The further we are from the time in which Kolé Nedelkovski lived, the dearer and greater to us is the poetical and vital accomplishments of this revolutionary poet who sang about the bright future. In the inhuman conditions under which the Macedonian people lived, in conditions of social oppression and cultural depression with no national rights, he joined our people who were loudly proclaiming, in the nineteen thirties, that the Macedonian language existed and that there were poets and writers who wrote in that language. And when his country fell under dark fascist slavery with the dawn of a bright tomorrow s o close, Nedelkovski took up arms and gave his life for the freedom of the Macedonian people and the liberation of the world from the fascist barbarians.

Kolé Nedelkovski was born in the village of Voinica near Veles, into a family of very poor farmers, on 1 6th December (according to some data on 1st October) 1912. He finished the four-year primary school in his native village and enrolled in the high school in Veles. But before the first term was over, he had been compelled to abandon school because of the utmost poverty. This clever boy became an apprentice to a decorator in Skopje where, at the same time, he attended a Sunday commercial school. We know that at that time he showed particular interest in the Macedonian folk-language, compiling words he did not know.

In 1933, at the age of twenty-one, Nedelkovski emigrated from Yugoslavia, hoping to find better living and working conditions in Bulgaria. But he soon found out that he had made a mistake. He lived alone and withdrawn in Sofia, continuing the improvement of his education. In 1937 he was accepted by progressive Macedonian writers who formed a Macedonian literary circle in Sofia. In that circle Nedelkovski was under the positive influence of his friends and became acquainted with the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Botev, Smirnenski and other poets. The poet Nikola Vaptsarov was of particularly great assistance to him. The collection of the Miladinov brothers and the book On Macedonian Matters by Missirkov (1903) were his constant companions.

In 1940, Nedelkovski published his first collection of verses, under the symbolic title Lightnings, and a year later his second collection of poems, entitled Through the World On Foot. Conceived as "Part One", it appeared in the second half of August 1941, about 12 days before the heroic death of the poet and fighter. While his first collection was devoted to his mother, his second collection was devoted "To the Young Macedonian Fighters" who, just at that moment, were hurriedly preparing to fight against the invaders and the so-called liberators. To the latter ones, in the days of their greatest victory, Nedelkovski threw into their faces,

"Keep quiet, keep quiet, you poor tyrants!
Stop lying, enough of malice —
Malicious voice from your hideous mouth
For my people at any time."
(Voice from Macedonia)

Nedelkovski died a heroic death on 2nd September 1941. The police discovered him in the attic of a tall building. But the poet would not surrender; he threw some bombs and then committed suicide by throwing himself out of the window of his room onto the pavement many floors below.

He was only thirty years old at the time.

The literary work of Kolé Nedelkovski is modest both in quantity and in the results achieved. He left us twenty-two or twenty-three poems and one long poem in two booklets, mainly composed under the strong influence of Macedonian folk songs. This is understandable. Nedelkovski was one of the first poets in contemporary Macedonian literature; at the beginning, the only model for him to learn from was the folk-song. He was born in a land where the folk-song was, so to say, the only affirmation of the Macedonian people in the literary field; he had to begin from the contents and expressive meanings of Macedonian folk-poetry, like his compatriot, the originator of contemporary Macedonian poetry, Kosta Ratsin (1904-1943).

Three topics are dominant in the poetry of Kolé Nedelkovski: 1) the national revolutionary past of our people, 2) the emigrants life, and 3) the struggle for social justice.

The poems about the struggle of the Macedonian people were made under the enormous influence of the folk-song, but with the least romantic charm and requisites of folk-songs. They were most often conceived in the form of a dialogue between a mountain and a girl, or between a mother and her son, etc. In the poem, "Stojan Ordanov", Nedelkovski gives us a picture of a national liberation fighter who could not bear slavery, "slavery weighed heavily on his mind", and he set off "to the mountain with his young friends". Years went by in fighting... And at the moment when he felt sad longing for those whom he had left at home: "poor mother in mourning" and "a bride, famous for her beauty", he was killed in an ambush by a "tyrant-murderer". And nature mourned her hero:

"The sky became black, it thundered,
the whole earth trembled
the hill, dark with sorrow,
crumbled and embraced its son Stojan."

In the poems devoted to the emigrants life, Nedelkovski did not show himself as a poet who painted a romantic past; he had an exalted and romantic relationship towards patriotic fighting. The lines in the poem "A Tramp" sound differently:

"I always walk, I always keep silent,
I always suffer terribly...
I bend my head... I shed tears...
I smolder amidst heavy wounds."

"... Days come one after another in horrible hunger", but the long expected storm will come:

"The slave will rise up, the day will be born,
and youth will fly in blood."

The poet did not see evil only in the lack of rights of the Macedonian people. Evil was in the social regime which condemned the working people, regardless of whether they were nationally "free" or not, to spend their lives "in damp mud huts" and to see youth as "mourning". But the explosion was inevitable:

"working people
lined in a strong swarm,
power glared in their eyes
for a bloody, horrible battle."

Among Nedelkovski’s other poems, we would like to mention specifically, "1941" and "The Voice from Macedonia", which were, no doubt, his last poems. They were written between April and August 1941. The former was a war cry against the fascist invasion of Macedonia, a verdict against the "damn murderers" who had sown death through the world, a blow against all those who had shouted about a so-called "liberation" in the days of the worst slavery of the Macedonian people. The poet was persuaded that the people would not give in; they would rise against the invaders and against the so-called "liberators":

"But you known only one song —
which centuries sang and are singing still,
and you keep it in your strong heart:
for treading on tyrants when a fighting."

The poet strongly believed in the dawning of a bright day for the Macedonian people who would achieve their national and social liberation through freedom fighting. And then, the poet wanderer, a son of the Macedonian land, would be home again. The meeting with the native country, liberated by "young fighters", would also mean the end of suffering for the hungry and poorly clad emigrants.

Unfortunately, such a meeting for the poet-emigrant remained unrealized.

Today’s readers will feel Nedelkovski’s poems are unskillful. But at the same time, they will see that the poet freed himself, although slowly, of the influence of the folk-song, and was orientated more and more towards modern expressive means. In 1941, Nedelkovski was not the same poet as he had been some years before. He learnt, developed and built himself as a poet — as much as he could in the hard daily struggle for a crust of bread. The poet’s death cut the clear rising line of literary development.

In the Iiberated country, new writers, our contemporary poets, exceeded the poetical work of Kolé Nedelkovski. But that does not mean that his poems will be forgotten or that his contribution to our poetry and literature and culture in general will not be appreciated. Nedelkovski, like a number of other characters from Macedonian literature and the cultural history of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, was doubtlessly a gifted poet. Only the general conditions under which the Macedonian people lived before the Liberation enabled this gift to manifest and become realized in a language which was denied and persecuted, but in a voice which was united with the life of the people, with their songs, in a voice which was, above all, understandable to an ordinary man.

The poetical work of Kolé Nedelkovski was important lust at the time when it was born and for the influence it had on the creation of contemporary Macedonian poetry and literature. But its importance does not end there: the author of Lightnings and Through the World on Foot has something to say even to the generations of our days, to the generations who were working towards the achievement for which — let us use one of his expressions — he himself burned and burned until the end.