Pencho Slaveykov

Pencho Slaveykov was born on April 27, 1866, in Tryavna, the youngest son of famed Revival poet Petko Slaveykov. Paralyzed in youth after falling asleep on a frozen river, Slaveykov overcame severe physical disability to study philosophy and aesthetics at Leipzig University.

As the philosophical leader of the Misal circle, Slaveykov advocated elevating Bulgarian literature beyond provincial folklore into European philosophical modernism. His epic poem Kurvava Pesen (A Song of Blood) celebrated the moral heroism of the April Uprising. In 1912, he was officially nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Swedish scholar Alfred Jensen, but died in Brunate, Italy, before the committee could vote.