| Bogomil Nikolaev Raynov | |
| Birth Date: | 19 June 1919 |
| Birth Place: | Sofia, Kingdom of Bulgaria |
| Death Place: | Sofia, Bulgaria |
| Alma Mater: | Sofia University |
| Occupation: | Writer |
| Awards: | Hero of Socialist Labour (Bulgaria), Order of Georgi Dimitrov, Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius. |
Bogomil Nikolaev Raynov (19 June 1919 – 8 June 2007) was a Bulgarian writer and professor of aesthetics.
He was the son of the writer, philosopher and artist academician and the brother of the sculptor . He took part in the Resistance Movement during the Second World War. He was a member of several Marxist circles. He became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1944.[1]
He was the editor-in-chief of the Starling newspaper. For some time he was an associate professor at the .[2]
From 1953 to 1960, he was cultural attaché at the Bulgarian Embassy in Paris, at which time he purchased various works of art exhibited at the National Art Gallery.
He was a member of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party beginning in 1976. He was vice-chairman in 1967 and deputy chairman in 1972 of the Union of Bulgarian Communists, and also a corresponding Member of BAS since 1974.
Together with Svetlin Rusev he participated in the selection and purchase of paintings at the National Gallery for Foreign Art. The money was state-owned, granted at the insistence of Lyudmila Zhivkova.[3]
He collaborated with the newspapers,,, Literary Life, Literary Critic, Art and Criticism magazine, and others. His works were first published in 1936 in The Women's Gazette.
He made scientific publications in the fields of aesthetics, art history, and culturology. He was the author of numerous monographs on the fine arts, history of theosophy, and a series of crime and spy novels, whose main character is Emil Boev, as well as novelized autobiographies. His novels are very popular, published several times in large numbers.
In one of his later books, Ludmila, he gives information about the backstage in Bulgarian cultural and political life in the 1980s of the 20th century and the attempt to break the narrow-mindedness and open the door to the world of free culture.
After the death of Raynov, his books Our Light Finger and Letter from a Dead Man were published, filled with harsh attacks against,, and Radoy Ralin.[4]
Bogomil Raynov is a highly controversial figure in Bulgarian culture. As a long-term deputy chairman of the Union of Bulgarian Writers and a member of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, he played a major role in imposing socialist realism in Bulgarian literature and in the ideological defeat of many "ideologically deluded" Bulgarian writers such as,, Atanas Dalchev, and others, during the early years of communist rule until the fall of Valko Chervenkov, and later.
The famous Bulgarian literary critic called Raynov "a scoundrel and high-class polemicist", "a cannibal", and "the right hand of the cult and its striking force, one of Zhendov's moral assassins" in his diary.[6] The Bulgarian poet and translator called him a "talented man".[7] Radoy Ralin gave him the famous nickname "Guess Numerainov" (Bulgarian: Погодил Номерайнов).[8]