За една тенденция в етнофем жанра. Бележки върху „Нишка“ на Виктория Бешлийска
On a Tendency in the Ethnofem Genre. Notes on Viktoria Beshliyska’s “Thread”

Summary/Abstract: The article addresses a genre that has recently emerged in Bulgaria and offers an interpretation of one of the novels associated with it. The genre is called “ethnofem” as it consists of stories written by women authors, with a stress on the ethnographic element and the feminine. It can be seen as a neoconservative form of feminism in which the insistence on the traditional values of the patriarchal society is accompanied by proclamations of women’s power. In all novels of this genre, there is always a strong old woman representing atemporal values. In the article, I discuss Viktoria Beshliyska’s “Thread” (“Nishka”) published in 2024. The novel tells the story of seven women who live in different periods throughout the 20th century. I analyze the role of the aphoristic sentences as well as the author’s own footnotes regarding old Bulgarian words. I argue that both of these textual strategies aim at moving beyond the fictional frame of the literary work. Then, I analyze the use of free indirect style combined with two kinds of omniscient narrator. The first kind is the traditional one, where the omniscient narrator helps the story move forward. The second kind, which I label “prophetic,” introduces intermittences in the narrative and develops a mystical sacred plane of explanation of what is happening, a non-narrative, mythical logic of the narrative. The prophetic omniscient narrator also moves beyond the fictional frame. The analyses help me delineate the textual structure of the implied reader of Beshliyska’s text.

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