Европейската представа за старата българска литература през първата половина на ХХ век: Боян Пенев и Юзеф Голомбек
The European view of Old Bulgarian literature in the first half of the twentieth century: Boyan Penev and Józef Gołąbek

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the activities of Professor Boyan Penev of Sofia University and Associate Professor Józef Gołąbek of the University of Warsaw, two scholars dedicated to promoting Bulgarian literature in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. The article begins by presenting Boyan Penev’s lectures on Bulgarian literature, delivered in the 1923/24 academic year at the universities of Kraków, Warsaw, and Lwów (then in Poland) and published posthumously: in Bulgarian, Balgarska literatura. Kratak istoricheski ocherk (1930), and in Polish, Literatura bułgarskа do roku 1878. Opracował i przygotował do druku Józef Gołąbek (Warszawa–Wilno, 1938). A comparative study is conducted between the manuscript version of the lectures, and their Bulgarian and Polish editions. The information provided about the scholarly activities and publications of the Polish scholar of Slavic and Bulgarian Studies, Józef Gołąbek, sheds additional light on the view that Literatura bułgarskа do roku 1878 (1938) was the only work from the first half of the twentieth century that gave foreigners a comprehensive idea of Bulgaria’s intellectual development from the origins of Bulgarian literature to the Liberation. In their oral version, Penev’s lectures to a Polish academic audience fulfilled the task set by the Bulgarian scholar. However, in print, it was Gołąbek’s essay Literatura bułgarska, published in Wielka literatura powszechna (1933), that first introduced (Old) Bulgarian literature to a Polish readership. Gołąbek’s concept of Old Bulgarian literature is analyzed both through this essay and his editorial participation in the publication of the Polish edition of Penev’s lectures (1938), thereby also tracing Penev’s influence on Gołąbek. The study presented in this article draws on the above-mentioned publications (Penev 1930; Gołąbek 1933; Penew 1938) as well as on archival materials from Boyan Penev’s personal collection (Scientific Archive of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, f. 37k, op. 1), containing the preparatory texts for his lectures and Gołąbek’s letters to him. They clearly show the professional collaboration of the two scholars, complement their biographies and, last but not least, reveal unknown pages of Bulgarian literary history in the interwar decades of the twentieth century.

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