Violeta Kuneva
- Bulgaria -
Violeta Kuneva was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, where she still lives. She holds a master’s degree in law. Since then, she has been working in the legal field. But poetry is undoubtedly more important to her. Her first poetry collection, Almost Everything is Fine (2019), won the Ivan Nikolov National Award (for debut) and the Pegasus Grand Prize in the National Competition for Debut Literature Yuzhna prolet (Southern Spring). Her second book, The Dog of Persephone (2023), received Peroto (The Pen), an award of the National Book Center, and was nominated for the Ivan Nikolov and Hristo Fotev awards. Violeta has participated in many poetry festivals and events in Bulgaria and abroad, with her poems featured in various literary anthologies and magazines in different languages.
The poetry of Violeta Kuneva finds meaning in darkness and reveals it through light. It explores and comes to know the pain of existence in order to make it bearable. Characteristic of her work is the dialogue between the profane and the elevated, between the everyday and the grand, as these continuously flow into one another and are either legitimized or challenged. This poetry is minimalist: the poems are usually short and written in an everyday, equally minimalist language that speaks of great themes without pathos. The human being is one of its central themes – within humans reside hell and paradise, gods and angels. This poetry is not afraid to speak of what is dark, of what is uncomfortable. Yet it always leaves an opening for escape. Sometimes this is a wound from which light pours out. It insists that we acknowledge our vulnerability, that we do not close our eyes to the truth, however uncomfortable it may be, but also that we do not lose our ability to recognize possible ways out.
Almost Everything is Fine, Violeta Kuneva’s debut collection (2019), received the Pegasus Grand Prize in the National Competition for Debut Literature Southern Spring (2020), as well as the Ivan Nikolov National Award for a debut book (2019). The collection deals with the challenge of enduring the difficulty of happiness, with the visible and the invisible, and with the substitution of the genuine by the artificial. One of the ways this substitution is revealed is through reflecting on our imperfections. They are seen as what is most valuable within us. Looking closely, without unnecessary mercy, at our own flaws, the book explores the world and, by naming pain, makes it easier to bear. Poet Petar Tchouhov writes about the book: “Delicate poetic determination and emotional erudition. The undeniable talent to turn the world around you into your inner world (or the other way around) gives birth to powerful poetry whose dimensions extend far beyond the limits of creative self-sufficiency. A book that wishes to communicate. And it does so in the best possible way – with love.”
Angels appear as part of ourselves and as а help that we must choose to give to ourselves. Salvation always comes from within us – the responsibility is ours. Freedom is also an important theme in this book, and once again it lies within our own power and is a matter of personal choice.
Her second book, The Dog of Persephone (2023), won The Pen National Award (2023) and was nominated for two other prestigious national awards – the Ivan Nikolov Poetry Award and the Hristo Fotev Award. The jury that nominated the book for the Hristo Fotev Award justified its choice as follows: “For the precision of expression and the ease with which it moves between the concrete and the metaphorical, the visible and the invisible, seeking clearings between them, expanding the earthly, transforming the myths; for the courage to look at fears, losses, and the dark sides of the soul, to accept them, tame them, and place them within that luminous unity which is life.”
The collection is conceptually shaped, even though it was not originally conceived as such. At its core lies the motif of taming hell – in various senses: from everyday hell, to hell as an otherworldly space, but also as the battle for ourselves, as a place we have the power to transform into paradise. Persephone’s dog moves freely through spaces and worlds; it is a guide showing us that boundaries can be shifted, that nothing is fixed forever, that it is meaningful to make openings in walls, to pass through them, to expand the limits. This book seeks not to distance itself from darkness, but to enter it and illuminate it from within. This is characteristic of Violeta’s poetry as a whole – often its theme is the dark, the heavy. Yet it is viewed through the prism of our strength to face it, to make it bearable, to understand it, and to call it by its true name. To give a name to what is frightening is a kind of victory.
Poet, writer, and journalist Yordanka Beleva observes that “Violeta Kuneva’s book is filled mostly with gentle miracles.” Their gentleness settles in the nature of everyday occurrence, in the domestic competence of extraordinariness, in the sudden appearance of the supernatural where everything has been mined by a foretold ending. That’s perhaps because Violeta’s writing handles with ease the transfer between literal and figurative meaning, discovering confirmations that poetry happens regardless of the unpoetic political and personal times.”
Another recurring theme is the war between light and darkness that constitutes each of us. Questions arise concerning what is at stake in this war, what is at stake in our survival within it. In some cases, it is better to stand on the side of the loser in order to remain in the light.
The clash between above and below, low and high, thesis and antithesis is one of the red threads running through the book. The constant dialogue between the poems in the collection, and at times their mutual contradiction, was noted by journalist, translator, and publisher Zornitsa Hristova: “I would not trust the recurring motifs so much as I would pay attention to how each subsequent appearance of a given image changes its meaning – not in order to play a rhetorical trick on the reader, to make the same word (mortality, dog, light, wound) say the opposite of what it said at the beginning, but in order to preserve the possibility of communication, which needs this mutual unsettling of poems that seem unshakable in their wholeness.”
In the newest poems by Violeta Kuneva, published in literary journals after her second book, more political themes can be observed, yet once again refracted through the personal world of the individual who is determined not to lose the capacity for reflection and who attempts to resist the invading existential darkness brought about by the disintegration of the world as we have known it so far.
Essay written by Petar Tchouhov
Poetry
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ENOUGH / ДОСТАТЪЧНО
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MIRACLES / ЧУДЕСА
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CREATION / СЪТВОРЕНИЕ
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POSTCARD FROM HELL / КАРТИЧКА ОТ АДА
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DEAR AUDIENCE / ДРАГИ ЗРИТЕЛИ
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FIGHTING WITH SNOW / БИТКА СЪС СНЕГА
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TO MY DAUGHTER / НА ДЪЩЕРЯ МИ
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UNTITLED / БЕЗ ЗАГЛАВИЕ
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UNTITLED / БЕЗ ЗАГЛАВИЕ
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YOUR APPLAUSE, PLEASE / МОЛЯ ЗА ВАШИТЕ АПЛОДИСМЕНТИ
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HAPPY ENDING / ХЕПИЕНД
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UNTITLED / БЕЗ ЗАГЛАВИЕ
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/ БЕЗ ЗАГЛАВИЕ
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AT THE CONCERT / НА КОНЦЕРТА
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AT THE CIRCUS / В ЦИРКА
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EITHER TRUTH OR / ИЛИ ИСТИНАТА, ИЛИ
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AND YET IT MOVES / ВСЕ ОЩЕ ТЯ СЕ ВЪРТИ
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UNTITLED / БЕЗ ЗАГЛАВИЕ
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UNTITLED / БЕЗ ЗАГЛАВИЕ
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SHOULD I BELIEVE IN MIRACLES / ДА ВЯРВАМ ЛИ В ЧУДЕСА
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UNTITLED / БЕЗ ЗАГЛАВИЕ
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UNTITLED / БЕЗ ЗАГЛАВИЕ
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UNTITLED / БЕЗ ЗАГЛАВИЕ
