novel

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 analysis is the first comprehensive look at the failed novel by P. Vezhinov and more exactly in its first authentic Stalinist version from 1952. The text tracks in details the ideological profiling of the characters, tied to gender and lifestyle, as well as the erasement and the concealment of these two realities in the novel, their perverse, "negative" events. Highlighted in the foreground is the intriguing identity between lordly / household / feminine / female. Apart from the precise ideological scheme, carefully thought out in the novel, there is an attempt to note also toposes and spaces issuing grueling, hoary, gloomy atmosphere in Bulgaria in the 50s of the twentieth century. Instead of final conclusions, the text ends with proposals for three film versions, as interpretations of the failed novelistic narrative of P. Vezhinov, that might be seen as emblematic of the three types of cultural (movies) conjectures.

This article reflects upon world literature as a socio-cultural construct behind which one can discern particular historical dynamics and tensions. The first part seeks to locate the Anglo-Saxon discourse of world literature vis-à-vis three major reference points: time, space, and language. This chronotopic interrogation allows me to identify focal points of dissent from the currently prevalent liberal mobilisations of 'world literature'. The second part of the article is attempts to locate world literature on the level of literature's self-reflexivity. This is a specific meta-location of world literature which I examine through close attention to a 1930s novel. This enables me to think about dissent as a meta-reflexive position, from which literature itself skeptically relates to the notion of 'world literature'.

In this paper essential aesthetical, ethical and social topics and motives in Tzvetan Stoyanov’s last novel, his article ‘Gangs’ and his essay ‘Homespun Intelligentsia” are subjected to critical scrutiny. Some of them are explored in other novels by the same author. Particular attention is paid to the questions of genre, literary formation of characters, the historical contexts of the novel’s creation and the fictional world created inside it, and to a contents structure based juxtaposition with Ilija Trojanov’s novel The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner. Moral and ideological dilemmas in the world outlook and the works of Tzvetan Stoyanov provide another subject of analysis.

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 is dedicated to the first and most significant novel in Bulgarian literature with a plot from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) – the novel "Condemned Souls" (1945) by Dimitar Dimov. In the context of criticism of the literary work of the author (the so-called „Tabacco“case 1951–1953) and its quasi-socialist poetics, the tendency towards historical incoherence is analyzed. Dimov’s novel has a large number of small historical and logical inaccuracies, but one error is indicated as essential: the narrative of the "Condemned Souls" takes place in 1936 and one of the main characters is a Jesuit, but the historical truth is that between 1932 and 1938 on the territory of Spain „The Society of Jesus“ is banned by the republican Constitution (1931) and edicts of the prime minister Manuel Azaña (1932); these statutory provisions are not repealed until 1938 when the rights of the Order are restored by Francisco Franco. In this way, Dimov’s novel is interpreted as a ‘torn creation’ between fiction and the historical truth.