women writers

The article pursues the first three decades following the National Liberation (1878) in order to discover the beginnings of women’s prose writing in Bulgarian literature. By means of bibliometric statistics, it challenges the myth that poetry has always been the stronger and the better side of Bulgarian women’s writing. A number of names appear on the surface. Ekaterina Karavelova was the first ever Bulgarian woman who wrote political pamphlets in a very early time (mid-80’s of the 19th). Vela Blagoeva was not only a feminist-oriented activist of the socialist movement but a prolific prose writer as well. The article pays close attention to their works and makes visible their contribution to the history of Bulgarian literature.

The article regards the advantages and setbacks of being bilingual when it comes to foreign women teachers and writers who contributed to the Bulgarian national project from the 1860s to the 1920s. They are the Serbian teacher Rahil Barak Dushanova (1845-1888), the Czech teacher and journalist Bogdana Iraskova Hiteva (1844-1929), and the second-generation Bulgarian émigré in Romania Evgenia Mihailova Vassileva (1852-1926) who was a poet, journalist, and writer. First, the article distinguishes the types of bilingualism for each case, attributing a coordinate type to the women teachers Bogdana Hiteva and Rahil Dushavova, and a subordinate one to Ekaterina Vassileva, who did not feel convenient in Bulgarian and wrote her texts in Romanian or French. Then the paper follows the biographical path of each of these women in order to distinguish whether her positioning in the receiving country displays a strategy of adaptation and inclusion into Bulgarian social and cultural life, and at what cost it was achieved. However, as it concerns the Bulgarian literary history, the identity of a bilingual woman writer has fewer chances for posthumous inclusion into the literary canon due to her unstable and transitive identity. The conclusion of the paper is that those women who managed to claim sufficiently their newly achieved and sustained Bulgarian identity have better chances for future remembrance. Yet, large parts of their writings need the application of a new and non-nationalistic perspective, which could acknowledge better their specific contribution to both Bulgarian literature and that of their birthplace.