I graduated from Sofia University “St. Kliment of Ohrid” in 2000 (Faculty of Slavic Philologies, department of Russian Philology; master’s thesis on Alexander Pushkin’s “Imagined Talk with Alexander the First”). In 2002, together with Vassil Vidinski and Emanuil Vidinski, I founded the scholarly seminar “Ъгъл” (‘Corner’) (hosted by the Faculty of Slavic Philologies); it followed and to some extent inherited the “Малка носовка” (Ѧ, ‘Little yus’) students’ scholarly seminar, founded by Vassil and me in 1998.
In 2002-2005 I was a PhD-student at the Institute for Literature (at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia), the PhD thesis (defended in 2006) theme being East, Greece and Rome in the Context of Russian ‘Silver Age’ (Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Nikolay Gumilyov).
Since 2005 I am employed there, working for the Institute’s library (2005-2006), Russian literature department (2006-2009; disbanded in 2010, after a monitoring report made by an expert commission of the European Scientific Foundation) and Comparative literature department (since 2010).
Since 2006 I contributed to the Institute’s Russian department project “Russian literary emigration in Bulgaria (1920-1940-ies)”. I wrote a study on early Eurasianism, on its reception in Bulgaria and on adopting in Bulgarian culture of ideas interoperable with it – the first part of it (dedicated to the ‘pre-natal’ evolution of Eurasianism after Trubetskoy’s “Европа и человечество” and before the collective manifest “Исход к Востоку”, and to the Eurasianist idea of Balkans and Bulgaria) was included in a collection of works on the project’s topic: “Pogaslo dnevnoe svetilo...”, see “Publications”; and I wrote one fifth of the articles, i.e. 19, for a Dictionary of Russian Émigré periodicals of Bulgaria (published January 2013).
In 2007-2008 I contributed in the Russian department project “Texts and Reading: Russian literature in the Russian Internet” (in 2010 a collection of a conference proceedings was issued; eds. R. Rusev et al.; Heron Press).
In 2008 I published a monograph, Fortune’s Vestige (Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s novel ‘Julian the Apostate’: An Analysis of its Classicizing Symbolism) (an updated part of my PhD thesis).
I am the author and the Bulgarian coordinator of the Institute for literature’s project “The Socialist Realism Discourse: Integration and Alienation (The specifics of Bulgarian experience against the Georgian)” (in partnership with the Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian literature, Tbilisi), since 2009.
In 2009-2011, I was among the beneficiaries of the EU HRD supported project BG051PO001-3.3.04/61. Hence I took part in the summer school on “The Marginal in/for Literature”, as a co-organiser and as a speaker.
In 2012 I took part in the session of the Bulgarian National Science Fund, promoting a project for a parallel anthology of Georgian and Bulgarian literatures of the 20th – 21st century.
In September 2012 I took part in the International Summer School of Translation organised by the Georgian Comparative Literature Association and the Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature, as 1) an instructor in classes in Georgian-Russian translation, with focus on literal translation of poetry and scholarly texts, and as 2) a lecturer.
In May 2013 I organised the conference “Russian classical literature today: The challenges/trials of messianism and mass-culture” (together with Radostin Rusev and Hristo Manolakev) and the workshop “Translating small literatures to the global market” (in collaboration with Maya Gorcheva and Boris Minkov). The former was held in Russian, and the latter in Bulgarian, Russian and English.
In April-July 2014 I attempted a study trip to Georgia, supported by the generosity of some of my Georgian friends, the hospitality of the Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature in Tbilisi and the benevolent tolerance of my employer. I still do hope to come across a learned society or a NGO inclined to support a Bulgarian academic guy willing to study Georgian language and literature for scholarly sake – against the neo-colonial grain.
I have almost excellent command of Bulgarian (my mother tongue), very good of Russian (university diploma and writing experience) and almost very good of English (secondary school diploma – English language school, and the experience of more recent though less frequent writing). I have basic writing, reading and listening skills in German and Georgian. I have studied Spanish, Latin and Polish.
I am interested in literary modernism; in intermediality (with focus on ekphrasis and literature – architecture correlations); in scholarship’s self-reflection; in conservative avant-garde; in the cultural and literary history of the post-Byzantine oecumene; in intercultural communication, especially from the perspectives of post-colonial studies and of hermeneutics, and with focus on Black Sea region and Georgian-Bulgarian parallels and contacts.