Bulgarian

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.