contemporary Bulgarian literature

The text traces the process of transferring the human brain into an artificial mechanical body in Lyuben Dilov’s novel “To choose yourself." My task is to bring forth the contingent wandering of the awareness of the character Daniel Dimi between spatiality of the already lost body and the new, another body, whose different sensuousness and shape the character has to cope with. The problematic identities of Dimi are presented by means of confrontation, a clash between own and foreign, between human reason (the peculiarities of knowledge which he owns) and opportunities provided by his the new mechanical body (this body presents him unlimited possibilities, but it itself is limited by the human who controls it). The emphasis of the narrative, on the one hand, is laid upon the ways in which human identity is rationalized as unsteady in the confrontation with beyond human, with the Other; and on the other hand - reveals the peculiarity of cognition bound by certain conditions.

The following text aims to analyze a growing mass of clichés and their penetrating power in popular Bulgarian literature. To understand how common notions are shared between the author and the implied reader we will discuss “More than love” by Radoslav Gizgindzhiev. It is a bizarre novel, where quasi-spiritual slogans are entangled with prescriptive and hypnotic guidance, which constitutes the narrator as an omnipotent godlike figure. Along with that, the analysis is focused on tracing how a peculiar mix of popular “quotes”, media imitations, and superstitions could melt into a story that becomes a market success.

Within the framework of the research project “Reading Practices in Bulgaria 2018”, the text presents an analysis of a Bulgarian contemporary literary work directed towards the popular reading taste. Nedyalko Slavov’s novel Piaffe is a fictional narrative that clearly targets the wide Bulgarian readership. It is amongst the top-ranking widely-read books in Bulgaria of 2018. The novel treats the subject of doomed love between a man and woman via a mixture of mythological allegories and metaphysical conceptions, forming a stereotypical axiological model of erotic interaction. Situating the love conflict within the cultural context of complex and challenging modernity, this strategy ultimately produces a multiplication of popular ideologemes and mythologemes, which are supposedly overlooked by the reader who is expected to treat them uncritically and beyond any self-assessment. The novel is an example of auto-exoticization of one's own/the native through its refraction in the context of the foreign/unknown, thus implying a stereotypically ignorant or ill-informed Bulgarian reader who is nonetheless capable of gaining high-level cultural competence both in relation to local conventions and clichés, and to the complex system of values of a progressive but largely undigested foreign culture.

The paper presents and comments on the papers, responses, and discussions from the Round Table “The post-1989 Transition in Contemporary Bulgarian Literature.” It gave focus to several topics related to events, ideas, and attitudes intrinsic to the understanding of the Transition but also to the period preceding it. The participants offered their analyses of how the changes in the social and political order were reflected in the literature, the public consciousness, the media, theatre, and film, among others.

The review is devoted to the second part of “Bulgarian Literature of 21st Century (2020 ‒ 2022)” by Milena Kirova. The main thematic and genre fields of interest are highlighted, including migrant literature, the novel and poetry of the second decade of the 21st century, Bulgarian dystopia, etc. The potential of the monograph to favour future, more segmented and in-depth studies of Bulgarian literature from the period is also considered and discussed.