Bulgarian literature

The preface to the divergent texts devoted to the work of Ivailo Petrov, seeks to cover and inspire their unexpected unity - on the basis of the experience of each of the researchers to extract and highlight the "different" in the remarkable storyteller: atypical, unaccustomed even unrepresentative. Thus here plebs and truth have core categories around which gravitate the individual studies. Due consideration is given also to the other bright gift of the writer - the artist in him, which contributes to the presentation of creative personality in fullness. The articles end with an excerpt from the unpublished second part of the novel "Baronovi" (1997), i.e. with another escape-shelter of the author Ivailo Petrov behind the mask of an aristocratic and amoral "I" - character and narrator simultaneously. Composed parallely with the epic masterpiece of the writer "Wolf Raid", the novel "Baronovi" once again reinforces the idea of the hierarchy in this writing and and how Ivailo Petrov is divided between two mismatched prose profiles.

The part of Ivaylo Petrov"s fiction that usually attracts critical attention today features the texts recreating different aspects of the life of Bulgarian peasants. This article seeks to revive the writer"s other works - the ones he conceived as an attempt to display a different face and to prove that he had overcome his commitment (being of peasant origin himself) to the "conventional patriarchal Bulgarian" mindset. The paper shows how the writer"s resistance to his "inherited identity" subsides with time (especially towards the end of his career) and how he evolves into a champion of the values and the worldview that he used to rebel against in his youth.

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.

The author shares his experience and insights during his work on a new Polish translation of Ivan Vazov’s novel Under the Yoke. The article reveals the results of his textological analysis of the novel that includes interpretations of its title message and of various aspects of Vazov’s masterpiece, such as the function of the play Genovefa and theatre in general in constructing the novel’s fictional universe, the culture war between the worlds of Christianity and Islam, the romantic design of the main character interpreted in the light of Adam Mickiewicz’s Gustaw-Konrad, wordplay and culminating metaphors as means of metaphorization, syntax twists in depicting characters’ moods and emotions, the role of speaking names etc. All aspects of Vazov’s novel, discussed in this article, aim to reveal its remarkable mastery.

The text is dedicated to some critical plots in the Bulgarian literature of the 20-th century - the attitude of the "Misal" journal to Ivan Vazov; the escalating topic of renegation after the transition of "the four" (N. Furnadjiev, As. Razcvetnikov, A. Karaliychev, G. Tzanev) from Georgi Bakalov's "Nov Pat" journal to Vladimir Vasilev's "Zlatorog" journal; the polemics involving Ivan Radoslavov and the "Hyperion" journal about the fate of Bulgarian symbolism; the actualization of the problem of plagiarism; the debate about hereditary rights over the new poetic language; the tension between left and right literary editions in the period between the two world wars, and the dangerous political consequences it caused after 09.09.1944. The plots in question are examined in the context of the larger topic of the activation of the literary myth Vladimir Vasilev and its metamorphoses in Bulgarian cultural life. The text synthesizes and develops further ideas, rooted in the book "The literary myth Vladimir Vasilev", published by the author in the year 2000.

The book presents a ground-breaking reading of a classical Bulgarian author who has been mostly neglected by theoreticians in recent decades. Kolarov’s approach demonstrates his capacity to work with all registers of the literary text, which has marked his writing ever since Sound and Sense (1983). By closely following the transformative effects of the material aspects of fiction, he innovatively opens his analyses to the conceptual "transmodalities" between philosophy and other spheres of the humanities, while remaining sensitive to facets of social and political engagement. After Kolarov’s reading, Elin Pelin will never be the same.

The paper raises the question of the place of the Biblical text in Bulgarian literature and the autostereotype of the religious indifferentism of the Bulgarians. Both the key texts of the famous Bulgarian literary critics (B. Penev, D. Konstantinov, A. Dalchev) and their reception in the latest Bulgarian literary studies are analysed. The cultural context of the perception of the Bible (and religion) is given in terms of formation of modernity, as the emphasis is put on the role of the Orthodox and Protestant thought. It is indicated that a new perspective on the phenomena can be provided by the postsecular thought.

Every community has its matrimonial rules describing some marriages as permitted, desirable, intolerable or forbidden. These rules have to do with the definition of the ‘own’ an ‘alien’ and with the inner differentiation of the ‘own’ and their basis is the question what is beneficial for the community. The paper deals with one particular case in Bulgarian literature from the 19th century – the complicated attitude of the distinguished writer and ideologist towards the Tsenovich family. Dimitar Tsenovich married to a Serbian widow just like Karavelov. In the beginning, Karavelov was in perfect relations with the family of his compatriot and friend. Then he started to present both Ekaterina and Dimitar in a negative light. The paper offers some observations on the image of love and marriage in Karavelov’s fiction and autobiographical text.

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.

The German academic annual “Bulgarica” has been published since 2018. It replaced the “Bulgarien-Jahrbuch” (“Bulgarian Yearbook”). Both “Bulgarica” and “Bulgarien-Jahrbuch” were and are published by the German-Bulgarian Association “Deutsch-bulgarische Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Bulgarien e.V.” (DBG). The publications include academic papers on Bulgarian studies, highlighting linguistics, literature, culture, architecture, history, documents, book reviews, varia and in memoriam.

The present study makes a comparative analysis of two works emblematic of Bulgarian literature – “The Fountain of the White-Legged Maiden” and “Ralitsa”. Both are poems, written on the basis of Bulgarian folklore motives, dealing with the tragic fate of two star-crossed love affairs. An interesting thing is that the two poems were written by father and son poets, both colossi of two epochs in the development of Bulgarian literature – Bulgarian Revival and Bulgarian Modernism. The study is founded on the supposition of clandestine rivalry between father and son on the literary field, as the son rebels against the father, striving to surpass him and impose a new set of literary canons to synchronize the nascent Bulgarian literature with European Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th century. The son (Pencho Slaveykov) takes the poem of his father (Petko Slaveykov) as a model, presumably with the intention to set an example how traditional means of expression, motives, ideas, beliefs etc. can be used and incorporated into modern poetry. Who wins this peculiar competition – the father, who does not question the anonymous genius of the people and uses the treasure trove of Bulgarian folklore freely to an extent of obliterating his own role as an author, or the son who reworks and recasts every bit of traditional views and approaches in order to shift the emphasis from the collective and the mythological to the individual and the psychological?

The study presents the conception of the project “Islands of the Unblessed. History of the Unconventional Bulgarian Literature from 1944 to 1989 in Its Socio-Cultural Context”. It is based on the idea of a kind of fragmentation of the Bulgarian literature from the period of the totalitarian regime, dictated by the non-inclusion of a number of authors and texts in the official stream of socialist realism without placing them by all means under the sign of dissidence. In this sense, twelve thematic “islands” are outlined – as areas of resistance, non-belonging, various types of marginalization in relation to the socialist canon. On the other hand, the Bulgarian literature of the period itself is presented as relatively isolated from the world – exactly because of its ideological closure.

This article examines the Bulgarian novels published in 2022 as a representative sample of what was created in this genre in the two decades of the 21st century. The year 2022 has a special place and significance in the development of modern Bulgarian fiction. On the one hand, because the number of new novels is very large – over fifty. On the other hand, and even more important, because this production shows well what has been achieved, breaking new ground since 1989, and what has already become obsolete three decades after the beginning of the changes. The thematic focus of the article is the representations of Bulgarian history, divided into three parts: representations of the recent past (1944–1989), representations of the Transition, representations of more distant history. The political messages specific to each group are defined, new directions of historical/epic thinking in Bulgarian novel are highlighted.

The article presents and comments on two topics, in which Pencho Slaveykov is present - in the presentation of Bulgarian literature in the monthly "Nord und Süd" of 1911 and in the thematization of the problem of paganism in various French and German language publications of 1914. In the former case, Slaveykov is the creator and dominant representative of Bulgarian literature, while in the latter, he is included in the broad circles of European aesthetic pursuits.