Bulgarian

CONTENTS

The topic of the history/story-based novel gives us the freedom to look at the concept from two perspectives: one being epistemological and the other artistic. The actual term istoriya (translated as ‘history’ and ‘story’) belongs both to science and to literature and in one case it can mean actual events, while in another it can be merely a narrative. Therefore, it would be intriguing to see not only whether a novel can serve as a ‘source’ and bring knowledge of the past (potential that has always attracted writers), but also if history can be read as a novel (a hazard that has usually repelled historians). Does erudition stay away from a fascinating story and what else can a novel teach a historian? These questions serve as a starting point in this article.

The study, in the first place, summarizes some of the main features of the historical novel genre, with a special emphasis on its connection with the national epic novel. But this is not an ultimate goal, is made in view of the discussion of Under the Yoke (1889/1894), the Bulgarian national epic novel – whether and to what extent it is a historical novel? – In the second, more important part, the research focuses on the synchronous reception of the novel through аn analysis of two detailed critical studies, appeared simultaneously in 1896, presenting the eyes of the “young” around the “Misal/Thought” magazine. The problem of whether the essence of the “nationality per se”, the “spirit” of national history and “destiny” can be understood “from outside”, by the foreign reader, the European man, is at the center of the discussion. The structural reflections of the opposition between Literature and History in the form of the antithesis Work–Author are also studied. Namely, how in the spirit of neo-Kantian aesthetics the figure of the author Vazov is divided into an artist who difuses in the Work (in the role of a “naïve” everyday life descriptor of the era) and a poet, bearer of its philosophical-historical meta-consciousness. It is the second of them that is to blame for the failure of Under the Yoke as a historical novel (of national-epic type): the author-Vazov did not understand the broad “spirit” of the Age and History: he has humiliated, parodied History by “translating” it into the language of literary fiction/lie: Literature seen as an involuntary (and therefore “serious”) parody of historical truth. On this basis, the study formulates a genre aporia (double bind), referring to another great work from/for the same era – “Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings”: historicity in the historical novel is possible only as an “object of desire”.

The article clarifies the concept of a story, narrator, memoirs, an eyewitness account and a major event in Bulgarian history according to the book Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings by Zaharij Stoyanov.

The text is based on Georgi Tsanev’s big study On Historical Novel issued in three consecutive books of his “Art and Critics” Magazine in 1942 and explores the technic of historical novel composition in Bulgarian, Russian and West European works, as also the challenges of recovery in the game of realities, the different types of historical narrative and last but not least – the dynamics of writers’, critics’ and readers’ reception.

In the national story of Turkish slavery, the words “janissary” and “pomak” are code. They are charged with the absolute meaning of evil. Became the object of artistic fiction, their reception is almost always subject to prevailing conjunctures, not to historical justice. “Janissary” and “Pomak” are some of the most helpful labels aimed at keeping alive the myth of slavery, on which there are parasitizing ideological discourses. The latter include the ethnic dimension as the basis of the meanings sought. In the face of several novels, Bulgarian fiction presents different meanings of these historical figures, weaving their authenticity into certain cultural models.

The text examines the “open” readings of Anton Donchev’s novel Time of Parting of the last decades through the attitudes towards the history of its creation, the film of the same name and especially through the prism of two opposing ideological doctrines, to highlight the legitimacy of the boundaries of this type of interpretation. The main thesis is that in this way both opposing interpretations with their arguments are made meaningless in their interaction within the field of the novel as a piece of art, as they both neglect the main message of the novel and the actualization of this message in the first decades of the 21st century.

The “postmodern conceptual project” in contemporary Bulgarian literature chalked up an undisputed paragon of the genre with the publication of Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow in 2009. But it was in 2014 with its reception and readerly success following the second edition of the novel that its literary critical value became apparent. The fiction dismantles ideological constructs of the historical metanarrative and rebuilds the authenticity of the pre-Revival by restoring its micro-narratives. By making use of postmodern compositional techniques and intertextuality, it offers a reinterpretation of the historical realia and the figure of the narrator.

The novel Photo Stoyanovich is an attempt not just to create another historical narrative, which will repeat painfully familiar scenes from the Bulgarian Revival, but rather to allow for dialogue with the history. The claim that recently was attributed to history to “speak” the truth is at the heart of this dialogue. The author takes advantage of some techniques typical of postmodern writing – the game, the hoax, the collage. The subtitle “novel-collage” draws attention to the specifics of the book, in which literature meets non-literature, and the novel itself is built on a collage principle, sketching – in the form of various fragments – photos, letters, articles (or individual passages) from newspapers, notes, diaries.

The text presents the absorption of historical plots in the epic novel narrative of the writer Konstantin Petkanov about Ravna Gora. In this unified novel corpus of Bulgarian fiction from the first half of the 20th century are resurrected not only legendary historical figures, but we are also presented, seen in an autobiographical light, the author’s countryman from the prehistories of his childhood. The text explores immersion itself of the writer K. Petkanov in the cozyness of Thracian patriarchal living and in the destinies of his idealized characters.

The matter of Power is one of the main topics in the Vladimir Zarev’s novels. This article analyses it through the universal prism of language. In reference to the question of the historical existence of the human the role of the Word is interpreted from a few points of view – the Word as memory, the Word as game, the Word as self-knowledge. In all three cases the Word acquires power over the time and individuality and the historical narrative grows into an existential and ontological one.

The most predictable analysis of Blood (1933) by Konstantin Konstantinov is the novel to be presented in terms of its social, historical, political characteristics, to look for reflections on the Bulgarian twentieth century or projections of real people. The present analysis offers a different view – the text to be considered as a work in which artistic aspects of literary utopia can be found. Such an interpretation allows a more complete presentation of the utopian world described in Konstantinov’s novel.

Thе aim of this article is to suggest a comparative analysis of the historical facts appearing to be the common focus in both Dimitar Dimov’s Tobacco and Yana Yazova’s The Salty Bay. Given the limited volume, it dares not claim to be exhaustive, but rather highlights the general story landmarks. From the position of a professional historian, Irina Yakimova reflects on the degree of event authenticity in each of the two novels, with either author actually proposing two alternative but mutually complementary views on the consequences of the Second World War, Bulgaria’s role in it and the notorious date 9 September 1944, as a major turning point in Bulgarian history.

The article addresses the period from the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945 and focuses on the historical events impact on the fate of people from different social layers, as this reflection is recreated in the novels War by Yana Yazova and The Meek by Angel Igov. The central characters’ story in the two novels, who stand on both sides of the line that radically divided Bulgarian society after the Communists took power back on September 9, 1944, is traced. The psycho-emotional profiles of the characters and the narrative strategies, that are used to motivate their personal behavior, are analyzed. The characters’ fate is the basis on which readers are left to value the historical events. The article also emphasizes the narrative techniques, which consider the time distance of the writing in relation to the depicted events, so that the historical narrative is as close as possible to the truth. 

The long-story Rally by Stefan Dichev (1960), one of the favorite youth-adventure works in Bulgarian literature, is a direct subject of the article. First of all, attention is focused on the restoration of the different, diverse contexts of its creation, not as a one-time act, but as a process lasting over time: the genre fluctuations and the changes in the various editions, the illustrations and the artistic design as a book, the extremely mysterious relations with another, simultaneously created work – Diyarbakir Exiles by M. Marchevski. The unusual creation of the “Rally” is an occasion to touch in a broader context on the relationship of literature with other, neighboring discursive territories, the “translation” of the literary text into other discursive languages: illustration and art design, film adaptation, but above all comics, as far as Rally was born just as the first successful experience in this intermediate genre.

The article examines three scenarios of the relationship between literature, history and parahistory through the prism of three novels: one was written before the collapse of socialism; the other two – in post-socialist culture. All three turn to the same historical epoch – the Bulgarian Middle Ages and focus on the same literary and mythical hero – Boyan the Magician. The first is an example of upgrading history through the author’s parahistorical penetrations, developed, thanks to the autonomous novel form, and moreover, the reversal of points of view and the placement of the parahistorical through parapsychology in an effort to rewrite the history. The second is an example of the use of the sensational historical for a sensational plot. The third is about the use of literature as a camouflage of parahistory and the risk of misleading the reader who wants to accept the historical novel as the absolute truth. The text notes the increased convergence of history, parahistory and literature in recent decades and connects it with the eternal shortage of history in the rise of any nationalism, backed by many historical and quasi-historical facts. The modern view of the Bulgarian Middle Ages is characterized by the attempt to radically correct the national memory. The whole offensive for a new “testing” of historical facts, the attempt to literally “reverse” historical conventions, speaks of permanent national dissatisfaction – a topic to be addressed later.

The article focuses on the functioning of concepts such as historical prototype, archetype and mysticism in the dramaturgical texts by Anton Strashimirov (“St. Ivan Rilski”, 1911), Konstantin Mutafov (“Omurtag Khan”, 1924), Lyudmil Stoyanov (“Tomiris”, 1921), Nikolay Raynov (“Once upon a Time…”, 1923) and Boyan Danovski (“Yoan Vladimir”, 1924). These plays interpret in an arbitrary way historical figures, facts and events from the Early Middle Ages in Bulgaria. The new type of protagonist in them is intricately modeled between the historically inherited as memory and facts, as a cultural archetype and as a self-defining modern character. The article seeks to answer several basic questions: how the Bulgarian playwright handles historical facts, why he replaces the documented and the real-historical with the mystical-legendary, the fairy-tale, the fantasy and even the surreal. What drives artistic reflection and provokes the mystification of historical narrative, the creation of a wide network of cultural associations, and the unlocking of archetypal mythological models? The answer to these questions shows that the historical theme is a necessary impetus for the modernization of the Bulgarian drama through the use of the principle of aesthetic syncretism in the tens and the twenties of the twentieth century.

The text reveals the reckless human attempt to skip the a posteriori – a priori gate and on the side of the finiteness and immediacy of the occasional existence, to deny the infinity of the divine being. Two remarkable authors ‒ Friedrich Nietzsche and Emiliyan Stanev ‒ take this road and frustrate in their efforts to establish the moral rightfulness of the antichrist, including via loading themselves with this ungrateful existential role.

The radicalisation of Kant’s critical philosophy by the Jena Romanticism and, above all, by Novalis, is decisive for the understanding of the modern relationship between philosophy and poetry (i.e. literature or, more generally, art), which is both a relationship of continuity and rupture: such is the starting hypothesis of the study. The shared horizon, but also a matrix of the ambiguous relationship of philosophy and poetry, is the turn I venture to describe as a transition from ontology to ontogony. After Kant, ontology became a field of modal orientation: the world is a necessary world. The world is becoming a task. The study delves into the conceptual depth of this turn, respectively of the relation between philosophy and poetry, based on the reading of Kant’s critical philosophy proposed by Gilles Deleuze. The analysis sets itself the task of highlighting unexpected yet crucial dimensions of the complex relationship between philosophy and literature, established in modern terms only in the second half of the 18th century. The figures of “Reason” and “Madness”, expressing the immanent tension of Kant’s productive power for imagination, will occupy a central place among them.

In his study “Metaphor and Myth: Percy, Ricoeur, and Frye”, Hugh White aims to question the traditional dichotomy between the cognitive and affective dimensions of metaphor by proposing a theory of metaphor that brings these two dimensions together on an intersubjective level. Criticizing Paul Ricoeur’s theory, White draws on Walker Percy's definition of “catachrestic metaphor” in order to clarify Northrop Frye’s understanding of the ecstatic metaphor and its role in religious myth. Here is the place in advance to ask the question to what extent it is appropriate to equate the metaphor with an error (in the case of the catachrestic metaphor) and to what extent the believed absurdity in the myth can be defined as a metaphor. I propose an alternative to White's vision of metaphor, referring to Douglas Bergren's study “The Use and Abuse of Metaphor”. I will also refer critically to individual passages by Frye to show the steps taken to bring the affective and cognitive aspects of metaphor closer together in the perspective of “metaphorical construing”.

The article focuses on the battle against modernism by the Marxist theory of reflection in Eastern Europe. The term reflection was in circulation as one of the key concepts of the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist aesthetics and especially of Todor Pavlov’s theory of reflection, in which literature is seen as an authentic reflection of reality, it requires the correct mirror of sober realism. The confrontation between Isaac Passy and Todor Pavlov in the early 1960s demonstrates the mechanisms of subverting the ideological state. 

In the context of western utopian philosophical and literary tradition from Plato to Dostoevsky, Mikhail Gorbachev’s book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987 and 1988) demonstrates not only its utopian character, but simultaneously tempts one to come with theoretical and practical dystopian objections. This essay analyzes six key utopian features of the book and their dystopian metamorphoses. First, the utopian postulate assuming all people are philosophers and, therefore, embrace perestroika’s only possible truth is an abstract philosophical concept, but not a practical possibility. Second, glasnost is the new garb of the old utopian requirement for a cataphatic language fully expressing the truth; language, however, can lie, too. Third, utopian self-criticism of Soviet dignitaries fosters incredulity and hatred in their subjects, who detest them as either weak leaders or self-serving hypocrites. Fourth, utopian belief in a future true and flourishing socialism is undermined by the paucity of real socialism. Fifth, perestroika as a utopia presupposes an idealistic temporality, which, however, contradicts perestroika’s claims to historical materialism and dialectics. Finally, following in the footsteps of utopia, which is an oxymoronic closed-open world not allowing imports of imperfection but exporting perfection, perestroika proclaims its self-sufficiency, but also lays bare its latent imperialism and militarism. Perestroika’s contradictory utopian-dystopian essence results to a great extent from the naïve quasi Marxism enjoying an unchallenged status in the USSR. Paradoxically, but also inevitably, pseudo Marxism smothers all other philosophical alternatives and thus leads not to strengthening, but collapsing of the USSR and its own philosophical and practical suicide. 
Keywords: perestroika, utopia, dystopia, philosophy, literature

This article deals with the genealogy of the Radical Left and the Conservative Revolution ideas in Dostoevsky’s work focusing on his novel “The Demons” (1872). It shows the genesis of the radical left-wing position of the young Dostoevsky and his mature and late conversion to Conservative Revolution as a model for understanding what happens with neoliberalism in the post-Trump era.

AUTHORS

Настоящият брой включва доклади, четени на международната научна конференция по повод 70-годишния юбилей на Института за литература, която се проведе през м. май 2018 г. Поради голямото хронологическо отстояние от конференцията някои от текстовете бяха междувременно публикувани – частично или изцяло, но целта на съставителите на броя бе да запазят автентичния формат, с който те бяха представени преди четири години.

Празникът е добър повод да припомним мисията, която е обвързала личната и творческата съдба на поколения талантливи учени с Института за литераратура към Българската академия на науките. А тя е – да изследваме и да творим литература; да създаваме литературна наука, съизмерима със световните научни критерии; да съхраняваме културната памет и да я превръщаме в разпознаваем, достоен за уважение знак на националната ни идентичност. Като литературен историк познавам добре и капризите на историята, и суетата на литературата. Зная колко подозрителни са те към юбилейните равносметки. Но именно затова се усъмнявам в добре известното мнение на Гео Милев, че юбилеят „не е никакво чудо, нито загадка, нито въпрос. Напротив – една съвсем твърда, положителна черна точка, която пада като литературен надгробен камък над юбиляра си“.

The text examines the form of a stage presentation of the con- version of the Bulgarian monarch and his people and the preservation of the Christian religion in three plays of the German-speaking Jesuit school theaters, as well as the presentation of this plot in the engraving of German artists from the 18th century.

The sponsorship during the Bulgarian Revival is part of an ancient, centuries-old tradition and is a kind of continuation of the donation from previous historical epochs. Religious books are an important part of the books published during the Renaissance. In the period 1806–1856, a total of 77 books were published with assistance, and 24 of them were religious (or 31%). Religious books “in simple Bulgarian language“ set and achieve the goal of maintaining, upholding and strengthening the religious identity of Bulgarians.

At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, Christian values for the Bulgarian community in the Ottoman Empire were in crisis. Joakim Karchowski responded to the crisis with two sermons published in his book. With them he set the beginning of a new theology. We will call it conditionally “weekday theology”. The high examples of Christianity, the holy fathers and teachers of the Church at that time were difficult for the ordinary man to understand. This led Joakim Karchowski to orient his theology towards early Christianity – simpler and more understandable. In his time, thinking about the physical dominated over thinking about the spiritual. This mental attitude leads community to moral decay.

In this article research interest is focused on the large-scale manuscript heritage of Nayden Gerov (Fund 22 of the SS. Cyril and Methodius National Library – Bulgarian Historical Archive). There is a brief historical overview of the current scientific activities with a small part of 2000 archive units in the personal archive fund of the Revival writer, linguist, teacher and politician Nayden Gerov. In the focus of the study are presented two unexplored until now educational handwritten stories – Bulgarian and universal (F. 22, archive unit 603 and a. u. 604). The facts surrounding the two historical textbooks are systematized, and separate hypotheses have been made about the year of writing, the presence of more than one author, the place and the function in the context of the other published historical textbooks.

The article notices the first critical assumptions about “Ivanko“ dramatic work by Vasil Drumev. It also directs towards the detailed comment by Yordan Trifonov about the historiography sources which the author used to construct the plot. After Drumev develops the character of Ivanko, it becomes attractive to other Bulgarian writers, too. The emphasis of the text is upon the fact that after the work of the playwright from Bulgarian National Revival, the image of Ivanko becomes recognizable and discussed historiographic character. Due to Drumev’s writer finding and the scientific interest of Trifonov, the historiographic plot about him develops right after its literature one.

This article presents Dimitar Shishmanov’s views regarding the new role of the woman and the change in the way she is treated in the existing conservative society during the years 60s to 70s of the 19th century. He shares his opinion in his dramas, in a published brochure and in some lectures, and defends it in practice by his attitude towards his family, as well as in his forty-one letters to his wife, kept in his son’s (Prof. Ivan Shishmanov) archives.

Images of the wealthy and the poor men/women are determined by different factors. We are often prone to think that communist ideology had imposed their axiological polarization in which the poor is appreciated positively and the wealthy was anathemized. Nevertheless, similar approach is much older, it is fundamental for Christian doctrine, especially for Orthodoxy. Hence similar polarization could be traced in other Balkan Christian cultures that were less infected by communist ideology. Some scholars are inclined to connect the notions of wealth and poverty in Balkan cultures with the prolonged absence of “own” nobility and with some peculiar forms of rural community as “zadruga”.

 Starting from such general premises this paper offers an overview of some representative images of rich men and poor men in Bulgarian culture, in some cases looking for parallels in other Balkan and East-European texts. Cinderella plot and the story about the abducted treasure as element of Bulgarian national mythology are some of the focuses of the study. The observations lead to the general conclusion that the discourse that idealize poverty and satirize wealth was dominant not only for 19th century.

The subjects of research are Bulgarian translations of “Anthem” by Ferenc Kölcsey, a true national song of Hungarians, which, among other things, lead to the historical characteristics of the text, related to the interpretation and assimilation of nationally coloured vocabulary, drаw paths of translatability. In a similar plan, focused are issues of the historical specificity in translation, which are presented mostly by certain lexical units – historical concepts and proper names (toponyms and antroponyms), related to the important issue of the realities in translation. Phenomena highlighting the specific historical moment (the present) but also the historical distance (the past) and the perspective (the future) are outlined in the meanings of the original text. Problems of foreign national identity stand out – historical and cultural, related to the spirit of the nation, more or less distant in time, which are reflected in the language of translation. The role of the translator is particularly important, he must bring the reader closer to the ideas, themes and the specific imagery of the source text with the means of poetic language. It is also necessary to take into account – especially in new translations – the reception attitudes, background knowledge, accumulated experience, the increased opportunities for expressing unknown aspects and concepts of foreign reality. This is also the way to overcome cognitive and cultural differences in translation.

The text works with the concept of canon in its sense of a set of ideas and cultural codes and their corresponding values ​​and norms that unite a given community. The canon is based on a collectively generated self-concept of the Self, which the research traces in possible directions of development in its relations to the other and the stranger in several stories and humorous sketches by Mihalaki Georgiev, illustrating the humor-generating collisions, inconsistencies, discrepancies between the Self and the collective, between the different collectives in the Bulgarian socio-cultural transition between the XIX and XX centuries. The encounter and failure in communication between cultural canons at the turn of the century demonstrate a rich artistic potential that sets artistic patterns in our literary canon.

Article discusses the thesis of the novel character of Bai Ganyu, one of the most mysterious works in Bulgarian literature, which is commonly read as a cyclic collection of short stories/fеuilletons. Here the novel-epic potential in the work is argued mainly in the “vertical“, historicalgenealogical aspect, in the traditions of romance. In parallel, the article included in the theoretical debate on the essence of the novel genre in general, using some ideas of Russian formalism, in particular V. Shklovsky.

The article is part of an extensive study on Dr. Krastev’s text “Art and Religion” (1904). The philosopher criticizes, above all, the differences between these two “actions of the spirit”. Under the influence of the German psychological and philosophical-aesthetic school of the second half of the 19th century, he sees religion and art in the light of modern experimental psychology. Dr. Krastev approaches the much later psychoanalytic research of K. G. Jung and his followers. The present text stops both from deviations. His views on art have been analyzed and a brief critical reading of the theories of T. Lips, K. Groos and K. Lange about psychology of the aesthetic is interpreted by Dr. Krastev. Some connections of modern art with the views of a critic-philosopher are pointed out, as well as the lonely contribution of his study to humanities.

This article focuses on critical texts, including Ludmil Stoyanov’s, in “Hiperion” journal. The writer’s complex and contradictory transition from individualism and ultimate aesthetics to a new type of humanism, democracy and social engagement is considered. Stoyanov defines the new direction as neo-romanticism, but according to author’s thesis it can also be described as neo-pantheism.

The essay traces the shifts in the modelled projections of the foreign cultural space in the poetic works of Kiril Hristov. Here I offer a comparative reading of two poems dedicated to Germany but written more than twenty years apart. The country praised in the ode “Germany” from 1914 as the ideal state appears as a sinister rejection of its own values in the untitled poem from the collection of poetry “Breakwater” from 1937. It only appears to be so, since the inclusion of this second text in the collection “The whole of Bulgaria” (1942) under the title “German” and its translation into German would open a completely different direction for its possible interpretation. My study of documents contained in the Prague archives of Kiril Hristov confirms that the second text also has the dimensions of an ode and is undoubtedly dedicated to Nazi Germany under Hitler.

This contribution closely focuses on the features of the first, as of yet not published, Prague version of the Kiril Hristov’s drama “Maystor i dyavol” [The Master and the Devil] written in 1935–1936. The manuscript is stored in the Museum of Czech Literature Literary Archive in Prague (unprocessed collection “Christov Kiril”). Attention is paid, first, to the original legend about the builder of the Church of the Assumption of the Our Lady and St. Charles the Great in Karlov (Prague) which Christov knew from various sources, and second, to the genealogical aspects of the drama (the author himself called it “a Prague dramatic legend”). It then deals with the circumstances of the genesis of the drama and possible genetic relations to other literary texts of diverse provenience. It has been supposed that, apart from newer literary treatments of the drama, the plot of the drama was built on Karel Navrátil’s (1830–1887) treatise about the aforementioned church in Karlov, written in the 1870s. Recently it was discovered that Navrátil’s treatise was only a impulse for the theater play, but especially Kiril Hristov’s own drama built its architectonic and plot line construction and composition on an older Eduard (Edvard) Herold’s (1820–1895) historical novella “The Builder of Karlov. A Short Story From the Times of Charles IV”, published in 1853.

The text is part of a larger research which pertains to the study of the problems of acting in national dramaturgy during the 20th century in Bulgaria. The main focus is on the first performances of Bulgarian plays on the stage of the National theatre between the two world wars. A special accent is put on the already established as classical dramas of St. L. Kostov, Y. Yovkov, R. Stoyanov, G. Raychev and others. Although Bulgarian drama from that period in a way is domestic and petty bourgeois the actors created some of their best characters in national plays. According to the preserved evidences the experience of the first stage interpretations of “Golemanov”, “Albena”, “Boryana”, “Masters”, “Deer’s Kingdom” left deep traces into the minds of the spectators with the symbioses between the actor and the role as a result of the effort from the both sides of the performers and the audience during the whole theatrical process. The national drama, written “on the backs of the actors“, gives a lot of opportunities to the contemporaries for empathy and unforgettable moments.

The text announces a literary discovery that for a long time has been waiting for its research scholar – the novel “Peter”, which Konstantin Petkanov wrote in the last years of his life but which remained in a private archive for seventy years, unknown to the public. A manuscript, preserved thanks to the happy circumstance of the long-lasting intellectual dialogue between the writer and his brother, priest Dimitar Petkanov. Today we have the opportunity to read a message of great spiritual merit, whose genre vacillates between the essay and the novel, remaining extremely close to the evangelical text; it is faithful to the very narrative of the New Testament. The author of the above-mentioned text defines K. Petkanov’s work as fiction of the evangelical fact.

The study offers a reading of Georgi Raichev’s “Sin” through the Bible perspective and, on the other hand, through the history of prohibitions in the society for madness and mad people. It contains examples of that kind of characters in the Bulgarian and world literature. It searches also in classical criminalistics for explanation of physical characteristics of the potential criminals. And recalls one of the basic oppositions in modern Bulgarian literature – the village and the city as a model of living, culture, virtues and civilization.

The text examines three short stories from the classic Bulgarian children`s literature. The authors are Simeon Andreev, Grigor Ugarov and Angel Karaliichev. The plot of these short stories is the character`s dream before Christmas day and the child and bird relations. These dreams are unpleasant and even scary experience for the dreaming protagonist. From a psychoanalytic point of view, they are somehow satisfying desires, which is every child`s dream. The psychoanalysis introduces us to the analysis of these dreams and proves that the dreams for punishment are also fulfilment of wishes, not of urges, but of the criticizing, censoring and punishing instance in the spiritual life of the Super-ego. These scary experiences for the child contribute for better knowledge of its fragile, forming in the process of growing, Ego. They uncover the unconscious Id, Ego and Super-ego.

The present article places the modernity of women writers in its research focus and begins its observations with the rethinking question, what do we recognize as modernism in the late XIX – the first two decades of the XX century? The modernity of women writers remains unrecognizable to their contemporaries and even historically – the opportunity to create is aggravated by prejudices, restrictions and even prohibitions, this is a modernity beyond modernism, examined in the work of two unrecognized authors – Vela Blagoeva and Ana Karima, and both unrecognized as female presences in Bulgarian literary life, with problematic critical and collegial reception. The study highlights a number of modern ideas and concepts in each of the authors: in Vela Blagoeva – an original, non-model interpretation of historical figures, anti-racism, feminism, adventurous twists, in Karima – the first travelogue of a woman, enriched with the themes of social justice and female destiny, anti-stereotypical thinking and behavior.

The article dedicated to “In Paris. Sketches“ by Ana Karima, analyzed the poetics of the work. It transcends the boundaries of the traditional travelogue. Karima examines not only the historical sights of Paris, but introduces the readers to the social problems of the country, the position of women in society and the prostitution as an evil. Somewhat aside, but also related to the general issue, is what was written about Yavorov. Irony is leading. The comparison is with Aleko’s Bai Ganiu with a perspective on the behavior of Bulgarians abroad. The occasion is their deteriorating relationships.

What did European XIX and early XX century writers think about the femme fatale? This article examines modern incarnations of the biblical notion of the temptress in European literatures, mainly based on examples in Bulgarian and French literature, also with references to а Romanian example. More specifically, the article analyses works by Bulgarian writer Elin Pelin, as well as by French writers Jacques Casotte and Prosper Merimée, mentioning Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale, all of them having a contribution to the perpetuation of this ancient myth in European literature. The comparative reading introduces the “Samodiva” (a traditional Bulgarian name for forest nymph or fairy) as a relevant incarnation of the “fatal woman”.