Keywords: review
More...Keywords: First Balkan War; Bulgarian Nationalism; Literature of Bulgarian History; History Text Books; Propaganda of History; Relations of Ethnic and Religious Groups
Every nationality has its own specific understanding of its history which distinguishes itself from the others. The didactic use of the resource of the different nationalisms leads to a different historical sensitivity and produces different perspectives towards the same historical events. The text shows the projections of the First Balkan War in the Bulgarian historiography and history textbooks in the context of the different phases of the Bulgarian nationalism. Another focus of the study is to examine the speculations, which were made in the Bulgarian public opinion from scientific and educational perspectives.
More...Keywords: Russians – Bulgarians; social attitudes; complexes; imperialism; vassality
This is the story of the modification of a hypothesis about the attitudes of Bulgarians towards Russians as a result of an empirical survey. The main tenetis that both groups regard one another through two different complexes. The adequacy of the notion of complex in the context is explained (in the sense of Charcot rather than Freud). The Bulgarian complex is vassality: Bulgaria is/should be a vassal to suzerain Russia, therefore expecting protection for services rendered. The Russian complex is imperialism: Bulgaria is/should be a colony of Russia, therefore Russia is under no obligation to Bulgaria regardless of circumstances. As in reality Bulgaria is a member of the EU and NATO, these complexes create misunderstandings that complicate further a relationship that objectively is complex enough.
More...Keywords: Baraban; Boryo Zevzeka; Chudomir; humor; popular culture; journalism
This paper deals with the humourist periodical “Baraban” (Drum) and two of its active authors and their relationship. Boris Rumenov known by his penname Boryo Zevzeka (Boryo the Joker) was a prolific writer of different types of humourist short stories, pieces for theatre, etc, editor of the periodical, killed by the communists in 1944. Chudomir is famous and author and painter; he became very popular when he left “Baraban” and started to publish in the newspaper “Zora” (Dawn). In his youth Chudomir was close friends with all the other contributors of “Baraban”, they exchange funny letters and deliberately build their public images as bohemians. This paper also offers some less known their works from the 1910s.
More...Keywords: Bulgarian themes; characters; and plots; Russian classic literature; discoverer; forefather
The traditional for Bulgarian literary science idea about the Bulgarian presence in Russian literature is reconsidered in this paper based on newly discovered texts from the first half of the XIXth century with Bulgarian characters present in them. Answers to the following questions are sought: Which text should be considered as a starting point for the topic at hand? Who is the first Bulgarian character? Who is the forefather of the Bulgarian theme?
More...Keywords: William Golding; “Rites of Passage”; Paregoric; Drug usage and literature
This paper briefly deals with the presentation of the Paregoric (camphorated tincture of opium) and the attitude of the characters of the novel to it. For the time when the plot took place the use of this drug was not formally forbidden, although it was not regarded as something fully acceptable. When Golding published the book in the 1980s these kinds of drugs, are under strict control by the medical authorities; at the same time, literature and art are changing their ambivalent attitude towards drug usage. The article looks at the use of the narcotic in the context of the use of alcohol in “Rites of Passage”, the use of some uncommon substances in the other Golding’s novels, and attempts to find some kind of link with the decease of the author. The aim is to ask the question about the function of the Paregoric in the narrative.
More...Keywords: reviews;
Před několika lety se překladatel a editor zde recenzované knihy Vladimir Penčev v rozhovoru otištěném na stránkách tohoto časopisu mj. svěřil, že překládá Sísovu interdisciplinární monografii Makedonie. Studie zeměpisná, historická, národopisná, statistická i kulturní (Sís 1914 [fakticky v důsledku válečné cenzury kniha vyšla až roku 19182 ]): „Co mi ale leží na stole za úkol, je přeložit knihu o Makedonii od velmi zvláštního a málo známého českého novináře, spisovatele a vědce Vladimíra Síse […], jedinečného bulharofila z první poloviny minulého století. Mimochodem, v tomto případě jde spíše o vědecký projekt […].“ (Jakoubek — Penčev 2016: 148) Překladatelsky náročná kniha vyšla v minulém roce péčí sofijského Makedonského vědeckého ústavu jako 51. publikace ediční řady Makedonská knižnice.
More...Keywords: Lyuben Karavelov; narratives; genre; discursive perspective
This critical undertaking seeks to establish the fictional status of prose by means of tracking down the genre’s genealogy. Drawing on the historical poetics of New Bulgarian literature, the study focuses on the differentiation of prose narratives from the variety of literary modes that shaped the discursive polyphony of Revival literature: journalism, folk studies, linguistic endeavours, philological reflections, folklore archives, parts of which went down in prose as specific expressions or synthetic formulations serving to impart a degree of fiction to the narrative. The specifics of Karavelov’s narration render it eligible for analysis that employs the strategies and methods of counternormative genealogy, the study of genre development that registers the impulse for its dissolution.
More...Keywords: conquest of Tarnovo; national mythology; history; Ottomans
This paper deals with the different images of one key event in Bulgarian history – the conquest of the capital city of Tarnovo by Ottomans (1393). Some of the main texts about it could be traced in hagiography, in folklore, in historiography and textbooks, and in literature are discussed. The focus is on the interpretations from the 19th century and on examining them as a network and in the context of some other similar events (e.g. the conquest of Constantinople, 1453, the Battle of Kosovo, some local military clashes, etc.), in the quest of a common mythical base beneath them presenting the conquest of an important city by foreign infidel barbarians. Some characteristics, typical for Bulgarian culture are discussed. Among them, the absence of reports for a great battle, the important role of the Patriarch and relatively small role of the last King, etc. The counter-discourse about the decline of the kingdom is also noticed in the context of the creation of the canonic image of the event that appeared relatively lately. The most prominent author in this counter-discourse was the poet Hristo Botev.
More...Keywords: Vasli Popovich; satire; Konstantin Jireček; Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan; Vasil D. Stoyanov; Orientalism; symbolic capital
This paper presents the satirical works of Vasil Popovich (1833-1897), most of them unpublished in his lifetime, and analyses them in the context of their time – the debates about the standard language, about literature and the Bulgarian Literary Society from the end of 19th century. In the focus are also the conflicted relations of V. Popovich with Ivan Vazov, Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan, Vasil D. Stoyanov, and Konstantin Jireček. The tension between them is interpreted as a manifestation of their competition for symbolic capital and for gaining an important position in society and literature. As a supplement, at the end is added an unpublished text by V. Popovich from 1887, written in an imitation of Oldbulgarian/ Church-Slavonic language as a personal letter.
More...Keywords: Petko Slaveykov; Teodosiy Ikonomov; Lovech, comedy; Greek-Bulgarian ecclesiastical conflict; morality; ideology
This paper analyzes an episode of the life of the young Petko Slaveykov, related to the comedy “The bishop of Lovech, or a misfortune of the watchmaker of Lovech” (1863) by Teodosiy Ikonomov and discuses the tension between morality and ideology. Slaveykov was a witness and took part in the events from 1847-1848, on which the comedy was based. The paper touches on the connection between the motif about the infidel wife, presented similarly in Molière’s play “George Dandin ou le Mari confondu”, the actual events and the political implications of the author, in the context of the Greek-Bulgarian ecclesiastical conflict.
More...Keywords: Botev; poetic-biographical (self) myth; “To her”; Pishurka; parody; heroic poetic canon vs. trivial literature; Propp
The article starts from the well-known disjunction “love or struggle/self-sacrifice in the name of the motherland”, characteristic of the national romanticism of the XIX century (Petőfi, Botev). However, the article directs its comparative efforts in another direction – not in the international, but in the interdiscursive, mythopoetic plan. Botev, of course, is at the center of the comparison. Not only as a lyrical voice but in the whole syncretic volume of the personal heroic myth, where the prophetic poetic speech, giving rise to biographical reality, is inseparable from the biographical gesture, which in itself is “living” poetry: relations such as the poem “Farewell” and the voyage with the steamer “Radetzky”, the poem “Hadji Dimitar” and own death оn the Balkan. The dialogue between the poem “To my first beloved” and the pre-death letter to the wife (“My dear Venetа, know that after the homeland...”) is also placed here, in the same order. – But the article prefers not the opposition, but the conjunctive intertwining and finds it in the most incredible place – “To her”, considered the weakest, marginal, non-Botev poem in the monolithic poetic corpus “Botev”, a Spanish drama about love, jealousy, and bloody revenge. In the spirit of the Revival preference for allegorical shifts, this trivial sentimental-adventurous plot is inscribed in the high biographical-poetic “text-Botev”: а threat of “jumping” across the Danube “with a naked knife in the hand” and killing the old husband, kidnapper of his beloved/homeland. – But the real comparative plot is forthcoming, because the autobiographical-heroic narrative “To her”, it turns out (Iv. Paunovski), has its probable prototype in the Crastyu-Pishurkov’s “Koutkoudyachka / Нen-croaking” (the poem “Fight of Roosters”), an emblem of the most helpless verse-knitting of this era, repeatedly ironized with fierce sarcasm by Botev himself. It is here, in this inverted parody, that the article sets its second heuristic horizon. – The conclusion: what the poet Botev does not know, the work “To her” itself knows and remembers, keeps deep in his genre crypto memory.
More...Keywords: family; ethnography; public hygiene; pedagogy; history of women; Foucault
The article claims that the family, even at the dawn of modernization, is a field of complex, volatile, reversible social forces. The force field of the supposedly traditional family is described on the basis of an analysis of unfinished play by one of the most popular Bulgarian writers of the XIX c., Petko Slaveykov. The close reading of the play demonstrates that the genealogy of the concept of patriarchal family is shaped by the power of the XIX c. ethnographic studies of common law which discipline the tacit, unreliable, situated common-sense knowledges so as to transform them into objective and academic truths. The article examines as well the discursive effects of the ethnographic concept of patriarchal family which can be boiled down to silencing the female voices and producing knowledge about men, women and desire crucial to the functioning of the discursive apparatus of masculine domination.
More...Keywords: Bulgarian National Revival; love songs; songs in Turkish; literary canon
The paper examines songs with love and erotic content, dating back from the so-called National Revival Period. They used to be visible part of the popular culture of Bulgaria and the Southeastern Europe region in initial decades of the Modern Bulgarian statehood. These songs were originally written in Bulgarian and in Turkish, but with Cyrillic alphabet. Turkish ones are introduced for the first time in Bulgarian Literary History Studies. They were taken from books by Manol Lazarov, Petko Slaveykov, and by an unidentified author with initials K.S.M. This popular literature genre had a complex biography, following to some extent the ideological planning of the Bulgarian society and the social trajectory of the ideas of the nation, particular for that period. Initially, they were well accepted, so they gained vast popularity. Such a positive reception was particular for the period, when they were not experienced as non-matching to the emerging national ideology. Coincidingly with the rising of Bulgarian nationalism, their popularity decreased and they accumulated certain criticism, so in the beginning of the XX c. they were marginalized. In the last decades of XIX s., according to the changes of the ideological climate in Bulgaria, some of them were reinterpreted in a patriotic key.
More...Keywords: contemporary Bulgarian prose; crime literature; criminal genre and ideology; criminal genre and social consciousness
The article examines generically diverse post-1989 Bulgarian texts based on crime stories. It compares representations of criminality in the literature of the People's Republic of Bulgaria and in the fiction of local authors from the post-communist era. The focus is on how new narratives about criminals and detectives shape assessments about the present, the legacies of the totalitarian era, and the presence (or absence) of justice within Bulgaria’s contemporary socio-political reality.
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