Преходът – петнайсет години по-късно в българския роман
The Transition in the Bulgarian Novel: Fifteen Years Latеr

Author(s): Milena Kirova
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Bulgarian Literature
Published by: Софийски университет »Св. Климент Охридски«
Keywords: Transition; Bulgarian literature; novel; mythologeme
Summary/Abstract: The Transition, which began in the early 1990s, had already ended by 2010, but in Bulgarian literature the novel went on using its plots and typical characters. This article briefly traces the Transition in terms of themes and imagery present in the Bulgarian novels of the first two decades of the 21st century. Taken all together, these observations make it possible to argue that despite their varied styles, genres and narrative devices, these novels conceptualize the social reality they present as a time of chaos and severe moral decline among the Bulgarian people. The second decade promoted a view of the Transition as no longer outside the individual but now inseparable from the intimate essence of the personality, a pattern that has disintegrated and then infused the fabric of psychic life. During the present decade, this tendency is undergoing a process of universalization and perpetuation: there is a shared feeling that the Transition has never come to an end and that the deficiencies of social life have solidified into general and permanent features of collective existence. The Transition has ceased to be a lived reality, at least in historical terms. Instead, it has become more than a reality, a mythologeme, an ur-event, a standard for social evil. By way of illustration, the paper analyzes five novels published within a single year – 2022, all of them typifying the trends pointed to above.

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