Life Story and Literary Interpretation. Atanas Dalchev’s Work in Literature Textbooks for Secondary Education

The paper focuses on the complicated inclusion of Atanas Dalchev’s work in the list of studied authors in Bulgarian secondary education after 1944. Although he had the reputation of one of the most significant Bulgarian poets, his influence on the younger generations was defined as negative by the socialist realists. Dalchev’s poetic principles maintained the distance between “reality” and literary convention, between author and Lyrical Self, which, however, confronted the Socialist realists’ idea about the social character of literature. This was one of the reasons why the poet’s work was left out of the school canon until 1980s and on its turn provoked a number of critical strategies that aimed to rehabilitate the author by including his works in the literary-historical process and by legitimizing his aesthetic system. The main object of the paper is the reception of Atanas Dalchev during Socialism, but at the end some trends in the textbooks published after 1989 are also noted.