The Renaissance Obituary – Archive, Archetype and Hypertext

Abstract

The article examines obituaries in Bulgaria during the period of the Bulgarian Renaissance. These texts are derived from the internal need of the Bulgarians for modernization on a spiritual, cultural and educational level. Obituaries are a kind of new secular text with the aim of not so much to announce the death of a person, but to point to a meaningful existence and intellectual pursuits. The genre itself modernizes the consciousness and pursuits of the people from the 19th century. It creates prereq-uisites for comparison in a positive or negative direction with certain individuals, and it was in a function of prescribing social behavior. Obituaries became a kind of trib-une of propaganda, assessment and imposition of linguistic style. Obituaries during the Bulgarian Renaissance modernize through their encyclopedic nature, introduction of new vocabulary and terminology, familiarization with cultural and social changes in our neighboring Balkan and Western European countries, and naturally became one of the significant and influential genres of Bulgarian enlightenment on intellectual and spiritual level. The polyfunctionality of the obituary defines it as hypertext that aims to suggest a multi-layered reading of the period, as well as an archive and archetype of the personality during the Bulgarian Renaissance.