Bulgarian prose

The article examines the means of artistic embodiment of a person in a transitional period – the period of the 1990s, based on the material of Bulgarian and Russian literature (the collection of stories Heads or Tails (1999) by D. Enev, the collection of stories and novellas The Nineties (2024) by R. Senchin). The key role in the prose of both writers is played by the “little man” who finds himself in a marginal position. Many characters have an emphatically asocial character. The interest of both authors in marginal heroes, the appeal to transit, border spaces and situations are due to the specifics of the extra-literary context – the philosophy of the transition time of the 1990s, a period of loss of the previous system of axiological coordinates, abrupt socio-political transformations. The analysis revealed that the writers gravitate toward different strategies for creating the image of a person of transition time: Enev often resorts to modeling heterogeneous space and describes the dual position of a modern person through spatial oppositions, while Senchin focuses on the inner world of the hero, conveying his psychological state through internal monologues and indirect speech. In his works, several types of marginal heroes and models of their behavior can also be identified (from the disintegration of personality to attempts to find new life guidelines).