Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov was born on 7 December 1909 in the town of Bansko. Shot on 23 July 1942 in Sofia. He is one of the most prominent proletarian poets. His most famous book of poems is Motoring Verses.

Nikola Vaptsarov was born on December 7, 1909 in the small town of Bansko at the foot of the Pirin Mountains in Bulgaria. He was shot by the fascists on 23 July 1942.

It is a strange experience to read Vaptsarov today as the revolutionary movement is receding and resurgent capital is capturing the imagination of one and all. Born on 7 December in 1909, he belonged to the interwar generation where brilliant minds sought to inherit the mantle of revolutionaries of bygone eras and to integrate themselves with the surge of revolutionary working class and peasant movements. He built upon the legacy of Hristov Botev the Bulgarian nationalist poet of the 19th century and that of Gorky and Mayakovsky. He was not alone in this and had his peers in England in David Guest or Caudwell, Lorca in Spain or Hikmet in Turkey, Brecht in Germany and Faiz in India among others. Those were the times when the ideals of Socialism and revolutionary transformation had caught the imagination of the sensitive and humanist intelligentsia. Vaptsarov was one of them and yet stood out in some respects. He stood out in this galaxy of revolutionary intellectuals perhaps because he was himself a worker and experienced the meaning of being a proletarian at first hand.

In early 1941 Nazi forces were allowed to enter Bulgaria and take control of the country as a prelude to the attack on the USSR. Vaptsarov joined the armed resistance movement and was active in the ‘military centre’. His training as an engineer and mechanic proved useful at this juncture. This was an extremely tiring and hazardous task and Vaptsarov found little time to write poems. Yet he was urged by his comrades to keep writing as one of them put it, ‘Though at the moment the fate of the world is being decided by arms, a stirring contemporary poem is no less important than arms.’

Vaptsarov was arrested in 1942 and subjected to inhuman torture and finally executed on 23rd July, 1942. He continued to write till the very end, and indeed his last verse addressed to his wife is one of the most moving and inspiring.