Petko Slaveykov

This paper analyzes an episode of the life of the young Petko Slaveykov, related to the comedy “The bishop of Lovech, or a misfortune of the watchmaker of Lovech” (1863) by Teodosiy Ikonomov and discuses the tension between morality and ideology. Slaveykov was a witness and took part in the events from 1847-1848, on which the comedy was based. The paper touches on the connection between the motif about the infidel wife, presented similarly in Molière’s play “George Dandin ou le Mari confondu”, the actual events and the political implications of the author, in the context of the Greek-Bulgarian ecclesiastical conflict.

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?

This paper deals with several well-known topics in a slightly different way: Petko Slaveykov’s articles on women’s question, his criticism of European fashion, and his love poems and their relations with his personal life. He was a great advocate of the emancipation of women, not without some restrictions typical for his time. His writings demonstrate different images of the author that were determined by the genres, patterns used by him, and the trends in society and literature; they also evolved with the age of the author.