably did not suspect when he lived because of his innate modesty.
The writer who has the gift of seeing the soul of things is born before 142 years in Zheravna.
Quiet, modest and always in the shadows – this is how Yovkov’s contemporaries describe him. But at the same time, he builds another image of himself in literary works. In him there is an extraordinary talent in conveying the most subtle feelings of love and pain, of unexpected magnanimity and self-sacrifice.
For 56 years of life, Yovkov managed to be a teacher, soldier, editor, librarian, writer.
It created legends about cruel but loving men, about beautiful and sinful women, about people who are ready to travel long ways for a good word or for a hope. He said, “Wrong was that woman, but she was beautiful,” and even with that sentence alone in Albena he made the readers wonder if there was no higher court than that which men have invented with their narrow notions of good and evil.
Among Yovkov’s published collections of short stories and novels are “Last Joy”, “Old Mountain Legends”, “Evenings in the Antimov Inn”, “A Woman’s Heart”, “If They Could Talk”, as well as the novel “The Homestead on the Border” , as well as the unfinished novel “The Adventures of Gorolomov”, the dramas “Albena”, “Boryana”, “Ordinary Man” and the comedy “The Millionaire”.
70 of his books have been translated into over 25 languages, and individual works of his into over 37, including Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, Persian, Polish, Finnish, Hindi, Swedish, Japanese and other languages.
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