BOOK 8

As a practice and a votive site, the vow has a significant place in traditional culture and is quite vital to the present day. It has its roots in Antiquity and is based on the belief that supernatural powers haunt all natural objects – caves, water springs, trees, etc., and are their owners. In order to settle on a particular territory and to use its resources, people should fight with the spirits and pay them for it – with gifts and sacrifices. Moreover, the sacrifices should be in a way equivalent to people’s expectations for favourable living conditions and abundant harvest, that is, the sacrifice should consist of what is most precious for the community. There are a number of rites containing some relics indicating that once even human life was sacrificed. Barbarous as they are, such rites suggest that striving for their living and paying a high price for all the earthly possessions they get from nature, people could not afford to squander and waste the earned resources; they were compelled to respect and highly evaluate them.

After presenting known and less known facts about the voynuks and the dervendjis, the article makes an attempt to clarify the reasons for the different stage of development of the different voynuk and dervendji villages. According to the author’s thesis, the privileged voynuk and dervendji status of part of the population in certain villages was not the main reason for their gradual transformation into significant economic and cultural centres, playing a major role in the Bulgarian history during the Revival period. Besides their geographic location in secluded mountainous areas and away from the main roads, a real reason was the adaptation of the inhabitants to the natural environment. The presence of pasture-grounds contributed to the development of the stock- breeding and the trade with wool, meat and dairy products, which were among the resources for developing some crafts. Certain settlements, on the other hand, developed because of the availability of resources for other crafts – production of rose oil, logging, metal-working, etc. The ethnographic features of the Balkan region can be added to the geographical situation, the natural environment and the development of certain economic sectors. Despite the fact that they had service farms (bashtina), in the situation of total control of the state over the agriculture and tax oppression, the voynuks, as well as the rest of the Bulgarians, could not easily turn into large landowners who directed their production mainly toward the market. For this, it was necessary to have such power and influence that belonged to the first big Turkish landowners, who usually came from the category of the askers (the military men), and in whose hands was the provincial administration. Although later on some Bulgarians obtained enough financial capital to turn into wealthy collectors of tax on sheep and goats, and of other taxes, and even large landowners, the primary means of their prosperity was stock-breeding, trade and crafts. It was precisely in these areas of economic activity that Bulgarians managed to get out of their dependence and total control of the state. Here, the Christians were sable more effectively to resist tax arbitrariness even with unauthorized means, and these dynamic and profitable industries managed to compensate it. They did not rely as much on tax privileges and service landowning, which actually made them dependent on the goodwill of the central authority.

This paper deals with two types of dependence of the Bulgarian journalists from the 19th century – the dependence of the editors from their editions, what they are inclined to do in behalf of them, even to the detriment of their personal writings, on one hand, and the dependence of the personal friendships and hostilities, on the other. The observations are based on some letters from the archive of Ivan Naydenov and other texts that draw the picture of his complicated relationships with Petko Slaveykov, Svetoslav Milarov, and Stefan Bobchev.

The paper seeks in the characters of G. P. Stamatov the tragedy of the modern man – the degradation from the creator of material culture to the slave of his own creations. This is an enduring topic in today‘s world, seen today in the prestigious prestige of our pseudo-elite – once at the bottom of society, now – accidentally unprepared at the top but without the necessary qualitative leap in intellectual and social terms. The text aims to show when the necessity of the accumulation of belongings becomes a disease and a dangerous dependence, as well as why the post-liberation Bulgarian in good standing in society feels a hunger not just to have a lot, but to show that he owns, to get legitimacy through others.

This text focuses on the specific dependence on the mother role which the childless woman in Julio Cortázar’s short story “The Condemned Door” warms to. The present work studies “fictional motherhood” and some of the possible explanations of the special double “play” of comforting the unborn son that exists both in the mind of the woman and in the mind of her neighboring man who seems to verify the child’s existence. This is a story of an obsession with what has no body, but exists in the form of a thought, a desire, and consciousness. The narrative tells how the dependence of the other reveals a need you may well feel too.

The article examines a main problem of late modernity in the 20th century: Technology as an atavistic shadow of Enlightenment rationality. As a force created by man but escaped from his power, which produces a new funda- mental slavery for the late modern das Man (in Heidegger’s sense). The article consists of two parts, unfolding two parallel but merging plots. The first part outlines the universal context of the era immediately after the end of WW II with an emphasis on Heidegger’s “second” philosophy (after die Kehre), the deepest critical self-reflection of late/crisis modernity in the mid-20th century and then: the basic idea of Technik/Machenschaft as an enslaving factor. The second part of the article examines how the same problem, which arose simultaneously but independently in the current Bulgarian reality in the 1960s and 1970s, was discussed by a representative part of Bulgarian prose: the “rural” writer Yordan Radichkov, the “urban” one Pavel Vezhinov, but above all Emilian Stanev, who, like Heidegger at the same time, paradoxically combines strongly right-wing ethno-conservatism and far-left eco-ideology.

The article interprets otherness as a distinctive feature of the person, positioning him beyond the scope of the community to which he belongs. That distinction is often behavioural and does not correspond to the moral conven- tions of the social group. It often brings about the rejection of the individual, and dooms him to misunderstanding, aloneness, even death. The following two works of the contemporary Bulgarian literature have been selected for observation: the 125short novel The Barrier by Pavel Vezhinov and the novella “Verse for Her” by Nikolai Vatov. The analytical parallel between the characters in the two lite- rary works has been driven by difference as a viewpoint for their interpretation.

The transformations we explore consist in the fact that from what is specifically contained in the text, the Absurdism passes into the principles of the director‘s thinking, and hence into the stage laws for constructing a new world. Now we think of this as an establishment of the unusual form of directors’ independence, hidden under the apparent dependence on drama. In Stoyan Kambarev’s practice, it manifests itself in a different light: independence, which does not reject, does not discredit, does not degrade the drama, but accepts it as an “accomplice”, and thus rehabilitates the director as seeking dialogue with the world around, instead of unambiguously staring at himself.

This text wants to pursue a somewhat different direction in the cur- rent con­versation on world literature; it seeks to ‘multiply’ world literature and demon­strate that there is no world literature per se, but rather different world literatures, because at different times different communities produce different constructs that they label as world literature. In my title, I signal that here we are dealing with answers to the questions what world literature is and how to write its his­tory that come from Soviet Russia, encompassing a period of some seventy years. My emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet atten­tion to world literature; foremost amongst these is the compelling determina­tion of Soviet intellectuals to conceive of world literature in a systematically non-Occidentocentric manner. With this, the Soviets were pioneer- ing an approach to world literature that foreshadows our current concerns, as I will try to demonstrate. But there is also another lesson emerging from the Soviet preoccupation with world literature: the conversation on world literature does not proceed in a vacuum, it is constantly interacting with, impacting on, and being impacted by, the conversation societies have about national literatures and literary theory. I begin by briefly adumbrating four historically attest- able meanings of ‘world literature’ that are still at work in the Soviet debates; I then identify three different cultural and ideological horizons (or frameworks) of thinking about world literature in the Soviet Union and, significantly, locate their common ground, the glue that bound them together, in the master approach of de-Westernizing the very notion of world literature, an attitude consistently enacted by Soviet intellectuals engaging with the history of world literature.

The paper is concerned with the nature of fact, as a part of the struc- ture of genre-hybrid fiction biographies. It is assumed that any fact created by author‘s imagination is implicitly literary unless it is a specific document. This argument is being supported by theoretical justifications by J. Tynyanov. The examples of the peripeteia of real facts about the personality and work of F. Dostoevsky in the genre of fictional biography are from the novel The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee. In this work, the author‘s interpreta- tion is achieved through an original intertextual play that reproduces Dostoev- sky‘s literary personality and the complex construction of his creative world.

The article belongs to a series of publications presenting the results of the author’s research of the XX–XXI centuries’ Russian and foreign fantasy from the viewpoint of the Afterlife Universe artistic image embodiment as a special locus of human being (soul) postmortem existence. The article highlights charac- teristic features and functions of one of the basic leitmotifs in the artistic structure of the narrative of the afterlife – the motif of memory. It has been revealed that the given leitmotif is interpreted by writers in several semantic aspects and includes a number of subordinate motives: “self-memory” as the basis of a person’s posthumous self-identification, the memory of close family members and years past, the memory of the alive about the dead, and, finally, the memory of the humanity as a whole about its own history. Based on the results of the analysis, one can draw certain conclusions on the general meaning of the leitmotif: memory is a unique trace in history left by a person, it is also a great debt owed by the living to the dead, and it is the total collective experience that shapes humanity. Besides, in a number of texts, it is a steady basis of the Afterlife Universe existence.

The study examines Russian poetry of the 20th century, falling into the field of the avant-garde, and presents the features of cultural processes, the development of avant-garde trends, changes in the functions of art and language, vectors, and concepts. The boundaries of the literary phenomenon are made meaningful. The rebellion against aesthetic norms requires searching for new proportions and aspects of perception. Both the early and the second half of the century avant-garde set themselves the goal of shaking the perceiver, breaking the automatism of reading, and causing active rejection or misunderstanding. Hence, techniques related to difficult reading include “memorized” creations, “cut-off” words, a multitude of neologisms, broken syntactic constructions, and the fusion of incompatible aesthetic or thematic phenomena. The avant-garde versions of twentieth-century art emphasize resistance to the label manifestations of culture, opposing as an alternative the reduced, careless form, affirming through negation the breakthrough to the sacred and the true, the search for new positive meanings.

The article is part of a larger study on Russian/Soviet dystopia in literature, and partly in cinema. Here, the subject of reading is Vladimir Sorokin‘s “Ice Trilogy”, containing the novels Ice (2002), The Path of Bro (2004) and 23000 (2005).

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).

Някои предмети на човешкото размишление привличат – било защото има нещо в самите тях, било защото има нещо у нас самите – към все по-задълбочено размишление, и колкото повече се отдаваме на това привличане и се изгубваме в тях, толкова повече те се превръщат в един единен предмет, който ние – в зависимост от това дали го търсим и намираме в себе си, или извън себе си – характеризираме като природа на нещата или като определение на човека. Други предмети вероятно никога не биха привлекли вниманието ни, ако в свещена самота посвещавахме наблюдението си изключително и единствено на този предмет на всички предмети и ако не се намирахме във взаимоотношения с други хора, едва от общуването с които да изникват подобни отношения и понятия за отношения, които при по-внимателна рефлексия да се разгръщат и разпластяват до предмети на размишлението, т. е. включително тук да следват тъкмо противоположния ход на нещата.

Предложените по-долу на българския читател стихове са от късния период на Фридрих Хьолдерлин (1770–1843), когато поетът – състудент и приятел на колосите на Немския идеализъм Шелинг и Хегел от Тюбингенската семинария – вече е изпаднал в период на видимо умопомрачение, продължило десетилетия, до самата му смърт (въпреки спекулациите от някои тълкуватели, че то е било преструвка, помагала му да се крие от реални или въображаеми политически противници и преследвания, най-вече във връзка с опитите за съдебен процес срещу неговия другар Исак фон Синклер и конспирациите за сваляне на вюртембергския курфюрст). В този период поетът обитава прочутата си кула в Тюбинген, част от дома на семейството на дърводелеца Ернст Цимер, когато помрачението на съзнанието му се редува с кратки периоди на просветление, а приемането на рядко наминаващите любопитни гости – и с продължителни импровизации на пиано и опити за творчество, вдъхновено от гледката отвисоко към река Некар.

В последните семинарни занятия по „Литература на Българското възраждане“ симптоматично пролича овладяното, ала заразително пристрастие на Сирма Данова към мястото на Паисий Хилендарски като особен вид конструктор или по-точно – около което се фокусираше нейният изследователски интерес – субстрат на терена на националната културна идентичност. Тогава не знаехме, че привилегироването на този въпрос е свързано с актуалната ѝ научна работа, не си давах- ме сметка, че този труд ще бъде нейната лебедова песен.