Elin Pelin

Elin Pelin’s first printed short story, “The Scourge of God” (1901), is a dialogue with the Bible that has not yet been the subject of independent research. The references to the Old and New Testaments in the text of the story have been discovered and analyzed in the present study. Subject of the research is how they participate in the message of the text, how they change and enrich the closed reading of the work. The analysis shows that Elin Pelin used in his own work primarily the eschatological biblical texts (to which the quote “Second Coming” at the end of the description of the drought refers) and the Book of Job (which, like the Bulgarian narrative, explores the causes of misfortune and examines the hypothesis of guilt from many sides). This result raises the question what Bible Elin Pelin read. For this purpose, certain passages of the story are compared with specific verses from the Holy Scriptures in three Slavic translations, which existed at the time of the writing of “The Scourge of God”. The comparison leads to the assumption that Elin Pelin most likely used the Russian Synodal translation of the Bible. The intertextual approach is combined with an analysis of the structure of the story. Duality is found to be the main structural principle according to which many components of the work (characters, attitudes, situations and plot events) are built. As the narrative unfolds sequentially, they split or double. The circumstances surrounding the creation of the work, as well as the spiritual convictions of the writer, are also examined.

The study, in the first place, outlines the literary-historical context at the beginning of the 20th century in Bulgaria; provokes the first serious creative impulses in the field of Bulgarian children‘s and adolescent science fiction. Тhe study marks scientific and technical achievements and ideas which are important for bringing out the prognostic elements of science fiction and its educational role – to reveal not only the wonders of science, but to emphasize the attention and the responsibility that human being assumes (or not) for each new discovery. In the second and third part of the study, it examines the works of Emil Koralov and Elin Pelin. These texts are not just fundamental for the emergence and development of Bulgarian children‘s and adolescent science fiction, but also for tracing the progress/evolution of the fantastic image from the fairy tales to the science fiction, their convergence, through the texts of the authors.

What did European XIX and early XX century writers think about the femme fatale? This article examines modern incarnations of the biblical notion of the temptress in European literatures, mainly based on examples in Bulgarian and French literature, also with references to а Romanian example. More specifically, the article analyses works by Bulgarian writer Elin Pelin, as well as by French writers Jacques Casotte and Prosper Merimée, mentioning Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale, all of them having a contribution to the perpetuation of this ancient myth in European literature. The comparative reading introduces the “Samodiva” (a traditional Bulgarian name for forest nymph or fairy) as a relevant incarnation of the “fatal woman”.