Under the aegis of the German-Bulgarian Association for the Promotion of Relations between Germany and Bulgaria (“Deutsch-Bulgarische Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und Bulgarien eV”) and within the “Bulgarische Bibliothek” series founded by Prof. Gustav Weigand, academic publishing house “AVM – Akademische Verlagsgemeinschaft München” has published in Bulgarian the monographs:

Zlatanov, Blagovest. The collection “The Shade of the Balkans”. Participants and Contexts of Origin. AVM – Akademische Verlagsgemeinschaft München, München, 2020, 435 p.

ISBN 978-3-95477-110-3

Zlatanov, Blagovest. “The Sofia Lion in a Cage”. Models, Mystifications and Reception of the Collection “The Shade of the Balkans”. AVM – Akademische Verlagsgemeinschaft München, München, 2020, 558 pp.

ISBN 978-3-95477-111-0

The collection “The Shade of the Balkans”. Participants and Contexts of origin.

In his monograph Blagovest Zlatanov proves that, contrary to previous assumptions, the collection “The Shade of the Balkans” (1904) is not the result of an accidental idea. It is an inevitable consequence of lots of intertwined factors. On the ground of many years of research in foreign libraries and archives, the author reveals the geopolitical constellations around the Macedonian crisis in the late 19th and early 20th century, the processes and deficits in international folkloristics and Bulgarian studies of the second half of the 19th century, and the personal and professional trajectories of the incredible cultural visionary Pencho Slaveykov, the cunning literary mystifier and joker Henry Berline, the famous scientist and correspondent Emil Joseph Dillon, as well as the world-famous folklorist and publisher Alfred Nut. In a word, all those geopolitical, sociocultural, scientific-disciplinary and personal-professional factors, which in a complex conglomerate give rise to the need of creating the collection.

The Sofia Lion in a Cage”. Models, Mystifications and Reception of the Collection “The Shade of the Balkans”

Through originally realized collection “The Shade of the Balkans” (1904), skillful mystification games, clever mastering of genre and art models, and entering into conceptual clashes Pencho Slaveykov and his associates Henry Berline, Emil Joseph Dillon and Alfred Nut implement the most successful project for  presentation of Bulgarian culture, history and folklore to the English-speaking audience. This second monograph by Blagovest Zlatanov reveals in detail the clever strategies for sculpting the image of the exceptional artist and researcher Pencho Slaveykov, and his veiled or open battles against the notions of Bulgarians and Bulgarian folklore in the field of international Slavic studies – battles that led to an unprecedented response in the international specialized and daily press.