On the banks of the Danube

The paper trackes some topoi related and arising from the works of the French poet from the “Pléїade” Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585). The autobiographical elements in one of his elegies provoked the curiosity and the comments of his contemporaries, posing questions for and against the “Danube origin” of the famous Renaissance figure rediscovered in the nineteenth century by the romantics in France.

Several emotional states which are an integral part of the national identity have been displayed based on the comparative analysis of a number of articles published mainly in Romanian and Bulgarian press since the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Pride was the main collective feeling that the prominent Western figure caused in both his countrymen and Bulgarians and Romanians. Sleeping pride of the ancient "roman" Lower Danube on the north coast was waken up, revived and updated through the efforts of the representative (s) of "the related and smaller sister”, known as France. Despite that fact, "the bigger sister" had come largely its way to national pride, while Romania following its example created its own in the nineteenth century and thereafter. Equality of national pride, means that Bulgarian and French ones or Romanian and French ones work simultaneously in the thinking of Lower Danube inhabitants. Its formation and development goes through the centuries until today, when the overall European space stands as a conciliator and unifier.

Shame is an inherent only to separate units of the Western nation that do not accept the destruction of failure already established myths of Bulgarians or Romanians about the relationship with Renaissance great men from the West. Shame, however, feed and reflectes on the Bulgarian national consciousness and borders on the indifference that characterizes most of the intelligentsia between the two world wars.