Hristo Botev as a “Great Dead” according to “Misal” Literary Circle

Anna Alexieva
Institute for Literature - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

https://doi.org/10.53656/bel2025-1-4A

Abstract. The paper is focused on how the image of the poet and revolutionary Hristo Botev was shaped according to the figures, belonging to the “Misal” (“Thought”) Literary Circle. There was no consent about how Botev should be thought. According to Pencho Slaveykov, he “could hardly be nominated as a good poet”. For Yavorov, Botev was “one of the gods, who ascended to the Earth”. Special attention was paid to the hierarchy of the “great dead people” (following the phrase by
dr. Krastyo Krastev) and the place of Hristo Botev amongst them. Chronologically considered, in the first papers, written by Slaveykov and Krastev, published in the last decade of XIX c., the image of Botev was everything, but high ranked national hero. They put particular accent on his uncontrollability and anarchic attitude. He was also heavily criticized as a poet.
The study states that all the variations of the way Botev was regarded by “Misal” figures could be explained by the memory about him, which was still personal experience based, communicative (Assmann), and its transformation into a cultural one, the foundation of the literary canon, was still to come. However, Botev was institutionalized as national hero in a relatively monolithic and positive narrative during the second decade of XX c., when communicative memory transformed into a cultural one.
Therefore, in the late texts by dr. Krastev, Botev was nominated as genius, lifted considerably above all of his contemporaries.
Keywords: Botev; “Misal” literary circle; communicative memory; cultural memory

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