“The Town and the Magazines of the Bulgarian Avant-garde"
How is the town depicted in the magazines of the Bulgarian avant-gardists? How do these magazines and the intellectual circles around them participate in the town culture of that time? Which are the towns of the Bulgarian avant-garde? These are the main questions that Lora Shumkova is going to try and find an answer to in her lecture.

The lecture will take place at the National Museum for Bulgarian Visual Arts

“Our Own and the Foreign in the Magazines of the Bulgarian Avant-garde"
The lecture of Yordan Eftimov is dedicated to the role of the European examples in the Bulgarian art and literature immediately before, during and after the First World War. The place of foreigners in these magazines. How are the subjects prompted by the European avant-gardists interpreted? Bulgarian imagination and European avant-garde meet.

The lecture will take place at the National Museum for Bulgarian Visual Arts

Lora Shumkova is a graduate in Bulgarian studies and Semiotics in the New Bulgarian University, where she is in the process of writing a PhD thesis on the subject of Literary Anthropology of the Town (1919 – 1939). She is the Secretary of the International Early-Autumn School of Semiotics (2001 - 2003) and of the Textological School in the New Bulgarian University (2003 – 2008). She is the winner of national awards for aesthetics, of the Boyan Penev award for literary critics (2001, 2004) and of the annual award for Best Student of the Principal of NBU (2004). She has published articles and reviews in the academic collections of papers and newspapers, such as the Literaturen Vestnik, Kultura (Culture) and Literaturen Forum (Literary Forum), as well as the magazines Sledva, Altera and Edno (One). Her interests include literary review, history of literature, visual research and town culture.

Dr. Yordan Eftimov is a Chief Assistant in Theory of Literature in the New Bulgarian University, City of Sofia. Among the subjects he teaches are BULB715 – The Bulgarian Modernism, and BULB602 – The Literature of the Balkans after the Balkan Wars and until Nowadays.
Since 1993, with some intervals, he has been the editor of the independent weekly issue for culture Literaturen Vestnik (Literary Newspaper). He is also the editor of the magazines Ezik I Literatura (Language and Literature) and Sledva (Next).
He is the author of the popular science book Modernism (2003). He is an active critic-observer of the paper market of Kapital newspaper (since November 2008), author and presenter of the Paper Tigers Programme on Radio France International (2001- 2005), of Studio Helikon in the programme Horizont (Horizon) on the Bulgarian National Radio (2005 – 2007) and of Zona za Chetene (Reading Zone) on Pro BG TV (since November 2009). At the moment he is translating The Modernism by Peter Gay – a professor in history in the Yale University.