fact

The book „Fiction in the archives. The selection of facts and documents in scientific research“ (2024) contains articles from the scientific conference with the same title held in March 2023 at Sofia University. Compilers of the collection are Andriana Spasova, Anna Alexieva, Boyka Ilieva, Nadezhda Alexandrova, Nikolay Zhelev, Slaveya Nedelcheva. The collection aims to raise the topic of the two-way interaction between fact and fiction, myth and history, document and literature.

The article, part of a larger study, provides the first accurate reconstruction of the funeral of Pencho Slaveykov, which was held on June 1/14, 1912, in Brunate (Italy). The text, based on rich archival and documentary material (memoirs, press articles, archival sources), aims to theoretically substantiate the heuristic of the scientific approach to such “marginal” micro-plots. It demonstrates that the funeral of Pencho Slaveykov in Italy was conceived as a fulfillment of the poet’s unspoken will and a merging with the “solemn psalm of the entire universe” (“Psalm of the poet”). At the same time, the article shows how the burial of the renowned author could be interpreted as a supreme expression of mercy and a manifestation of Bulgarian-Italian reciprocal understanding and friendship.