Alexander Teodorov-Balan
BulgariaAlexander Teodorov-Balan: Bulgarian Linguist and Literary Scholar
Alexander Teodorov-Balan was a prominent Bulgarian linguist and literary scholar. He was born in the village of Kubey, which, three years before his birth in 1856, transitioned from the Russian Empire to the Principality of Moldavia, and later became part of unified Romania. Teodorov-Balan only visited Russia almost a century later, a year before his death, during the Slavists Congress in Moscow in 1958. His brother, Georgi Todorov (1858-1934), was a Bulgarian general, and a village named General-Todorov was named in his honor.
Teodorov-Balan studied philology at Charles University in Prague and Leipzig University. He defended his doctoral dissertation in Prague, titled "The Sound ь in the Modern Bulgarian Language." In 1884, he moved to Sofia and worked at the Ministry of National Education, teaching history and dialectology at the Higher Pedagogical School. In 1888, the Sofia University was founded based on the school, and Teodorov-Balan was elected as its first rector in January 1889. He served as rector multiple times and dedicated a total of 70 years to the university. From 1907 to 1910, he served as the secretary of the Bulgarian Exarchate. In 1939, he became an honorary doctor of Sofia University and a member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Personal Life and Contributions
Alexander Teodorov-Balan was married to a Frenchwoman named Julie Gressot, who sadly passed away from tuberculosis. His son, Milko, became a professor of radiology and anatomy. Vladimir, another son, served as a pilot and aviation engineer but went missing after the arrival of Soviet troops in Bulgaria in September 1944. His youngest son, Stanislav, worked as a secretary to King Boris III and was sentenced to life imprisonment in January 1945. He was later released after his father's appeal to Georgi Dimitrov and continued to assist his father and publish his works.
Throughout his nearly 100-year-long life, Teodorov-Balan continued to work, interact with colleagues, and study the life of the Bulgarian people. The Soviet Bulgarianist S. B. Bernstein, who personally knew Teodorov-Balan, wrote warm words about him in his diary "Zigzags of Memory" and published an obituary for him in the "Izvestiya of the USSR Academy of Sciences."
Alexander Teodorov-Balan authored over 900 works on Bulgarian language and literature. He wrote biographies of Cyril and Methodius, Sofroniy Vrachanski, and Paisius of Hilendar. He played a significant role in the development of the literary Bulgarian language, inventing new words to replace Turkish and Greek loanwords, many of which have become firmly established in the language. His word-creation and purist activities have received some criticism and parodies, similar to the activities of the Russian creator of "wetbooters" and "quietthunders," A. S. Shishkov, in the early 19th century. However, most of Teodorov-Balan's discoveries turned out to be successful. He also authored normative and problematic works on grammar and orthography, leading the "struggle for orthography" from the 1920s, which resulted in the adoption of modern spelling in 1945. He researched verbal inflection and conducted pioneering studies on evidential mood in Bulgarian. In his final years, he embarked on a comprehensive work on Bulgarian grammar and managed to publish four parts covering external and internal word forms, nouns, and verbs.
