THE PIONEERS OF THE BULGARIAN REVIVAL ON THE PAGES OF THE TURKISH MAGAZINE “SHEHBAL”

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of ​​developing the Ottoman Empire according to the Western model became more and more relevant. An important role in spreading the idea of ​​modernization of Turkish society played the increasing number of newspapers and magazines, as a result of the liberalization of the press after the adoption of the Second Constitution in 1908. Among them, the most popular one is the illustrated magazine “Shehbal”, published in Istanbul by the famous musicologist, rightist and intellectual Husein Saadedin Arel (1880-1955). The main goal of the magazine is to raise the cultural level of the general readership and to promote the modernization of the country. For this purpose, the magazine covers a wide range of topics on: art, philosophy, medicine, technology, women's rights and other civil rights, social and scientific topics, which are mainly borrowed from the West. Foreign and native literature, as well as literary criticism, also have a central place. Two literary-critical articles: “Bulgarian writers and Bulgarian literature. Paisios - the first historian and writer” and “Bulgarian writers and Bulgarian literature. Followers of Paisios”, written by Husein Arif, published in numbers 97 and 99 (1914) of the magazine are the subject of the analysis in this paper. Here we attempt to study the role of the pioneers of the Bulgarian revival in the processes of the awakening of the Bulgarian national self-consciousness and the Bulgarian language and literature, as well as their influence on the Turkish readership.

Keywords: Bulgarian revival; reception of Bulgarian literature in Turkey; Turkish periodicals in the 1910s.