Zamurowana niewiasta, Odyseusz i Bułgarska Wielkanoc. Tonczo Żeczew w poszukiwaniu mitu konserwatywnego

This article reflects on Bulgarian Easter, or Bulgarian Passions, a 1975 book by the Bulgarian humanist Toncho Zhechev, once regarded in Communist Bulgaria as a call for a return to traditional values. Zhechev’s quasiconservative ideological turn (which in formal terms ran counter to the precepts of Marxist ideology) was based, among other things, on a complex and richly layered reinterpretation of Izvorat na belonogata, a poem by Petko R. Slaveykov (The Spring of the White-Legged Girl, 1873), and on its revitalisation of the myths of the immured woman and of Odysseus. The way Zhechev positively reinvented a manufactured archaic tradition as a mainstay of primeval wisdom and mysticism offers an interesting testimony to the quest for a concept of “integral traditionalism” in a form that was reconcilable with the progressism of the Zhivkov era.