Transition

The article is dedicated to the theme of hope in two monodramas by Boyan Papazov –Nadezhda The Blind [literally ‘The Blind Hope’] and Mad, Cross-eyed and Greedy. United by their common genre convention, theme and character type, they enfold, in a symbolic framework, two periods in Bulgarian history - the era of the communist regime and the period of the so-called political transformation (known in Bulgaria as the transition). The analysis presented in the article aims to discover the theological and anthropological foundations of Papazov's concepts of the sources of human hope in a world of destroyed axiological norms.

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 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.