West European Impulses of Bulgarian Diabolism (A Look at the Bulgarian Literature of the 1920s) Abstract Keywords: Bulgarian literature, expressionism, avant-garde, diabolism, horror fiction, marvelous, uncanny, Menippean carnival discourse, romanticism, naturalism, individualism Svetoslav Minkov (1902-1966), Vladimir Poljanov (1899-1988), Georgi Rajčev (1882 - 1947), Čavdar Mutafov (1889-1954) Contrary to its generally innovative potential for Bulgarian literature, the phenomenon called Bulgarian diabolism has been a marginal one from the point of view of literary discourse. The interest of postmodern writers and reviewers has given rise to accentuating some of the partial aspects of the works of Svetoslav Minkov, Vladimir Polyanov, Georgi Raychev and Chavdar Mutafov. However, with the exception of Thomas Martin's monograph Der bulgarische Diabolismus. Eine Studie zur bulgarischen Phantastik zwischen 1920 und 1934, published in 1993, works explicating the nature of the phenomenon in Bulgarian literature have been missing. Due to their novelty and impurity, the syncretic writings of Bulgarian diabolists, blending fading individualistic modernist tendencies together with elements of romantic fiction of horror in the generally expressionist roots of their works, were a phenomenon difficult to rank for their...