All events at a glance

Jacques Canetti – Behind the scenes of French chanson – EXHIBITION

October 5 at 6 p.m.,Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

From Edith Piaf’s first steps to those of Brigitte Fontaine, via Charles Trenet, Charles Aznavour, Félix Leclerc, Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel, Guy Béart, Michel Legrand, Serge Gainsbourg, Serge Reggiani, and other “big names”…

Step behind the scenes of French chanson with Jacques Canetti. This exhibition recounts the sometimes difficult beginnings of the “big names of chanson” through the career and work of artistic director Jacques Canetti, who left his mark on the 20th century.

Françoise Canetti, Jacques Canetti’s daughter, has created a traveling exhibition of 20 panels that trace her father’s 50-year history of French chanson. Discover a fascinating and intergenerational exhibition that will take you behind the scenes of French chanson through all its eras: unpublished documents, photographs, record covers, and posters from the Canetti family’s personal archive.

ALEXANDRA IVOYLOVA – Presentation of the book “Zatvaryane na kraga“(Closing the Circle) and an exhibition titled “Serii“(Series)

October 5 at 7 p.m.,Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

If we skim the surface without looking at the true essence of things, even a brilliant work of art becomes a cliché. Let our lives be far removed from clichéd ideas about them.

Alexandra Ivoylova

 

The book “Zatvaryane na kraga“, published by Ogledalo in 2025, contains 48 metaphorical and associative poems (free and blank verse) whose themes—transience-eternity, life-death, earthly-cosmic, faith, art, love, nature—address universal human problems. Several original illustrations are included.

The exhibition titled “Serii” (ink, pastel, collage), presents abstract images that originate from my earliest attempts at Japanese calligraphy. My first attempts created certain associations in me pulling threads in many directions.

“TOVA BESHE 1965,”(THIS WAS 1965) – FILM SCREENING

October 6 at 6 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

Director – Lisa Marie Stojčev

Screenplay – Lisa Marie Stojčev

Cinematographer – Grigory Shklyar

Music – Rahel Hutter

Cast – Stoycho Penev Stojčev, Lisa Marie Stojčev, Rahel Hutter, Grigory Shklyar

Producer – Lisa Marie Stojčev

The director is searching for her own origins as well as the story of her father’s escape. Together with her two friends – the film’s cinematographer and composer – she travels around Bulgaria. The three of them explore places, texts, letters, documents, and archival footage of her family’s past and present in Bulgaria and Germany. The books that accompany the director during her search play an important role in the film including Elias Canetti’s The Tongue Saved the last book her father read before his death and her personal gift to him. The connection with Canetti, who writes in German about Bulgaria from within – through his own childhood memories – creates a special parallel with the journey itself and with the themes of memory, loss and multilingualism.

“Tova beshe 1965” is a memory-filled immersion in times and places where personal history intertwines with literary traces and an ongoing conversation with a dead father.

Prof. Dr. M. GRIGOROVA and Dr. V. NACHEVA

– Presentation of the book “The Mad Dictator”

October 7 at 6 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

The book “The Mad Dictator” brings together two works by leading Polish authors that are diverse in genre but similar in spirit: the dystopia “Dwa końce świata” (Two Ends of the World) by Antoni Słonimski and the play “Baba-Dziwo” (A Woman of Wonder) by Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnowska. Written in the late 1930s, they reflect not only the madness of the Dictator and dictatorships, but also the looming war that they experienced in exile. The texts are still relevant today.

The novel “Dwa końce świata” (1937) by Antoni Słonimski is similar to the dystopian novels of Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and Karel Čapek. It was rediscovered in Poland in 1989 and is mentioned by historians Norman Davies and Adam Zamoyski as a prophetic book.

In it, Hans Redlich (a mirror image of Hitler), also known as “The New Noah,” destroys the old humanity with deadly blue rays in order to create a new one in his own image and likeness on his estate in Denmark. Five accidental survivors from Warsaw, Edinburgh and a small town in Italy, each colorful and different in their own way, get mixed up in risky situations, funny adventures and strange combinations with each other as they try to get used to the new world. The book is underpinned by the erudition and brilliant sense of humour of the author – a leading Polish poet, writer and journalist.

“Baba-Dziwo” (1938) is considered by critics to be one of the most valuable plays by Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnowska, a member of the famous Kosak family of Polish artists. Its first staging at the renowned Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Krakow was a major event, and its Warsaw premiere in the early days of the war (September 2, 1939) provoked strong discontent on the part of the German embassy (due to the recognition of Hitler’s regime presented in it). The writer was forced to leave her homeland. Today, the play is experiencing a renaissance on theater stages in Poland.

In the fictional country of Pravia, the perfect female dictator Valida Vrana rules, imposing absurd measures to increase the population, playing with women’s rights, and keeping everyone and everything under control… until, with the help of chemistry, a brave and beautiful female scientist causes her to expose herself and fall from power. “Wonder Woman” introduces us to a satirical and tragic world of absurdities, filled with the author’s feminine charm and rebellious spirit.

IVAN STANKOV – Presentation of the short story collection “Na dva glasa”(In Two Voices)

October 8 at 6 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

It’s not just people who have favorite animals. Animals also have favorite people. Especially those who live close to humans.

Each story in this book tells of the love between an animal and a person. They understand each other with and without words. This has been done in literature for a long time. Everything in literature is an old song with a new voice. Here, there are two voices in each story. One leans toward minor, the other toward major. The action takes place in our time on the banks of the Danube, which continues to diligently measure human time.

The author

Ivan Stankov is a writer and translator. He is a professor of Bulgarian literature at the University of Veliko Tarnovo. He was born in 1956 in the village of Gomotartsi, Vidin district. He graduated in Bulgarian philology in 1982. He is the author of monographic studies on the works of Assen Raztsvetnikov, Yordan Yovkov, Dimitar Talev, Vasil Popov, Boris Hristov, and others. He is a translator from Romanian of Mircea Cartarescu, Dan Lungu, and others. He is the author of the books “Spomeni za voda” (Memories of Water. Dm), “Ulitsi i korabi. Gm”(Streets and Ships. Gm), “Imena pod snega.A7” (Names Under the Snow. A7),”Vecherna svatba” (Evening Wedding), “Kasna smart” (Late Death) and “Na dva glasa”.

He is the recipient of the Elias Canetti National Literary Award and the literary awards of Portal “Culture,” “Stoyan Mihaylovski,” and “Helicon.”

Violeta Radkova – Presentation of the novel ” I Legoto ni e Zelenina” (And Our Bed Is Greenery)

October 8 at 7 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

“I Legoto ni e Zelenina” tells of turbulent times when the centrifugal forces of the Balkans rage mercilessly – uprooting families, sending brothers and fathers across the ocean, and entangling the threads of human destinies. Untangling each knot leaves scars, but also liberates unsuspected heroes. Free to love, to fight their fears, to build and to fail, they weave the fabric of a new society full of ambition. If this rich family history seems somehow familiar to you, it is because its twists and turns reflect Bulgaria at the beginning of the 20th century, and perhaps also the green threads of your own family paths. Follow them again as you immerse yourself in this skillfully written debut.

Violeta Radkova graduated in English philology from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski with a master’s degree in British and American literature. She is a scholarship holder of the Sozopol Seminars of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. Together with Mihail Minchev, she is the co-author of the book podcast “Chetene mu e maykata”(Everything depends on reading).”I Legoto ni e Zelenina” is her first novel.

Edit Király – The River: A Different Anthology for the Danube

October 8 at 8 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

The many faces of the Danube: as a border and as a bridge and link, as a magnificent resort and as a drainage canal, sometimes as a graveyard or a route of exile. Now the Danube, an internal European river, is preparing to transform itself from a dividing to a “connecting element.” The Danube, one of Europe’s great arteries, passes through more countries than almost any other river. It has always challenged writers and aroused interest.

This book takes us on a literary journey through the centuries and between cultures. Organized by theme, its 22 chapters reveal sunken islands, riverside forests, landscapes and gorges, bridges and cities, spaces that serve as repositories of historical events. Hidden places and themes, markets and penal camps, escape and persecution come to the fore, but also the idea of the Danube as the great bracket for the regions through which it flows. Significant writers from different languages and literatures along the Danube are presented, revealing an astonishing diversity and colourfulness. The Danube should be seen not only as a river, but also as a “textual flow,” as a discourse “that arises from different perceptions, representations, and narratives as a projection of diverse points of view.”

Each chapter is preceded by a cultural-historical introduction.

Edit Király is Associate Professor of German Literature and Culture at Eötvös Lóránd University Budapest. Her main research interests include semantics of space, travelogues, river narratives. She is the author of Die Donau ist die Form. Strom-Diskurse in Texten und Bildern des 19. Jahrhunderts. (The Danube is the form. Discourses on rivers in 19th-century texts and images, Böhlau Publishing House 2017), (in Hungarian 2021). Recently she co-edited Der montierte Fluss. Donaunarrative in Text, Film und Fotografie (The assembled river. Danube narratives in text, film and photography, Steiner Publishing House 2023). She has published essays on Péter Esterházy, Heimito von Doderer, Gert Jonke, Wolf Haas, Andreas Okopenko and also on Lost Places etc. Currently, she is working on a book on the poetics of contemporary literary travelogues.

Claus Löser is a German author, curator, film historian, and specialist journalist. He was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz. Since 1990, Löser has been program director at the cinema of the cultural institution “Brotfabrik” in Berlin-Weissensee. In 1992, he began working as a freelance author. After graduating from the film school in Potsdam-Babelsberg in 1995, he founded the film archive “ex.oriente.lux” in 1996, dedicated to East German underground and experimental films. His dissertation “Strategies of Refusal: Studies on the Political-Aesthetic Gesture of Nonconformist Film Expressions in the Late GDR” was published in 2011 in the DEFA Foundation series. From 2013 to 2015, he was a member of the board of the Association of German Film Critics, and has since been a member of its advisory board. Löser lives and works in Berlin.

“The approximately 20 texts will cover the period from my beginnings in the early 1980s to the present day with the focus on more recent works. Nevertheless, I consider it important to embed them in the historical background of East Germany. Together with friends, I published a samizdat magazine (title: A DREI) with graphics, photos and texts in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz again) from 1983 onwards. My first film ‘Nekrolog’ was also created in this subcultural context.”

 

Claus Löser

Dr. Hristo Rayanov and Denitsa Doncheva – The Art of Screenwriting – Short Film

October 9 at 7 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

Summer Film Academy “FILMARI” 2025 – Ruse

This summer, over the course of two weeks, Ruse became the home of youth creativity and the power of cinema. Ten young people, inspired by the desire to tell their own stories and to discover the language of the seventh art, underwent intensive training in cinematography, acting, screenwriting, and directing.

The mission of the academy is to provide young people with the tools to express themselves through the visual language of cinema, to empower them to articulate their ideas, to share their perspectives, and to create content that is meaningful and impactful.

Mentors included Denitsa Doncheva – directing and visual language, Hristo Rayanov – screenwriting, and guest lecturer Dimitar Rozov – cinematography.

The finale of the academy was marked by the premiere of their film “Prosto peyka” (Just a Bench).The film is a poetic and multilayered story in which an ordinary city bench becomes a witness and silent participant in six human stories. Each narrative touches on important themes such as loneliness, loss, motherhood, young love, homelessness and the burdens of daily life.

Krasimir Dimovski – Presentation of the novel “Theseus in His Labyrinth”

October 10 at 6 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

“Dnevnikat na edna P.”(The Diary of a P.)

What will happen to humanity if it turns out that God is a girl? Is it right to save someone who does not want to be saved? What is Dozlo and why is it deadly dangerous to humans? These questions overwhelm Theseus, an uneducated man with a sharp mind, and throw him into a labyrinth of events…

The novel is dynamic, readable, and full of twists and turns. Theseus in His Labyrinth is a kind of continuation of the books “Momicheto, koeto predskazashe minaloto” (The Girl Who Predicted the Past) and “Lovetsat na rusalki” (The Mermaid Hunter) and completes the thematic trilogy.

“Theseus in his Labyrinth: right from the start, from the very beginning, which is the title of any book, we understand that we are faced with an unexpected text, passionate and unique. Because everyone knows: in labyrinths there are only minotaurs and generals, Theseuses act differently—they escape from them. Krasimir Dimovski’s Theseus, however, enters the labyrinth with all his might bringing us along with him rushing us into a world that is special, strange, extraordinary; a world in which the definite article is even used for the feminine gender and a violin is like a thread, Ariadne’s thread. It is with this thread that Krasimir Dimovski and his Theseus lure us: Come, come, come, reader! And draw us deep into a novelistic space that we wander through, entranced, startled and enchanted. Enchanted by the talent, magic and beauty of the writing…”

Mitko Novkov

 

Krasimir Dimovski grew up in Yavrovo, between the big Mogila Mountain and the small Mogilchitsa Mountain. This magical place fills his modern prose with energy, which is distinguished by its unique style. After nearly thirty years of silence he published a book of 13 short stories, “Momicheto, koeto predskazashe minaloto” (2021), and “Lovetsat na rusalki” – three novellas about love and fury (2022). They have been awarded the Portal Culture Prose Award, the SBP Prose Award, the Milosh Zyapkov National Award and the Plovdiv Award. He has been nominated for the European Union Prize for Literature.

Zachary Karabashliev – Presentation of the novel “Rana” (Wound)

October 11 at 6 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

What is sacrifice? To die on the battlefield for your country or to save the life of a child?

Sava is a refugee from the ashes of Adrianople Thrace after the Balkan Wars, now a law student in Sofia. Eliza is a general’s daughter, a talented pianist, now in her final year at the Music School. Their love is innocent and short-lived—the new, great world war will send the young idealist to a reserve officers’ school, and in September 1916, it will take him to the front of Dobrudzha, where fate brings him together with a mobilized Romanian writer and a four-year-old orphan.

Touching and humane, Rana echoes the cruel pains of a Bulgaria inspired by idealism but torn apart by merciless conflicts, where personal and national wounds have yet to heal.

Zachary Karabashliev unfolds some of the least known pages of Bulgarian history to draw us into a tense but lyrical tale of heroism, tenderness and hope.

Zachary Karabashliev was born in Varna on September 3 1968. He began writing as a student, first literary criticism, then short stories. In 1997 he left for the United States, where he completed courses in fine art photography, cinema, and theater. In 2014 he returned to Bulgaria and became editor-in-chief at Siela Publishing House and in 2022 he became a writer and playwright at the National Theater.

Zachary Karabashliev’s debut novel, “18% Sivo”(18% Gray), was published in 2008. It not only won the Bulgarian Novel of the Year award, but also became one of the 100 favorite books of Bulgarians in the “Big Read” campaign. His subsequent novels—“Havra”, “Zhazhda”(Thirst) and “Opashkata”(The Tail)—were no less successful. Karabashliev’s works often explore themes such as identity, memory, and the human condition, transporting the reader into a world of unforgettable characters, poignant moments, and thought-provoking themes. His work has been translated into several languages including English and is well received both in Bulgaria and abroad.

Maria-Ruxandra Burcescu – Presentation of the novel “Instabil”(Unstable)

October 12 at 6 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

Maria-Ruxandra Burcescu was born in 1989 in Giurgiu. She studied communication and public relations at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (SNSPA). In 2016 she began working for the website Republica.ro, after which she collaborated with several other publications including “Liternet” and “Dilema Veche”. In 2017 she won an award at the Superscrieri gala ceremony in the “Opinion Articles” category and in 2018 she was nominated for the European Press Awards.

Also in 2018, she won a mentorship scholarship with Marius Chivu and Florin Iaru as part of the program Prima Carte of the Friends for Friends Foundation. In 2021 she published a short story in the anthology “Kiwi – Arrivals/Departures”. In 2022 she made her debut with the novel “Instabil”, nominated for the Observator Cultural magazine awards and the Sofia Nădejde awards for literature written by women and winner of the debut novel award.

She received one of the Cărturești Foundation’s literary scholarships for her second novel, which she is currently writing.

Emil Basat – A story of Germany through the lives and works of three Bulgarian writers

October 12 at 7 p.m., Canetti House, 12 Slavyanski Blvd.

Emil Basat was born on April 26, 1949, in Sofia and graduated in Bulgarian philology from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. For 40 years, he has been contributing to various publications with book reviews and profiles of foreign Bulgarian scholars, translators, artists, and writers. He has worked for National Television, Evreyski Vesti, St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, and the Ministry of Culture. Since 2000, he has been part of Slovo Publishing House in Veliko Tarnovo, where he is responsible for public relations.

Since 1984, he has been preparing portrait questionnaires of famous Bulgarian translators. In 1995, in collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Velichko Todorov, he published the book “Cheshki triptih. Obrazat na balgarskata literatura v profil i anfas”(Czech Triptych. The Image of Bulgarian Literature in Profile and Full Face). In 2007, his first solo book, “Prevodat – Litsa i maski” (Translation: Faces and Masks), was published, followed by two more volumes in 2010 and 2019, featuring portrait-questionnaires of Todor Neykov, Prof. Tseko Torbov, Valentina Topuzova-Torbova, and others. He is currently working on his next book of portraits of translators.

He is the author of eight books, including “Cheshki triptih” (1995), the trilogy “Prevodat – Litsa i maski” (2007, 2010, 2019), “Balgaro-ungarski dvuglas”(Bulgarian-Hungarian Duet, 2015), “Slovashkite litsa na balgarskata literatura”(Slovak Faces of Bulgarian Literature; electronic version, 2017), ” Za Polsha s lyubov. Balgarskite glasove na polskata literatura”(With Love for Poland. Bulgarian Voices of Polish Literature, 2018), and “Radostite i tegobite na balgarskata bohemistika” (The Joys and Burdens of Bulgarian Bohemian Studies, 2023).