responsibility

The article examines three highly debated and polemic Polish essays, written in the 1980s by Henryk Grynberg, Jan Błoński and Jerzy Jedlicki. The aim of the paper is to present the different view of their authors about the traumatic recent Polish-Jewish past and to analyze how these essays deal with the notions of historical guilt and responsibility.

The article dwells on Atanas Natev’s lifetime contributive research on the essence of aesthetic experience. It explores some of his most well-known publications on the forms of interaction between literature and society, as well as the dynamics and multiplicity of the reception of a literary product across a national culture. In addition, the paper tries to limn the contours of authorial intention in the long 20th century, offering insights into the controversial paths of the development of Bulgarian fiction and critical theory. We should also like to propound a strategy for perusing the matter of aesthetic responsibility through a closer look at Nikolay Haytov in view of Mikhail Bakhtin’s polemical perception of the content, material, and form of a literary work as founded on living experience.

The paper focuses on a series of interviews conducted with Bulgarian intellectuals on the occasion of the 10th and the 25th anniversary of November 10th, 1989, for Deutsche Welle and the Kultura newspaper respectively. An analysis is carried out on the opinions shared by the interviewees on the significance of that date for Bulgarian political, social and cultural life, on freedom, the new political trends and the emblematic figures in them. Special attention is paid on the role which the new democratic situation assigned to the intellectuals. They are altogether set in opposition to the political elites of the Transition.