Dana Hronkova

Twenty years ago, very little was known about Bulgarian literature in the Czech Republic. The older generation might still remember the translations of Vazov's works (mostly published towards the end of the 19th century and before the First World War), as well as something from the 1920s and 1930s, when one could read something by Elin Pelin or Kiril Hristov, whose articles, poems and stories often appeared in the press in Czech and German during his stay in Prague - later, readers and critics only knew a few names from the scattered individual poems in Bulgarian literature or forgotten books. Hardly anyone connected these names with specific works. After all, Botev was more of a legendary national liberation hero for the Czech cultural community between the two world wars than a poet and publicist, and of his works, only the poem "Hadji Dimitar" and the article "Funny Cry" were known at that time, which was reprinted several times. Bagryana's poetry collection "The Eternal and the Holy" ("Ta věčna a ta svatá", 1931), archaized by translation to the Parnassian poetry of the late 19th century, failed, Strashimirov's poorly translated "People" ("Svatebni rej", 1928) was met with no success - and conversely, the poems of Lyuba Kasyrova, a poet completely forgotten in Bulgaria, found a response in the critics. The set of ideas about Bulgarian literature with which one entered the forties was insignificant. Apart from the usual folk literature, the stories of Elin Pelin, the prose of Yordan Yovkov and the small book "Once Upon a Time" ("Dávno", 1938) by Dora Gabe translated by Vitezslav Nezval, born from the moments of the first child's perception of the big unknown world, like much of Nezval's work, it is difficult to find another translation from Bulgarian until 1944 that is somehow more deeply connected to Czech literature. After the liberation of Bulgaria and after the liberation of Czechoslovakia a year later, the blank field in the knowledge of Bulgarian literature came to the surface very plastically and clearly.