Bogomil Nikolaev Rainov

Born June 19, 1919, in Sofia. Bulgarian writer and art historian. People’s Cultural Worker of Bulgaria (1971). Corresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (1974). Member of the Communist Party since 1944.

Rainov studied in the faculty of philosophy at the University of Sofia. His first published work was the collection Poems (1941). The collections Verses About the Five-year Plan (1951), Verses (1962), and City Winds (1969) are lyric meditations about life and art.

In the short stories and novellas in the collections Journey Into the Everyday (1945), Man on the Corner (1958; Russian translation, 1962), A Rainy Evening (1961; Russian translation, 1962), and As Soon as We Die (1961), Rainov depicts the Resistance and the social conflicts of bourgeois society. Moral and ethical conflicts of contemporary life are portrayed in the novella Road to Nowhere (1966; Russian translation, 1967).

Rainov has also written adventure novels, including The Inspector and the Night (1964; Russian translation, 1964) and Mr. Nobody (1967; Dimitrov Prize, 1969; Russian translation, 1970). In addition, he is the author of the following works on aesthetics and fine arts: The Freedom of the Creative Individual in the Bourgeois World (1966; Russian translation, 1967), Mastery in Art (1969), and The Black Novel (1970).