In 1911, an elderly woman in typical peasant dress walks into a socialist bookshop in the small Bulgarian town of Vrats. “Grandmother, we don’t have the books you are looking for,” remarks the shopkeeper, when he has finally taken notice of her. Unfazed by his rude dismissal, she calmly requests a copy of Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring and asks if they have a particular work by Karl Kautsky on hand. The shopkeeper, somewhat taken aback, obliges her requests — and she leaves the store satisfied.

This story is one among many glimpses into the lives of early Bulgarian socialists included in Maria Todorova’s The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins. The peasant woman mentioned, Angelina Boneva, is one of the subjects of its detailed biographical chapters, which depict a rich history of socialist militants from outside the movement’s Western Europe core. Indeed, while this episode is an amusing curiosity, it is also shown to be an apt metaphor for Bulgaria’s social-democratic movement at the turn of the century.

But why would an old peasant woman be interested in the works of German Marxists? And what would a nation of peasant smallholdings stand to benefit from Marxian socialism, with its focus on the organization of the industrial working class? The answers have much to tell us about the socialist project of this era, far beyond Bulgaria.