letters

In the period of the Slovene moderna in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century Slovenian women writers were establishing themselves in the literary field for the first time. With the analysis of their correspondences from the point of view of the history of emotions we focus on how they experienced the new roles they assumed in this period: the writer/poet, the editor, the intellectual, the critic and emancipated woman. The analysis shows the struggles they experienced when trying to be a part of the Slovenian literary system. Their letters were a place of critical reflection and intimate relationships forming a community of women writers that at the time were a marginalised group.

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.

The text reviews Daria Vasileva’s “Renegotiating Kinship. The People of Kalofer from the Middle of the 19th to the First Decades of the 20th Century.” This book analyzes the epistolary correspondence kept in the archive of Nikola Nachov – a writer, historian, and bibliographer from Kalofer (1859 – 1940). In the letters, the examined cases of systematically incorrect kinship terminology encourage the researcher to hypothesize that, in the period under discussion, certain individuals became symbolically related on the level of communication. In the monograph, it is argued that the emergence of the “vocative kinship” and of extended kinship groups testifies the process of erosion of kinship as a structure and its transformation into a social network. The reviewed text is a fascinating reading and deserves the attention not only of the researchers of the literature from the National Revival period but also of a wider range of scholars.