Russian Classical Literature Today ― The Challenges/Trials of Messianism and Mass Culture

Yordan Lyutskanov, PhD (2006), is Associate Professor at the Institute for Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and is the author of Fortune's Vestige (Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's Novel Julian the Apostate: An Analysis of its Classicising Symbolism) (2008; in Bulgarian) and The Thinkability of Someone/the Other: Early Eurasianism and its Bulgarian Neighbours (2012; contains chapters in Bulgarian, English, and German). He is predominantly interested in intermediality, modernism, and cross-Black Sea interliterary contacts and parallels. Hristo Manolakev is Associate Professor in the Department of Russian Language and Literature at St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo, and is the author of three monographs; two in Bulgarian -- Between Image and Reading: Translated Russian Fiction During the Bulgarian National Revival (1996); and Text and Boundaries. A. S. Pushkin and His Povesti Belkina (2001) -- and one in Russian: Griboedov - Dostoevskii - Gogol': Typology and Hermeneutics of Word (2011). His research interests include 19th century Russian literature, and Russian-Bulgarian cross-literary contacts between the 18th and 20th centuries.Radostin Rusev is a PhD holder in Russian literature (1993) and Associate Professor at the Institute for Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He is a specialist in the poetics of Russian literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. His research focus is the Russian-Bulgarian literary dialogues of the 20th century. Rusev headed the Institute's research projects The Russian Literary Emigration in Bulgaria (2002-2007) and The Russian Literature in the Internet: Texts and Reading (2007-2010). He is the author of the monograph With a Mask and Several Faces: Valentin Rasputin and Russian village prose in 1960-80s (2000), and the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Russian Emigre Periodicals in Bulgaria (1920-1943) (2012).The editors share a research interest in the Russian emigre culture and literature of the 1920s-1930s.