Scoperta del mondo e modernizzazione di una litteratura: Scrittori bulgari in viaggio tra XIX e XX secolo

Discovery of the World and Modernization of a Literature: Bulgarian Writers Traveling Between the 19th and 20th Centuries. The purpose of the present article is to rediscover the travelogue in the Bulgarian literature between the end 19th and the beginning of the 20th c., that is at a crucial stage for Bulgaria. After five centuries of Ottoman domination, it was natural that, first and foremost, the voyage expressed the aspiration of the new Bulgarian intellectuality to relocate in the European cultural scene, laying the foundations of a modern national literature. On the one hand, it was a matter of reconstructing from scratch a literary tradition whose most recent splendor went back to the Preslav School (i.e. to the 9th-10th centuries), but also, on the other, to mediate between the legitimate identity instances - it was still the day after a national "resurgence" - and the curiosity for new European models, with which the Bulgarian writers were perhaps confronting for the first time directly. In short, the birth of Bulgarian travel literature coincided with that of a modern Bulgarian literature and this coincidence assumed a symbolic value. Not only, in fact, re-writing the journey is configured as a metaphor of a projection of subjectivity (therefore also of "Bulgarianity") towards a European cultural space already at least virtually common, but also encourages the transposition of cultural and ideological confrontation with the “new” and the “other” on an aesthetic and poetic level. It is significant that Italy has become, from a political reference during the "Risorgimento" (cf. bg. Văzdaždane), rather an artistic and a cultural reference for the new independent Bulgaria and its writers, Ivan Vazov, Aleko Konstantinov, Konstantin Veličkov, the "youth" of occidentalist cultural orientation - Penčo Slavejkov, Kiril Hristov, Petko Todorov. The beginnings of the Bulgarian travel literature were contextual to the complex transition of post-Risorgimental Bulgaria towards the new century and towards modernity, in which Italy, the Mediterranean, Europe itself represented a topos of knowledge and more generally the new cultural and aesthetic horizon of Bulgarian intellighencija.