It's raining in my soul: Touches from the portrait of Mara Belcheva
Ръми в душата ми. Щрихи от портрета на Мара Белчева
Category: Bulgarian Literature after the First World War
Language: Bulgarian

   Mara Belcheva (1868—1937) was a Bulgarian poet. She was born in Sevlievo. Her father was a leader of the April uprising against the Ottoman Empire. She graduated from secondary school in Veliko Tarnovo and went on to study at a women's school in Vienna. She became a teacher and taught in Ruse and Sofia. In 1886, she married Hristo Belchev, poet and economist who served as minister of finance under Prime Minister Stefan Stambolov. An assassination attempt on Stambolov claimed the life of Belchev in 1891. Tsar Ferdinand I was taken with Belcheva and kept a marble sculpture of her hand on his desk. He wished her to serve as lady-in-waiting to his mother, Clémentine of Orléans, but she refused a life in the palace. Belcheva went to Geneva to study philology. In 1903 she began a relationship with poet Pencho Slaveykov which lasted until his death in 1912. They never married but referred to her as his "wife" throughout his writings. Belcheva began publishing verse in 1907. She published three collections of poetry: Na praga stûpki (Footsteps on the Threshold, 1918), Soneti (Sonnets, 1926), and Izbrani pesni (Selected Songs, 1931). She published a biography of Slaveykov in 1925. She also translated Friedrich Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra and Gerhart Hauptmann's Die versunkene Glocke into Bulgarian.

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