Dimitr Khristov Metodiev

Born Sept. 11, 1922, in Gara-Belovo, Pazardzhik District. Bulgarian poet. Honored Cultural Worker of Bulgaria (1969). Member of the Bulgarian Communist Party since 1944.

The son of a peasant, Metodiev participated in the resistance movement. He studied in the agronomy faculty of the University of Sofia and then at the Urals University in Sverdlovsk from 1948. He received a degree from the M. Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow in 1954. Since 1966 he has been chief editor of the literary and sociopolitical magazine Nasha Rodina. Metodiev made his literary debut after the people’s democratic revolution of 1944 with the poetry collection The Attack (1945). His poetry is noted for its lyricism, lofty civic spirit, and enthusiasm for the work of the party, as exemplified in The Dimitrov Generation (1951; Russian translation, 1954; G. Dimitrov Prize, 1952)—a novel in verse about Bulgarian revolutionary young people—and the collections Poems (1961), About Time and About Myself (1963; G. Dimitrov Prize, 1964), Not From the Earth (1965), The Closing of the Circle (1967), and Verses and Short Narrative Poems (1968). The narrative poem The Dream Country (1956) and the poetry collection Song About Russia (1967) are devoted to the Soviet Union. Metodiev has translated works by T. G. Shevchenko, I. la. Franko, V. V. Mayakovsky, A. T. Tvardovskii, and other writers.