Венцислав Димов: „Добруджа: памет и песни“
Ventsislav Dimov: Dobrudja: Memory and Songs

Summary/Abstract: The book Dobrudja: Memory and Songs by Ventsislav Dimov recaps 30 years of research work. It is dedicated to Dobrudja and its inhabitants in the first half of the twentieth century. The author seeks to make a new interpretation of important events in a significant period of Bulgaria’s recent history. According to the researcher, the district of Dobrudja culturally and geographically has a special place in Bulgarian folk and musical tradition and its new reading offers an ‘indispensable perspective to the understanding of dramatic times of Bulgarian culture at the crossroads’. Historical events in the study are represented by ‘the Dobroudja song, which has evolved from personal experience into communal memory’. In the examined period it is defined as a living and indivisible monument to Bulgarian mentality in Dobrudja. To create a multifaceted picture of the subjects under consideration, an interdisciplinary interpretation of facts and sources is undertaken for the first time ever on this topic. The book sums up wideranging research experience. On the one hand, there are personal observations of the ethnomusicologist, including dozens of fieldwork materials and interviews with tradition bearers in Dobrudja. On the other hand, there is a systematisation of facts from an array of audio, visual and verbal records. The analytical work on them led to the creation of a dense and multifaceted description of the research object. Ventsislav Dimov for the first time presents a chronological historical picture of the period, which was reconstructed largely through folk song. It is seen as a transmission between tradition and modernization. In the contextual outlines the author focuses on typical song materials related to Dobrudja and argues for the existence of a specific Dobrudja song cycle.

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