Under the Yoke. A Romance of Bulgarian Liberty (First English Translation)

by Ivan Vazov, Edward Gosse, C.B. (Introduction), Edward Gosse, C.B. (Translator)

Overview

The tranquility in a Bulgarian village under Ottoman rule is only superficial: the people are quietly preparing for an uprising. The plot follows the story of Boycho Ognyanov, who, having escaped from a prison in Diarbekir, returns to the Bulgarian town of Byala Cherkva (White Church, today Sopot) to take part in the rebellion. There he meets old friends, enemies, and the love of his life. The plot portrays the personal drama of the characters, their emotions, motives for taking part in or standing against the rebellion, betrayal and conflict.
Historically, the uprising fails due to bad organization, limited resources, and betrayal. The way in which the Ottomans break the uprising down then becomes the pretext for the Russian-Turkish war, that brought about Bulgarian independence.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940149891023
Publisher:	London: William Heinemann, 1912
Publication date:	01/20/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	399 KB

About the Author

IVAN VAZOV, the Bulgarian national poet and novelist, was born in 1850 and died on September 22, 1921. There was hardly a phase of Bulgarian life during these seventy years which did not come within the sphere of Vazov’s own experience, and the main lines of his career differ little from those of many of his contemporaries. His father, who had a small business in the village of Sopot, was almost uneducated; it was from his mother that Ivan inherited his love of books, and it was she who encouraged him in his wish for education and in his first attempts to write. Ivan received his earliest education in the primary school of his native village; later on he went to a school at Kalofer, and finally to the gymnasium at Plovdiv. Several times his father brought him back to help in the shop at Sopot, but Ivan had neither liking nor aptitude for business, and, while he was at Plovdiv, he had begun to read French and Russian literature and to write verses himself. For a time he became schoolmaster at Mustapha Pasha, and, later, an employee on the construction work of the Sofia-Kiustendil Railway. While on a business visit to Romania, Vazov came into touch with the group of young Bulgars who were spending the time of their exile there in making plans for further insurrections against the Turks, and he naturally found himself in complete sympathy with their ideals. He was implicated in the unsuccessful revolutionary movement of I876, and was forced to take refuge in Romania. After the liberation of Bulgaria, he served for a time as a Government official, but, after Prince Alexander’s abdication, his political sympathies compelled him to leave the country for some years; he was Minister of Education in the Stoilov Cabinet from I897 to I899, when he definitely retired from public life and devoted himself to writing. Vazov’s earliest works were published in I870 and, from then on till the last year of his life, he produced poems, plays, novels and short stories in rapid succession, for he believed it to be the duty of an author to write a great deal.
The long list of Vazov’s works would convey little to British readers, for, though many of his writings have been translated into various foreign languages, the novel “ Under the Yoke” (“Pod Igoto“) is probably the only book of his which has been at all widely read outside Bulgaria. To a great extent, therefore, foreigners must be prepared to accept the judgment of Vazov’s own countrymen as to the value of his work.