Книжка-3

Table of Contents: Issue 3, 2022 - Bulgarian, English

This paper analyzes an episode of the life of the young Petko Slaveykov, related to the comedy “The bishop of Lovech, or a misfortune of the watchmaker of Lovech” (1863) by Teodosiy Ikonomov and discuses the tension between morality and ideology. Slaveykov was a witness and took part in the events from 1847-1848, on which the comedy was based. The paper touches on the connection between the motif about the infidel wife, presented similarly in Molière’s play “George Dandin ou le Mari confondu”, the actual events and the political implications of the author, in the context of the Greek-Bulgarian ecclesiastical conflict.

The present study makes a comparative analysis of two works emblematic of Bulgarian literature – “The Fountain of the White-Legged Maiden” and “Ralitsa”. Both are poems, written on the basis of Bulgarian folklore motives, dealing with the tragic fate of two star-crossed love affairs. An interesting thing is that the two poems were written by father and son poets, both colossi of two epochs in the development of Bulgarian literature – Bulgarian Revival and Bulgarian Modernism. The study is founded on the supposition of clandestine rivalry between father and son on the literary field, as the son rebels against the father, striving to surpass him and impose a new set of literary canons to synchronize the nascent Bulgarian literature with European Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th century. The son (Pencho Slaveykov) takes the poem of his father (Petko Slaveykov) as a model, presumably with the intention to set an example how traditional means of expression, motives, ideas, beliefs etc. can be used and incorporated into modern poetry. Who wins this peculiar competition – the father, who does not question the anonymous genius of the people and uses the treasure trove of Bulgarian folklore freely to an extent of obliterating his own role as an author, or the son who reworks and recasts every bit of traditional views and approaches in order to shift the emphasis from the collective and the mythological to the individual and the psychological?

The article starts from the well-known disjunction “love or struggle/self-sacrifice in the name of the motherland”, characteristic of the national romanticism of the XIX century (Petőfi, Botev). However, the article directs its comparative efforts in another direction – not in the international, but in the interdiscursive, mythopoetic plan. Botev, of course, is at the center of the comparison. Not only as a lyrical voice but in the whole syncretic volume of the personal heroic myth, where the prophetic poetic speech, giving rise to biographical reality, is inseparable from the biographical gesture, which in itself is “living” poetry: relations such as the poem “Farewell” and the voyage with the steamer “Radetzky”, the poem “Hadji Dimitar” and own death оn the Balkan. The dialogue between the poem “To my first beloved” and the pre-death letter to the wife (“My dear Venetа, know that after the homeland...”) is also placed here, in the same order. – But the article prefers not the opposition, but the conjunctive intertwining and finds it in the most incredible place – “To her”, considered the weakest, marginal, non-Botev poem in the monolithic poetic corpus “Botev”, a Spanish drama about love, jealousy, and bloody revenge. In the spirit of the Revival preference for allegorical shifts, this trivial sentimental-adventurous plot is inscribed in the high biographical-poetic “text-Botev”: а threat of “jumping” across the Danube “with a naked knife in the hand” and killing the old husband, kidnapper of his beloved/homeland. – But the real comparative plot is forthcoming, because the autobiographical-heroic narrative “To her”, it turns out (Iv. Paunovski), has its probable prototype in the Crastyu-Pishurkov’s “Koutkoudyachka / Нen-croaking” (the poem “Fight of Roosters”), an emblem of the most helpless verse-knitting of this era, repeatedly ironized with fierce sarcasm by Botev himself. It is here, in this inverted parody, that the article sets its second heuristic horizon. – The conclusion: what the poet Botev does not know, the work “To her” itself knows and remembers, keeps deep in his genre crypto memory.

One of the most frequently analyzed texts in Bulgarian literature is the story „Indje by Yordan Yovkov. What is striking, however, is the large number of contradictory theses and conclusions, each of which claims to give the most adequate interpretation of the meaning laid down in the text. This turns „Indje“ into a real case that requires an adequate solution. The proposed article attempts to analyze these numerous contradictions, and then, on the basis of a detailed narratological analysis, to describe the receptive paradigm adequate for the story. Particularly complicated is the problem that „Indje“ is in fact a retelling of various songs and legends, but the narrative is conducted from a witness's point of view. In addition, the restored memory of the past is expressed in the structure of the work through three different genre paradigms, each of which has its specifics and social function. What reading behavior will allow the most adequate reading of the impact potential set in the text?

In Western literature, the Balkans are most often represented in an unfavourable way. A remarkable exception seems to be the Dutch writer A. den Doolaard (1901-1994). He wrote three novels rendering the Balkans in a positive way. The inn with the horseshoe (1933) describes the braveness of an Albanian boy avenging the besmirched honour of his brother. Orient-Express (1934) deplores the decline of the Macedonian liberation movement due to internecine terrorism. The wedding of the seven Gypsies (1939) extols the dissolute lifestyle, associated with Gypsy music. However, the positive qualities the reader is supposed to admire differ essentially from the norms valued in daily life. Taking pleasure in the Balkans seems to be a form of escapism, limited to leisure time

The article focuses on a not well-known poem by Atanas Dalchev – “Hronika” / “A Chronicle” which was published in a literary journal but later was not included in any of the poet’s books. In the research, the reasons for the rejection of the work both by the author himself and by the compilers of his books are sought in the literary characteristics of the poem as well as in Dalchev’s strategies for modeling his literary-historical image.