Bulgarian literature

The article researches Todor P. Todorov’s novel Hagabula as a distinctive contribution to Bulgarian magical realism, combining myth, history, and global exploration. Central are two female archetypes: the witch, embodied in a young, beautiful woman whose connection to the supernatural reopens humanity’s roots, and the grandmother, familiar from Bulgarian literature as a symbol of primal time and maternal essence but also appearing as a magical figure in the literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Todorov transforms the grandmother figure into a rejuvenated, magical witch, thus bridging tradition and innovation. The article examines how the novel stages both the loss of home and the search for the new in general, positioning Hagabula simultaneously as a departure from and a continuation of the Bulgarian literary heritage of root-seeking from the previous century.

In the article are shortly mentioned the main motives of the poetry of Atanas Dalchev of his art and philosophical discoveries, which led to the spiritual and aesthetic changes in the consciousness of his contemporaries and the tangible influence of his talent on the development of Bulgarian Literature. I would like to highlight that his poetry specially his “Fragmentsˮ and his critical texts express the whole vision of a writer “place of the person in the worldˮ. Constant search of the seсret of being of Atanas Dalchev can also be achieved thanks to his expressive philosophical motives. He intends to conceptualize the artistic world and give him a philosophical depth. The world or space is full of important things: world which tells about the eternal and sad story of existing here and now. At the same time the poetry of Atanas Dalchev like it is mentioned in the article aspires to the theme of the devil. This is why we pay attention to the dual influence and mystic elements in his poetry and also philosophical and existential reflection on his life. In the article are analysed some peculiarities of expression of Atanas Dalchev of poetic texts in Ukrainian taking into account its specific features and significance in the development of Bulgarian poetic creativity.

Bulgarian literature in the distant European North is unknown for both Swedish readers and literary scholars. The ‘real’ readers of our native literature in Sweden are the students, who participate in the courses in Bulgarian at Uppsala University. By analyzing exams, papers, abstracts, analyses, and coursework, written between 2014 and 2017, we can understand how and what they discover in the Bulgarian literature. Their literary expedition suggests that the perception of a literary text is strongly related to the place and time at which it is read. The article argues also that the interpretation of one and the same literary work depends on the readers’ individual situation.