Antiquity after antiquity: a (post) modern reading of antiquity in Bulgarian poetry

Abstract

Only after the democratic transition in Bulgaria in the late 1980s was the concept of the classical tradition, conceived as an ancient legacy, mobilized in a more or less conscious search for a cultural identity that could be traced back to common European roots. The present study traces the peculiar and inventive reception of antiquity in the poetry of post-communist Bulgaria. I focus on two poetry collections by the Bulgarian poet Kiril Merjanski (born in 1959), which, by reinventing ancient epitaphs, articulate political concerns and cultural aspirations that were current in Bulgaria at the end of the twentieth century. Merjanski’s poetry reflects a specific attitude towards the near and more remote Bulgarian historical past while at the same time aiming at rediscovering mislaid traditions. What is more, problems related to historical memory are interwoven with a sense of the worthlessness of life in the new cultural and political milieu, as well as with a sense of freedom and shattered hopes for a new and better beginning. Both poetry collections represent the shift and the contrast between an apparently fixed and stable society and the instability of society in the present, and deal with global phenomena such as exile, migration, and wandering, which are characteristic of the modern geopolitical spectrum on the millennial borderline.