Issue-3

Table of Contents: Issue 3, 2020

This text is a lecture delivered in the “Forum for justice”, established in 2019 in memoriam to the friend and intellectual ally Christian Takov, a professor in low, who passed away in 2017. The lecture explores the concept of justice with methods unusual for philosophical or juridical inquiry - the interpretative techniques of literary theory. Central is the hypothesis that the various forms of literary imagination are instrumental in awarding a major hermeneutical Good — understanding; a claim, exemplified by a close reading of works by Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Nabokov. Narratology (especially the various patterns of relationship between the omniscient narrator and literary characters, limited in their knowledge), is used as a methodological tool to investigate the forms of uneven distribution of this Good in different historical epochs. The lecture concludes that unlike literature in previous centuries, modern literature is in its very nature utopian enterprise: its mission consists in universalizing understanding up to the limits of human nature.

The article was written in the frames of the project „The Transition after 1989 – the interpretations of historical transformations, social experience and cultural memory in the modern Bulgarian literature and culture“. In the main focus of the present study are two movies. The first one – „Gori, gori, ogunche“ (Burn, Burn Fire) (1994), scenario – Malina Tomova, director – Rumyana Petkova, is a metaphor of the initiated by the Communist government process of the violent change of Turks or Arabian names of Bulgarian Muslims, realized in 60-ties and 70-ies of 20th century. The second movie – „Radiogramofon“ (Radiogram) (2017) – scenario and director Ruzie Hasanova – is a more concrete narrative about a particular family story, which happened in the beginning of 70-ies. Analysed in a confrontative aspect both movies show different social and cultural aspects of the so-called Time of transition and the time after it. This approach helps to understand the main topics of changing Bulgarian society – the collective images, the attitudes towards history, the problems of group identities in new social, political, economic and historical period.

This article is dedicated to the dramaturgy of one forgetfulness Bulgarian playwright from the years of the so-called Socialism when he builds his own existential poetics, different from the official ones. The meaning of human life is understood by Velichkov as balancing between two categories – the mystery of Intimacy and the wisdom of Anxiety. His style has been seen as a language of silence and anger as a language of Harold Pinter and David Campton. His style has been seen as a language of Poetry itself, as a language of Theatre as a Ritual of the Love.