Носталгиите на прехода – повествователни версии
The Nostalgias of the Transition: Narrative Versions

Author(s): Inna Peleva
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Bulgarian Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Софийски университет »Св. Климент Охридски«
Keywords: contemporary Bulgarian literature; nostalgia for the People’s Republic of Bulgaria; nostalgia for the Kingdom of Bulgaria; nostalgia for rural life
Summary/Abstract: The study examines nostalgia as a moderator of highly value-laden notions of the past and the present, where the factors playing a role in their formation include personal background, political beliefs, cultural competence, media images of reality, and dominant attitudes to the present in the communal consciousness. The discussion covers a variety of contemporary Bulgarian texts expressing one kind of nostalgia or another – for the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, for the Kingdom of Bulgaria, for rural life (or for classical artistic depictions of the Bulgarian patriarchal order). Special attention is paid to narratives of return in today’s Bulgarian literature. The key theses of the study are: 1. not only former State Security officers, former high-ranking party members or people ideologically tied to the left are nostalgic for the People’s Republic of Bulgaria; 2. narratives are capable of infecting with nostalgia for a given historical period generations that have no autobiographical experience of the era presented by the specific text; 3. today’s wave of “rural” texts is part of yet another conservative reaction to yet another modernization project underway in Bulgaria; 4. in any cultural paradigm, there is a co-presence of nostalgias that are differently motivated and that lament different “spaces” of the past (although according to the Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language, the word nostalgia is used only in the singular).

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