The paper seeks to question the concept of the ‘Bulgarian Revival’ as a fixed, self-evident and taken-for-granted concept. Nowadays Bulgarian literary theory and historiography are experiencing in a similar way the general problematicity of the Revival concept stemming primarily from two things: firstly, this concept completely lacks neutrality, it is axiologically overladen with wholly positive connotations; secondly, the metaphoricity of the concept and the consciousness of an ‘era’ in it invariably turn out to be interlinked at its very core. This also necessitates an inquiry into the relationship between metaphor and era in the Revival concept which ensure, in different ways and for different occasions, its ability to boundlessly produce cultural continuities, whereby the metaphor blurs and transcends the boundaries and differences between the different eras. The cultural, contextual, and political ability of the Revival concept-metaphor to produce different narratives and, hence, different eras in Bulgarian history is interpreted here as a major premise for its countless historical and contemporary uses.

Keywords: revival period, metaphors and concepts, the longue durée of the Revival metaphor, Bulgarian history and culture

The paper is elaborated especially for The Political Uses of Revival: Historical Heritage and Contemporaneity Project, supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Bulgaria, 2017 – 2020.

The paper analyzes the discourse of the so-called “spiritual revival” in Bulgaria in the interwar period, tracing back the history of various periodicals and organizations with non-material and non-secular aims. The latter are compared and opposed on the base of (non)belonging to the orthodox faith and the institutional basis of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and respectively are seen as two different responses to the increased search for moral and existential alternatives. Thus the orthodox charity promoted by parish confraternities and journals is presented as a platform for legitimizing the intervention of the Church in the social sphere after WWI, while the varied and complex network of Tolstoists, theosophers, Dunovists, Masons among others, are discussed as blending the individual mystic transformation with a return to the centuries-old folk traditions and to the practices of Christian neo-gnostic sects such as Bogomilism. The paper, however, outlined the common discursive environment of these two branches of the Bulgarian spiritual revival movement, growing from the postwar anti-liberal attitudes and projecting the development and welfare of the society in retroactive, nationalistic terms.

The paper is elaborated especially for The Political Uses of Revival: Historical Heritage and Contemporaneity Project, supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Bulgaria, 2017 – 2020.

Keywords: spiritual revival, church charity, moralism, Tolstoism, occultism, theosophy, folk mysticism, new nationalism

The article studies the specifics of the visions of degeneration and regeneration in Bulgaria within the eugenics discourse and other intellectual and political discourses with which it interceded. Hence, certain concepts of modernity, historical time and identity are reconstructed as a result of biosocial engineering in Bulgaria at the end of the 19^th century and especially during the interwar period. The analysis is structured in several sections, which address the following topics: biological images of social time as elaborated at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century; the racial anthropological perspective of the biologist Metodiy Popov towards national historical time; the psychologizations of the “national soul” envisaged as undergoing social progress and/or decay, as well as the scientific-political versions of a “New Revival” of the Bulgarian collective organism. The theme of biopolitical regeneration is interpreted as enriching the conceptual background of the “revivalist imagination” in Bulgaria.

Keywords: Degeneration, Revival, Regimes of Historicity, Eugenics, Racial Anthropology, Folk Psychology, Mental Hygiene

The article examines national psychology and its development in Bulgaria in the second half of ХІХ and the first half of XX century in the context of the Revival and the notions and images of the Bulgarian associated with it. It is hypothesized and argued that thinking of national psychology as of an instrument for selective actualization of what is reckoned as original Bulgarian traits is heuristic for understanding the political uses of the descriptions of the people and its character. A specific type of discursive approach in the descriptions of the Bulgarians is identified and analyzed – one that reaffirms the value of what is Bulgarian by an utterance of negative traits. 

The paper is elaborated especially for The Political Uses of Revival: Historical Heritage and Contemporaneity Project, supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Bulgaria, 2017 – 2020.

Keywords: national psychology, people, Revival, traits, character

The study focuses on Petar Beron’s, Raino Popovich’s, Konstantin Fotinov’s and Sava Dobroplodni’s views on childhood revealed in their writings. Moments from their works tell us their answers to question “What’s a child?”, which the beginnings of modernization had put on the public agenda. For them, children should not be seen oxi-moronically as “little grownups”. One of their strongest messages is for a new understanding of childhood and children as a stage in human development, requiring from adults specific treatment. Along with Locke, they believed that a kid’s mind is a tabula rasa focusing on its being free of the “original sin”. Childhood is “innocent”; corporal punishment should be abolished, and the other punishments should be inflicted on a strictly individual and equitable basis. Some of them were especially strong on defending the right of girls to school education. More traditional are they regarding the power distribution at home and school: free choice is the domain of adults; children don’t have enough knowledge and experience to be vested with it (reminding one of Locke again). But unlike Locke, Beron, Popovich, Fotinov and Dobroplodni seem to see the goal of moral education to be the production of subjects, not citizens. Their belief that children should be trained to re-act in mâlchanie, blagochinie, pokorenie and smirenie (roughly: reticence, respect of one’s betters, submissivness and humbleness) definitely points that way.

The paper was especially elaborated to consult the work for The Political Uses of Revival: Historical Heritage and Contemporaneity Project, supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Bulgaria, 2017 – 2020.

Keywords: Bulgarian 19^th Century, History of Childhood, Child, Enlightenment, John Locke.

The article deals with the diverse public representations of parenting, mothering and fathering in contemporary Bulgaria and aims to explore some of the narratives, claims and gendered implications on which they rely. Two contradictory types of representations are analyzed – the first one is construed around the image of the responsible parent and the second one around а humorous vision of motherhood. While the responsibilizing representations are situated within a global intensive and deterministic parenting culture which naturalizes the gendered expectations towards mothers and fathers, the humorous ones produces new emancipatory visions of motherhood and femininity.

Keywords: parenting, parenting culture, gender, motherhood