Книжка-1

Table of Contents: Issue 1, 2023 - Bulgarian, English

The paper examines songs with love and erotic content, dating back from the so-called National Revival Period. They used to be visible part of the popular culture of Bulgaria and the Southeastern Europe region in initial decades of the Modern Bulgarian statehood. These songs were originally written in Bulgarian and in Turkish, but with Cyrillic alphabet. Turkish ones are introduced for the first time in Bulgarian Literary History Studies. They were taken from books by Manol Lazarov, Petko Slaveykov, and by an unidentified author with initials K.S.M. This popular literature genre had a complex biography, following to some extent the ideological planning of the Bulgarian society and the social trajectory of the ideas of the nation, particular for that period. Initially, they were well accepted, so they gained vast popularity. Such a positive reception was particular for the period, when they were not experienced as non-matching to the emerging national ideology. Coincidingly with the rising of Bulgarian nationalism, their popularity decreased and they accumulated certain criticism, so in the beginning of the XX c. they were marginalized. In the last decades of XIX s., according to the changes of the ideological climate in Bulgaria, some of them were reinterpreted in a patriotic key.

The article presents for the first time the thesis that the so-called "Epilogue" of Pencho Slaveykov's "Bloody Song" is a literary mystification. Based on the author's historical and documentary research in recent years, it has been concluded that the real author of the text is Mara Belcheva, and the literary mystification was carried out by Boyan Penev. A series of arguments in defense of the thesis are formulated, and both the original manuscript of M. Belcheva and a facsimile of the mystification of B. Penev are published for the first time as appendix.

In 1926, Italian Futurist Tommaso Marinetti received the radical Manifesto of the Fellowship Fighting against Poets. It was sent by Bulgarian avant-gardist Kiril Krastev, whose literary circle, Crescendo, was putting into question the normative dichotomy between Young and Old, modernists and traditionalists, constitutive of Bulgarian literature. In every national literature or Weltliteratur, there are anomalies, malfunctions, and exclusions. This essay analyses a particular anomaly – the Crescendo literary circle and its (im)possible existence. We define distext as something that does not belong to a particular context or that breaks with(in) the cultural conditions of possible or actual emergence. Our analysis raises several theoretical and historical questions: how radical is the manifesto in relation to the Western European avant-garde; does it have any influence outside its local distextual context; what is its connection to Dada movement; and most importantly, what does this anomaly say about the history of Bulgarian literature and its peripheries?

The article is focused on one of the few plays for children by the Bulgarian poet and playwright Stefan Tsanev. On the basis of some poetical specifics in the text of “The most wonderful Wonder” is formulated a hypothesis about the ‘strategy’ of this work as an actualization of phoneticism of the language. In this sense the form of the play is analyzed as a demonstration of the archaic and even the paleolinguistic aspect of the language i.e. of its asemanticity. In this way are interpreted the names of the characters, which are only letters, and the poetic figures with homonymy, paronymy, onomatopoeia etc. The form of the dramatic work is analyzed in relation to the allegorical narrative of a starving primitive tribe which literally degrades to the apes. The one of the main characters – the chief and shaman called U is understood as an ambivalent figure of the speech, as a figure of the both political demagoguery and mystical poetic speech.

The article examines how the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar reworked and reinterpreted the story of the House of Atreus. Yourcenar herself clearly distinguishes her reading of the classic tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The present paper focuses mainly on the similarities with Aeschylus' trilogy Oresteia in order to outline what is new and different in Yourcenar's reading. My thesis is that the figure of Clytemnestra in “Fires” (Feux, “Clytemnestre ou le crime”, 1936) is presented as a political subject who is entitled to her own voice and political defence in court.

The paper analyzes the place and the social roles allotted to intellectuals in post-totalitarian societies, with a special focus on the Czech situation. From the sources relevant to the topic, the choice here falls on Václav Havel’s public speeches since they offer particularly rich study material. Attention is paid to the political, social, and cultural contexts that have served as a stimulus for each of the analyzed texts, as well as the intention, implicit in them, to model the environment in which they are to function. The paper also touches upon the themes of historical and cultural memory, personal choice, the intellectuals’ resignation, and the sense of cultural isolationism, among others.

The article is devoted to the inscriptions found in the Odessa Damaskin № 38 (64). The manuscript is part of a collection of manuscripts of Viktor Grigorovich the prominent, professor of Slavik history and literature. As a specific subject of the research, the author uses several inscriptions of significant value, that provide information about the history of the book. The purpose of the article is to contribute to the history, localization and existence of a specific written monument, which will enrich the knowledge of Bulgarian linguistic, literary, cultural and ecclesiastical history during the period.