Keywords: Denis Diderot, cultural transfer, Romanian Francophonie, Ion Luca Caragiale, Mihail Eminescu
This article makes use of new elements to describe the complex process through which the works of Denis Diderot penetrated into Romanian culture from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century. While he had first kindled Romanian interest as the editor of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des arts et des métiers, he was already translated and published as a novelist as early as 1838, first (and mostly) in Transylvania, then in Moldavia and Walachia. He was, however, also read in French, as shown by a number of articles mentioning him (dating from 1842). Some important names of Romanian literature also had keen interest in him : Ion Luca Caragiale appreciated his Paradoxe du comédien, which he quoted and frequently used in his own essays about the dramatic art, and Mihail Eminescu, who made a fine romantic poem inspired by the beginning of Diderot’s La Religieuse.
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Keywords: National identity, the image of “the other”, Occidentalism, Panslavism, geopolitics
The article focuses on an understudied trend in the ideological and political life of the Bulgarian society. An analysis of the texts of Bulgarian authors from the eighteenth-twentieth centuries underlies the conclusion that they contain a number of elements of Occidentalism, i. e. of the mental and verbal structures related to the communication with the West, of the negative predisposition to the West manifested in hatred for cities and for the modern urban civilization with its literature and music, for trade and modern communications. An attempt is made to reveal the cultural, historical and geopolitical factors determining these elements. The article accounts for the circumstance that in the course of the centuries that followed the Ottoman conquest the affiliation of the Bulgarians to the community of Eastern Orthodox Christians had as a consequence the superimposition of the negative effects from the confrontation between Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism on the image of the West. The author recognizes the role of the influence of German philosophy representatives Herder, Schelling and Schlegel, which permeated the Bulgarian space via the works of Pavel Šafárik, Jan Kollar, Yuriy Venelin and the Russian Slavophiles. It is pointed out that in the early decades of the 19th century Occidentalism in the Balkans acquired an increasingly distinct geopolitical ring related to the resurgence of Russian policy in the Balkans.
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Keywords: review; chronicle; Russia-image; Balkans
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Keywords: Nationalities Affairs; authors; contributions; bibliography 1992-2012
On the occasion of the 20 years’ anniversary of the academic journal Sprawy Narodowościowe (Nationalities Affairs) its origin and current situation have been presented in some detail. This bi-annual international and multidisciplinary journal was established in 1992 as a continuation of traditions of the prewar bi-monthly of the same title, which originally appeared in Warsaw in 1927-1939. It focuses on the study of nation, nationalisms and ethnicity, and is published under the auspices of the Polish Academy of Sciences, with the Institute for the Slavic Studies in Warsaw and Poznan as its editor. In the years between 1992 to 2012 a total number of ca. 550 articles, including 60 in English, as well as 170 book reviews was published, while the total number of printed pages reached 10,000. The contributors, in the number of 350, come mainly from Poland but also from abroad. Abstracts and pdf versions are available in the Internet. The text comprises a separate part including a full list of all the issues published over the 20 years’ period, as well as a full bibliography of all the contributions. Each entry contains a name of the author/co-author, title of the article, issue number and year of publication (a name of translator, if there is one).
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Keywords: Book reviews
“A BOOK THAT WARMS THE HEART...” (Калицин, М . Корона на историите на Ходжа Садеддин . Първа част . Превод от османотурски , студия и коментари. Велико Търново , Абагар 2000); Мишкова , Диана . Приспособяване на свободата . Модерност – легитимност в Сърбия и Румъния през XIX век. София, Парадигма 2001; Brunnbauer, Ulf, Karl Kaser (Hg.) Vom Nutzen der Verwandten. Soziale Netzwerke in Bulgarien (9. und 20. Jahrhundert). Wien–Köln–Weimar, Böhlau Verlag 2001; Korespondencija Josip Juraj Strossmayer – Serafin Vannutelli 1 88 –887 (prir. Josip Balabani i Josip Kolanovi ) Monumenta Vaticana Croatica, Posebna izdanja 1. Zagreb, 1999; Василев , Г . БЪЛГАРСКИ БОГОМИЛСКИ И АПОКРИФНИ ПРЕДСТАВИ В АНГЛИЙСКАТА СРЕДНОВЕКОВНА КУЛТУРА ( НА ХРИСТОС ОРАЧ В ПОЕМАТА НА УИЛЯМ ЛАНГЛАНД “ НА ПЕТЪР ОРАЧА ”). София 2001
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Keywords: slavery; power; legitimacy; Bulgaria; concept; slave; metaphor
This article examines the concept of ‘slavery’ in nineteenth-century Bulgarian culture. Starting from the theoretical problems in abstracting and formalizing ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ as unified terms and concepts, it examines their formalized metaphorization in nineteenth-century journalistic texts and institutional documents, as well as the social ‘encounters’ between the thematizations of the metaphor and the literal legal meanings of the term. The study focuses on the interpretations of the legitimacy of power in Bulgarian writing.
More...The main objective of this paper is to reconstruct, so far as is possible, some aspects of the medieval cultural identity of one of the emblematic cities in the Byzantine oecumene, namely the city of Sofia. Undoubtedly, medieval Sardica/ Serdica/ Sredets/ Triaditsa/ Sofia was neither a real factor nor an imaginary topos of the rank of Constantinople. However, for part of the Balkan population, the town functioned in much the same way, especially at the level of Christian eschatology and political teleology. That is why the reconstruction of its cultural memory could create sound grounds for reconstructions of the memory of other Balkan towns whose history and/or identity were connected with those of Serdica/ Sredets/ Sofia. Last but not least, studying these issues will make it possible to comprehend more correctly the mechanisms of functioning of Byzantine memory, because the way in which the ‘golden age’ (if the archaeologists are to be trusted) of Sofia – the period between the 4 th and 6th centuries AD – was conceived of and memorialized was totally dependant – that is, at the level of the official historiography – on the short-term purposes and long-term projects of the ideologists of Constantinople, the New Rome.
More...Keywords: the Balkans; East – West; myth; history; stereotypes; the new Slavic novels;
The article discusses how the Balkans create the myth of their history/histories through the experience of subordination and the aspiration to overcome it. One of the common moments in these stories at the beginning of the 21st century is connected to the idea of the adventures of identity with the motive for the memory and seeking foot in their own past, in the national vicissitudes and myths that are transforming. Some key Slavic novels from the beginning of the 21st century reflect the intersections of what civilizational east-west ‘luggage’ the Slav in Europe has at the beginning of the century, how this ‘luggage’ fights the stereotypes of the West and of the East as well, how the collapsing Yugoslavia-world, as well as the world of communist regimes in the region topicalize the issue of memory, history, literature and language as a whole.
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