witch

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.

In literary, film, and computer realities, a woman is projected in different ways. One of these transformations of the feminine is the witch. The knowledgeable woman is subjected to a number of taboos and (re)makings since ancient times. Creators embody diverse variants of the witch in their works to turn the image into a sustainable model. Wheth- er nurtured by the mythological, the gothic, or the popular, the witch embodies femininity that arouses fear because it cannot be completely rationalized. Female writers use the witch as a special type of femi- ninity – sometimes punished for her nature (Madeleine Miller’s Circe), sometimes able to overcome taboos and prohibitions (Angela Carter). How these “old” and at the same time “new” essences manage to coexist in modern prose, what implications and interpretive models are set for the image of the woman and the witch: these are some of the questions that this paper aims to raise and unfold in the context of the remake as a cultural practice.