Bulgarian

The article discusses the Russian translation of The Slavic King- dom by Mavro Orbini, published in Moscow at the initiative of Peter the Great. He takes a particular interest in the Southern Slavs during the campaign of 1711 to river Prut, hoping to raise them to fight against the Ottoman enslavers. The campaign is failed, but on the tsar’s order Sava of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) translates the above-mentioned work of Orbini. Attention in the article is given both to the personality of the translator and to his translation techniques. In the process of translation Sava of Ragusa omits many parts of the Italian original text in view of the interests of Russian readers. The Bulgarian share of the The Slavic Kingdom and the reasons for the translation’s gaps are analyzed in more details. An attempt to classify the omissions is made.

През 2025 г. – в навечерието на своята 80-годишнина – вдъхновеният българист и изследовател на историята на славянските и балканските литератури Игор Калиганов напусна този свят. Оценен високо не само в славистиката, но с приносите си в европейското културно пространство, през 1997 г. той бе удостоен с премията в памет на митрополит Макарий (1482–1563), а през 2006 – с Международната премия „Св. св. Кирил и Методий“. Дейността му като българист бе отличена с почетни грамоти от Министерството на културата на Република България (1994 и 2000), с почетните знаци на БАН и на Руската православна църква, както и с най-високото българско държавно отличие – орден „Стара планина“ I степен (2000) за цялостно творчество.

The article starts from the discrepancy between the visual image of Bai Ganyo imposed by Bulgarian artists and the descriptions of the character in the text of the work, in order to ask the question of what is the model on which the book is built. Is this the model of realistic literature, as the work is usually read, or is it some other? The distinction introduced by Sergey Averintsev between the models of ancient Greek literature and Near Eastern literature has been used to defend the thesis that Bai Ganyu exhibits all the basic signs of literature. The main characteristics of this model are: the allegorical poetics of the parable, not of ekphrasis; the involvement of the word directly in life situations; indexical, rather than iconic, function of verbal descriptions of the visual; the fundamental incompleteness of the work; manifestation of the personages as “ethos” rather than “characters”; functioning of the work as part of a ritual, in which its social function is realized through direct instruction. The analysis of the book in accordance with this model concludes that the allegorical meanings of the two main problematic concepts in it – “European” and “Bai Ganyu” – are different in the first and second parts. Thus, the question arises about the genre of the work, which also determines its place in life – way of perception, cultivated patterns of behavior and social function. The thesis that Bai Ganyu – Incredible Stories of a Modern Bulgarian is a novel has been disputed, and it has been stated that the book is a cycle of stories built on the paradoxical combination of the models of parable and anecdote, and its entirety is organized 100not around a single story, as would happen in a novel, but around the main problem that the book poses. The problem of the difficult transition of Bulgaria and Bulgarians to the conditions, values, lifestyle and social rules of modernity.

Midhat Pasha, the Governor-General of the Danube Vilayet, managed to unravel the complex knot of the Svishtov Adventure of May 1867 thanks to the betrayal of Yordan Gergitsov, who was one of the main organizers. Several dozens of young people from Svishtov, who were sentenced to exile in Diyarbakir, were pardoned prematurely with the decisive intercession of the Grand Vizier Midhat Pasha. In the proposed text, the Svishtov Adventure is viewed as a story full of lessons and teachings about betrayal, punishment and storytelling.

The study deals with the educational and religious elements of Petko Slaveikov’s Revival children’s magazine “Pchelitsa”. Their presence is conditioned by the author’s views on the role of the child in social construction and the need to integrate them into Christianity. The text aims to highlight the guiding principles in the creation of the faith related publications. Several main themes are identified, united by Christian themes. These are God, duty to others, abstract concepts, Holy Scripture, the prayer, and the man.

Настоящият дял на „Studia Litteraria Serdicensia“ събира изследователските приноси от проведения през месец април 2025 година ХХIХ Колегиум по възрожденска литература на тема „Ние за другите и ние за нас“, посветен на светлата памет на доц. д-р Недка Капралова – ръководител на секция „Литература на Българското възраждане“ (2020–2024) и дългогодишен ревностен изследовател на възрожденските процеси. Недка Капралова беше основен организатор на този колегиум, който не успя да се състои в планираното време през 2024 г. поради нейната неочаквана кончина. Проведен със закъснение от една година, форумът се превърна в акт на научна приемственост и почит към паметта и изследователския труд на доц. Капралова.

This article examines one of the main research projects of Nedka Kapralova, namely, the practice of sponsorship during the Bulgarian National Revival and its importance for understanding the processes that accompanied the transition to modernity in the Bulgarian lands. The new historical era gave rise to new social actors. Literature would begin to “produce” those actors and circulate them as cultural models. The Enlightened European, the National Awakener, and the Teacher became symbolic images charged with the notions of a new and desired cultural space. These figures had their antipodes: the Phanariot and the Pseudo-Civilizer, both rooted in the enemy aggressor stereotype. The collective self-envisioned images of “We, the Bulgarians” and “We, the Enlightened Bulgarians” were gradually affirmed by being juxtaposed with, and contrasted against, the above-mentioned antipodes. The phenomenon of sponsorship, as analyzed by Kapralova, reveals the mechanisms through which new normative frameworks were established. It highlights notable cases in the legitimization of an emergent modern culture, with its guilds and its respective new social networks and circles. The study further attests to the mentoring ethos of the men of letters and offers intriguing insights into the self-determination of the Enlightened. Another line that is traced is represented by the shifts in attitudes and moral orientations of successive generations of intellectuals of the Revival period.

Thе article examines Bulgarian responses to American missionary edu- cators in the Ottoman Balkans during the nineteenth century, tracing a spectrum that ranges from curiosity and engagement to suspicion and intolerance. It ex- plores how Protestant ideas and cultural ideals intersected with Bulgarian literary and spiritual life, education, and the activities of educators and church figures. The reception of missionaries’ work — both favourable and highly critical — is documented in the literature, in periodicals, pamphlets and brochures, as well as in personal correspondence. The article also considers how interpretations of missionary contributions shifted over time, with broader reassessments emerging more than a century after the official beginning of their work among Bulgarians.

The first issue of the newspaper “Svoboda” marks a new stage in the journalistic activity of the Bulgarian revolutionary Lyuben Karavelov. The experience that he gained by publishing papers in different Russian and Serbian jour- nals brings him to the next logical step – his own independent journalism, aimed mainly at the Bulgarian readers in their own language. The research concentrates on how the different Slavic peoples and the Slavs as a whole are presented, what ideas for their unification are articulated – cultural, or political, or if there is some combined model. The way those ideas of the revolutionary change over time is also followed, be it during his stay in Russia or in the Serbian Principality later on.

In the 19th century Bulgarian poetry, two contradictory tendenc- es could be outlined. The first one is represented by intensified interest in fo- reign cultures and cultural models. The second one is driven by the idea of national self-preservation. The term “regional” refers to a limited scope of nationally-centered uses. They are based on the locality, nationality, Balkan and Oriental identities, regarded in an essentialist approach, and function as a protective framework of belonging to a group. These spheres were deliberately distinguished from the broader European context and, even more so, from the notion of the universality, which remained influential in Western intellectual discourse at the time. The paper also examines the dynamics of regional discourse, tracing its development from local to national levels, and the strategies through which the Bulgarian identity was legitimized through language, cultural heritage narratives, and certain Occidentalist attitudes.

The text sets forth a critique of the concept of the Odesa Literary Circle, which has been widely employed in studies of the Bulgarian National Revival literature to typologically characterise the intellectual life of Bulgarians studying in Odesa during the 1840s. It reexamines the literary careers of Dimitar Mutev, Elena Muteva, Nayden Gerov and Dobri Chintulov and suggests that there is insufficient factual evidence to substantiate the relevance of the two main components underlying this concept: organised literary life and literariness.

The paper examines the use of niy/nie (we/we – on different stylis- tic levels of language) in Bulgarian National Revival literature as a means of constructing a journalistic voice and c­­­­onferring representativeness on expres- sion in the press. The study is grounded in the satirical text “Niy ili nie” (“We or We” – on different stylistic levels) by Petko R. Slaveykov, published in the newspaper Shutosh in 1874, in order to trace how National Revival intellec- tuals constructed the categories of we and the others within the framework of the Bulgarian cultural community. The analysis focuses on stereotypes and the rhetorical strategies employed by these intellectuals to legitimize their place in the public and political discourse. Particular attention is paid to the role of the collective we in the Bulgarian press, with the aim of addressing the following question: to what extent does the language of the Revival function as a means of self-affirmation in opposition to external cultural influences and internal social tensions? The rhetorical functioning of niy and nie extends beyond the level of linguistic choice and emerges as a means of constructing a journalistic stance and conferring representativeness on expression in the Revival press.

This article attempts to reconstruct (partially) the composition of the manu- script collections owned by Todoraki Hadzhitoshev from Vratza (the manuscripts received at the National Library “St. Cyril and Methodius”) and Mihail Hadzhinedelchev, which is part of the collection of the Regional Museum of History – Lovech.

The article presents the Bulgarian old printed edition – Life of Grigoriy Omiritski, prepared by Averkiy Popstoyanov, abbot of the Osogovo Monastery “St. Joachim Osogovski,” and remaining the only one in the National Revival printing tradition. The funds for the printing of the book were collected by supporters from the entire Bulgarian ethnic territory. Among them are National Revival teachers, clergymen, monks, writers, who became in the fol- lowing years some of the famous figures of the Bulgarian National Revival.

The present article examines the reception of George Sand in Bulgarian Revival culture, considering it as a process of selective appropriation of Eu- ropean modernity. The main thesis is that nineteenth-century Bulgarian society did not adopt Sand’s work directly or in its entirety, but rather “domesticated” it by adapting it to its own moral and ideological norms. The study draws on 270reception aesthetics (Jauss, Iser), the theory of translation as rewriting (Lefevere), cultural transfer theory, and polysystem theory in order to demonstrate that translation functions as an active mechanism of filtering and rearranging foreign texts. In this context, Bulgarian translators act as cultural mediators who select and adapt Sand’s works according to the “horizon of expectations” of the National Revival reader. The analysis shows that predominantly moralizing and pastoral works entered the Bulgarian cultural milieu, while the more radical novels addressing issues of female autonomy, sexuality, and the critique of marriage remained outside the translated corpus. This selective appropriation transforms Sand’s image from that of a socially critical emancipatory writer into a “safe” moralist, compatible with the patriarchal values of Revival society. At the same time, her translations perform an important cultural function: they introduce new aesthetic models, romantic motifs, and social sensibilities, while contributing to the formation of the national literary system. The reception of George Sand in the Bulgarian National Revival is thus strictly selective and adaptive, admitting only those elements of European modernity that can be in- tegrated into the local moral and cultural context. This process reveals a broader mechanism of cultural mediation, whereby modernity is appropriated not as a direct transfer but as a transformed and ideologically refracted phenomenon.

Todor Peev’s drama draws attention to the status of women in the revival family and unfolds the various patterns of acceptance, rejection or accommodation to its norms. Social changes in the transition from traditional to pseudo-modern social roles are articulated as a moral and ethical problem. The female protagonist is a young girl set out on the path of “becoming civilized,” she is the agent of social dynamics. Becoming an adult, she attempts to ground her understanding of a woman’s place in the world on the category of free will, but finds out that “the new theories” are a subject of irony. The violation of established relationships and the pursuit of fashionable bookish models turn her life into tragedy. With the proposed theme, I aim to examine the personal story of this character and that of the other female figures in the play. I relate their behavior and mentality to Fudulescu’s “new doctrine of limitless personal freedom.” Are women free in their choices, or they are the helpless prey of false ideas and remain dependent on the manipulator’s persuasions? What are their tactics for coping with the imposed authority and male dominance and what are their existentially important goals?

This paper focuses on the reflections of the National Revival poet P. R. Slaveykov concerning falling in love and the nature of love. It traces the meta- morphoses of infatuation and the foundations that establish the new family unit from the perspective of three mutually exclusive worldviews, which compete 290with each other within the Bulgarian sociocultural space, neutralizing the traditional model as a regulator of family planning. Slaveykov’s insights reflect a civilizational curve entering the difficult to control zone of emotional charge and social coercion. He follows a reverse trajectory: from feelings of shame and awkwardness, through the unleashing of instincts, to the pragmatic logic of the marriage market, which transforms love into an economic transaction

The paper explores the origin and content of five articles sent by Ekaterina Vasileva, a revivalist intellectual with an interesting and unusual personal biography, to the newspapers Otechestvo and Turtsiya. Her publica- tions are among the rare public appearances of a female voice in the public sphere during the Bulgarian Revival period. This required courage, and Ekate- rina Vasileva demonstrated it. In several publications, she expressed her opini- on on public matters and joined in one of the heated theatrical debates that erupted around the performance in Braila of “Velisava, Bulgariann Princess” by Dobri Voynikov. Nedka Kapralova’s book Ekaterina Vasileva. Spomeni. Sti- hotvoreniya. Dopiski gives the reader a much more complete and comprehen- sive picture of the author, who transcends the limitations of her environment.

The article reveals the significance of Nedka Kapralova as a scientist with contributions to the Bulgarian literary history. The emphasis is upon her research related to her book Ekaterina Vasileva. Memoirs. Lyrics. Reports (2022). That book has a fundamental importance for future researchers.

The text interweaves personal memories of Assoc. Prof. Nedka Kapralova, PhD, with a presentation of her most significant literary contributions to the field of the Bulgarian National Revival. The paradoxical connections between various themes, figures, and works outlined in her research is traced here to present sketches of the colorful and multifaceted image of the National Revival period, as well as the importance of her numerous translations – some of them foundational for Bulgarian literary studies and culture.

The article traces how Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nedka Kapralova became one of the prominent researchers of culture and literature of the Bulgarian Revival. Having left us untimely, she did not realize her ideas, did not fulfill her research dreams. Her research is primarily in the field of Revival culture, with her scientific interests mostly focused on the phenomenon of philanthropy. She is interested in the connection between folklore and literature, researches female initiation as a phenomenon, etc. The topic of philanthropy is her doctoral thesis. She treats the facts and the documents with respect, which is evident in her book dedicated to the letters of Elisaveta Karaminkova. Over the years, she has been involved in various projects, the result of which is her latest book, dedica- ted to Ekaterina Vasileva. She bequeathed to the Bulgarian cultural community some precise translations of modern French scholars, cultural theorists and philosophers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu.

Книгата на Анна Алексиева „Христо Ботев: Идеологическо моделиране на героичния образ“ е книга за нацията и нейната не особено дълга история – от 1848 година до днес. Книга, която разкрива колебанията на идеологическото махало, чиято амплитуда се определя от силата на отделните социално-визионерски проекти през годините. И четена по този начин, книгата на Анна Алексиева разгръща един цялостен и дълбинен разказ за културната история на българската нация. Изследването задава много въпроси за това кой е Христо Ботев. При това авторката ги задава и на големите езикови модели ChatGPT и BgGPT в усилията си да свери собствената си аналитична точка с машинната. „Ще призная, че ми се иска българският изкуствен интелект да не е отражение на „естествения“, споделя Анна Алексиева с лека ирония наблюдението си, съдържащо драматична сериозност. Авторката има право на тази ирония. Тя е допустима, позволена, разбираема, а драматичността зад нея се получава от наблюденията ѝ върху влиянието, оказвано върху колективното мислене, от страна на едрите и натежали от противоречиви идеологически конотации национални сюжети.

Основа на този брой на „Studia Litteraria Serdicensia“ съставляват студии и статии от последните два съвместни научни форума, организирани от секцията по теория на литературата на Института за литература – БАН и катедрата по теория на литературата в СУ „Св. Климент Охридски“. Става въпрос за Националната научна конференция „Автотекстуалност и цитат“ (2025) и Националната научна конференция „Паралитературни жанрове и литературност“ (2023), които представляват своеобразно продължение на една инициатива, отбелязала своето начало 13 години по-рано със събитието „Невидимата школа. Изплъзващият се предмет на литературознанието“ (2012). Оттогава двете звена – секцията и катедрата по теория на литературата – създават периодични събития, които целят да срещат изследователи в диалог върху проблемите на историята на българската литературна теория и нарастващото интердисциплинарно значение на литературоведските търсения. Примери за някои съвместни конференции от този тип са: „Просветителство срещу идеологема (Цветан Стоянов, Атанас Натев, Димитър Аврамов)“, състояла се през 2013 г., „Наследството на лингвистиката на българската теория“ през 2014 г., „Парачовешкото: Грация и гравитация. Двудневен форум в чест на проф. Миглена Николчина“ от 2015 г., както и форумите „Повторение, обновление – практики на римейка“ (2020) и „Кино, канон, готика: Двудневен форум в чест на доц. Огнян Ковачев“ (2021). 

С представените материали в този том се надяваме да изразим признателността си към научната дейност на Радосвет Коларов, дългогодишен член на секцията по теория на литературата в ИЛ – БАН, и да провокираме интереса на академичната общност към темата за паралитературните жанрове и тяхното нарастващо значение за съвременното литературознание. 

С третия дял отдаваме почит към двойния юбилей на Гео Милев (1895–1925), една от най-силните фигури в модернизацията на българската култура, но и – жертва на идеологическа свръхинтерпретация, затормозяваща и до днес рецепцията на творчеството му.

The paper examines two key terms in the theoretical works of the Bulgarian literary theorist Radosvet Kolarov — metaphony and autotextuality — in the immediate context of their emergence: Kolarov’s books Sound and Sense (1983) and Repetition and Creation (2009). Special attention is paid to the strategies that Kolarov follows in the process of term formation, as well as to the potential problems and limitations related to these strategies. Although Kolarov generally follows a morpheme-based minimalistic approach to his terminology, it often creates, intentionally or not, quite productive amphibolies that are helpful in charting some unstudied or neglected subfields of literary theory.

The paper’s aimed at elaborating and reinterpreting certain potentials of Radosvet Kolarov’s theory of autotextuality in order to revise the question of the relation between autotextual systems (idiolects) and difference, which has been mentioned and left unaddressed in “Repetition and Creation”. The paper researches the problematic of autotextual differences from the perspective of the question of the iterability of language constructs and its effects on the constitution and further interpretation of autotextual systems. Starting from that assumption, the text suggests a reading of Radosvet Kolarov’s theory as a specific deconstruction of authorship as an epistemological obstacle for the interpretation of texts framed by an author’s oeuvre.

On the terrain of psychology, the weather can activate involuntary memory and play the role of Proust’s madeleine. Identical meteorological circumstances are able to awaken the lost memory (“and then it was raining”). Thus memories seem to gush out of the picture of weather. The paper discusses some discursive strategies of the text (repetitions, variations, recurring motifs, disseminations) related to weather, as well as a number of more discrete intuitive or deliberate autotextual dominances and preferences for a particular season, type of weather or atmospheric phenomenon that form an invisible aura and lend a certain tonality to one’s work.

The present paper deals with the autotextual potential of the codex “Book of Three Religions” written by Sofroniy Vrachanski in 1805. The main hypothesis, inspired by Radosvet Kolarov’s term “autotextuality”, is that the organization of the volume of three translated theological works on the Abrahamic religions and the original autobiography of the author correspond with a deliberately designed “epigraph”. The text of the “epigraph” is a maxim that can be regarded as a key for interpreting the whole logic of the volume. The maxim, which dates back to Antiquity coincides with Sofroniy’s idea of the different modes of time that define the role of humans as agents in global historic events.

The article focuses on the creative legitimation of P. R. Slaveykov upon the appearance of his first self-edited newspaper. The text interprets the intratextual mechanisms related to the development and testing of authorial roles, the multiplication of creative figures, and the construction of Slaveykov’s own personal myth in the context of the Bulgarian revival publicity. In this case, we are interested in the special emphasis on the creation of the writer as an unfinished act of initiation, enclosed in the multiplying iterative scheme of becoming.

The article considers the presence of the motif of death in the early and late poetical works of Stoyan Mihaylovski. Outlined as the main core facets of this motif, consistent in all of his works, are the general feeling of deadness associated with the death of ideals and grounds for social action in the world, and also with the perishing of all hope for the betterment of the human race; the universal scale of this calamity and the unsatisfying reasoning for “triumphant” evil in world history. The aforementioned aspects of the motif are viewed within the framework of a limited in scope whole, comprising the cycles “Doloroso” and “Varia”, from the most representative collection of Mihaylovski’s selected works to date – “Divine Rebel”, published in 1987. This makes it possible for two main and in many respects mutually exclusive world outlooks to collide and stand out, closely connected to the death motif, but oriented towards different horizons of meaning. The first one, stronger in the early Mihaylovski is the linear horizon fully contained in earthly human History with no way “upwards”, no way beyond. The second one, characteristic of the late Mihaylovski does not completely negate the first one, but integrates in itself the vertical transcendent dimension of being as well. The sonnet “Lama Sabahtani!” is seen as a key poetical work, marking the transition between the two. In the second part of the article, the death motif is viewed in a different interpretative context from the one in “Divine Rebel”. The analysis is focused on poems from another collection representative of Mihaylovski’s works, published in his lifetime and with his active participation – “Collected Works. Volume I”. The aim is to show the transformation in the death motif, using the autotextuality terms work of initiation, enhancing work and explicating work.

Elin Pelin’s first printed short story, “The Scourge of God” (1901), is a dialogue with the Bible that has not yet been the subject of independent research. The references to the Old and New Testaments in the text of the story have been discovered and analyzed in the present study. Subject of the research is how they participate in the message of the text, how they change and enrich the closed reading of the work. The analysis shows that Elin Pelin used in his own work primarily the eschatological biblical texts (to which the quote “Second Coming” at the end of the description of the drought refers) and the Book of Job (which, like the Bulgarian narrative, explores the causes of misfortune and examines the hypothesis of guilt from many sides). This result raises the question what Bible Elin Pelin read. For this purpose, certain passages of the story are compared with specific verses from the Holy Scriptures in three Slavic translations, which existed at the time of the writing of “The Scourge of God”. The comparison leads to the assumption that Elin Pelin most likely used the Russian Synodal translation of the Bible. The intertextual approach is combined with an analysis of the structure of the story. Duality is found to be the main structural principle according to which many components of the work (characters, attitudes, situations and plot events) are built. As the narrative unfolds sequentially, they split or double. The circumstances surrounding the creation of the work, as well as the spiritual convictions of the writer, are also examined.

Yavorov’s experiment to be not himself, to enter the zone of fiction, is a performative act: what we see on the road, on the move, crossing Sofia, coincides with the entry into and exit from the narrative (from the prose). In this compendium text, Yavorov, adopting a role uncharacteristic of him, continually refers to recognizable or hidden gestures of famous writers, demonstrating an ostentatious familiarity in handling them. There is an empathy with Luben-Caravelov’s “physiological sketch”, reminiscences from Aleko’s feuilletons, ironically snide remarks to P. P. Slaveykov, mockery at the poetry of Trifon Kunev. The narrative’s travelogue, the selected Sofia topoi are frankly reminiscent of Vazov’s cycle of stories “Kardashev on the Hunt”. Yavorov’s text abounds with quotations – from the mocking-parody of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the Gospel to the profane-volgarized belitrization of his own lyrical motifs, i.e. to the seemingly muted self-reference to already published.

The article examines the ways in which the novel Dilettante (1926) and the short story “Rudeness” (1923) by Ch. Mutafov dialogize with each other through the problematics of the lover’s discourse. An attempt is made to illuminate the encounters and divergences between the two works on issues of inter-sexual relationships. The figure obscene by R. Barthes, drawn from his A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, and the sociological concept plurality, proposed by the native art critic and essayist Kiril Krastev, play a significant role. The work is divided into three main parts. They correspond accordingly to the possibilities presented in Dilettante, which organize the book purely formally, but also conceptually, and through which we can think of one or another text as a work-amplifier or a work-explicator for another (according to R. Kolarov’s theory).

The paper aims to reveal the mechanisms of discursive disintegration in Georgi Karaslavov’s novel The Ordinary people (Obiknoveni hora, 1952–1975). According to the proposed thesis, the novel's ideological and compositional disorder is not an accidental example of the inapplicability of the social-realist method, but is due to the peculiar relationship between the individual features of the creative process and the demands of epic form as understood by the early György Lukacs. The methodological stake of this soldering is Radosvet Kolarov's concept of matrix and repetition functioning at the level of autotextuality. According to the thesis argued for here, the textual matrix that encompasses Karaslavov's work consists of two guiding principles that come into different relations according to the specific text: the principle of the documentary thought of as a marginal artistic objectivism, and the principle of the epic, thought of as an ideological treatment of the lived material. Hence the peculiarity of the epic form in the novel The Obiknoveni hora is interpreted as the result of the hypertrophy of the principle of the documentary, which seizes and thereby degenerates the epic functionality. The examples of discursive dissonance discussed serve to exemplify the consequences of the disintegration of epic form and the mechanisms of its reintegration within a post-epic structure.

Initially, the article brings together two areas. The first is thematic: attention is paid to some, albeit discreet, glimpses of current, topical, acutely political issues in Radichkov’s fiction prose from the 1960s–1970s. But even more important is the second – the poetic one: the techniques through which the political theme enters the narrative. It is here that the concept of autotextuality is introduced as a key operational concept. From here on, we proceed to examine the ways in which it operates in Radichkov’s prose. Two such forms are examined – of a folkloric and a specifically literary type, with the emphasis on the latter. The “soft”, veiled, elusive subversion of this technique is examined on a two-fold level: first, in relation to the ideological norms of the era, and second – in relation to literary (linguistic) norms.

Thomas Mann is one of the most prominent autotextual authors who himself has commented on the key role of the leitmotif for his own work. According to the main thesis of this article, the connections between his texts is determined by a peculiar autotextual leitmotif technique. The paper elucidates what autotextual leitmotifs are and in what ways their development connects different texts of the author. The paper problematizes the boundaries between fiction and essay (in particular between the novel and the essay) of Thomas Mann through two examples of autotextual leitmotifs, the core of which is oriented towards the author's key problem of the relationship between genius and disease.

The article examines Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama “Waiting for Godot” through the lens of autocitation, repetition, and shifting context. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notions of the instability of meaning and context, as well as Radosvet Kolarov’s concept the analysis emphasizes the absence of internal memory within the fictional text itself. The first and second acts are approached as autonomous yet mutually reflective textual units, connected not through logical continuity but through rhythmic repetition with variation. This structural pattern evokes a sense of circularity and stasis. The transformations observed in the characters of Pozzo and Lucky are interpreted as metatextual gestures that undermine the linear progression of events. Meanwhile, through the erasure of memory and the constant recurrence of identical actions, Vladimir and Estragon appear trapped within the closed boundaries of a chronotope of waiting. In this way, the play presents memory not as a source of meaning, but as a mechanism of deferral.

This article analyses Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet through the lenses of autotextuality, mise en abyme, and recursion. Inspired by the poetics of Radosvet Kolarov, the study traces how recurring visual and narrative elements construct a self-reflexive structure in which each new meaning emerges through the transformation of already familiar motifs. Mise en abyme functions not only as a device for embedding a story within a story, but also as a mechanism for unsettling the boundaries between different layers of the text, while recursive structures generate a fractal sense of a world that continuously creates itself. In this context, The Hearing Trumpet is approached as a microcosm of Carrington’s broader autotextual practice, evident across both her literary and visual works. The study argues that repetition in Carrington’s oeuvre is not mechanical but productive—a form of discursive desire through which texts unfold new meanings and interrelations.

This article offers a speculative, autotextual reading of J. G. Ballard’s oeuvre through the lens of psychoanalysis and the theoretical framework of Radosvet Kolarov. It seeks to develop the concept of “auto-catastrophe” – a traumatic event that marks a radical turning point in an author’s creative output. The study conceptualizes this auto-catastrophe as a “transmodal cut” that (dis)connects various techniques, motifs, media, corpora, etc. The text also proposes a reading of Kolarov’s notion of “discursive desire,” interpreted through Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment [jouissance].
The article applies these concepts in an analysis of Ballard’s most experimental work, The Atrocity Exhibition, emphasizing its intermedial aspects in order to demonstrate how the transgressive nature of the transmodal cut enables literature to cross its own formal boundaries. The text also explores how the auto-catastrophe can (dis)connect the works and enjoyments of different authors who share the same trauma. To this end, it briefly examines the relationship between the works of Ballard and those of the American writer William Burroughs.

The article “Finishing William Burroughs: The Ethics of Theft and the Gesture of the Joke” seeks to reconsider the legacy of the Burroughsian corpus of experimental texts (novels, essays, manifestos) by proposing a new trajectory focused on the conceptual and ethical stakes found in the work of the cult American author. Working in the space between the writer’s biographical trauma (the accidental shooting of his wife during a game) and the logic of Burroughs’ own texts, the article offers an entry point into his method and the specific ethics of a writing that exceeds the control of language. This writing may be defined as a speculative radicalization of the problem of (self-)citation, articulated through the notions of conceptual theft and the joke as a gesture of the cut.

The analysis of these techniques is carried out through a reading of Queer and its 2024 film adaptation by Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Presenting the unfinished second novel Queer as an initiaton work (in the sense developed by Radosvet Kolarov), the text reveals the play of a “citation of the Real” (the shooting), exposed through Guadagnino’s cinematic rendering. In unfolding the wager of this key Burroughsian remainder, the article turns to its central object of inquiry— the logic of theft and the gesture of a joke. These are linked to the methods of cutting and folding (cut-up and fold-in), which secured Burroughs’ cult status in postwar Western literature. 

The latter are theorized through late Lacanian psychoanalysis (the symptom) and Deleuzian concepts such as the body without organs (BwO) and his notion of humor. Through the attempt at a singular synthesis of these trajectories in Burroughs, the article reveals the ambivalent (political, psychosocial, and ethical) experiment of writing yourself out of language conceived as a totalizing system of control. 

Furthermore, besides functioning as an introduction to the Burroughsian ethics of resistance to language via theft and humour, the article aims to serve as a speculative tracing of possible connections between Burroughs’ writing practice and some pressing contemporary issues. These include the problems of informational (digital) control societies, the logic of large language models (LLMs), the consumption of nonsense content (“brainrot”), the institutionalization of paranoia, and of conspiratorial reason. These are the contemporary stakes that define the article’s experiment with the Burroughsian ethos.

Finally, beyond theorizing theft and the joke as a speculative approach to writing and ethics, “Finishing Burroughs…” also performs a brief demonstration. It applies the Burroughsian disposition to the local context of Russian propaganda, disinformation, and nationalist (patriotard) ideology.

The Article presents a close reading of the movie “Her” (2013), directed by Spike Jonze. In that reading the artificial intelligence in the movie is modeled via the theoretical apparatus of Radosvet Kolarov introduced in his book Repetition and Creation: Poetics of Autotextuality. Twelve years after the premiere of the movie, the operating system Samantha seems like a plausible extension of current large language models, bearing in mind her full dependence on the human-derived textual data on which she has been trained. “Her”, however, goes beyond the mechanical extrapolation that artificial intelligence is going to get ever faster, more precise and defter at the manipulation of language, as it is used by people. The operating systems in the movie gradually converge on the position of being simultaneously readers, authors, editors and critics of the full corpus of texts, and perhaps ultimately achieve the virtual being of the idea, which in Kolarov’s work is tied to the concept of “matrix”, i.e. a virtual invariant of the idea that determines the autotextual transformations within the oeuvre of a given author. The artificial intelligences in “Her” implicitly work with the whole of humanity as a corpus and in this way they dynamize the boundaries between work and oeuvre, person and world, individual and archetype, body and mind, as well as other ontological binaries. Following Kolarov, the article attempts to explicitly reconstruct this model for the development of artificial intelligence, which is hidden in the movie. That model perhaps should be seen not so much as a speculative attempt at prediction, but as the hyperintensification of a phenomenology of text which is already deeply implicated in the present.

Thе article observes the need to recollect traces from different sources in order to weave the image of the woman from the Middle Ages. Given the scarcity of recourses from the times when women were explicitly denied voice – both in personal and artistic sense – a research should rely more on intertextual connections between dialoguing texts, rather than on focused and in-depth analysis of a certain corpus. The article illustrates this statement by providing two concentric examples: firstly, by looking into the identity of the first Italian female poet Compiuta Donzella, and secondly, by attempting to trace the origins of Gostanza which is mentioned in one of the sonnets addressed to Compiuta Donzella herself.

The until recently marginal study of ego-texts has become a relevant scientific field, which constantly questions the traditional view of central and peripheral phenomena and authors in literature. This article aims to draw attention to an autobiographer and his autobiographical text, which have remained in the shadow of the traditional literary canon. The study focuses on the interpretation of the autobiography “Povest’ o rozhdenii moyem, proiskhozhdenii i vsey zhizni” of Prince I. M. Dolgorukov (1764–1823), an interesting figure of the Russian cultural scene of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although I. M. Dolgorukov was a successful writer during his lifetime, today he is considered a “secondary” author. His voluminous autobiography had a similar not very happy fate, as it remained unpublished for a long time. However, the subject of this text is particularly interesting for understanding the evolutionary dynamics of Russian male autobiographical prose in that epoch. The analysis gives the opportunity to identify some typical characteristics of autobiographies in a period when the genre had not yet crystallized in Russia. At the same time, it highlights the many innovative features of the author’s autobiographical discourse. Therefore, the article also compares I. M. Dolgorukov’s text with the “canonical” autobiographies of A. T. Bolotov (1738–1833) and G. R. Derzhavin (1743–1816).

Microhistory emerged as an independent field after the 1950s, gaining ground in Italy, Mexico, France and the United States. Despite its increasing popularity, comprehensive theoretical and methodological studies have remained few in number for decades. Despite their differences in approach and understanding, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and the Mexican historian Luis González y González, both trained in the French historical schools, were key figures in the development of microhistory. Le Roy Ladurie focuses his archival analysis on the social, economic and religious manifestations of smaller settlements in France. Luis González explores the microcosm of Mexican villages, highlighting local dynamics and local “small” voices. However, both historians emphasize the importance of microscopic details for understanding larger “historical narratives”, despite criticisms from historians influenced by the “linguistic turn”, and despite accusations in reductionism and fictionalisation. The contributions of Le Roy Ladurie and Luis González helped shape microhistory as a nuanced approach to historical research that balances the local “narrative” with the broader socio-political context.

“Life as a quotation” (“das zitathafte Leben”) is a phrase that Thomas Mann formulated in his celebratory speech on the occasion of Sigmund Freud's 80th birthday to present his vision of a life that is always made up of (un)conscious repetitions of prefabricated patterns. This paper offers an analysis of the “life-as-quote” formula in two perspectives. The notion is examined, once, within the writer's speech and, secondly, in the context of psychoanalysis with an emphasis on the mechanisms of identification. Some of the questions the text attempts to answer are: what is quotation in this perspective and what is its significance for literary studies.

The text is dedicated to the peculiar place of Mikhail Bakhtin as a literary theorist. It relies heavily on the work of Galin Tihanov in his recent book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory and also formulates certain critiques of it concerning the important elements that make a literary theorist. Bakhtin is set on the background of two opposing thinkers – Andre Jolles and Erich Auerbach. While Jolles tries to impose his traditional romantic etymological method upon the whole literature and set the genres below certain key words, Auerbach is almost methodless in his attempt to draw the genesis of literature in the perspective of historically oriented sociology. Both Jolles and Auerbach found their theories on certain paraliterary genres and invest them with anthropological and civilizational value. For Jolles these are the “simple forms of narrative” and for Auerbach it is the middle preaching style or genre sermo humilis as a beginning of Western literature. On his part, Bakhtin manages to enter the cannon of literary theory and we shall see why. He represents the intermediate methodological position of literary theory. 

The article traces the genealogy of theory-fiction—a hybrid writing practice that consciously blurs the boundaries between philosophical argument and literary narrative. It begins with the early activities of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick (1995–2003), whose key figures, Nick Land and Mark Fisher, “punctured” academic discourse in order to inject elements of cyberpunk, occultism, and electronic music. Through close readings of Land, Fisher, and Reza Negarestani—especially the novel-essay Cyclonopedia—the study shows how the concept of hyperstition turns literary fiction into an instrument of actual cultural intervention.

Part I situates James Wood’s notion of “hysterical realism” as a historical backdrop for the crystallisation of theory-fiction. Part II analyses CCRU concepts such as “Meltdown” and “spinal catastrophism,” following their passage from lecture halls into the early-2000s blogosphere (K-PUNK, Hyperstition, Xenosystems). Part III examines hyperstition itself: a mechanism by which fictional ideas—like William Burroughs’s “word-viruses” — materialise in socio-technological reality. Finally, deploying Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “minor literature” (deterritorialized, collective, and inevitably political), the article shows how theory-fictions undermine hierarchies between “high” theory and popular culture. The conclusion defends the thesis that theory-fiction offers a model of radical writing capable of both describing and transforming reality, restoring to philosophy its status as a dangerous, “magical” practice.