Надежда Стоянова

The article focuses on a not well-known poem by Atanas Dalchev – “Hronika” / “A Chronicle” which was published in a literary journal but later was not included in any of the poet’s books. In the research, the reasons for the rejection of the work both by the author himself and by the compilers of his books are sought in the literary characteristics of the poem as well as in Dalchev’s strategies for modeling his literary-historical image.

This research work is focused on the interpretations of the letter as a literary image in Bulgarian poetry of the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as on the question of the sender and their complex relationships with the addressee. The image of the letter is presented in two ways. On the one hand, a letter received or sent becomes an expression of hope for the presence of the Other, despite the distance in space or time. On the other hand, the written messages do not always reach their addressee, or it may be difficult to reconstruct their content – the envelopes are sealed, the content is fragmentary and laconic. Therefore, they can awaken the fear of the absence of the Other – a fear that, during these years, is no longer devoid of post-structuralist intuitions about the vulnerability of the subject. The study is divided in three parts that consider the issues of the expected or unexpected letters; the unarrived, unwelcome, and unopened letter; the unwritten or written letters.