Content area
Full Text
Tradition and Future
This article aims to provide a very brief overview of alternating trends in the history of Bulgarian children's literature and a useful, if necessarily severely limited, introduction to its most popular authors.
Bulgarian literature for children began during the Bulgarian National Revival in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was linked to the growth of secular education, and to the appearance of the first Bulgarian textbooks and school texts. To cater to the needs of secular schools, Bulgaria's foremost men of letters created a number of elementary reading textbooks, mostly based on foreign models. The most important such reader is Dr. Peter Beron's so-called Riben Boukvar (literally "'Fishy Reading Textbook," nicknamed erroneously after the picture of a dolphin on its cover; Sofia: Narodna Prosveta, 1964; first publ. 1824).* The first popular texts and poems written specially for children appeared in the period's magazines.
As five centuries of Ottoman rule ended, the young nation's moral values changed radically to emphasize hard work, learning, and patriotism. These moral fundamentals entered the poetry of the first Bulgarian children's authors-Petko R. Slaveykov, Ivan Vazov, Konstantin Velichkov, and Tsanko Tserkovski-whose poems aimed to instill love of one's country, devotion to work, thirst for knowledge, and respect for one's parents. The principal characteristics of these first poets were sincerity of thoughts and emotions and open didacticism (usual for periods of new beginnings). Their poems are imperative and contain layer upon layer of direct exhortations. However, they are not devoid of lyrical touches: affection for the homeland, for its natural beauty, or for the life of village children. In this initial stage, the young reader is mainly an object of tuition, a tutee; the poets are not concerned with his or her psychology and do not bother to look for less direct ways of imposing their moral values.
However, poems for the very young adopted, from the beginning, a more intimate, warm, and friendly tone. In the work of Petko R. Slaveykov (an eminent educator and founding father of Bulgarian children's literature), we find the playful, natural-sounding short lullaby, modeled on children's games. At the end of the nineteenth century, the pronounced didactic tendency gave way to play and entertainment. An example of this new...