Юлия Йорданова

This paper presents the subject of the image of America in Bulgarian works of literature: from the traditional folklore on the subject of emigration, through the Bulgarian travelogue prose and poetry up to the present-day pop song. This broad framework, in terms of genres and time period, is offset by the emphasis laid on the period around the 1930s, when the most sweeping emigration wave began from Bulgaria to America, and when a number of works of art were produced in this connection. A sui generis centre of the comparative textological analysis is Atanas Dalchev’s poem “Novelette”, dated 1925. It builds the image of America as the radical Strangeness with respect to the modern Bulgarian of the post-Liberation period, who was becoming already europeanised. Gravitating around this were all the other pieces of writing on the subject of that time: the labour songs of the Banat Bulgarians of the 1930s, the travelogues by Boris Shivachev and Svetoslav Minkov, and the short stories by Matvei Vulev dated to that period. In a broader perspective, works preceding and appearing in the wake of Dalchev’s poem have been considered like Aleko Konstantinov’s travelogue “To Chicago and Back” of the 1890s, and pieces of contemporary Bulgarian poetry, mostly of the 1990s, including also a popular song of Todor Kolev from the last decade of the 20th century. The phrase “Rhapsody in Blue” featuring in the title of this paper points to the extraliterary criticism of the study which, alongside the Bulgarian literature in prose and in verse covers the songs from traditional folklore, to present-day pop music. It also presents the general idea of America persisting in Bulgarian arts and culture and converging around the semantics of the English word “blue”. The paper takes advantage of the homonymy of this word in the title of Gershwin’s Rhapsody, in order to consider the ambivalent image of America: as an image “in blue colour”, symbolising freedom...

One of the first articles of the Bulgarian philologist Petar Dinekov Literary Legends (1937) provides the occasion for this analysis. Petar Dinekov wrote about the risks of making-up scientific legends for literature for the first time in Bulgarian scholarship, before its ideological stagnation in the period after 1944. This way of critical thinking and volition of re-examination of the historiography in the field of literary knowledge are defined as ‘first stasim’ of the drama of the Bulgarian humanitarian thought where Dinekov brings the academic history of literature in question. Scrutinizing Dinekov’s ideas, in terms of the last changes in the Bulgarian humanitarian context (after the crash of the communist regime’s ideology in 1989); we can speak about ‘second stasim’ in the literary history researches and about some kind of a reinforced scholarly interest in the problems of the folklore. This article analyzes Petar Dinekov’s history-theoretical conception about the place of the folkloristic in the humanitarian academic corpus. The actual question about the contemporary borderline position of the folkloristic is discussed in the following perspectives: 1. Folkloristic between “expert” knowledge of literary history and ethnography, on the one hand, and “ideological” knowledge of eclectic science as anthropology and philology – on the other hand. 2. Crossroad position of the folkloristic researches – between romantic-nationalistic intellectual project of philology and Euro-expansionistic intellectual project of anthropology. The third perspective discusses the place of the folkloristic between literary-philological understanding (about oral and written word) and ethno-anthropological knowledge about custom and nature of living.

The paper examines the dramatic-prose work in question at two levels – once, in the context of the Old Testament version of the plot in The Book of Judges; and next on the background of the Bulgarian political history of the 1920s. At the latter level the paper suggests a few basic ideas, connected, in the first place, to the conservative position manifested by the author living in a highly revolutionary age and, secondly, to the discovery of the emancipating sociologem of the daughter who symbolically gives birth to her father. In regard to the first aspect the paper considers the possible role positions of the individual living in troubled times, and draws the attention to Emanuil Popdimitrov’s choice to describe an adaptive and socially constructive (not a reforming revolutionary) type of person, as seen in the character of the regentjudge Jephthah. In regard to the second more important aspect the paper makes a comparative analysis of the original (biblical) and the secondary (literary) versions of the plot about the daughter who rescued her father by physical exploit from disgrace and social death. In conclusion the paper emphasizes the fact that the literary text raises problems in the family identity of the person in society to a degree in which it may turn out that the woman can rehabilitate the man’s honour, and the children can produce their parents’ dignity.