The Thaw In Bulgarian Literature

A critical review of post-World War II Bulgarian literature focusing on the 1950s and 1960s when the rigidity of communist restrictions on literary expression were temporarily relaxed.

Bulgaria is a country of extraordinary beauty, with high, wild mountains and gentle valleys, and with picturesque cities and idyllic villages. It’s bordered by Romania, Serbia Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, and the Black Sea. After many years of communist rule, Bulgaria adopted a democratic constitution and began the process of moving toward political democracy and a market economy while combating inflation, unemployment, corruption, and crime. The country joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Bulgaria.

This book brings together papers presented at an international conference held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2013, and organised by the Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature and the Georgian Comparative Literature Association (GCLA). It represents the first in-depth analysis of the different angles of the problem of emigration and emigrant writing, so painful for the cultural history of Soviet countries, as well as many other European countries with different political regimes. It brings together scholars from Post-Soviet countries, as well as various other countries, to discuss a range of issues surrounding emigration and emigrant writing, highlighting the historical and cultural experience of each particular country. The book deals with such significant problems as the fate of writers revolting against different political regimes, conceptual, stylistic and generic issues, the matter of the emigrant author and the language of his fiction, and the place of emigrant writers’ fiction within their national literatures and the world literary process.

The collection Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse represents selected proceedings from the conference, Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse: 20th Century Experience, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in October 2009. The Tbilisi conference pioneered scholarly inquiry into post-Soviet space, which evaluated political and cultural realia, emphasizing the challenges facing literature and culture in totalitarian strangleholds, various kinds of ideological diktat, their possible forms and consequences. The Soviet type of totalitarianism was especially accentuated. Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, full comprehension of the process of Sovietization has become possible, and in the field of literary studies scholars have worked on a number of issues: assessing conceptual and motivational models of Soviet-period texts; demonstrating the reaction of literary discourse to intellectual terror and systematizing alternative models offered by anti-Soviet discourse; exhibiting the myths and stereotypes of the totalitarian epoch; and classifying literary genres. The collection Soviet Totalitarianism and Literary Discourse has gathered papers by scholars from almost all of the post-Soviet states, as well as of some other countries. It is a first attempt to solve the above-mentioned issues and offers a wide array of questions.

This comprehensive overview of the history of Bulgaria covers events in this important Balkan nation from its 9th-century origins in the first Bulgarian Empire through the present day. Now an Eastern European leader in the fields of science and technology, a nation with impressive renewable energy production capabilities and an extensive communication infrastructure, as well as a top exporter of minerals and metals, Bulgaria has grown both economically and politically over the past two decades. The History of Bulgaria examines the country's development, describing its cultural, political, and social history and development over 13 centuries. The modern era is particularly emphasized, including Bulgaria's role in World War II, the long tenure of Communist leader Todor Zhivkov, the role of Aleksandur Stamboliiski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, and the myriad changes in Bulgaria's post-Communist period. The author also highlights significant individuals in Bulgarian history, such as Dimitur Peshev, the Deputy Speaker whose actions saved 50,000 Jews from the Holocaust.

The Iron Curtain concealed from western eyes a vital group of national and regional writers. Marked by not only geographical proximity but also by the shared experience of communism and its collapse, the countries of Eastern Europe--Poland, Hungary, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and the former states of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany--share literatures that reveal many common themes when examined together. Compiled by a leading scholar, the guide includes an overview of literary trends in historical context; a listing of some 700 authors by country; and an A-to-Z section of articles on the most influential writers.

National literary histories based on internally homogeneous native traditions have significantly contributed to the construction of national identities, especially in multicultural East-Central Europe, the region between the German and Russian hegemonic cultural powers stretching from the Baltic states to the Balkans. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, which covers the last two hundred years, reconceptualizes these literary traditions by de-emphasizing the national myths and by highlighting analogies and points of contact, as well as hybrid and marginal phenomena that traditional national histories have ignored or deliberately suppressed. The four volumes of the History configure the literatures from five angles: (1) key political events, (2) literary periods and genres, (3) cities and regions, (4) literary institutions, and (5) real and imaginary figures. The first volume, which includes the first two of these dimensions, is a collaborative effort of more than fifty contributors from Eastern and Western Europe, the US, and Canada.The four volumes of the History comprise the first volume in the new subseries on Literary Cultures.

This book provides a comprehensive survey of Bulgaria's transition to democracy from its position as perhaps the most stable communist regime in Eastern Europe.