Single-minded in his ideas about the role he considered that poetry, literature in general, and art could and should play in the collective life of a people, Koco Racin, while best remembered today as a poet, had a renaissance universality--of a socially committed sort--in the variety of creative activities to which he turned his hand. His work from the late 1920s to the early 1940s can be likened to a first functional footbridge where later a more substantial structure would be built, linking the past, largely oral, literature of Macedonia with that of the present and the future.

Kosta Solev, who later took the pen name by which he is better known today from the affectionate form of the name of his youthful sweetheart Raca, (or Rahilka), Firfova (then Firfovic), was born on 22 December 1908 into a family of potters in the town of Veles, on the Vardar River...