site.btaLiterary Scholar Yordan Eftimov: Wealthy People Made Sacrifices to Establish First Community Centres
Wealthy people made sacrifices and founded the first chitalishta community centres in Bulgaria, said Yordan Eftimov, literary scholar and lecturer at Sofia's New Bulgarian University, here on Friday. He took part in the presentation of the January issue of the Bulgarian News Agency's LIK magazine, titled "Chitalishta: Past and Future."
The issue comes out on the eve of the 170th anniversary of the first Bulgarian community centre in Svishtov.
Eftimov congratulated the LIK team for choosing to interview writer Vladimir Zarev, whom he called "one of the most representative contemporary Bulgarian writers." According to Eftimov, Zarev is a master of the classic genre of the bourgeois novel, in which there are many characters who are connected to each other and who undergo personal growth, but also participate in the life of the community.
According to Eftimov, one of the reasons why reading culture in Bulgaria is declining is "the situation with reading clubs and talking about books." "We cannot blame young people for being absorbed in their phones," he said. According to him, over the last quarter of a century, the only television station that had a programme about books was Bulgarian National Television. According to him, this programme failed to attract the attention of young people due to its late broadcast time and uninteresting format. He compared it to similar programmes in Western countries.
Eftimov said that the reading club at New Bulgarian University, of which Eftimov is one of the leaders, manages to attract the interest and attendance of students. "Our environment in this respect is much less cultured than it was 170 years ago," he said about reading in Bulgaria.
Returning to the founding of the first community centres in Bulgaria, he explained that "wealthy people made sacrifices and founded these institutions." "We live in a time when there are achievements in business, but there is not much clarity about what the major achievements in the field of culture are," he said. According to him, the Bulgarian News Agency can help restore reading culture by reminding the people who drive the country's economy that they must be attentive and critical of what is happening in the country in the field of culture.
/DS/
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