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The article deals with the doomed to failure efforts to break the bond between writing and the biographical personality of the author, to erase the traces of his biography. Emphasis is put on the responsibility of the writer to the society in which he lives. It is pointed out that the modern paradigm, outlined by the chaos theory, the catastrophic theory, dissipative systems, as well as by the so called “butterfly effect”, puts in a new light the possibility of the writer to have an effect on the social system.
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The article stems from the popular concept “crisis of authorship”, promoted by the Russian literary scholar Mihail Bakhtin, implemented and developed by Atanas Buchkov in his works throughout the years. The crisis of authorship gradually developed into a new concept, “the death of the author”, in the context of French post-structuralism. Yet, Bulgarian literature knows another process which could be called “oblivion of the author”. What I have in mind is its capacity to forget, sometimes completely, some writers even among those who have been well known in their time. Such is the case with Evgenia Dimitrova (1875-1930), the best known Bulgarian woman prose writer during the first three decades of the 20th century, author of the first psychological novel in our literature. The article aims to revive and to introduce her name and her works in the history of Bulgarian literature.
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The paper deals with the “I am not…” formula of Bulgarian lyric poetry and refers to two specific cases – that of a 1873 satirical poem of Bulgaria’s greatest poet of the nineteenth century Hristo Botev, and that of Nikolay Liliev’s lyrical discourse, a paragon of Bulgarian symbolism of the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Botev rejected his own context by making an apophatic canon, a list of writers taken as laughing stock. Liliev did not pronounce any writers’ names yet he rejected the social images and roles of the writers of his decade. Thus, by negating names and discourses or by negating writers’ roles and images, both authors aimed at definitely declaring their bias of non-belonging to their literary contexts.
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The article deals with the problem of time and its influence on the moral world of the characters in Dostoevsky Pentateuch. It turns out that the age of the hero determines his place in the spiritual scale of values, where the highest value is childhood, and the lowest degree is old age. Dostoevsky believes that it is possible to save man from the defamatory power of chronos. Remembrances and suffering return the child's guise, restoring in the person the "image and likeness" of God.
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The present paper traces the reasons for the mutual (mis)recognition of two in essence intrinsically semantically inter-related concepts: World literature and translation. By chartering some stages in the cultural debates about them in the period between the 19th and the 21st century (Goethe, Auerbach, Schleiermacher, Ortega y Gasset and a number of contemporary scholars), the analysis does not aim at presenting a panorama but at elucidating the biases and prejudices that led to this “theoretical shortsightedness”: the high expectations of cosmopolitanism from the beginning of the 19th century, the sharp negativism towards mass culture, the denial of the creative essence of translation, today’s heightened demands for inter- and transcultural communication, behind which we can very often straightforwardly discern, among other things, market mechanisms.
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The study is focused on Yordan Radichkov’s novel Everyone and No-one (1975). At first glance, the work meets the normative requirements of socialist realism for “correct” artistic representation of reality. A closer scrutiny, however, will discern in Radichkov’s text a number of “incorrect” things, among which one can feel the expression of deep disappointment over the unfulfilled (and unfulfillable) project of the Revolution to create a new (better) man and a new (better) world. This disappointment partly manifests itself in the peculiar dialogue with Geo Milev’s poem September – one of the most powerful “prophetic” articulations of left-wing ideology in the Bulgarian context…
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The object of study is the comparative analysis of Ruben Dario’s Poem of Autumn, translated by Gennadiy Shmakhov, and Joseph Brodsky’s “Piazza Mattei”. The aim is to find grounds for the possibility of Shmakhov’s influence on Brodsky’s work. Both poems are written in rhymed 4-to-2 step iambic quatrains with a slight difference in the structure of clauses: in Shmakhov’s translation there is the alternation of male and female endings, while in Brodsky’s poem we find only female ones. In the course of the analysis, we come to the conclusion that the rhythm, the tonality, the topical structure and the atmosphere of love of life with elements of hedonism, as well as the mythological semantics of some images of Ruben Dario’s poem could be taken to persist in Brodsky’s memory and to somehow manifest themselves in Piazza Mattei. Even if Brodsky had not known Shmakhov’s translation, still the typological proximity of the two poems makes an interesting example of literary interrelations.
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The present text focuses on the question of the "ultimate" observing authority in the "The drool of the devil". This is an attempt to study who is the biggest, the highest, the most real viewer that is present? Who is the "true master" of the story? The narrative, the author, the heroes, the reader, the one in the center of the sphere? The answer is to be sought in “The drool of the devil” or “The Devil's Drool”, also commonly known as “Blow-up” – after Antonioni’s film which it inspired.
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The essay discusses the travelogue To Chicago and Back by juxtaposing it to Oriental slaughterhouses and the modern slaughterhouse of the New world. Amidst the glamour of expositions (Aleko Konstantinov visited Paris (1889) and Chicago (1893) but described Chicago only), there crop up the questions “what is the future” and “what is the New world”. The basic anxiety is “where is the world going” and “well, when are we going to live” which appeared when Aleko Konstantinov encountered the images of the Columbian Exposition, the slaughterhouses, Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward and the description of Paris upon his return from the New world. During his entire trip around America Aleko remembers Paris but continues to avoid describing it. The promise that he would do so in 1900 (a new World exposition in Paris) remained hypothetical (he was killed in 1897). But the trip to Paris was combined with a round-the-world one, i.e. again a visit on the way. In the flame of progress he detected coldness; there was a chill discernible in the picture of the coming modern world. The problematics of “when are we going to live” is important in the context of American, European and Balkan culture. On the other hand, it was precisely in America that the idea for the most emblematic of Aleko Konstantinov’s works appeared, i.e. Baj Ganyo. The essay compares the visions of the future in the context of the Paris and Columbian World Expositions.
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The paper traces the possible parallels between Walter Benjamin’s Book of Passages and Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk. The conclusions lead to identifying a search for the “Western gaze” as a narrative model for constructing the personal world of memory in the novel by the Turkish narrator.
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Stoyan Zaimov is the first reviewer who analyses in detail the biography of Hristo Botev‘s by Zahari Stoyanov. Zaimov shows weaknesses of different types, he adds and corrects facts from Botev‘s life. On the other hand, he admires the pages in which Zahari Stoyanov, in his inimitable style, displays events and scenes from Botev‘s life and those of the Bulgarian revolutionaries. In his analysis Zaimov uses a metaphorical language clear for the wide range of readers; in addition, however, he uses a terminology which would require a special audience (including terms like feuilleton, short story, drawing, novel, political novel, historical novel, biographical-historical novel, the term novel-biography is also implicated). As a whole, the biographical work has been evaluated as a superb accomplishment. According to Zaimov, the author Zahari Stoyanov has managed the difficult task of writing a history of the Bulgarian people and at the same time – a personal biography of Botev.
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The article deals with several literary works (poems, parodies, dramas), dedicated to Bulgarian poet Peyo Yavrov. The main focus is the change in the image of Yavorov throughout the twentieth century.
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The text deals with the topos “Portartar” of the story of Yordan Yovkov’s „Drugoselets” through the prism of anthropological geography and conceives the notions of otherness, borderline and marginality in their philosophical and moral dimensions.
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The object of the present paper is to study Emilian Stanev’s novella The Queen of Turnovo through the prism of the medicine – literature relationship by virtue of which his work holds a special place in Bulgarian literature. Therefore, this paper brings up a host of medical and social issues for discussion – the activities of the formally trained physician, hygiene care, prostitution and venereal diseases, tuberculosis, destructive passion, political insanity, war (as) syndrome, cholera, and clashing views on (in)effective medical therapies. On the one hand, these problems suggest the need for a diagnostic consultation; on the other hand, they reveal the impossibility of making an accurate diagnosis and finding a way to deal with this alarming situation. They allow one to construe illness and the morbid in the flesh and soul of the body politic, to make sense of the eternal questions about free choice, guilt, responsibility, and punishment.
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This essay offers reflections on the lyrical poetry of Pavel Matev, Dimitar Danailov, Andrey Germanov, Nikola Indjov and Kiril Kadiiski
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The article discusses the world’s literature devoted to the history of the Lodz ghetto published since 1943.
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The aim of the article was to discuss the influence of jealousy (phthonos) on the fame of godly and ungodly people and to present two divergent views on the posthumous fate, which Birkowski described with regard to three aspects: physical, religious and metaphysical – death in people remembrance.
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