Истинският наследник
The real inheritor

Summary/Abstract: The paper describes the unique destiny of a man, who was a living incarnation of the totalitarian cultural power – the Marxist professor, regent of Bulgaria, the maninstitution Todor Pavlov – together with his role for the stabilization of the Bulgarian literary canon. In the beginning the paper depicts his early vicissitudes in constructing the idea of “Bulgarian literary classics” and of the institutions maintaining it – the first period of suffering its civilizational absence and the efforts to fill it up and the second period of struggles to officialize it and alternative projects. Special place is devoted to the cultural policies of the Bulgarian left wing during the period 1880 – 1935-6 when it contests the “bourgeois classics” and tries to construct its own alternative tradition. Todor Pavlov, initially a part of this leftist policy, gets into the USSR during the most Stalinist years (1932 – 1937) and turns there into an international authority on philosophy, aesthetics, art theory and history and literary criticism. Having taken up this position, in the late 1930s and early 1940s in Bulgaria he manages to construct a new and paradoxical, leftist-national canon including (by means of a dialectical Aufhebung) the most important and previously repudiated bourgeois authors. After the World War II under the conditions of communists gradually seizing the state institutions Todor Pavlov manages (through a combination of organizational, terrorist, festal, political-instructive and rhetorical means) to mould a stable notion of Bulgarian classics that rapidly turned into institutionalized reality of the Bulgarian literature still valid today.

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