Book and Copyright Day
The Book and Copyright Day which is part of the national reading marathon was held on 24th april, 2017 in the conference room of the Russian Centre . The event was organised by the Foreign Language Department, the university library and the Russian centre for a seventh consecutive year on the occasion of the World book and copyright day/ 23rd April/. This year the event was dedicated to 180 years from the death of Alexander Pushkin - the great Russian poet and belletrist.
The Director of the university library Mrs Maria Minkova greeted the participants and made them familiar with the history of the World book and copyright day in the countries all over the world.
- Pushkin spends his childhood years in Moscow, surrounded by French gonernesses. His first Russian governess Pushkin calls “ Mum”. She is the one who tells him the first fairy tales in Russian.
- Pushkin’s great grand father is the ethiopian Hanibal – associate of Peter I. An interesting and amusing fact is that in Ethiopia there is a monument of Pushkin with an inscription saying “To our poet”.
- Pushkin graduates the elite school – The Carskoselski college, where he is called ‘the frenchman’ because of his love for the French poetry.
- While courting his future wife, the famous beauty Natalia Goncharova, Pushkin says to his friends: “I’m enraptured, I’m enchanted, in short I’m ‘engoncharoved’”
- The prologue of “Russlan and Lyudmila” is written 8 years after the poem is finished.
- Being jealous and hot-tempered, the poet often takes part in duels. The fatal shot he got from Dantes. That was Pushkin’s 21st and last duel. According to the statistics the poet initiated 15 duels, 4 of which really took place. He was challenged to a duel more than 90 times.
- The poet dedicates his famous poem “ I still recall the wondrous moment „ to Anna Kern. 20 years later the composer M. Glinka writes the music for this poem and dedicates the new song to Anna Kern’s daughter in which he’s in love.
- Lots of well-known people loved the Russian poet with a special mystic enthusiasm. I. Turgenev advised people to read at least ten poems of Pushkin in cases of severe depression. Prosper Merimee calls Pushkin ‘the greatest poet in the world’.
- In the newspaper issued the day after Pushkin’s death V. F. Odoevsky wrote: ” The sun of the Russian poetry went down! Pushkin died in the prime of his life, in the middle of his great pursuits! I don’t have enough strength to talk about it anymore, and there is no need to: every Russian heart knows the full price of this irreversible loss and every Russian heart will be tormented.”
Students, teachers and employees of VFU also took part in the initiative. They read fragments from their favourite authors in Bulgarian, Russian, English, Kazakh, Turkish and Chinese. We could hear the works of Pushkin, Emily Dickinson, N. Vaptsarov, Orhal Veli Kanuk, Pavlo Tychyna, Kasum Amandjolov, Jozdemir Asaf, Lama Mohamed Ikbal, Mu Shi and Todor Boyadjiev.
The audience listened with great interest to the fragments from Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”, presented by Hamide Halil, Yasmin Barakat / 1st year “Administration, Managment and Political science/, Gergana Nikolova and Natalia Doneva / 1st year “Psychology”/. Alexander Ivanov /2nd year “Psychology”/ presented the poem “ I loved you”.
Emily Dickinson, the famous American poet, was also presented with her poems “ I’m nobody. Who are you?”, “I took my power in my hand”, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" , "Success is counted sweetest" , “ To make a prairie”. The fragments were read by Hristiana Eliseeva, Yasmin Barakat, Hamide Halil, Ioan Dimitrov, Daria Petrova, all students in “International Relations and law”.
The foreign students from the preparatory year Shinasi Bozkurt (Turkey), Eugenia Krizhanovskaya (Ukraine), Karina Tomataeva ( Kazakhstan), Sibel Yozdemir (Turkey), Tayab Assaver (Pakistan), read fragments from their favourite works in their native language and confidently translated them in Bulgarian. They were greeted for their artistism and the good command of Bulgarian as a foreign language.
The Chinese students Pan Qiuxia, Luo Zhiyan and Shi Lei also participated with the presentation of a poem in Chinese and English.
All the participants in the marathon were rewarded by Mrs Maria Minkova and received deeds and books for their support, responsiveness and personal contribution to the popularization of books and reading.
