Богдана Паскалева

The text is an analysis of the reader's figure in Hristo Karastoyanov's novel “The Same Night” (2014). In accordance with the instrumental framework of the ‘Reader in the Text’ project, the analysis traces the way in which the novel models its implied reader. The figure of this reader turns out to be essentially connected the problems of history and within its framework – the history of literature. Therefore, the key competence that the novel “The Same Night” expects from its reader is the knowledge of the political history of Europe and Bulgaria, but much more of the history of Bulgarian literature and its forms of problematization of the historical after the Liberation of Bulgaria (1878) and onwards.

This article examines the relationship between sound and meaning, addressing the questions of the arbitrariness or (partial) motivation of their connection, as well as the related problem of the specific value of linguistic sound in poetic texts. The analytical section of the article comments upon three poetic texts: an episode from the third book of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (ca. AD 8), Ivan Vazov’s poem “Echoes” (1884), and Nadezhda Radulova’s poem “Echo” (2020). The article argues that these three texts share a common poetic strategy that functionalizes sound by combining the repetition of words or word fragments with a transformation of meaning. Thus, new meanings arise through the repetition of an already existing acoustic image.