“THE GRAY PROFESSOR”, OR ON BULGARIAN CRITICISM AS A LIFELONG PURSUIT (DR. KRASTYO KRASTEV IN MILENA KIROVA’S LITERARY-HISTORICAL PORTRAITURE)
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Date
2025
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Plovdiv University Press
Abstract
The text critically examines one of the defining strokes in the post-independence literary history of Milena Kirova – the one dedicated to Dr. Krastyo Krastev, whose devotion to literary criticism became a lifelong pursuit. The focus is on one of the first extensive literary-historical attempts that constructed a complex, internally contradictory, multifaceted – both in characterological and socio-stylistic terms – portrait of the Critic, known as “the man in gray.” For the first time, a silhouette of a modern arbiter of esthetic taste has been outlined so closely and in such detail from a psychographic, esthetic-literary, historical-contextual, and creative-biographical perspective within the framework of the literary-historical narrative. To shift the perspective on him–from the familiar, conventional literary-historical image of a rigorous but dull and doctrinaire scholar, he emerges as one of the most perceptive and conceptual connoisseurs of esthetics, a zealous builder of modern Bulgarian culture; the “General” of literary criticism in our country.
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Keywords
“the gray professor”, Dr. Krastyo Krastev, literary criticism, post-independence literary history, Milena Kirova