Фантастиката – медиум на модерността: Светослав Минков

Author(s): Nikolina Burneva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2019

The article introduces the reader to the context of the momentous transformations of the aesthetic and worldview paradigms at the end of ‘the long 19th century’ and the arrival of modernity in Bulgarian culture which had– until then – been traditional and folklore-based. In this context, the author traces the early work of Svetoslav Minkov – a distinguished author of fantastic literature and cofounder of Bulgarian diabolical literature. The article focuses on comparative reading of several short stories by Gustav Meyrink and Svetoslav Minkov in order to highlight the arguments supporting the discussion of this literary movement in a broad, European context.

„Сърцето на мрака“ – идеи и решения на първата българска постановка

Author(s): Margreta Grigorova,Petya Tsoneva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2019

Heart of Darkness is a multilayered but coherent work whose universally acclaimed appeal draws on its thematic preoccupation with the problems of initiation and cognition. The rich variety of interpretations and creative reworks of the novella vary from discussions of its importance as a sample of anticolonial fiction to the acknowledgement of its role as a precursor to contemporary fantastic literature. The first Bulgarian dramatisationof Heart of Darkness, screen-written and directed by Valeria Valcheva, is an insightful and successful attempt to do justice to both its contents and the suggestive power of its poetics translated into the language of drama.The performance combines the stylistic features of farce, cabaret, ritual and classical theatre, inserting fragments of Edgar Allan Poe, Vachel Lindsay, Tom Waits, Thomas Eliot and even Pushkin’s poems. Valcheva is particularlyconcerned with reading Conrad’s work as a “European” collective narrative where the African Other is rendered through the poetic features of mask-wearing and the symbolic “curtain” of the jungle. The performance is likewise accompanied by music that includes the “talking drums” of Congo, and its stage design was apparently borrowed from Orson Welles’s cinematic adaptations. One of the outstanding contributions of the Bulgarian performance to the earlier attempts at dramatising Conrad’s work is the use of a marionette to represent Kurtz’s self-glorified condition. The play likewise foregrounds the biographical aspect of Conrad’s work related to Conrad and Marguerite Poradowska’s correspondence.

Интервю: „ЕЛА И ВИЖ САМ!“ С Валерия Вълчева, режисьорката на първият български спектакъл по „Сърцето на мрака“, разговаря Маргрета Григорова

Author(s): Margreta Grigorova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2019

МИТ ИЛИ РЕАЛНОСТ – ТРАКИЯ И ТРАКИТЕ В МЕТАМОРФОЗИ НА АПУЛЕЙ

Author(s): Slavtcho Kirov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 26/2022

This article discusses the various stereotypes associated with Thrace and the Thracians during the Roman era, not only drawn from the Greek literary tradition, but also directly inspired by the political situation in Rome and the Balkans, skillfully intertwined by Apuleius to offer different levels of interpretation.

Editor’s Introduction

Author(s): / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Tihana Klepač. 𝐷𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑅𝑒𝑑 𝑆ℎ𝑜𝑒𝑠: 𝐵𝑎𝑟𝑏𝑎𝑟𝑎 𝐵𝑎𝑦𝑛𝑡𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐴𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑀𝑦𝑡ℎ

Author(s): Vanja Polić / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Loss of Home and Loathing Nostalgia in the English Writing of Central and Eastern European Exiles

Author(s): Christoph Houswitschka / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Writers who are forced into exile by a hostile government tend to suffer from the grievances of loss and deprivation. They either divorce themselves completely from their former home country or they look back in nostalgia. After 1989, leaving central and eastern European homes was not only a free decision, but could also be an act of liberation. Leaving had not been an easy option before the Iron Curtain had come down. Changing one’s language and writing in English represented this act of liberation. Creating a new memory (e.g. Eva Hoffman) and a literary persona in the language of globalization and cosmopolitanism meant to look back and to discover the new at the same time. This article investigates this tension by reading writers who have published books about both their former home countries and their new English-speaking environments. Loathing nostalgia in the creative process of writing has helped authors, such as Bulgarian Kapka Kassabova and Miroslav Penkov and Czech writer Jan Novak, to imagine new spaces of cosmopolitan belonging without being in denial about the places of their childhood thus redefining the concept of eastern Europe altogether.

𝐶𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝐹𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑠 𝑊𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒, edited by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen

Author(s): Ioana BACIU / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

𝑅𝑢𝑠ℎ𝑑𝑖𝑒’𝑠 𝐶𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑠-𝑃𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 by Dana Bădulescu

Author(s): Galina Devedjieva / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Красотата като автентичност и автентичността като красота в разказите на Николай Хайтов

Author(s): Nikolay Turlakov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

In this article, I examine some philosophical intuitions and existential motives in the descriptions of the beautiful in the stories of Nikolay Haitov. When Haitov asks what the "soul” of our language is, “its beauty", he does not give an explicit answer, but simply describes the beauty he sees in the richness of the Bulgarian language. If the beauty of language, which has found expression in folk songs and stories, implies the gift of unknown "talented masters", bards and story tellers, then, for its part, this beauty lasts only insofar as it is daily revived and shared in people’s soul. The soul wants a soul. Haitov's stories are valuable from a philosophical point of view, because they show the primordial and inseparable connection of beauty and language – the sense of beauty is cultivated as an experience in language. And then any masterly artistic description of the beautiful can be considered as a kind of reciprocal relation of language to the sense of the beautiful, in which the latter is enriched and constructed as taste.

На ръба на играта: "Притчата за Стенли/The Stanley parable"

Author(s): Snezhana Popova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 13/2023

Galactic Cafe's videogame The Stanley Parable (2013), with a 2022 remake as The Stanley Parable Ultra Delux, becomes a base for reflections about the communicative boundaries of the game in its classical parameters.

Диалогът на културите в романите на български и турски автори „мигранти“ (Емине Йоцдамар, Феридун Заимоглу, Илия Троянов, Димитър Динев)

Author(s): Snezhana Boycheva / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2019

The basic link between the four authors, mentioned in the title of the present research, is the constituting of the dialogue between the cultures in the topos of ‘between’, ‘the border space’. Central to the plotline of the novels are the so-called ‘not-places’ (non-lieux, Nicht-Orte) (Auge), transtopoi (Foucault) - airports, railway stations, harbours, planes, trains, ships, refugee camps, hotels, vacation places, parking lots, gas-stations, shopping malls. „The open“ spaces are not the only local markers; they often turn into a main character in that type of literary texts. These are the spaces that question standard models of behaviour and thinking; that change identities, transfer and gather together different cultural standards.

Teaching Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” from the Perspective of Postcolonial Ecocriticism in Twenty-First Century Taiwan

Author(s): Pei-Wen Clio Kao / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

The article explores some of the key challenges of teaching Joseph Conrad’s fiction in present-day Taiwan. It focuses on how to teach “The Secret Sharer” (1910) through the lens of ecocriticism, aided by Peter Fudakowski’s 2014 film adaptation. Targeted at a class called “Literature of the Sea,” teaching Conrad’s fiction is expected to guide students to re-evaluate the literary canon from a contemporary perspective. The film adaptation is employed as a teaching supplement to the original short story. The entire process of teaching and reading this work is structured by the threefold role of “Intercultural Translator,” “Intercultural Interpreter,” and “Intercultural Mediator” played by the director Fudakowski, the teacher, and one of the film’s characters, Li. The article reflects on how Fudakowski’s film adaption helps students understand the significance and relevance of Conrad’s short story to the twenty-first century world in general and Taiwan in particular.

Достоевски през погледа на полски писатели емигранти след 1939 г.

Author(s): Margreta Grigorova / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2022

The text presents the views on Dostoevsky’s work of Polish emigrant writers after 1939, who published in the emigrant publishing house “Culture”: Witołd Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz, Stanisław Lem, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Stanisław Mackiewicz, Jerzy Stempowski, Józef Czapski. Their main texts are analyzed, in which the following issues are covered: the Russian specificity of his religious and philosophical views; Polish-Russian relations and the question of Dostoevsky’s „polonophobia”, relations between Russia and the West; universal philosophical-psychological and existential views of man and society; literary polyphony.

Ономастикон драматичної поеми «Бояриня» Лесі Українки

Author(s): Tetyana Krupenyova / Language(s): Ukrainian Issue: 1/2018

За книгата: Владимир Сабоурин. Студии. 2023, 750 с., ISBN: 9786199178348.

Author(s): Maria Endreva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

Book review: Vladimir Sabourín. Studies. 2023

За книгата: Антоанета Робова. Творчески фигури и кръговрат на изкуствата в прозата на Ерик-Еманюел Шмит. София, Унив. изд. „Св. Климент Охридски“, 2022, 304 с., ISBN 978-954-07-5505-2

Author(s): Margarita Serafimova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

Book review: Antoaneta Robova. Artistic Characters and Cycle of Arts in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Prose Writings. Sofia, St Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2022, 304 p., ISBN 978-954-07-5505-2

За книгата: Ангел Валентинов Ангелов. Филология, литература и символна география на Европа: Ерих Ауербах, Лео Шпитцер, Едуард Саид, Стефан Цвайг, Хуго фон Хофманстал. София, Булгед, 2022, 364 с.

Author(s): Todor Hristov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

Book review: Angel V. Angelov. Philology, Literature and Symbolic Geography of Europe: Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Edward Said, Stefan Zweig, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Sofia, Bulged, 2022.

За книгата: Надежда Стоянова. Украси и гримаси. Мода и модерност в българската литература от 20-те и 30-те години на ХХ век. София, Изд. „Парадигма“, 2022, 378 с.

Author(s): Alexander Hristov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

Book review: Nadezhda Stoyanova. Adornments and Grimaces. Fashion and Modernity in 1920s and 1930s Bulgarian Literature. Sofia, Paradigma Press, 2022

За книгата: Миглена Николчина. Бог с машина. Изваждане на човека (от романтизма до трансхуманизма). София, „Версус“, 2022.

Author(s): Kamelia Spassova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

Book review: Miglena Nikolchina, God with Machine. Subtracting the Human (From Romanticism to Transhumanism). Sofia, Versus Publishing, 2022