Nikolay Aretov

Dialectic of Traditional and Modern: Vidrica by Mincho Kunchev

Summary

We usually think the modern in opposition with traditional. Real phenomena are always more complex, they bear different often opposite trends which are in complex relations and only the view-point of the observer could give the priority of one of them over the others. The variety of potential viewpoints determines the possibility of the coexistence of different ideas and evaluations. One more ambitious and more adequate to the complexity of the world approach is trying analyze the coexistence, the dialectic and the conflicts between different trends in the text, to reveal the inner structure and hierarchy of the trends, the motives and causes that lay under them, etc. In this sense the notion ‘dialectic of traditional and modern’ is more general than the familiar term ‘modernization’, which puts the stress on the introducing of the new and leaves apart the relicts of the past.

Vidrica obviously stand on the border between traditional and modern. Its author was at the same time a man of the tradition - village priest without any modern education, and of the modern - a revolutionary man and champion of the fight against the political status quo. Vidrica was written long time, it is one large text without inner concordance. This permits the undisguised co-existence of different elements that are opposed to one another.

This paper deals with the dialectic of traditional and modern analysing the plot of the ‘unhappy family’, the image of the Other and the set of identities, which could be traced in the work of Mincho Kunchev.