Dear readers,
The Bible has been the most discussed text throughout the centuries: some consider it a message from God above all, others treat it as a written evidence for the language of Speech and its translation specifics, and there are also those who think it is a collection of motifs, images, and ideologems, transposed onto a field of folklore or the mental and fictional world of writers from different eras. The theme of the 2022 issue of “Slaviyanski dialozi” offers a variety of fiction and scientific texts that enter a dialogue with the Bible.
The variety of possible creative methods is made clear by separating the texts into different sections; the first three offer new research in the field of linguistics, literary studies, and cultural studies. The articles take a closer look at Bible interpretation problems (I. Hristova-Shomova, T. Ilieva, M. Walczak-Mikołajczakowa), the creation myth as seen in the context of folklore (B. Petkova), the treatment of the biblical Jove in the religious studies of John Amos Comenius (Zh. Cholakova), the concepts of being, time, and movement according to the Holy Writ, and their projection in the spiritual world of F. M. Dostoevsky (N. Neychev). There are innovative ideas, a result of many years of research endeavors, and they provide significant academic findings that prove the existence of a wide scale perspective for Bible studies in all fields of the humanities.
In the Christian world, there is hardly a creative mind that looks for the spiritual dimensions of being and an answer to irresolvable existential problems but remains indifferent to the eternal question of God’s presence in the human world. Based on motifs from the New Testament that relate to the birth and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, several Slavic translations of the poems of Jan Neruda shed new light on the collision between Divine Providence and human nature. In the “New Translations” section, there are texts that approach the Bible from different conceptual directions: J. A. Comenius’s interpretation uses the Holy Writ to explain the reasons for this collision in the shifting spiritual center of people; in his lyrical prose, J. Słowacki redefines the biblical interpretation of Genesis into a new cosmogonic vision of a common spiritual inception of all creation; Z. Gippius’s poems shift the focus of interpreted biblical motifs to the moral problems of the duality of human nature and the possibility of a person to overcome themselves.
Zhorzheta Cholakova