Is It Easy to Write about Bulgarian Literature?

Abstract

Is it easy to write about Bulgarian literature? The suggested essay ensues from the well-known debate in Bulgarian culture concerning the concepts of “the ours” and “the foreign”. It examines some examples from the critical and fictional texts of Tzvetan Stoyanov, which show both ruptures and linking “threads” between specifically native and non-Bulgarian culture and literature in the 1960s. Bulgarian culture, as a counterpoint to alienation, is characterized by the category of orality and preserves the harmonious relation between author and community. Therefore, the critic insists that it should be taken out of the “museum vitrine” and become a critical benchmark for the present. Secondly, we examine the manifold correlations between Bulgarian and non-Bulgarian in Tzvetan Stoyanov’s writings: the non-Bulgarian as a way of overcoming deficiencies; as mutual reflection and self-understanding; the interweaving of Bulgarian and non-Bulgarian images in an ever more uniform modern culture that standardizes cultural models despite ideological divisions. In conclude, the image of the threads is developed as a metaphor for the quest to preserve communion, and the asymmetry between authors labeled as “pro-Western” and their works on Bulgarian themes is displayed.