Имената на Българското възраждане
The Names of the Bulgarian National Revival

Summary/Abstract: The article presents an attempt at reading the Bulgarian national revival text through the mediation of seven concepts used by modern European historical writing in narrating the transition to the Modern epoch. The centre topic of the exposé deals with the thesis of the productivity of the research style bequeathed to us by Ivan Shishmanov and Hristo Gandev, a style that constructed the narrative of the historical evolution of the Bulgarians of the 19th century as a part of the narrative of the civilizational transformation of the Old continent carried out in the post-Columbian epoch. The concepts Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Nationalism, Liberalism, Constitutionalism, Irredentism are the ones that in the author's opinion describe in the shortest possible way the essence of the transformation in Bulgarian public life that took place within the 19th century. In the system of semantic hierarchies these concepts have been bound to the two terms evolution/revolution but it is not done on the basis of mutual subjection. The author stresses the point that the syntagm evolution/revolution presents the dynamics of the processes in Bulgarian society in the national revival period, whereas the seven previously mentioned concepts play the part of a paradigmatic construct in the arrangement of the meanings and values in the Bulgarian national revival text. With no claims to comprehensiveness and universality the approach the author has offered surmounts the opposing of European to Bulgarian while drawing intellectual impulses from the awareness on the part of the national revival main figures of the European identity of the change undergone within the 19th century. At the same time this kind of approach gives the researchers interested in the mysteries of our national history the chance of getting acquainted not only with the beaten tracks of the centrifugal point of view - differences/clashes/opposition but with the newly traced out path of the centripetal point of view - analogies/parallels/unities as well.

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