Keywords: migrant literature; Iliya Troyanow; „Macht und Widerstand“
The latest novel of the world-famous Bulgarian author Iliya Troyanov „Macht und Widerstand“, who writes in German and whose novel is translated by Lyubomir Iliev, has been on the Bulgarian book market since 2016. This article aims at revealing these places in the novel, the depiction of the characters, the structure of the plot and the topics the author has touched upon, in order to discuss some issues which 'disturb' both the Bulgarian and the German readership‘s comprehension through discussing them from different critical viewpoints.
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Keywords: Balkan literatures; literary history; Bulgarian literature; national canon; Balkan studies; university course
The paper discusses the thematic scope of a university course on the history of Balkan literatures and is based on the author’s personal experience at Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin during the years 2012–2018. The creation of such a course poses a number of theoretical and methodological problems that relate to the adequate existence of this academic field and of Balkan Studies in general: the chronological boundaries and periodization of Balkan literatures, the selection of main and secondary authors and phenomena during the course, the historical and the synchronous method in researching separate literary traditions. Special attention is drawn to potentially Bulgaria-related topics and their functionality in the context of a synoptic approach to Balkan literatures. The author’s general conclusion is that a national literary canon cannot be mechanically regarded as an integral part of the general history of the Peninsula’s traditions. In terms of the common processes and the comparative perspective of a literary history comprising of several different linguo-cultural traditions, the author suggests that a national canon should not only be reduced in order to be integrated into a foreseeable academic course, but the most important thing is to emphasize the phenomena that retain their unique features among other traditions. Although the national literary canons in the Balkans are heavily dependent on the periods of the National Revival in the 19th c. and modern writing in the 20th c., they include many significant aspects that are not strictly connected to the stereotyped ideas of patriotism, collective struggles or Europeization and thus deserve more attention.
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Keywords: translation; reception; contemporary Bulgarian literature
The paper deals with the actual presence of contemporary Bulgarian literature abroad. Part of it was written and published first abroad in Bulgarian or in other languages, another part of it was created in Bulgaria and then translated and publishes elsewhere. In both cases several questions arise – they are connected with the integration of these authors and their texts in the non-Bulgarian environment (Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Kapka Kassabova, Rouja Lazarova, Miroslav Penkov et al.); the returning of some of them (Atanas Slavov, Germinal Civikov, Zachary Karabashliev) and the motives if this returning. Another knot of problems is associated with the motivation of the foreign translators and publishers and the criteria of their choices. Another important problem is the reception of the Bulgarian text abroad (Georgi Gospodinov), etc and the way this reception is presented in Bulgaria. Another topic is the ambitions of the writers when publishing in foreign language, the dilemma between the two options – to follow the stereotypes of the public (and so to auto-exoticization or even to self-colonize their culture) their writings, or to clash with them, presenting the viewpoint of the Bulgarian at home, therefore even to clash with such Western stereotypes. The paper is seeking answers to some of these questions.
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Keywords: types of bilingualism; women writers; women education; translation; memoirs
The article regards the advantages and setbacks of being bilingual when it comes to foreign women teachers and writers who contributed to the Bulgarian national project from the 1860s to the 1920s. They are the Serbian teacher Rahil Barak Dushanova (1845-1888), the Czech teacher and journalist Bogdana Iraskova Hiteva (1844-1929), and the second-generation Bulgarian émigré in Romania Evgenia Mihailova Vassileva (1852-1926) who was a poet, journalist, and writer. First, the article distinguishes the types of bilingualism for each case, attributing a coordinate type to the women teachers Bogdana Hiteva and Rahil Dushavova, and a subordinate one to Ekaterina Vassileva, who did not feel convenient in Bulgarian and wrote her texts in Romanian or French. Then the paper follows the biographical path of each of these women in order to distinguish whether her positioning in the receiving country displays a strategy of adaptation and inclusion into Bulgarian social and cultural life, and at what cost it was achieved. However, as it concerns the Bulgarian literary history, the identity of a bilingual woman writer has fewer chances for posthumous inclusion into the literary canon due to her unstable and transitive identity. The conclusion of the paper is that those women who managed to claim sufficiently their newly achieved and sustained Bulgarian identity have better chances for future remembrance. Yet, large parts of their writings need the application of a new and non-nationalistic perspective, which could acknowledge better their specific contribution to both Bulgarian literature and that of their birthplace.
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Keywords: Baraban; Boryo Zevzeka; Chudomir; humor; popular culture; journalism
This paper deals with the humourist periodical “Baraban” (Drum) and two of its active authors and their relationship. Boris Rumenov known by his penname Boryo Zevzeka (Boryo the Joker) was a prolific writer of different types of humourist short stories, pieces for theatre, etc, editor of the periodical, killed by the communists in 1944. Chudomir is famous and author and painter; he became very popular when he left “Baraban” and started to publish in the newspaper “Zora” (Dawn). In his youth Chudomir was close friends with all the other contributors of “Baraban”, they exchange funny letters and deliberately build their public images as bohemians. This paper also offers some less known their works from the 1910s.
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Keywords: Bulgarian themes; characters; and plots; Russian classic literature; discoverer; forefather
The traditional for Bulgarian literary science idea about the Bulgarian presence in Russian literature is reconsidered in this paper based on newly discovered texts from the first half of the XIXth century with Bulgarian characters present in them. Answers to the following questions are sought: Which text should be considered as a starting point for the topic at hand? Who is the first Bulgarian character? Who is the forefather of the Bulgarian theme?
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Keywords: migrant literature; cultural transfer; Bulgarian literary criticism
The article reviews the distinction between emigrant, immigrant and migrant literature from the perspective of the contemporary Bulgarian literary criticism. The body of emigrant literature is regarded as comprising the works of nineteenthcentury Bulgarian authors (Rakovski, Karavelov, Vazov) who wrote in Bulgarian and intended their works for the Bulgarian readership. The works from the first half of the twentieth century, written in Bulgarian by Bulgarian authors living mostly in Germany and France, are perceived as part of the Bulgarian literature from this period on the grounds of their engaging with themes recognized as characteristically Bulgarian (Elisaveta Bagryana, Pencho Slaveykov, Kiril Hristov, Svetoslav Minkov etc.). The Bulgarian intellectuals who moved to Western Europe in three immigrant waves after 1944, however, wrote in the language of the country in which they settled. This is the reason why Bulgarian literary criticism did not acknowledge their works as part of Bulgarian literature. The authors this article deals with – Ilija Trojanov, Dimitre Dinev and Tzveta Sofronieva – do not deny their Bulgarian origins. They have chosen to write in German in order to be understood by readers in their new country. The German-speaking readership regards them as mediators between Bulgarian history, traditions and culture and the German, respectively Austrian, society precisely because they have rendered Bulgarians and the Bulgarian past in a language that is easy to understand. The interest in Bulgarian authors writing in languages other than Bulgarian in Western Europe peaked in the years immediately preceding and following Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union as the Western European citizens wanted to find out more about the new country in the Union. With their established reputation as eminent artists, these authors continue to cast a bridge between the two cultures. Their works keep being translated into many different languages and have won prestigious international awards
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Keywords: William Golding; “Rites of Passage”; Paregoric; Drug usage and literature
This paper briefly deals with the presentation of the Paregoric (camphorated tincture of opium) and the attitude of the characters of the novel to it. For the time when the plot took place the use of this drug was not formally forbidden, although it was not regarded as something fully acceptable. When Golding published the book in the 1980s these kinds of drugs, are under strict control by the medical authorities; at the same time, literature and art are changing their ambivalent attitude towards drug usage. The article looks at the use of the narcotic in the context of the use of alcohol in “Rites of Passage”, the use of some uncommon substances in the other Golding’s novels, and attempts to find some kind of link with the decease of the author. The aim is to ask the question about the function of the Paregoric in the narrative.
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Keywords: Lyuben Karavelov; narratives; genre; discursive perspective
This critical undertaking seeks to establish the fictional status of prose by means of tracking down the genre’s genealogy. Drawing on the historical poetics of New Bulgarian literature, the study focuses on the differentiation of prose narratives from the variety of literary modes that shaped the discursive polyphony of Revival literature: journalism, folk studies, linguistic endeavours, philological reflections, folklore archives, parts of which went down in prose as specific expressions or synthetic formulations serving to impart a degree of fiction to the narrative. The specifics of Karavelov’s narration render it eligible for analysis that employs the strategies and methods of counternormative genealogy, the study of genre development that registers the impulse for its dissolution.
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Keywords: conquest of Tarnovo; national mythology; history; Ottomans
This paper deals with the different images of one key event in Bulgarian history – the conquest of the capital city of Tarnovo by Ottomans (1393). Some of the main texts about it could be traced in hagiography, in folklore, in historiography and textbooks, and in literature are discussed. The focus is on the interpretations from the 19th century and on examining them as a network and in the context of some other similar events (e.g. the conquest of Constantinople, 1453, the Battle of Kosovo, some local military clashes, etc.), in the quest of a common mythical base beneath them presenting the conquest of an important city by foreign infidel barbarians. Some characteristics, typical for Bulgarian culture are discussed. Among them, the absence of reports for a great battle, the important role of the Patriarch and relatively small role of the last King, etc. The counter-discourse about the decline of the kingdom is also noticed in the context of the creation of the canonic image of the event that appeared relatively lately. The most prominent author in this counter-discourse was the poet Hristo Botev.
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Keywords: Vasli Popovich; satire; Konstantin Jireček; Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan; Vasil D. Stoyanov; Orientalism; symbolic capital
This paper presents the satirical works of Vasil Popovich (1833-1897), most of them unpublished in his lifetime, and analyses them in the context of their time – the debates about the standard language, about literature and the Bulgarian Literary Society from the end of 19th century. In the focus are also the conflicted relations of V. Popovich with Ivan Vazov, Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan, Vasil D. Stoyanov, and Konstantin Jireček. The tension between them is interpreted as a manifestation of their competition for symbolic capital and for gaining an important position in society and literature. As a supplement, at the end is added an unpublished text by V. Popovich from 1887, written in an imitation of Oldbulgarian/ Church-Slavonic language as a personal letter.
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Keywords: Petko Slaveykov; Teodosiy Ikonomov; Lovech, comedy; Greek-Bulgarian ecclesiastical conflict; morality; ideology
This paper analyzes an episode of the life of the young Petko Slaveykov, related to the comedy “The bishop of Lovech, or a misfortune of the watchmaker of Lovech” (1863) by Teodosiy Ikonomov and discuses the tension between morality and ideology. Slaveykov was a witness and took part in the events from 1847-1848, on which the comedy was based. The paper touches on the connection between the motif about the infidel wife, presented similarly in Molière’s play “George Dandin ou le Mari confondu”, the actual events and the political implications of the author, in the context of the Greek-Bulgarian ecclesiastical conflict.
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Keywords: Botev; poetic-biographical (self) myth; “To her”; Pishurka; parody; heroic poetic canon vs. trivial literature; Propp
The article starts from the well-known disjunction “love or struggle/self-sacrifice in the name of the motherland”, characteristic of the national romanticism of the XIX century (Petőfi, Botev). However, the article directs its comparative efforts in another direction – not in the international, but in the interdiscursive, mythopoetic plan. Botev, of course, is at the center of the comparison. Not only as a lyrical voice but in the whole syncretic volume of the personal heroic myth, where the prophetic poetic speech, giving rise to biographical reality, is inseparable from the biographical gesture, which in itself is “living” poetry: relations such as the poem “Farewell” and the voyage with the steamer “Radetzky”, the poem “Hadji Dimitar” and own death оn the Balkan. The dialogue between the poem “To my first beloved” and the pre-death letter to the wife (“My dear Venetа, know that after the homeland...”) is also placed here, in the same order. – But the article prefers not the opposition, but the conjunctive intertwining and finds it in the most incredible place – “To her”, considered the weakest, marginal, non-Botev poem in the monolithic poetic corpus “Botev”, a Spanish drama about love, jealousy, and bloody revenge. In the spirit of the Revival preference for allegorical shifts, this trivial sentimental-adventurous plot is inscribed in the high biographical-poetic “text-Botev”: а threat of “jumping” across the Danube “with a naked knife in the hand” and killing the old husband, kidnapper of his beloved/homeland. – But the real comparative plot is forthcoming, because the autobiographical-heroic narrative “To her”, it turns out (Iv. Paunovski), has its probable prototype in the Crastyu-Pishurkov’s “Koutkoudyachka / Нen-croaking” (the poem “Fight of Roosters”), an emblem of the most helpless verse-knitting of this era, repeatedly ironized with fierce sarcasm by Botev himself. It is here, in this inverted parody, that the article sets its second heuristic horizon. – The conclusion: what the poet Botev does not know, the work “To her” itself knows and remembers, keeps deep in his genre crypto memory.
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Keywords: Bulgarian National Revival; love songs; songs in Turkish; literary canon
The paper examines songs with love and erotic content, dating back from the so-called National Revival Period. They used to be visible part of the popular culture of Bulgaria and the Southeastern Europe region in initial decades of the Modern Bulgarian statehood. These songs were originally written in Bulgarian and in Turkish, but with Cyrillic alphabet. Turkish ones are introduced for the first time in Bulgarian Literary History Studies. They were taken from books by Manol Lazarov, Petko Slaveykov, and by an unidentified author with initials K.S.M. This popular literature genre had a complex biography, following to some extent the ideological planning of the Bulgarian society and the social trajectory of the ideas of the nation, particular for that period. Initially, they were well accepted, so they gained vast popularity. Such a positive reception was particular for the period, when they were not experienced as non-matching to the emerging national ideology. Coincidingly with the rising of Bulgarian nationalism, their popularity decreased and they accumulated certain criticism, so in the beginning of the XX c. they were marginalized. In the last decades of XIX s., according to the changes of the ideological climate in Bulgaria, some of them were reinterpreted in a patriotic key.
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Keywords: contemporary Bulgarian prose; crime literature; criminal genre and ideology; criminal genre and social consciousness
The article examines generically diverse post-1989 Bulgarian texts based on crime stories. It compares representations of criminality in the literature of the People's Republic of Bulgaria and in the fiction of local authors from the post-communist era. The focus is on how new narratives about criminals and detectives shape assessments about the present, the legacies of the totalitarian era, and the presence (or absence) of justice within Bulgaria’s contemporary socio-political reality.
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