Empathetic Sorrows: Recent Bulgarian Literature

Undergraduate / Graduate

What does it feel to write from "the saddest place in the world"? In 2010, The Economist published an article entitled "The Rich, the Poor, and Bulgaria," in which Bulgaria bucked the paradigm of predicted correlation between income and happiness. "The saddest place in the world, relative to its income per person," the Economist reported, "is Bulgaria." Storytelling invites us to step outside ourselves and inhabit someone else's way of relating to the world. This course will explore the gentle, melancholic empathy with which Bulgarian post-socialist literature seeks otherness in the (no longer heroic) past and the (even less heroic) present.