Pencho Slaveykov, scion of a historically prominent literary family, surely hoped to continue along both those lines but had little success in the literary sense and none in the historical. It is easy to confirm the latter, since he was never formally married and died without children. It is more difficult to be certain about the former. He did--along with the other members of the so-called Misul group--attempt to play a dominant role in the literary culture of his day, but the catastrophe of World War I in large measure severed the normal channels of literary influence, and his achievement had a lesser resonance in the ensuing generation than he expected it would. Still, in his day he was a guiding literary presence, a man who helped shape Bulgarian literary and artistic culture from about 1890 to 1912, down to the eve of the Balkan Wars and World War I...