Bulgarian

The Article emphasizes the image of the mother and motherhood in the context of Bulgarian prose after 2000, realized verry extream and painfuly manifested in that kind of works. Locked up in the poisonous circle of “the heardity of trauma“ the woman in this works tries to get over the “mother matrix“, because she is burn with it. The selected works are representative of the visualization of the so called “female perversion“ and one of the forms of its manifestation is “perverted motherhood“.

The text “About Bulgarian Meanings of Avant-garde and Avant-gardism in Literary Culture“ maintains that these two terms are fundamentally different in meaning. We can speak of avant-garde when a certain complex cultural – and not only literary – phenomenon is attached to history precisely as a cultural term (for instance, Russian revolutionary avant-garde, First and Second Polish avant-garde, etc.). Whereas we denote as avant-gardism the radical manifestations of some of the late modernisms (surrealism, Constructivism, futurism, Dadaism, etc.), seen in their completeness, somehow converged. As far as Bulgarian literature is concerned, we can speak of avant-gardism in reference to the 20s and the early 30s of the twentieth century. Yet, the only really Bulgarian phenomenon that can be defined as avant-garde is the marginalized over the years, Yambol-originated avant-garde of the early 20s. In addition, in the most recent several decades, we have been witnessing a certain not-too-well-defined neo-avant-gardism.

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.

The survey focuses on the Russian émigré spiritual and literary existence in Bulgaria during the period after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 – an existence fed by concern in the fate of Russian culture in post-revolutionary, soviet Russia. It speculates on the possibilities of creating culture and literature in emigration, on the meaning of the creative act when the artist is forcibly deprived of his homeland and his readers. The research work has taken notice of connections with the local culture and the natives not typical of the Russian Diaspora elsewhere. Russian writers and scientists show keen interest in researching our culture, in the similarities between the two nations’ spiritual lives and in parallel cultural phenomena. They turned out to be favorably disposed toward artistic and scientific research of Bulgarian history, culture and literature, which is easily recognizable when reviewing both emigrants’ and national book publishing and periodicals. Their translation of Bulgarian folklore, poetry and prose are essentially important for spreading Bulgarian works and culture to different parts of the world. At the time, Russian emigrants’ cultural invasion in Bulgaria was perceived by Bulgarian authors and intellectuals as something positive, as a catalyst for development of national literary and cultural processes and furthermore as an episode of a pre-existing tendency of Russian cultural influence penetrating Bulgarian reality. This unforeseen meeting with Russian culture, represented by Russian writers, dramatists and migrant-scientists creates many opportunities for positive impact on Bulgaria’s cultural and literary life.

The text presents the possibilities of applying a microhistorical approach to the literature of the communist era in Bulgaria. The article emphasizes that literary microhistory pays attention not only to what and how the author writes, but also to what he does with and around his texts, who reads and understands them, and how they enter into dialogue with other texts and contexts. The article highlights the differences between a scandal and a case, with an emphasis on the opportunities provided by the study through the case in the studies of literature from the period of the Peoples‘ Republic of Bulgaria.

The text tries to sketch very briefly the significance and peaks in the literature of Bulgarian political emigration. It absolutely agrees with the statement of the writer Dimitar Bochev that we must finally consider what was created by emigration as a “natural part of the national organism“. The essay traces the history of emigrant waves and their contribution to our liberation from Bolshevik dogmas and the urge to write a new, non-ideological history of our literature, in which the emigrants starting from Grigoriy Tsamblak to Georgi Markov and Krasimir Damyanov to be equally present, not forgetting the internal emigrants such as Konstantin Pavlov and Nikolay Kanchev.

This article aims to examine some aspects of the attitude to wellknown historic facts as presented in Milen Ruskov’s “Summit” („Възвишение“, 2011) and Alek Popov’s second novel on the lives and adventures of the Palaveevi sisters („Сестри Палавееви – по пътя към новия свят“, 2017). The former book deals with the period of Bulgarian national revival in the 19th century and with the controversy surrounding the figure of Dimitar Obshti. The latter novel narrates the tale of the partisan resistance of 1940s. Both periods have a very special and important meaning in Bulgarian history and for the Bulgarians. Ruskov’s novel can be read in close dialogue with the romantic and Kantian idea of the sublime. The novel of A. Popov mimics the story lines of the chronicles, approved by the Bulgarian Socialist Party, about the communist resistance and its struggle with both fascism and capitalist class society, among which is I. Hadzhimarchev’s “The Shepherd Kalitko” („Овчарчето Калитко“, 1946). At times Popov’s novel reads as a classic comic book in the style of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. M. Ruskov and A. Popov rewrite and deconstruct the myths surrounding both periods in Bulgarian history, and reincorporate both the National revival and the partisan movement in the contemporary ever-changing outlook on the country’s shared political, literary and historical background. The question is, can literature do what both politics and history proper have failed so far to accomplish, to alter and still preserve the memory of past events? The paper uses texts of E. Fromm, W. Benjamin, B. Latour and D. Matravers.

The article reviews and analyzes the ways of representing historical topics in the contemporary fiction of Central and Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovakia). After significant turn from the western-oriented consumerist culture of the 90s and early 2000s to the search for new formulas of national identities in the late 2000s the authors from this region began to rethink the historical material. Three ways of this rethinking (and correspondingly, three groups of texts) can be outlined: the first, most analytical, innovative, and corresponding to Barbara Misztal’s „public history“; the second, intended to strengthen official national historical narratives; and the third, using clichés and stereotypes of popular culture to subvert conservative, isolationist rhetoric of current political establishment.

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.

The paper delineates and examines the distortion and demolishment of classical literary concepts and approaches and their replacement in the postcolonial studies and some other similar-sounding paradigms with designations, which are their badly camouflaged and distorted replicas. As a consequence, these replicas are used in the service of various non-literary and non-scientific purposes. Three strategies of camouflaging and distortion are under scrutiny in the paper: “the strategy of political correctness“, “the strategy of conceptual vampirization“, “the strategy of deformed shell“.

Osip Mandelstam’s criticism has been studied much less than his poetry and life. This article sheds some light on three complex ideas in Mandelstam’s critical texts viewed as a whole: synchrony and diachrony, word and language, and dialogicity. Taken together, these three areas form what I term Mandelstam’s cultural and literary holism. One of my leading ideas is that this criticism is imbued with implicit phenomenology. This type of philosophizing also influences Mandelstam’s critical style — it does not define but describes and narrates. This explains why my effort to “translate” Mandelstam’s critical ideas into a stricter scholarly idiom by necessity uses long quotes. The study concludes that Mandelstam’s holism is utopian and idealistic because it thinks the cultural past can be reenacted in the cultural present. Today, in its totality, Mandelstam’s holism is somewhat archaic because it is an apparatus by which a subjective mind attempts to control all meanings. Yet, many aspects of this holism, such as dialogicity, reader’s activity, and the eclectic accumulation of various cultural strata, are still viable in our contemporary postmodern thinking and practices. Initially, the study was written in English in December 1996 and was reworked in Bulgarian in October 2022.

This article attempts to outline the contours of a critique of translation that does not focus on the “losses”, the inaccuracies of translations in relation to the original, but rather investigates the co-rrespondence between the originеl text (the so-called original) and the text continued through translation into another language (the translation), the way the translator – as a writing reader, i.e. the only reader who turns his reading into writing – responds to the call of the text.