Bulgarian

Основа на този брой на „Studia Litteraria Serdicensia“ съставляват студии и статии от последните два съвместни научни форума, организирани от секцията по теория на литературата на Института за литература – БАН и катедрата по теория на литературата в СУ „Св. Климент Охридски“. Става въпрос за Националната научна конференция „Автотекстуалност и цитат“ (2025) и Националната научна конференция „Паралитературни жанрове и литературност“ (2023), които представляват своеобразно продължение на една инициатива, отбелязала своето начало 13 години по-рано със събитието „Невидимата школа. Изплъзващият се предмет на литературознанието“ (2012). Оттогава двете звена – секцията и катедрата по теория на литературата – създават периодични събития, които целят да срещат изследователи в диалог върху проблемите на историята на българската литературна теория и нарастващото интердисциплинарно значение на литературоведските търсения. Примери за някои съвместни конференции от този тип са: „Просветителство срещу идеологема (Цветан Стоянов, Атанас Натев, Димитър Аврамов)“, състояла се през 2013 г., „Наследството на лингвистиката на българската теория“ през 2014 г., „Парачовешкото: Грация и гравитация. Двудневен форум в чест на проф. Миглена Николчина“ от 2015 г., както и форумите „Повторение, обновление – практики на римейка“ (2020) и „Кино, канон, готика: Двудневен форум в чест на доц. Огнян Ковачев“ (2021). 

С представените материали в този том се надяваме да изразим признателността си към научната дейност на Радосвет Коларов, дългогодишен член на секцията по теория на литературата в ИЛ – БАН, и да провокираме интереса на академичната общност към темата за паралитературните жанрове и тяхното нарастващо значение за съвременното литературознание. 

С третия дял отдаваме почит към двойния юбилей на Гео Милев (1895–1925), една от най-силните фигури в модернизацията на българската култура, но и – жертва на идеологическа свръхинтерпретация, затормозяваща и до днес рецепцията на творчеството му.

The paper examines two key terms in the theoretical works of the Bulgarian literary theorist Radosvet Kolarov — metaphony and autotextuality — in the immediate context of their emergence: Kolarov’s books Sound and Sense (1983) and Repetition and Creation (2009). Special attention is paid to the strategies that Kolarov follows in the process of term formation, as well as to the potential problems and limitations related to these strategies. Although Kolarov generally follows a morpheme-based minimalistic approach to his terminology, it often creates, intentionally or not, quite productive amphibolies that are helpful in charting some unstudied or neglected subfields of literary theory.

The paper’s aimed at elaborating and reinterpreting certain potentials of Radosvet Kolarov’s theory of autotextuality in order to revise the question of the relation between autotextual systems (idiolects) and difference, which has been mentioned and left unaddressed in “Repetition and Creation”. The paper researches the problematic of autotextual differences from the perspective of the question of the iterability of language constructs and its effects on the constitution and further interpretation of autotextual systems. Starting from that assumption, the text suggests a reading of Radosvet Kolarov’s theory as a specific deconstruction of authorship as an epistemological obstacle for the interpretation of texts framed by an author’s oeuvre.

On the terrain of psychology, the weather can activate involuntary memory and play the role of Proust’s madeleine. Identical meteorological circumstances are able to awaken the lost memory (“and then it was raining”). Thus memories seem to gush out of the picture of weather. The paper discusses some discursive strategies of the text (repetitions, variations, recurring motifs, disseminations) related to weather, as well as a number of more discrete intuitive or deliberate autotextual dominances and preferences for a particular season, type of weather or atmospheric phenomenon that form an invisible aura and lend a certain tonality to one’s work.

The present paper deals with the autotextual potential of the codex “Book of Three Religions” written by Sofroniy Vrachanski in 1805. The main hypothesis, inspired by Radosvet Kolarov’s term “autotextuality”, is that the organization of the volume of three translated theological works on the Abrahamic religions and the original autobiography of the author correspond with a deliberately designed “epigraph”. The text of the “epigraph” is a maxim that can be regarded as a key for interpreting the whole logic of the volume. The maxim, which dates back to Antiquity coincides with Sofroniy’s idea of the different modes of time that define the role of humans as agents in global historic events.

The article focuses on the creative legitimation of P. R. Slaveykov upon the appearance of his first self-edited newspaper. The text interprets the intratextual mechanisms related to the development and testing of authorial roles, the multiplication of creative figures, and the construction of Slaveykov’s own personal myth in the context of the Bulgarian revival publicity. In this case, we are interested in the special emphasis on the creation of the writer as an unfinished act of initiation, enclosed in the multiplying iterative scheme of becoming.

The article considers the presence of the motif of death in the early and late poetical works of Stoyan Mihaylovski. Outlined as the main core facets of this motif, consistent in all of his works, are the general feeling of deadness associated with the death of ideals and grounds for social action in the world, and also with the perishing of all hope for the betterment of the human race; the universal scale of this calamity and the unsatisfying reasoning for “triumphant” evil in world history. The aforementioned aspects of the motif are viewed within the framework of a limited in scope whole, comprising the cycles “Doloroso” and “Varia”, from the most representative collection of Mihaylovski’s selected works to date – “Divine Rebel”, published in 1987. This makes it possible for two main and in many respects mutually exclusive world outlooks to collide and stand out, closely connected to the death motif, but oriented towards different horizons of meaning. The first one, stronger in the early Mihaylovski is the linear horizon fully contained in earthly human History with no way “upwards”, no way beyond. The second one, characteristic of the late Mihaylovski does not completely negate the first one, but integrates in itself the vertical transcendent dimension of being as well. The sonnet “Lama Sabahtani!” is seen as a key poetical work, marking the transition between the two. In the second part of the article, the death motif is viewed in a different interpretative context from the one in “Divine Rebel”. The analysis is focused on poems from another collection representative of Mihaylovski’s works, published in his lifetime and with his active participation – “Collected Works. Volume I”. The aim is to show the transformation in the death motif, using the autotextuality terms work of initiation, enhancing work and explicating work.

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.

Yavorov’s experiment to be not himself, to enter the zone of fiction, is a performative act: what we see on the road, on the move, crossing Sofia, coincides with the entry into and exit from the narrative (from the prose). In this compendium text, Yavorov, adopting a role uncharacteristic of him, continually refers to recognizable or hidden gestures of famous writers, demonstrating an ostentatious familiarity in handling them. There is an empathy with Luben-Caravelov’s “physiological sketch”, reminiscences from Aleko’s feuilletons, ironically snide remarks to P. P. Slaveykov, mockery at the poetry of Trifon Kunev. The narrative’s travelogue, the selected Sofia topoi are frankly reminiscent of Vazov’s cycle of stories “Kardashev on the Hunt”. Yavorov’s text abounds with quotations – from the mocking-parody of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the Gospel to the profane-volgarized belitrization of his own lyrical motifs, i.e. to the seemingly muted self-reference to already published.

The article examines the ways in which the novel Dilettante (1926) and the short story “Rudeness” (1923) by Ch. Mutafov dialogize with each other through the problematics of the lover’s discourse. An attempt is made to illuminate the encounters and divergences between the two works on issues of inter-sexual relationships. The figure obscene by R. Barthes, drawn from his A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, and the sociological concept plurality, proposed by the native art critic and essayist Kiril Krastev, play a significant role. The work is divided into three main parts. They correspond accordingly to the possibilities presented in Dilettante, which organize the book purely formally, but also conceptually, and through which we can think of one or another text as a work-amplifier or a work-explicator for another (according to R. Kolarov’s theory).

The paper aims to reveal the mechanisms of discursive disintegration in Georgi Karaslavov’s novel The Ordinary people (Obiknoveni hora, 1952–1975). According to the proposed thesis, the novel's ideological and compositional disorder is not an accidental example of the inapplicability of the social-realist method, but is due to the peculiar relationship between the individual features of the creative process and the demands of epic form as understood by the early György Lukacs. The methodological stake of this soldering is Radosvet Kolarov's concept of matrix and repetition functioning at the level of autotextuality. According to the thesis argued for here, the textual matrix that encompasses Karaslavov's work consists of two guiding principles that come into different relations according to the specific text: the principle of the documentary thought of as a marginal artistic objectivism, and the principle of the epic, thought of as an ideological treatment of the lived material. Hence the peculiarity of the epic form in the novel The Obiknoveni hora is interpreted as the result of the hypertrophy of the principle of the documentary, which seizes and thereby degenerates the epic functionality. The examples of discursive dissonance discussed serve to exemplify the consequences of the disintegration of epic form and the mechanisms of its reintegration within a post-epic structure.

Initially, the article brings together two areas. The first is thematic: attention is paid to some, albeit discreet, glimpses of current, topical, acutely political issues in Radichkov’s fiction prose from the 1960s–1970s. But even more important is the second – the poetic one: the techniques through which the political theme enters the narrative. It is here that the concept of autotextuality is introduced as a key operational concept. From here on, we proceed to examine the ways in which it operates in Radichkov’s prose. Two such forms are examined – of a folkloric and a specifically literary type, with the emphasis on the latter. The “soft”, veiled, elusive subversion of this technique is examined on a two-fold level: first, in relation to the ideological norms of the era, and second – in relation to literary (linguistic) norms.

Thomas Mann is one of the most prominent autotextual authors who himself has commented on the key role of the leitmotif for his own work. According to the main thesis of this article, the connections between his texts is determined by a peculiar autotextual leitmotif technique. The paper elucidates what autotextual leitmotifs are and in what ways their development connects different texts of the author. The paper problematizes the boundaries between fiction and essay (in particular between the novel and the essay) of Thomas Mann through two examples of autotextual leitmotifs, the core of which is oriented towards the author's key problem of the relationship between genius and disease.

The article examines Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama “Waiting for Godot” through the lens of autocitation, repetition, and shifting context. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notions of the instability of meaning and context, as well as Radosvet Kolarov’s concept the analysis emphasizes the absence of internal memory within the fictional text itself. The first and second acts are approached as autonomous yet mutually reflective textual units, connected not through logical continuity but through rhythmic repetition with variation. This structural pattern evokes a sense of circularity and stasis. The transformations observed in the characters of Pozzo and Lucky are interpreted as metatextual gestures that undermine the linear progression of events. Meanwhile, through the erasure of memory and the constant recurrence of identical actions, Vladimir and Estragon appear trapped within the closed boundaries of a chronotope of waiting. In this way, the play presents memory not as a source of meaning, but as a mechanism of deferral.

This article analyses Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet through the lenses of autotextuality, mise en abyme, and recursion. Inspired by the poetics of Radosvet Kolarov, the study traces how recurring visual and narrative elements construct a self-reflexive structure in which each new meaning emerges through the transformation of already familiar motifs. Mise en abyme functions not only as a device for embedding a story within a story, but also as a mechanism for unsettling the boundaries between different layers of the text, while recursive structures generate a fractal sense of a world that continuously creates itself. In this context, The Hearing Trumpet is approached as a microcosm of Carrington’s broader autotextual practice, evident across both her literary and visual works. The study argues that repetition in Carrington’s oeuvre is not mechanical but productive—a form of discursive desire through which texts unfold new meanings and interrelations.

This article offers a speculative, autotextual reading of J. G. Ballard’s oeuvre through the lens of psychoanalysis and the theoretical framework of Radosvet Kolarov. It seeks to develop the concept of “auto-catastrophe” – a traumatic event that marks a radical turning point in an author’s creative output. The study conceptualizes this auto-catastrophe as a “transmodal cut” that (dis)connects various techniques, motifs, media, corpora, etc. The text also proposes a reading of Kolarov’s notion of “discursive desire,” interpreted through Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment [jouissance].
The article applies these concepts in an analysis of Ballard’s most experimental work, The Atrocity Exhibition, emphasizing its intermedial aspects in order to demonstrate how the transgressive nature of the transmodal cut enables literature to cross its own formal boundaries. The text also explores how the auto-catastrophe can (dis)connect the works and enjoyments of different authors who share the same trauma. To this end, it briefly examines the relationship between the works of Ballard and those of the American writer William Burroughs.

The article “Finishing William Burroughs: The Ethics of Theft and the Gesture of the Joke” seeks to reconsider the legacy of the Burroughsian corpus of experimental texts (novels, essays, manifestos) by proposing a new trajectory focused on the conceptual and ethical stakes found in the work of the cult American author. Working in the space between the writer’s biographical trauma (the accidental shooting of his wife during a game) and the logic of Burroughs’ own texts, the article offers an entry point into his method and the specific ethics of a writing that exceeds the control of language. This writing may be defined as a speculative radicalization of the problem of (self-)citation, articulated through the notions of conceptual theft and the joke as a gesture of the cut.

The analysis of these techniques is carried out through a reading of Queer and its 2024 film adaptation by Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Presenting the unfinished second novel Queer as an initiaton work (in the sense developed by Radosvet Kolarov), the text reveals the play of a “citation of the Real” (the shooting), exposed through Guadagnino’s cinematic rendering. In unfolding the wager of this key Burroughsian remainder, the article turns to its central object of inquiry— the logic of theft and the gesture of a joke. These are linked to the methods of cutting and folding (cut-up and fold-in), which secured Burroughs’ cult status in postwar Western literature. 

The latter are theorized through late Lacanian psychoanalysis (the symptom) and Deleuzian concepts such as the body without organs (BwO) and his notion of humor. Through the attempt at a singular synthesis of these trajectories in Burroughs, the article reveals the ambivalent (political, psychosocial, and ethical) experiment of writing yourself out of language conceived as a totalizing system of control. 

Furthermore, besides functioning as an introduction to the Burroughsian ethics of resistance to language via theft and humour, the article aims to serve as a speculative tracing of possible connections between Burroughs’ writing practice and some pressing contemporary issues. These include the problems of informational (digital) control societies, the logic of large language models (LLMs), the consumption of nonsense content (“brainrot”), the institutionalization of paranoia, and of conspiratorial reason. These are the contemporary stakes that define the article’s experiment with the Burroughsian ethos.

Finally, beyond theorizing theft and the joke as a speculative approach to writing and ethics, “Finishing Burroughs…” also performs a brief demonstration. It applies the Burroughsian disposition to the local context of Russian propaganda, disinformation, and nationalist (patriotard) ideology.

The Article presents a close reading of the movie “Her” (2013), directed by Spike Jonze. In that reading the artificial intelligence in the movie is modeled via the theoretical apparatus of Radosvet Kolarov introduced in his book Repetition and Creation: Poetics of Autotextuality. Twelve years after the premiere of the movie, the operating system Samantha seems like a plausible extension of current large language models, bearing in mind her full dependence on the human-derived textual data on which she has been trained. “Her”, however, goes beyond the mechanical extrapolation that artificial intelligence is going to get ever faster, more precise and defter at the manipulation of language, as it is used by people. The operating systems in the movie gradually converge on the position of being simultaneously readers, authors, editors and critics of the full corpus of texts, and perhaps ultimately achieve the virtual being of the idea, which in Kolarov’s work is tied to the concept of “matrix”, i.e. a virtual invariant of the idea that determines the autotextual transformations within the oeuvre of a given author. The artificial intelligences in “Her” implicitly work with the whole of humanity as a corpus and in this way they dynamize the boundaries between work and oeuvre, person and world, individual and archetype, body and mind, as well as other ontological binaries. Following Kolarov, the article attempts to explicitly reconstruct this model for the development of artificial intelligence, which is hidden in the movie. That model perhaps should be seen not so much as a speculative attempt at prediction, but as the hyperintensification of a phenomenology of text which is already deeply implicated in the present.

Thе article observes the need to recollect traces from different sources in order to weave the image of the woman from the Middle Ages. Given the scarcity of recourses from the times when women were explicitly denied voice – both in personal and artistic sense – a research should rely more on intertextual connections between dialoguing texts, rather than on focused and in-depth analysis of a certain corpus. The article illustrates this statement by providing two concentric examples: firstly, by looking into the identity of the first Italian female poet Compiuta Donzella, and secondly, by attempting to trace the origins of Gostanza which is mentioned in one of the sonnets addressed to Compiuta Donzella herself.

The until recently marginal study of ego-texts has become a relevant scientific field, which constantly questions the traditional view of central and peripheral phenomena and authors in literature. This article aims to draw attention to an autobiographer and his autobiographical text, which have remained in the shadow of the traditional literary canon. The study focuses on the interpretation of the autobiography “Povest’ o rozhdenii moyem, proiskhozhdenii i vsey zhizni” of Prince I. M. Dolgorukov (1764–1823), an interesting figure of the Russian cultural scene of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although I. M. Dolgorukov was a successful writer during his lifetime, today he is considered a “secondary” author. His voluminous autobiography had a similar not very happy fate, as it remained unpublished for a long time. However, the subject of this text is particularly interesting for understanding the evolutionary dynamics of Russian male autobiographical prose in that epoch. The analysis gives the opportunity to identify some typical characteristics of autobiographies in a period when the genre had not yet crystallized in Russia. At the same time, it highlights the many innovative features of the author’s autobiographical discourse. Therefore, the article also compares I. M. Dolgorukov’s text with the “canonical” autobiographies of A. T. Bolotov (1738–1833) and G. R. Derzhavin (1743–1816).

Microhistory emerged as an independent field after the 1950s, gaining ground in Italy, Mexico, France and the United States. Despite its increasing popularity, comprehensive theoretical and methodological studies have remained few in number for decades. Despite their differences in approach and understanding, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and the Mexican historian Luis González y González, both trained in the French historical schools, were key figures in the development of microhistory. Le Roy Ladurie focuses his archival analysis on the social, economic and religious manifestations of smaller settlements in France. Luis González explores the microcosm of Mexican villages, highlighting local dynamics and local “small” voices. However, both historians emphasize the importance of microscopic details for understanding larger “historical narratives”, despite criticisms from historians influenced by the “linguistic turn”, and despite accusations in reductionism and fictionalisation. The contributions of Le Roy Ladurie and Luis González helped shape microhistory as a nuanced approach to historical research that balances the local “narrative” with the broader socio-political context.

“Life as a quotation” (“das zitathafte Leben”) is a phrase that Thomas Mann formulated in his celebratory speech on the occasion of Sigmund Freud's 80th birthday to present his vision of a life that is always made up of (un)conscious repetitions of prefabricated patterns. This paper offers an analysis of the “life-as-quote” formula in two perspectives. The notion is examined, once, within the writer's speech and, secondly, in the context of psychoanalysis with an emphasis on the mechanisms of identification. Some of the questions the text attempts to answer are: what is quotation in this perspective and what is its significance for literary studies.

The text is dedicated to the peculiar place of Mikhail Bakhtin as a literary theorist. It relies heavily on the work of Galin Tihanov in his recent book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory and also formulates certain critiques of it concerning the important elements that make a literary theorist. Bakhtin is set on the background of two opposing thinkers – Andre Jolles and Erich Auerbach. While Jolles tries to impose his traditional romantic etymological method upon the whole literature and set the genres below certain key words, Auerbach is almost methodless in his attempt to draw the genesis of literature in the perspective of historically oriented sociology. Both Jolles and Auerbach found their theories on certain paraliterary genres and invest them with anthropological and civilizational value. For Jolles these are the “simple forms of narrative” and for Auerbach it is the middle preaching style or genre sermo humilis as a beginning of Western literature. On his part, Bakhtin manages to enter the cannon of literary theory and we shall see why. He represents the intermediate methodological position of literary theory. 

The article traces the genealogy of theory-fiction—a hybrid writing practice that consciously blurs the boundaries between philosophical argument and literary narrative. It begins with the early activities of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick (1995–2003), whose key figures, Nick Land and Mark Fisher, “punctured” academic discourse in order to inject elements of cyberpunk, occultism, and electronic music. Through close readings of Land, Fisher, and Reza Negarestani—especially the novel-essay Cyclonopedia—the study shows how the concept of hyperstition turns literary fiction into an instrument of actual cultural intervention.

Part I situates James Wood’s notion of “hysterical realism” as a historical backdrop for the crystallisation of theory-fiction. Part II analyses CCRU concepts such as “Meltdown” and “spinal catastrophism,” following their passage from lecture halls into the early-2000s blogosphere (K-PUNK, Hyperstition, Xenosystems). Part III examines hyperstition itself: a mechanism by which fictional ideas—like William Burroughs’s “word-viruses” — materialise in socio-technological reality. Finally, deploying Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “minor literature” (deterritorialized, collective, and inevitably political), the article shows how theory-fictions undermine hierarchies between “high” theory and popular culture. The conclusion defends the thesis that theory-fiction offers a model of radical writing capable of both describing and transforming reality, restoring to philosophy its status as a dangerous, “magical” practice.

The paper makes an inquiry into the structural characteristics of the mainly internet based musical genre of sovietwave. The aim is to simultaneously observe certain features of the cultural context of its actualization and to problematize some contextual codes thought of as self-evident throughout its reception.

The article explores three contemporary Bulgarian novels in order to underline the characteristics that allow us to use the genre definition “documentary novel”. Based on Philippe Lejeune’s 1975 definitions of “autobiography” and “novel”, the article analyses the identity of the three narrative persons in the novels in order to define the distance they have with the two genres. Later, other bordering genres are discussed in order to establish the space that the documentary novel occupies. Certain literary approaches used in the novels are discussed, serving to present the narrative’s fictional side. The article concludes that the documentary novel as such has its place in literature, maintaining at the same time strong bonds with extra-literary genres.

The paper centers around a possible line of interpretation of literature-reality intercourse with the help of author-figure mediation. The autobiographical disposition of the latter in A ballad to Georg Hennih fictional space is what scientific lenses are set upon. Considered the opening first part of an autobiographical trilogy (followed by Germany – a dirty story, and A love story autopsy), A ballad to Georg Hennih short novel inaugurates autofiction as Victor Paskov’s literary style and means of recognition. The ballade’s world is based on a playful dialogue between fictional and real, skillfully handled by Paskov’s own maneuver of questioning author’s status in the twofold manifestation of self-revealing and being a novel’s character. The self-revealing dimension is imbued with childhood trauma thus launching the long-term journey of answering the essential question “Who am I really?”

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.

The task of “Jests of the Infinite: Introduction to David Foster Wallace” is to mark some key aspects within the thought of the contemporary author David Foster Wallace. The main goal of the article is to open a conceptual field where the texts of a little known within the local context author could be discussed, analysed and criticised.

It is in this sense that the article is explicitly introductory and therefore limited not only to Wallace’s most famous work – the 1000+ pages maximalist novel “Infinite Jest” — but also to its title. Thus, what “Jests of the Infinite” presents is a speculative reading of the novel’s title, which is a quote from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. It is through this speculative reading that the article explores some of Wallace’s key ideas, themes and positions. Ideas and positions, which trace and weave together the fields of contemporary philosophy (both analytic and continental), Lacanian psychoanalysis and mathematics. So, what article еxplicates is how the mentioned fields can be found already within the title of Wallace’s maximalist novel. And furthermore, how such an explication opens the possibility for an interesting rethinking of modern culture’s constitutive tragedy (Hamlet) and also how it can ground the dynamic conceptual space for Wallace’s thought.

Last but not least, after the explication of the title, which will focus mainly on the concepts of the “jest” and the “infinite”, the article concludes with marking a specific counter-intuitive relation between Wallace’s thought and literary project and the philosophy of Alain Badiou whose project regards the fields of psychoanalysis and mathematics as crucial for the creation of a rigorous and operative contemporary ontology

Geo Milev’s poem “September” can be read as a socio-political dystopia-utopia. It belongs to a tradition that stretches from Plato’s Republic, through Plutarch’s “Lycurgus” and Thomas More’s Utopia, to Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. The study begins by identifying several key signifying discourses and cultural codes that frame the poem as a dystopia-utopia. It then sketches the theoretical parameters of the dystopian-utopian genre. Finally, the analysis demonstrates that “September” embodies the core features of this genre. The study concludes by identifying those utopian aspects that enabled communist literary criticism to interpret “September” as a prophetic vision of communism’s inevitable victory in Bulgaria. The approach is comparative, engaging both Bulgarian and Euro-American historical and theoretical contexts. The interpretation examines the poem on multiple levels—philosophical, aesthetic, poetic, and phonetic.

Споровете около канона, избух- нали във втората половина на 1980-те и разгорещили се в следващите две десетилетия, са имали разнообразни следствия. Едно от тях е, че те са оставили до голяма степен извън критическото внимание понятието за „класика“ и „класическо“ със специфичното му място в историята на идеите. Така, след началната саморазправа с него, от една страна, то започва да изглежда твърде лесно заменимо, например от по-ясно ангажираното с политическите залози на хуманитарните изследвания понятие за „канон“. Класическото се критикува като канонично и канонизирано. Тъкмо поради тази причина то се оказва не просто заменимо, а отстранимо. В съвременното литературознание думите „класика“ и „класическо“ вече рядко се употребяват критически.

През 2022 година литературният проект Future Fiction, който обещава да представя научнофантастични сюжети, способни да ни помогнат да разберем утрешния ден, публикува малък сборник, наречен Meteotopia: Futures of Climate (In)Justice („Метеотопия: Сюжети на климатичната (не)справедливост“). Замисълът на тази социално ангажирана книжка бе наистина мащабен; тя започва с манифест от Франческо Версо и Ана Рюше, според които „от зората на времето отношението между човека и природата […] има две постоянни характеристики: уважение и подчинение“. През последните векове обаче „подчинението успя да прекърши уважението. Експлоатацията зае мястото на разумното управление. И науката разомагьоса древната мистика на природата, оголвайки я за всеки, който би пожелал да се домогне до нейните ресурси“. Основен виновник за всичко това, разбира се, е капиталистическата система, която днес, в епохата на антропоцена, изглежда, „вече няма конкуренти“ , и тази нейна неоспорвана хегемония прави въобразяването на алтернативни светове трудна, дори невъзможна, но пък за сметка на това необходима задача. Именно с това ужасно сложно начинание се захваща „Метеотопия“ – за да се провали главозамайващо на всички възможни нива

As a practice and a votive site, the vow has a significant place in traditional culture and is quite vital to the present day. It has its roots in Antiquity and is based on the belief that supernatural powers haunt all natural objects – caves, water springs, trees, etc., and are their owners. In order to settle on a particular territory and to use its resources, people should fight with the spirits and pay them for it – with gifts and sacrifices. Moreover, the sacrifices should be in a way equivalent to people’s expectations for favourable living conditions and abundant harvest, that is, the sacrifice should consist of what is most precious for the community. There are a number of rites containing some relics indicating that once even human life was sacrificed. Barbarous as they are, such rites suggest that striving for their living and paying a high price for all the earthly possessions they get from nature, people could not afford to squander and waste the earned resources; they were compelled to respect and highly evaluate them.

After presenting known and less known facts about the voynuks and the dervendjis, the article makes an attempt to clarify the reasons for the different stage of development of the different voynuk and dervendji villages. According to the author’s thesis, the privileged voynuk and dervendji status of part of the population in certain villages was not the main reason for their gradual transformation into significant economic and cultural centres, playing a major role in the Bulgarian history during the Revival period. Besides their geographic location in secluded mountainous areas and away from the main roads, a real reason was the adaptation of the inhabitants to the natural environment. The presence of pasture-grounds contributed to the development of the stock- breeding and the trade with wool, meat and dairy products, which were among the resources for developing some crafts. Certain settlements, on the other hand, developed because of the availability of resources for other crafts – production of rose oil, logging, metal-working, etc. The ethnographic features of the Balkan region can be added to the geographical situation, the natural environment and the development of certain economic sectors. Despite the fact that they had service farms (bashtina), in the situation of total control of the state over the agriculture and tax oppression, the voynuks, as well as the rest of the Bulgarians, could not easily turn into large landowners who directed their production mainly toward the market. For this, it was necessary to have such power and influence that belonged to the first big Turkish landowners, who usually came from the category of the askers (the military men), and in whose hands was the provincial administration. Although later on some Bulgarians obtained enough financial capital to turn into wealthy collectors of tax on sheep and goats, and of other taxes, and even large landowners, the primary means of their prosperity was stock-breeding, trade and crafts. It was precisely in these areas of economic activity that Bulgarians managed to get out of their dependence and total control of the state. Here, the Christians were sable more effectively to resist tax arbitrariness even with unauthorized means, and these dynamic and profitable industries managed to compensate it. They did not rely as much on tax privileges and service landowning, which actually made them dependent on the goodwill of the central authority.

This paper deals with two types of dependence of the Bulgarian journalists from the 19th century – the dependence of the editors from their editions, what they are inclined to do in behalf of them, even to the detriment of their personal writings, on one hand, and the dependence of the personal friendships and hostilities, on the other. The observations are based on some letters from the archive of Ivan Naydenov and other texts that draw the picture of his complicated relationships with Petko Slaveykov, Svetoslav Milarov, and Stefan Bobchev.

The paper seeks in the characters of G. P. Stamatov the tragedy of the modern man – the degradation from the creator of material culture to the slave of his own creations. This is an enduring topic in today‘s world, seen today in the prestigious prestige of our pseudo-elite – once at the bottom of society, now – accidentally unprepared at the top but without the necessary qualitative leap in intellectual and social terms. The text aims to show when the necessity of the accumulation of belongings becomes a disease and a dangerous dependence, as well as why the post-liberation Bulgarian in good standing in society feels a hunger not just to have a lot, but to show that he owns, to get legitimacy through others.

This text focuses on the specific dependence on the mother role which the childless woman in Julio Cortázar’s short story “The Condemned Door” warms to. The present work studies “fictional motherhood” and some of the possible explanations of the special double “play” of comforting the unborn son that exists both in the mind of the woman and in the mind of her neighboring man who seems to verify the child’s existence. This is a story of an obsession with what has no body, but exists in the form of a thought, a desire, and consciousness. The narrative tells how the dependence of the other reveals a need you may well feel too.

The article examines a main problem of late modernity in the 20th century: Technology as an atavistic shadow of Enlightenment rationality. As a force created by man but escaped from his power, which produces a new funda- mental slavery for the late modern das Man (in Heidegger’s sense). The article consists of two parts, unfolding two parallel but merging plots. The first part outlines the universal context of the era immediately after the end of WW II with an emphasis on Heidegger’s “second” philosophy (after die Kehre), the deepest critical self-reflection of late/crisis modernity in the mid-20th century and then: the basic idea of Technik/Machenschaft as an enslaving factor. The second part of the article examines how the same problem, which arose simultaneously but independently in the current Bulgarian reality in the 1960s and 1970s, was discussed by a representative part of Bulgarian prose: the “rural” writer Yordan Radichkov, the “urban” one Pavel Vezhinov, but above all Emilian Stanev, who, like Heidegger at the same time, paradoxically combines strongly right-wing ethno-conservatism and far-left eco-ideology.

The article interprets otherness as a distinctive feature of the person, positioning him beyond the scope of the community to which he belongs. That distinction is often behavioural and does not correspond to the moral conven- tions of the social group. It often brings about the rejection of the individual, and dooms him to misunderstanding, aloneness, even death. The following two works of the contemporary Bulgarian literature have been selected for observation: the 125short novel The Barrier by Pavel Vezhinov and the novella “Verse for Her” by Nikolai Vatov. The analytical parallel between the characters in the two lite- rary works has been driven by difference as a viewpoint for their interpretation.

The transformations we explore consist in the fact that from what is specifically contained in the text, the Absurdism passes into the principles of the director‘s thinking, and hence into the stage laws for constructing a new world. Now we think of this as an establishment of the unusual form of directors’ independence, hidden under the apparent dependence on drama. In Stoyan Kambarev’s practice, it manifests itself in a different light: independence, which does not reject, does not discredit, does not degrade the drama, but accepts it as an “accomplice”, and thus rehabilitates the director as seeking dialogue with the world around, instead of unambiguously staring at himself.

This text wants to pursue a somewhat different direction in the cur- rent con­versation on world literature; it seeks to ‘multiply’ world literature and demon­strate that there is no world literature per se, but rather different world literatures, because at different times different communities produce different constructs that they label as world literature. In my title, I signal that here we are dealing with answers to the questions what world literature is and how to write its his­tory that come from Soviet Russia, encompassing a period of some seventy years. My emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet atten­tion to world literature; foremost amongst these is the compelling determina­tion of Soviet intellectuals to conceive of world literature in a systematically non-Occidentocentric manner. With this, the Soviets were pioneer- ing an approach to world literature that foreshadows our current concerns, as I will try to demonstrate. But there is also another lesson emerging from the Soviet preoccupation with world literature: the conversation on world literature does not proceed in a vacuum, it is constantly interacting with, impacting on, and being impacted by, the conversation societies have about national literatures and literary theory. I begin by briefly adumbrating four historically attest- able meanings of ‘world literature’ that are still at work in the Soviet debates; I then identify three different cultural and ideological horizons (or frameworks) of thinking about world literature in the Soviet Union and, significantly, locate their common ground, the glue that bound them together, in the master approach of de-Westernizing the very notion of world literature, an attitude consistently enacted by Soviet intellectuals engaging with the history of world literature.

The paper is concerned with the nature of fact, as a part of the struc- ture of genre-hybrid fiction biographies. It is assumed that any fact created by author‘s imagination is implicitly literary unless it is a specific document. This argument is being supported by theoretical justifications by J. Tynyanov. The examples of the peripeteia of real facts about the personality and work of F. Dostoevsky in the genre of fictional biography are from the novel The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee. In this work, the author‘s interpreta- tion is achieved through an original intertextual play that reproduces Dostoev- sky‘s literary personality and the complex construction of his creative world.

The study examines Russian poetry of the 20th century, falling into the field of the avant-garde, and presents the features of cultural processes, the development of avant-garde trends, changes in the functions of art and language, vectors, and concepts. The boundaries of the literary phenomenon are made meaningful. The rebellion against aesthetic norms requires searching for new proportions and aspects of perception. Both the early and the second half of the century avant-garde set themselves the goal of shaking the perceiver, breaking the automatism of reading, and causing active rejection or misunderstanding. Hence, techniques related to difficult reading include “memorized” creations, “cut-off” words, a multitude of neologisms, broken syntactic constructions, and the fusion of incompatible aesthetic or thematic phenomena. The avant-garde versions of twentieth-century art emphasize resistance to the label manifestations of culture, opposing as an alternative the reduced, careless form, affirming through negation the breakthrough to the sacred and the true, the search for new positive meanings.

The article is part of a larger study on Russian/Soviet dystopia in literature, and partly in cinema. Here, the subject of reading is Vladimir Sorokin‘s “Ice Trilogy”, containing the novels Ice (2002), The Path of Bro (2004) and 23000 (2005).

Някои предмети на човешкото размишление привличат – било защото има нещо в самите тях, било защото има нещо у нас самите – към все по-задълбочено размишление, и колкото повече се отдаваме на това привличане и се изгубваме в тях, толкова повече те се превръщат в един единен предмет, който ние – в зависимост от това дали го търсим и намираме в себе си, или извън себе си – характеризираме като природа на нещата или като определение на човека. Други предмети вероятно никога не биха привлекли вниманието ни, ако в свещена самота посвещавахме наблюдението си изключително и единствено на този предмет на всички предмети и ако не се намирахме във взаимоотношения с други хора, едва от общуването с които да изникват подобни отношения и понятия за отношения, които при по-внимателна рефлексия да се разгръщат и разпластяват до предмети на размишлението, т. е. включително тук да следват тъкмо противоположния ход на нещата.

Предложените по-долу на българския читател стихове са от късния период на Фридрих Хьолдерлин (1770–1843), когато поетът – състудент и приятел на колосите на Немския идеализъм Шелинг и Хегел от Тюбингенската семинария – вече е изпаднал в период на видимо умопомрачение, продължило десетилетия, до самата му смърт (въпреки спекулациите от някои тълкуватели, че то е било преструвка, помагала му да се крие от реални или въображаеми политически противници и преследвания, най-вече във връзка с опитите за съдебен процес срещу неговия другар Исак фон Синклер и конспирациите за сваляне на вюртембергския курфюрст). В този период поетът обитава прочутата си кула в Тюбинген, част от дома на семейството на дърводелеца Ернст Цимер, когато помрачението на съзнанието му се редува с кратки периоди на просветление, а приемането на рядко наминаващите любопитни гости – и с продължителни импровизации на пиано и опити за творчество, вдъхновено от гледката отвисоко към река Некар.

В последните семинарни занятия по „Литература на Българското възраждане“ симптоматично пролича овладяното, ала заразително пристрастие на Сирма Данова към мястото на Паисий Хилендарски като особен вид конструктор или по-точно – около което се фокусираше нейният изследователски интерес – субстрат на терена на националната културна идентичност. Тогава не знаехме, че привилегироването на този въпрос е свързано с актуалната ѝ научна работа, не си давах- ме сметка, че този труд ще бъде нейната лебедова песен.