In Defense of Native Literature: Writers’ Associations, State and the Cult of the Writer in pre-1945 Bulgaria

Abstract

Looking at Bulgarian society and cultural life of the first half of the 1900s, this study scrutinizes a common belief in the high public esteem reserved for poets and writers in eastern Europe. It demonstrates that the creators of literature (and the national arts in general) occupied a precarious position in a society without a sustainable cultural market. The predicament of Bulgarian writers, however, was that of many European literati in early 1900s competing for readers’ attention with a rising mass culture. Placing Bulgarian writers in a broader interwar framework, this article explores the various non-literary strategies they pursued in affirming the public value of national literature. In the process, it suggests that the lore of “the writer as a national hero” was the deliberate work of social actors seeking to correct an unsatisfying reality and not an expression of an organic relationship between nation and writers (and intellectuals more broadly).