“The Scourge of God”

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.