Martin Nag

I believe it will interest Bulgarian readers, who have long appreciated Ibsen, to know that his thoughts were, among other things, directed towards Bulgaria when he wrote "When the Dead Rise". The main female character, Irena von Satow, bears the surname of her second husband, a Ruthenian, owner of gold mines in the Urals. And her first husband was a South American. "A senior diplomat", says Ibsen's final version. But in the first draft it is said that he was a "Ruthenian", and in an intermediate version that he was a diplomat, a senior Bulgarian diplomat. "Why Bulgarian"? My theory is that Ibsen originally intended to allude to the Bulgarian Insarov from Turgenev's novel, "On the Eve." But Irena, who may be a "Turgenev" woman, is more of a femme fatale, like Irena in "Smoke," than a "strong" woman, like Elena in "On the Eve." That is why Ibsen ultimately dropped the term "Bulgarian." (I deal with this situation in more detail in a major study, "Turgenev in the Spiritual Life of Norway," which I have just finished.)

The topic "Blok Mayakovsky, Milev" is relatively often considered, especially in Soviet and Bulgarian literary studies. But so far, no aesthetic analysis of this topic has been made, something that two researchers, one Bulgarian and one Hungarian, presented in their contribution to the sixth congress of Slavists in Prague in 1968 - Ekaterina Daskalova "Alexander Blok in revolutionary-proletarian poetry in Bulgaria" and Endre Boitar in "Some problems of East European socialist poetry between 1914 and 1929".