Любка Липчева-Пранджева

A study, Sex and Character by Otto Weininger, falls into the epicentre of the curiosities of the day in the Bulgarian cultural milieu. Who and how is reading Weininger and are indeed exactly women who turn out to be so loyal to his "female sex" postulates? The current paper examines the reception of the Weininger text, highlighting the dialogic fields provoked by it - the vague menace of the feminist movement, the suicide as a free will choice, the rejection of the rather screaming speech about/of sexuality. And while the Bulgarian creator feels obliged to find and offer an exemplary model for the modern (and yet "unaffected" by modernity, "healthy") Bulgarian woman, his imagination tenaciously refuses to unfold the suicide woman plot.

In the introductory part, the article presents Kiril Hristov’s Prague archive while paying special attention to documents which are likely to upgrade or alter our perception of the poet. There is included a detailed commentary on the manuscripts “Bulgarian grammar” and “Lectures on the Bulgarian language”, which both evince Kiril Hristov’s work as a lecturer in the Bulgarian language in Prague. The poet, who can be argued to have turned his identity into an aesthetic object and the literary scandal into an aesthetic creed, assumes the long-last role of intermediary and cultural ambassador, of the one held academically responsible for drawing the portrait of “the others” – of Bulgarian poets and writers and of Bulgarian culture as an entity.