Гражина Шват-Гълъбова

In his novel Gods and Ants: Chronicle of the 20-th Century Stefan Tsanev uses some representing techniques, typical for the magic realism, to describe the fate of the Bulgarians in the context of the historical events. The fate of the characters is present in the light of Proto-Bulgarians’ heritage and Bogomilian tradition. In this way it attracts the readers’ attention to the roots of the common Bulgarian fate, closely connected to the history of the state. The succession of events in the novel’s world is presented as a matrix which reproduces itself during the centuries. The reality is presented as a demonic realm (like in the Bogomilian myths) and contrasts with Enlightenment’s ideas of people’s progress. The belief in collapse of all kinds of utopias leads to a typical postmodern loss of hope for the illusion of the sense.

V. Zarev's Priest Bogomil and the Perfection of Fear (1998) is one of the attempts - representative for the contemporary Bulgarian culture - at a revaluation of the heretic tradition of Bogomilism. It is at the same time a noteworthy opinion in the discussion which concerns the Mediaeval neo Manichean tradition in Europe. Zarev's protagonist is the orthodox priest Bogomil, founder of a gnosis; the author attempts a deconstruction of a heresiarch's myth, functioning in Bulgarian culture. While subordinating the world presented to the rules of a post Modernist discourse, Zarev is not content with a diagnosis of an inner rift in Bulgarian culture, its being torn between the two incoherent Weltanschauung paradigms (Christianity and Bogomilism) which had supposedly led to the destabilization of the Bulgarians' moral horizon. For in Zarev's world of axiological void, the "last word" belongs to the myth of Bogomilism as the forerunner of heretic movements, the hermetic and enlightenment tradition in Europe.

The present article reflects on the Poem of evil (1889) by Stoyan Mihaylovski as an original attempt to introduce a new language of artistic reflection into Bulgarian literature on the universal theme of religion. Making use of a paraphrase of the biblical theme of the fall, Mihaylovski makes his own interpretation; he poses the eternal question about the source of evil in man, looking at it from the perspective of the age he lives in; and searches for invariable in what is variable. In my article I examine the text of the poet in a manner consistent with the hermeneutical strategies of Paul Ricoeur. My goal is not the reconstruction of the artistic influences on the works of Mihaylovski, but an attempt for exegesis of the anthropological model presented in the poem, which, after Ricoeur, I call "Adamic myth". Ricoeur turns the archaic symbols preceding the very concept of "evil" into a subject of hermeneutical analysis that enables the drawing, from the complex tangle of Middle Eastern and European myths, of four types of narrative structure about the origin of evil and its scope. Ricoeur"s typology covers basic cosmogonic and anthropological myths that have remained to this day not only as artistic facts, but also as still active mental structures. These narrative models have their own history, intertwined into the history of European cultures and literatures that, along with the dynamics specific to individual periods, remain proof of their adaptation. The "Adamic myth" understood as a universalized structure of thinking based on the Judeo-Christian (or rather the Jewish and the Christian) tradition, is situated at the very centre of the Christian tradition. This myth has been deeply rooted in the Church-Slavonic literature of the long Bulgarian Middle Ages, but this does not give grounds to predetermine its place in the constantly changing map of the new Bulgarian culture. The question of the positioning of the "Adamic myth" in it is gaining significance, especially in view of its fascination by the gnostic anthropology of modernism. The Poem of evil by Mihaylovski represents an interesting attempt of the writer to avoid the pitfalls of dualistic thinking and the anthropological pessimism related to it.

This article is an expanded version of a lecture delivered in the autumn of 2016 upon receiving an honorary degree from the University of Sofia. The author focuses on the geo-cultural metaphor of the South in Polish and Bulgarian cultures. The starting point is the so-called keystone or dominant tradition, shaped in each case by the respective country’s monoculture of the “communist" era, which continues to exert considerable cultural influence in both countries. In her discussion of the metaphor of the South as an axiologically and emotively functionalized element of the two national imageries, the researcher tackles the way in which Romanitas or “Roman-ness” continues to be applied in modern contexts. In Poland, conservative circles tend to regard Roman-ness as something that’s been fully absorbed and incorporated into the philosophical fabric of “national” republicanism, whereas Bulgarian conservatives treat it as a component of the land’s material heritage, complemented in spiritual terms by the Thracian tradition of classical antiquity. Based on Rémi Brague's cultural typology, the author breaks new discursive ground by opening up for inquiry the cultural consequences of a nation’s various forms of interaction with its cultural roots and sources.

The article is dedicated to the theme of hope in two monodramas by Boyan Papazov –Nadezhda The Blind [literally ‘The Blind Hope’] and Mad, Cross-eyed and Greedy. United by their common genre convention, theme and character type, they enfold, in a symbolic framework, two periods in Bulgarian history - the era of the communist regime and the period of the so-called political transformation (known in Bulgaria as the transition). The analysis presented in the article aims to discover the theological and anthropological foundations of Papazov's concepts of the sources of human hope in a world of destroyed axiological norms.

The review concerns the book by Ewelina Drzewiecka entitled Юбилейно и модерно. Кирило-Mетодиевският разказ през социализма в България (2020), which is an attempt to create the typology of the narratives about the Solun Brothers and their followers in Bulgarian scientific, Orthodox church, pseudo-scientific and journalistic writing of the socialist era, that is in texts that were created under conditions of a disturbed communicative situation, strong ideological pressure and (self-)censorship. The review not only discusses the book, but also contains comments on the Author’s research approach (based on the achievements of postsecular thought) and cognitive benefits that result from it.

The article is devoted to reflection on the functionalisations of the topos of Minotaur in the novel The Physics of Sorrow (2012) by Georgi Gospodinov, a Bulgarian writer. The text, which is rich in intertextual references, engages in polemics with the tradition of Western culture and undermines its ossified notions related to the figure of Minotaur and the labyrinth. In the view of the Bulgarian writer, this human–animal hybrid becomes the epitome of melancholy that is generated by the personal and common experience of being in the world and a point of reference for post-anthropocentric reflection. In turn, the space of the monster’s imprionment – the labyrinth – is in the novel an ambiguous metaphor for creative practices or intricacies that the artistic imagination has to overcome. In the article, these issues are analysed using the category of self-reference.