Novel

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 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 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.

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.