One of the first things I realized was the need to look critically at the critical practice of recent decades. I say this as the author of more than seven hundred reviews of newly published books, written in the period 1995-2020 and published mainly on the pages of the "Kultura" newspaper. I re-read them, as well as what other reviewers have written elsewhere, as well as some of the endless stream of reader comments on various forums, sites and blogs on the Internet. I clearly saw how great the difference can be between operative criticism and literary-historical evaluation of the same phenomenon. Thus arose the need to challenge some critical opinions, including my own. The critic writes under a microscope, and the literary historian is like an engineer trying to assemble a complete mechanism from a vast amount of jumbled parts. Sometimes you sacrifice a good author or work if you can't fit them into the construction scheme. Other times you bring forward works with less than brilliant features because you need them functionally to assemble some important part of the overall mechanism.
However, I am aware of a paradox. Written with the ambition of being a literary history, this book will be read as a critique because its yesterday is still today.
Prof. Milena Kirova (1958) teaches Bulgarian literature from the Liberation to World War I and anthropology of the biblical world at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski ". Head of the Department of Bulgarian literature from 2003 to 2011 and from 2015 onwards. She is the author of fifteen books, including the monographs "The Dream of Medusa. Toward a psychoanalysis of Bulgarian literature"(1995), "Yordan Yovkov. Myths and mythology"(2001), "The problematic realism"(2002) and "Biblical woman. Mechanisms of design and policies of depiction in the Old Testament"(2005), "The literary canon. Challenges"(2009).
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