[citation needed] At the age of 45, Pulevski fought as a member of the First Bulgarian Legion in 1862 against the Ottoman siege at Belgrade.

[13] In an application for a veteran pension to the Bulgarian Parliament in 1882,[14] he expressed his regret about the failure of the unification of Ottoman Macedonia with Bulgaria.

In 1883, aged 66, Pulevski received a government pension in recognition of his service as a Bulgarian volunteer.

Pulevski settled in the village of Progorelec, near Lom, Bulgaria, where he received gratuitously agricultural land from the state.

[19] In 1875, Pulevski published Dictionary of Three Languages (Rečnik od tri jezika, Речник од три језика) in Belgrade.

It was a trilingual conversational manual composed in "question-and-answer" style in three parallel columns, in Macedonian, Albanian and Turkish, all three written in Cyrillic.

[20] Pulevski chose to write in the local Macedonian rather than the Bulgarian standard based on eastern Tarnovo dialects.

[26][full citation needed] All records of this book were lost during the first half of 20th century and only discovered again in the 1950s in Sofia.

Owing to the writer's lack of formal training as a grammarian and dialectologist, it is considered of limited descriptive value; however, it has been characterized as "seminal in its signaling of ethnic and linguistic consciousness but not sufficiently elaborated to serve as a codification.

This opinion was based on the claim that Philip II and Alexander III were of Slavic origin and thus this confirmed the ancient ancestry of the modern Macedonians.

[8] Despite Pulevski being an early adherent of Macedonism,[36][37] because of his pro-Bulgarian military activity, in Bulgaria he is regarded as a Bulgarian.

[38][39][40] According to Tchavdar Marinov, of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,[41][42] there are reasons to interpret the case of Pulevski as a lack of clear national identity by him, while his numerous self-identifications reveal unclear Macedonian nationhood.