Maria Ogoyska

The text announces a literary discovery that for a long time has been waiting for its research scholar – the novel “Peter”, which Konstantin Petkanov wrote in the last years of his life but which remained in a private archive for seventy years, unknown to the public. A manuscript, preserved thanks to the happy circumstance of the long-lasting intellectual dialogue between the writer and his brother, priest Dimitar Petkanov. Today we have the opportunity to read a message of great spiritual merit, whose genre vacillates between the essay and the novel, remaining extremely close to the evangelical text; it is faithful to the very narrative of the New Testament. The author of the above-mentioned text defines K. Petkanov’s work as fiction of the evangelical fact.

The text presents the absorption of historical plots in the epic novel narrative of the writer Konstantin Petkanov about Ravna Gora. In this unified novel corpus of Bulgarian fiction from the first half of the 20th century are resurrected not only legendary historical figures, but we are also presented, seen in an autobiographical light, the author’s countryman from the prehistories of his childhood. The text explores immersion itself of the writer K. Petkanov in the cozyness of Thracian patriarchal living and in the destinies of his idealized characters.