Kiril Krastev's Book “Memories of the Cultural Life between the Two World Wars” – Return of Modernism

Abstract

In the center of this article is Kiril Krastev's memoir book “Memories of cultural life between the two world wars” (1988). Two of the central literaryhistorical “narratives” of the memoir are analytically examined – the Yambol literary modernism and the role of Geo Milev in the development of Bulgarian avant-garde art. The discrepancies between the visions of literary events proposed in the memoir text and the canonical narrative of academic literary history are highlighted. Kiril Krastev's specific strategy for literary memory offers its readers a different reading of the literary events during the period between the two world wars, at a time when literary history is subordinated to the ideologies of the socialist regime for decades.