Раждането на бащата - размишление върху "Дъщерята на Йефтая" от Емануил Попдимитров
The Birth of the Father (Reflection on Emanuil Popdimitrov’s “The Daughter of Jephthah”)

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the dramatic-prose work in question at two levels – once, in the context of the Old Testament version of the plot in The Book of Judges; and next on the background of the Bulgarian political history of the 1920s. At the latter level the paper suggests a few basic ideas, connected, in the first place, to the conservative position manifested by the author living in a highly revolutionary age and, secondly, to the discovery of the emancipating sociologem of the daughter who symbolically gives birth to her father. In regard to the first aspect the paper considers the possible role positions of the individual living in troubled times, and draws the attention to Emanuil Popdimitrov’s choice to describe an adaptive and socially constructive (not a reforming revolutionary) type of person, as seen in the character of the regentjudge Jephthah. In regard to the second more important aspect the paper makes a comparative analysis of the original (biblical) and the secondary (literary) versions of the plot about the daughter who rescued her father by physical exploit from disgrace and social death. In conclusion the paper emphasizes the fact that the literary text raises problems in the family identity of the person in society to a degree in which it may turn out that the woman can rehabilitate the man’s honour, and the children can produce their parents’ dignity.

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