Vasilev, Orlin

(pseudonym of Khristo Vasilev). Born Dec. 4, 1904, in the village of Vraniak, Vratsa District. Bulgarian writer. Joined the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1924 and has been an active contributor to the proletarian and antifascist press.

The events of the September Uprising of 1923 are depicted in Vasilev’s novel The White Trail (1929) and the novella The Ring of Fire of 1923 (1933). The historical novel The Haiduk Does Not Feed His Mother (1937; in Russian translation, Strakhil, 1945) reveals the moral and social problems of the national liberation struggle of the Bulgarian people. In his short stories Vasilev described the tragic fate of the little man in bourgeois society and portrayed the fighters against fascism. In the social and psychological dramas Anxiety (1948; on the Soviet stage under the title of Paradise on Earth; Dimitrov Prize, 1950), Love (1952), and Happiness (1954), Vasilev condemned political neutralism in times of social clashes and posed problems of ethics and the duty of the individual to society.