Книжка-3

Table of Contents: Issue 3, 2020 - Bulgarian, English

This text is a lecture delivered in the “Forum for justice”, established in 2019 in memoriam to the friend and intellectual ally Christian Takov, a professor in low, who passed away in 2017. The lecture explores the concept of justice with methods unusual for philosophical or juridical inquiry – the interpretative techniques of literary theory. Central is the hypothesis that the various forms of literary imagination are instrumental in awarding a major hermeneutical Good – understanding; a claim, exemplified by a close reading of works by Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Nabokov. Narratology (especially the various patterns of relationship between the omniscient narrator and literary characters, limited in their knowledge), is used as a methodological tool to investigate the forms of uneven distribution of this Good in different historical epochs. The lecture concludes that unlike literature in previous centuries, modern literature is in its very nature utopian enterprise: its mission consists in universalizing understanding up to the limits of human nature.

The article was written in the frames of the project „The Transition after 1989 – the interpretations of historical transformations, social experience and cultural memory in the modern Bulgarian literature and culture“. In the main focus of the present study are two movies. The first one – „Gori, gori, ogunche“ (Burn, Burn Fire) (1994), scenario – Malina Tomova, director – Rumyana Petkova, is a metaphor of the initiated by the Communist government process of the violent change of Turks or Arabian names of Bulgarian Muslims, realized in 60-ties and 70-ies of 20th century. The second movie – „Radiogramofon“ (Radiogram) (2017) – scenario and director Ruzie Hasanova – is a more concrete narrative about a particular family story, which happened in the beginning of 70-ies. Analysed in a confrontative aspect both movies show different social and cultural aspects of the so-called Time of transition and the time after it. This approach helps to understand the main topics of changing Bulgarian society – the collective images, the attitudes towards history, the problems of group identities in new social, political, economic and historical period.

The subject of this article is the connection between Nikolai Raynov and Rabindranath Tagore, which so far has not been a particular object of literary study. It is based on the fact that Raynov was one of the first translators and interpreters of Tagore in Bulgarian. The attempt to outline possible „silent dialogues“ between the two related artists is part of the great East-West dialogue in the first half of the twentieth century and the perception of Eastern philosophy as a corrective to that of the West after World War One (WWI). There is also a thesis about Tagore's possible influence on Raynov's style after the First World War.

P. Yu. Todorov is one of the few Bulgarian writers who artistically recreate the Jewish theme. His story "Stones" is directly connected with the life of the Bulgarian Jews, but in the first volume of his collected works (1979), it is called "idyll". Another mistake, but this time a typo, is that in the contents of this volume the title "Stones" is printed as "Reed". This article attempts to prove that "Stones" does not fit the genre "idyll" and that this story is tied with both moments of the biography of the writer, as well as his civil and socio-moral positions. The analysis is based on documentary sources, letters, memoirs, and himself publications of P. Yu. Todorov. The historical and biblical events and motives that are directly or indirectly present in the work are also interpreted. One of the important conclusions is that "Stones" represents a more complex genre mixture, in which modern and traditional narrative and stylistic techniques are intertwined, building its semantic polyphony.

This article is dedicated to the dramaturgy of one forgetfulness Bulgarian playwright from the years of the so-called Socialism when he builds his own existential poetics, different from the official ones. The meaning of human life is understood by Velichkov as balancing between two categories – the mystery of Intimacy and the wisdom of Anxiety. His style has been seen as a language of silence and anger as a language of Harold Pinter and David Campton. His style has been seen as a language of Poetry itself, as a language of Theatre as a Ritual of the Love.

This paper briefly deals with the presentation of the Paregoric (camphorated tincture of opium) and the attitude of the characters of the novel to it. For the time when the plot took place the use of this drug was not formally forbidden, although it was not regarded as something fully acceptable. When Golding published the book in the 1980s these kinds of drugs, are under strict control by the medical authorities; at the same time, literature and art are changing their ambivalent attitude towards drug usage. The article looks at the use of the narcotic in the context of the use of alcohol in “Rites of Passage”, the use of some uncommon substances in the other Golding’s novels, and attempts to find some kind of link with the decease of the author. The aim is to ask the question about the function of the Paregoric in the narrative.

The review discusses the bilingual anthology Украински поетически авангард. Антология (Sofia, 2018) which presents artistic texts from the 1910s and 1920s in Ukrainian and in Bulgarian translations. The anthology offers various examples of literary works from typical avant-garde genres (poetry, visual poetry, manifestos), which are divided into the categories of Futurism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Scientism. The movements and their general positions within the Ukrainian avant-garde are briefly explained from a historic perspective in the foreword and appendix. Thus, the anthology makes a phenomenon, which so far has received only a little attention in terms of research and translation, available to readers in Bulgaria. However, from a methodological point of view, the publication first and foremost presents a classical collection of literary works, which can be regarded as an eligible basis for further analytical approaches to the Ukrainian avant-garde in Bulgaria, particularly from a comparative perspective.

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