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The essay investigates an unresolved issue in the early history of modern Bulgarian literature concerning the person or persons who translated the 1893 English edition of Ivan Vazov’s novel ‘Under the Yoke’. The argument is based on some recently found material backed by literary-reception methodology.
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The text “reads” Vazov’s “feature stories out of metropolitan life” as the first book in Bulgarian literature after the Liberation that permeates through the modern city. The image of the city is/represents a mosaic of stories that the educated/the intellectuals share with each other and analyze. It is noteworthy that in the middle of the last decade of the 19th century the city/Sofia is rather a research field than a space where the writer has already got its own clearly defined place – different writing people inhabit different individual closed spaces, and the tension between the exquisite literature, newspaper genres and “the sad reality” (Aleko Konstantinov) does not yield to easy mastery/solving.
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The paper is concerned with a problem unresearched up to now, namely, in what ways the architecture of Art Nouveau (in its Secession concretisation, appropriated in the Bulgarian context), the influence of which on the literary process in Bulgaria in general has been sufficiently elucidated, exercised an impact on the style and locations of literary life, in particular. Therefore it is focused on the correlation between the newly introduced architectural style and the cultural life of the capital during the first decades of the twentieth century.
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The paper presents an unstudied text with the name of the Apostle Andrew in the miscellany of 15th c., now Muz.10272, Rashka orthography. The text (with traces of archaic archetype) is a unique copy of the compilation. The history of the manuscript is very interesting, because it belonged to the A. Hilferding collection in the past. The aim of the author is to propose a preliminary analysis of the text, its origin and chronology, as well as its context in the Slavic tradition.
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The article aims to present and analyze those passages of the Hexameron (Šestodnev) in which ‘heretics’, ‘Manichaeans’, ‘pagans’ or ‘pagan Slavs’ are mentioned. The fragments are compared with their Greek counterparts (as long as these exist); the Old Bulgarian texts (especially those that can be considered original additions or loose compilations) are utilized for interpreting certain elements of heterodox doctrines common to Manichaeism, Paulicianism, Massalianism and Bogomilism. The Old Bulgarian translation/compilation by John Exarch supplies important information on the cosmology, theological doctrine and liturgical life of the Neo-Manichaeans within the Byzantine- Slavic world. The original additions and passages that can be seen as loose translations or compilations testify to the relevance of anti-dualist polemics even in the later periods of the Byzantine-Slavic religious community. The old Gnostic and Manichaean concepts, adapted by later dualist heresies (as e.g. Massalianism and Paulicianism), coupled with Trinitarian and Christological deviations from the official dogma, infiltrate the 1st Bulgarian Empire and provide a hospitable environment for the appearance of Bogomilism. In this sense, the Old Bulgarian Hexameron turns out to be an important source of information on the predecessors of the ‘Bulgarian heresy’. The original additions and loose translations/compilations of certain passages uncover some ‘common areas’ characteristic of all medieval Neo-Manichaean doctrines: the dualist creation myth, the belief in Satan as God’s ‘first-born son’ and the related Trinitarian and Christological departures from the prescribed dogma. Especially noteworthy is the passage referring to the Trisagion (Trisvetoe). The rejection of particular elements of the Liturgy of the Faithful attests to the dualists’ more diversified attitude towards the official ritual – not an indiscriminate renunciation, but the exclusion of those elements that were considered to praise the Old Testament God and to be irreconcilable with the Neo-Manichaean beliefs concerning creation and forgiveness. The mentioning of a Slavic pagan sun cult should be analyzed not only in connection with the charges against Manichaeans and Slavs concerning idolatry, but also in a wider context of the refutation of antique astrological beliefs and soothsaying practices. The comparison of particular lexemes, phrases and larger textual units in John Exarch’s Hexameron on the one hand and the Sermon Against the Heretics on the other makes it possible to conjecture that Cosmas the Priest was familiar with his predecessor’s work and made use of it when composing his own anti-heretic text.
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The New Testament apocryphon Didascalia Domini is one of the least known. Its original was written in Greek, according to François Nau, at the end of the 7th century. Relatively early it was translated into Old Church Slavonic. At present five copies of this translation are known, stretching from the 13th to the 15th century. Three of them belong to the Serbian redaction, one each to the Russian (East Slavic) and to the Middle Bulgarian redaction. According to Michail Nestorovič Speranskij the translation originated in Bulgaria. The Greek copies, the oldest of which stems from the 11th century, have divergent final chapters. Moreover, the Slavic translation has yet another ending not corresponding to any of the Greek texts. The textological analysis of the five Slavic copies makes it possible to get an idea of their mutual relationship. On the basis of the linguistic archaisms of the text one can surmise that the translation has been made in Eastern Bulgaria during the 11th century. At the end of the paper there is a critical edition of the Slavic text.
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The paper follows out the way of denomination and description of Sofia town in manuscripts from different genre during the period of the 15th –17th centuries, namely: the original hagiographic and hymnographic works of the men of letters from the 16th century Sofia literary school; the bedrolls; some marginal notes. This type of sources is rich enough not only for shaping the image of the town according to the linguistic evidences it was depicted with, but for making some general conclusions about its place in the so called “linguistic world view” as a semiotic model for approaching the lifestyle, the spiritual culture and the Bulgarian ethnic consciousness during the Ottoman domination. The chosen frame of time is not hazardous. It was a transitory period for both naming process and the creation of a new cultural situation, when the ideological and political dominant of the medieval town (the capital in particular) as an incarnation of the ruler’s institution has been already changed. Moreover, with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the very Byzantine prototype of the town-mother and the spiritual center of the Orthodox world were destroyed. It is a matter of scholarly interest to give an idea on how another, different (new) model of the town was created in the Bulgarian cultural space to replace the past glorious vision, and how it reproduced the tradition. Briefly, how does the text create an image? It is a way to introduce the notion of hierotopy and its language in the original Bulgarian works of the given period. The specifically Bulgarian material inscribes itself in the common typological frames of the Balkan medieval culture in Ottoman times. The paradigm of holiness and the formation of the holly space require those aspects to be carried out in the light of the complex interdependency between the text, the image and the historical context – a binding triad that will be the base for the attending presentation.
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In his works upon the Italian Renaissance, Ivan Shishmanov shows special interest to not so well known in Bulgaria author – Ludovico Ariosto. One of the reasons for that is quite logical and objective – Ariosto is a remarkable figure in the literature of the Italian Renaissance. The other reason is emotionally subjective – the presence of a Bulgarian theme in his emblematic work – the poem “The furious Orlando” (Orlando furioso).
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This report aims to present some amusing stories of Bulgarian writers among the Bulgarian resorts as well as poems and songs about wine and resorts. The songs praise passion, love and adventures with women, wine and temptations. The report uses fiction, memories and poetry from Iv. Vazov, K. Hristov, P. P. Slaveykov, P. K. Yavorov, Tz. Tzerkovski, D. Debelyanov, Hr. Smirnenski, N. Liliev, As. Raztsvetnikov, M. Petkanova, Iv. Hadzhihristov, Ran Bosilek, and other. The biographical notes of the Bulgarian poets include many funny and entertaining stories. They are the reason why classic literature spreads in the same pace and in the same place as popular literature in Bulgaria. The most sensible genre in this respect is poetry – it manages to accept and create a lot of hit songs, praising these feelings. Love, wine and women are three irreplaceable constants when it comes to adventures around Bulgarian resorts.
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An impressive collection – I would keep her under lock and key until she stops writing ... – with studies on women and their creative force, was published at the end of 2015. The editors of the book – Magdalena Kostova-Panayotova and Boyka Ilieva – have done extremely precise selection and ordering of the texts in it. All are dedicated to the woman: the woman mother and guardian of family values, traditions and faith; woman benefactress; woman with progressive ideas, open to new and creative; woman at home and at work; woman as author of literary works – lyrics and prose. Creativity of the woman is viewed on two levels, separated into two sections of the book, namely: 1) Female voices in the Bulgarian cultural space and 2) Female voices in the European cultural space.
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This article deals with the sense of the pace of time as reflected in the works of Bulgarian philosophers from the “philosophy of life” school, and of other thinkers active in the humanities. It is shown that the feeling of “condensed” time among the authors of the inter-war period is inevitably associated with Biblical imagery – the “reduction” of time foresees the end of time. Several authors left a lasting mark on Bulgarian intellectual history due to their sensitivity to the sharp turns of the age, and their awareness of the intense “flow” of time. The most prominent among tchem were Spiridon Kazandjiev and Yanko Yanev, authors with right-wing political leanings. This article reveals how the end of time provoked in them not only distress and anxiety but also exhilaration at what lay ahead, as if it were the realisation of a longcherished dream.
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The paper is an attempt to reflect on the place of eschatological themes in modern and post-modern Bulgarian literature from the viewpoint of the istory of ideas. The objective of the study is literary paraphrases of the evangelical history of the 20th and early 21st centuries, which are perceived as modern apocrypha and thus as evidence of philosophical exploration of the epoch. These are placed in the context of three worldview systems competing in Europe: Judeo-Christian, Gnostic (Esoteric), and rationalistic (the Enlightenment), which considered as a epistemological paradigms (or ideal types) serve only as a hermeneutic perspective. In this light, the authors’ paraphrases about God’s Kingdom (and its Prophet and Messiah) give a diagnosis about the present crisis (of values), and therefore define an evil, speaking in fact about the Bulgarian search for a Modus Existendi. Their soteriological proposal bring about an eschatological perspective, revealing some ethical concepts (hidden in the author’s anthropology). The subject of interest relates to sources of salvation (i.e. the higher good), which manifest itself in the concepts of time (and narrative). Therefore, at the philosophical heart of the paper is Charles Taylor’s idea about the fundamental relation between the concepts of good, self, narrative and society. The analyses are provided in the light of the philosophical reflections of Agata Bielik-Robson, Philip Rieff, Paul Ricoeur, Luis Dupré, and Jacob Taubes. The main aim of the paper is to reveal the progressive process of internalising the sources of salvation, which makes the eschatological perspective disappear. Therefore, after a brief presentation of the Judeo-Christian and Gnostic apocrypha from the first half of the 20th century,in which the promise of (some king of) salvation is still valid, it is shown that most of the Bulgarian apocrypha written after 1989 create an absolutely nihilistic message, since with the help of the positive pattern they give a radically negative interpretation of the world, and thus essentially announce a complete lack of hope for its improvement. Paradoxically however, by creating a world without a good end, by revealing the mechanism of slipping into a Neognostic worldview (based on the reversed Gnostic spiritual monism), the Bulgarian apocrypha illustrate the need for a (re)dynamisation of the axiological sphere, the need for a restoration of multidimensional existence. In consequence, a connection is pointed out – according to Taubes – between the condition of the eschatological man, who pins his hope on the future, and the messianic necessity to approve the ontological leap.
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Modern Bulgarian Bessarabian Prose was established in the 1980s. It was created by authors born and raised in the Bulgarian villages of a region which is today part of Ukraine and Moldova. The article is based on a survey questionnaire submitted by three of these authors. It starts with an introduction to these authors’ portraits as creative writers, followed by biographical details about the way they acquired command of literary Bulgarian, how they became familiar with national Bulgarian prose, about the reception and appreciation of Bulgarian Bessarabian intellectuals’ achievements etc. Special attention is devoted to the themes which these three authors introduce to modern Bulgarian Bessarabian prose.
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The review presents the latest documentary study of the case of Laura - Yavorov by Dr Yordan Nanchev, a literary historian, and a lawyer. The work is highly appreciated as a good tracking of the facts and an adequate reading of their documentary impact in the archives, especially those of the publisher Alexander Paskalev and Prof. Asen Zlatarov, with whom the author has been working for years.
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The paper presents and comments on the papers, responses, and discussions from the Round Table “The post-1989 Transition in Contemporary Bulgarian Literature.” It gave focus to several topics related to events, ideas, and attitudes intrinsic to the understanding of the Transition but also to the period preceding it. The participants offered their analyses of how the changes in the social and political order were reflected in the literature, the public consciousness, the media, theatre, and film, among others.
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The article is the first attempt in the Bulgarian humanities to analyze, on the basis of comparative material from different time segments of the Bulgarian literary process, the image projections of Patriarch Euthymius. This is done in the light of a very debatable theory – the theory of the importance of passionaries for historical procedurality. We are looking for interpretive visions, attracted by the philosophy of history, ethnology andl iterature, to prove the complex understanding of the role and importance of this Bulgarian passionary through the axiological options of the times in which literary works were created, whose main actor was the last patriarch of the second Bulgarian kingdom.
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The paper is focused on the book “Hristo Botyov – an attempt for a biography” (1888) by Zachary Stoyanov. It is the first and probably the most popular biography of the poet and revolutionary. The creation of that book could be considered, alongside with the book “Works by Hristo Botyov”, edited and published by Z. Stoyanov as well, as an episode, part of a systematic project to install Botev into the then-rising heroic pantheon of Bulgarian history and culture. The biography text was reflected during the days of his publication and later on. Some of them, seen as signifying, are regarded in the current research work. According to certain authors, the biography of Botev by Stoyanov is written in idealized mode. Others claim, in contrary, that Hristo Botev was discredited by his first biographer. Reflections were obviously heterogeneous, and the reason for that is the fact that in the late XIX c. the Bulgarian national cultural canon was still in its formative period. Personal memory was still not transformed into cultural one, and the canonical image of the character, fashioning him into a national hero paradigm, was still not forged. Not only in Botev’s case, but also concerning the Bulgarian wide publicity and its historical imagery. That’s the main reason why these first biographies of Botev were not able to match the authors’ intentions on the level of the reception, and to emit fully positive image of Hristo Botev.
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The main goal of the present text is the study of the concept of the rose - its semantics and functionality in the context of current floral poetic research. The rose is one of the most literary flowers, an example of expanding the boundaries of the symbol. The floristic code will be considered as a part of the decorative experiments of the Bulgarian Symbolist-Secessionist literature on the pages of the magazines "Khudozhnik", "Nash zhivot", in the translated texts of the representatives of "Young Poland" - Kazimesh Psherva-Tetmayer and Stanislav Przybishevsky, as part of the figurative-metaphoric system of the Russian symbolists.
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This essay analyses The Defeated (2019), the latest novel by Bulgarian writer Theo-dora Dimova, as well as the ways in which literary narrative can affect collective memory.Dimova’s book references events that unfolded in Bulgaria in the aftermath of the commu-nist coup on 9 September 1944. The analysis relies on methodology developed in the field ofmemory studies, focusing on collective memory (A. Assmann, J. Assmann), as well as the inter-relationship between literature and memory (Erll). The concept of postmemory, as describedby Hirsch, is also critical to the arguments presented here, alongside trauma and affect studies(LaCapra, Caruth).
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