Bulgarian Literature in a “Romaic” Context

According to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Literary Terms, a national literature consists of the “written creations in a specific national language,” especially with a view to those characteristics that are considered to determine the appearance of the literature in question.1 An answer to the question of what exactly “appearance” (облик) might signify is provided by the entry “National singularity of literature” (“Национално своеобразие на литературата”) in the same dictionary: “the national singularity of a literature is displayed in its subjects matters, in the description of everyday life and nature, in the language and style of the authors, but first of all in the character of the protagonists.”2 In practice, since language is supposed to constitute the base of the nation and to reflect the “people’s soul” or Volksgeist, which allegedly is omnipresent in all material and immaterial cultural achievements of the nation, the entire literary production in a specific national language—from the first written accounts to contemporary literature—is believed to reflect the collective singularity of the national community using that language.3 However, many, if not most literary works have no particular national features except for the language in which they are written. This is the case with literary works produced during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. They are strongly marked by a common perception and experience of the surrounding world, a religious or philosophical outlook on life, a moral and aesthetic value system characteristic of a civilization in a specific phase of its historical development, but do not display a particular ethnic, let alone national specificity. Admittedly, these works may contain references to certain realia. Medieval mystery plays, neo-stoic Renaissance poems, Enlightenment contes philosophiques conveying abstract ideas are inevitably situated in a concrete location and deal with concrete people, but the “national” particularities of that location and these people are of no relevance to their chief message. It might be useful to attribute to the term “national literature” a narrower meaning, comparable in its specificity to terms such as “Renaissance literature,” “Enlightenment literature,” and others. “National literature,” then, relates to such literary works, in which the author had purposefully meant to display national distinctive features: they deal with