Emilian Stanev

(pen name of Nikola Stoianov). Born Feb. 14, 1907, in Veliko-Tyrnovo. Bulgarian writer. Hero of Socialist Labor (1967); People’s Cultural Worker of Bulgaria (1966). Member of the Bulgarian Communist Party since 1944.

Stanev was educated at the Academy of Arts and later studied finance and trade at the Free University in Sofia. He began publishing in 1931. His short-story collections Beckoning Lights (1938), The Dreamer (1939), and Workdays and Holidays (1945) and the novella Peach Thief (1948) portray the drab everyday life of a small provincial city. Stanev’s animal stories became well known in the collections Alone (1940), The Last Struggle (1942), and January Nest (1953). His novel Ivan Kondarev (books 1–2, 1958–64; Dimitrov Prize, 1965; Russian translation, 1967) is an epic depiction of the life and struggle of the Bulgarian people during the September antifascist uprising of 1923. The moral and ethical problems of the struggle between good and evil permeate the historical novels Legend of Sibin, Prince of Preslav (1967; Russian translation, 1970) and The Antichrist (1970).