Four contemporary poets – four paths to renewing Bulgarian poetry
Author of the Week: Bulgaria
In this essay I will focus on the poetic work of four contemporary Bulgarian postmodernist poets. After a brief overview of their poetic work as a whole, I will offer an example of one poem that is emblematic of each of them. I have selected poems from their most celebrated chapbooks, namely Amelia Licheva’s Beastly Meek (2017); Plamen Antov’s The Wolf’s Totem: The Unpolitical (2013); Petar Tchouhov’s ADdicted (2017) and Marin Bodakov’s Naive Art (2011). I have tentatively named the paths of renewal of the Bulgarian poetic tradition which their poetry takes as ‘Literary Theory’, ‘Nature’, ‘Hell’ and ‘The Body’, respectively.
Path one – Literary Theory
The first poet I would like to introduce is Amelia Licheva. She is also a literary critic and theorist and an associate professor at the Department of Literary Theory at Sofia University with two major research works under her belt – her thesis The Female Voice as a Historical and Theoretical Problem (2001) and her post-doc titled Voices and Identities in Bulgarian Poetry (2007). She debuted with poems in the magazine Flame in 1988 and then in the magazine Bridge in 1989, and has since served as an editor with two important literary magazines, and a literary critic and reviewer.
Amelia Licheva is an emblematic representative of postmodernism in Bulgarian literature. Her poetry is multi-layered and erudite, full of hidden and overt intertextuality. Though deeply subjective, she often uses ancient Greek mythology, Western European literature or modern twentieth-century European culture as a gateway to new meanings (The Second Library of Babel, 1997). One of her main themes is the assertion of the female voice in Bulgarian literature. The lyrical heroine of her poetry travels not only through imaginary European cultural spaces, but also through real ones. The motif of travel is central, with European identity as a special object of attention (My Europes, 2006; Must See, 2013). Her poems are layered with the language of theory, colloquial and mythological language, and she explores the ways in which linguistic transformations shape poetry (Alphabets, 2002). Her poetry can be read as an artistic extension of her theoretical observations. Here is an example:
Amelia Licheva won the 2017 National Literary Award named after the great Bulgarian poet Binyo Ivanov for her book Beastly Meek (2017). This award is given for an outstanding contribution to the development of Bulgarian poetic syntax.
Path two – Nature
Plamen Antov received a PhD in Bulgarian literature for his thesis titled Bulgarian Postmodernism in the Tradition of Bulgarian Modernity. Context. Genesis. Specificity (2006). He works at the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences as a literary researcher since 2006, moving up to the rank of professor in 2020.
Like Licheva, Plamen Antov is a quintessential Bulgarian postmodernist poet. Characteristically, he not only works within this movement writing poetry, short stories and drama, but is also a keen researcher of it. In the spirit of postmodernism, his work is a palimpsest that stacks different layers of meaning from world literature and culture. An example of this is his poetry collection Our Americas (2002), where specific Bulgarian issues are presented against the backdrop of events from the Age of Discovery.
Another characteristic of his work is the radical critique of the impossibility of authentic change in Bulgarian society, of its readiness to adopt false values. Examples of this can be found in his book The Wolf’s Totem: The Unpolitical – Poems and Fragments (2013). In Antov’s radical philosophical system, man is criticised from the subject position of the animal, society from the perspective of nature, and the word from the position of silence. An important feature of Antov’s work is the development of the topic of antagonism between the false social construction of the self and its authentic divine essence. This is illustrated by the poem ‘Nature – I’:
Plamen Antov has won several major nominations and awards for his poetry including a nomination for the National Hristo G. Danov Award for the book Our Americas (2003), and the Pencho’s Oak Award as well as the National Binyo Ivanov Literary Award for contribution to the development of Bulgarian poetic syntax for the poetry collection The Wolf’s Totem: The Unpolitical (2013).
Path three – Hell
The third path towards the renewal of the Bulgarian poetic tradition is traced by the poetry of Petar Tchouhov. He is the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose, the most important of which are: The Garden of Weak Reality (1995), Pedro’s Mule (1999), Small Days (2002), Snowmen (2003), Most Likely Never (2004), Safety Pins (a bilingual book of haiku and senryu in Bulgarian and English, which was also published in Ireland), Camouflage (short stories and a novella, 2014), Farewell to Narcissism (2015), ADdicted (2017) and Long Enough (2019).
Petar Tchouhov is a master of haiku and short poetic and prose forms. His style is musical and refined to the extreme, and his poetry expresses a wide range of moods, from subtle irony and humour to existential drama and sublime tragedy. His poems often reinterpret, invert or ironise hardened clichés from everyday language, European culture or Bulgarian literature. He sets out from actual experience in order to transport the reader into the realm of the imaginary, where fantasy and reality intertwine. An example of his poetics is the poem ‘Addicted’ – note that the title contains an untranslatable pun, as ad is the Bulgarian word for ‘hell’:
Tschouhov has won a number of major literary prizes for poetry, including the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Prize for the poetry collection Small Days (2002), the Grand Prize for SMS Poetry from the National Palace of Culture and MTel (2004), the Slaveykov Prize for Lyric Poetry (2005, 2016), the Grand Prize of the Basho Museum in Japan (2007) and the Ivan Peychev National Lyric Poetry Prize (2017).
Path four – the Body
The fourth trailblazer on the path to poetic revival in Bulgaria is Marin Bodakov. He made his debut with poems in the magazine Native Speech in 1988. An alumnus of Sofia University, he has worked in the media for years, and now teaches at the Department of Print Journalism and Book Publishing at Sofia University.
He is the author of eight poetry collections: Virginity (1994), Cookies (1998), Announcing Failure (2002), Angel at the Zoo (2008), Naive Art (2011, which won the National Ivan Nikolov Literary Award for the best poetry book of the year), Northern Notebook (2013), The Battle for You (2016, winner of the National Memory Literary Award in honour of Konstantin Pavlov) and Bear Fear (2018).
His poetry is minimalist and fragmentary, highly subjective and marked by an extreme interest in detail. It examines small things, small stories, and searches for the intimate, the primordial meaning of words, inevitably running into the problem of truth. One can detect a biblical layer in his entire opus, particularly evident in his first collection of poems, Virginity (1994). Another important concept in his poetry is silence and falling silent, an interesting continuation of the tradition of so-called ‘quiet lyrical poetry’ of the 1960–70s. Here are two emblematic poems:
Unfortunately, Marin Bodakov left us too early, at the age of only 50, but his work remains an important contribution to the renewal of the Bulgarian poetic tradition.
Popular
Author
Ivan Hristov

Ivan Hristov (1978, Bulgaria) is a poet and a literary researcher. He is the author of the poetry collections Сбогом, деветнайсти век (Farewell, Nineteenth Century, National Prize for the best poetic debut Southern Spring 2002), Бдин (Bdin, National literary prize Svetlostruy 2006) and Американски поеми (American Poems, 2013), as well as of two academic monographs. Любовен речник (A Dictionary of Love), his fourth poetry book, was published in 2018.
His works have been translated into a dozen of languages. In 2015, Bdin was published in Turkish. The next year Bdin followed by American Poems came out in Romania. In 2019, within the framework of the European project Versopolis his third poetry book American Poems was published in Paris, France, and his fourth poetry collection A Dictionary of Love, in Bratislava, Slovakia. In 2021, an anthology with his poems was published in Poland. In 2022, a collection of his love poems was published in Slovenia under the title I am your grain of sand. Since 2019, Ivan Hristov has been a director of the Sofia: Metaphors Poetry Festival International Program. He currently works as an Associate Professor at the Institute for Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Photo by Alexander Sandev