Еросът – мит и роман. Анализ на имплицитния читател в романа „Пиафè“ на Недялко Славов

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.