Българска мозайка
Bulgarian Mosaic

Summary/Abstract: The article is dedicated to the travel notes on Bulgaria, Down the Donkey’s Path. Bulgarian Mosaic, written in 1978 in East Germany by the East German writer Kurt Biesalski and republished in 2001 in united Germany without any changes, explanations or supplements. Biesalski based the book on his experience in Bulgaria in 1977 when he paid an official visit at the invitation of the Union of the Bulgarian Writers. However, the Embassy of People’s Republic of Bulgaria in Berlin criticizes the travel notes, stigmatizes the author and recommends not to translate the book into Bulgarian. The Committee for State Security accuses the work in distorting the socialist reality and prevents its distribution in Bulgaria. This article presents Down the Donkey’s Path as a mobile book – restricted but not everywhere, prohibited but not completely, occupying the extra-national art space extended across the political borders within the socialist bloc from the 1970s and the 1980s. Analysing the author of travel notes as an anthropologist, Bulgaria as a field of research and the Bulgarian readers as a local critical public allows us to look at the problem of the relation between anthropology, literature and political censorship from another angle.

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