Делото на Васил Стоин
The Lifework of Vassil Stoin

Summary/Abstract: The present article is meant to commemorate a hundred years since the birth of the great Bulgarian folklorist and musicologist Vassil Stoin (1880-1938). He was born in Samokov – a town of strong folklore traditions. He was a teacher in the villages round Sofia and Samokov from 1891 to 1907, thus being able to get well-acquainted with Bulgarian folksongs. He studied violin at the Brussels Conservatoire and graduated there (1907-1910). When back in Bulgaria he became teacher again; he had been teaching for several years in the Sofia Academy of Music. In 1926 he was appointed head of the newly-formed department of folk music at the Popular Ethnographic Museum in Sofia. Since then he had been actively engaged in collecting and publishing Bulgarian musical folklore. He formed a small team of well-trained, musicologists and started systematically travelling about Bulgaria’s various regions – from the western borders to the Black Sea, and from the Danube to the Rhodopes. All this resulted in the collection of an enormous material, Vassil Stoin himself recording the texts and melodies of over 12000 songs. In fact, Bulgarian folklorists had undertaken a campaign to collect Bulgarian folk poetic art as yet during the nineteenth century, but those were chiefly recordings of texts without melodies. It was V. Stoin who first engaged folklorists in recording the folksong melody. The first four collections were published under his editorship: „Folksongs from the Timok to the Vita Rivers” (1928); „Bulgarian Folksongs from Middle North Bulgaria” (1931); „Rhodope Songs”(1934); „Bulgarian Folksongs from East and West Thracia” (1939). The next four volumes were issued edited by close collaborators of Vassil Stoin: „Folksongs from the Western Districts” (1959), „Folksongs from Northeast Bulgaria” (1, 1962 and II (1973), and „Folksongs from Samokov and the Samokov Region” (1975). Vasil Stain was also the author of several theoretical works on folk music.

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