Quite symptomatically, among the four or five fiction titles of the decade there were two translations of Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe". The first one, though dating from 1841, has remained until today in manuscript form, and the second one was published in the newspaper "Tsarigradski vestnik" in 1848-9. Taken out of its original context and having undergone a patriarchal-type adaptation, the novel adopted the receptional function of "a true story about the wonderful adventures of a foreigner". Here we come to the crux of the matter. "True", "wonderful" and "foreigner" stand for reader-response attitudes of the period. "Wonderful" and "foreigner" were, equally, markers of particularly great distance between protagonist and reader. On the other hand, "true" and "wonderful", without curbing the distance, added up a context of intimate sacrality: the story of Jesus was both "true" and "wonderful".
Thus, picking up "Robinson Crusoe" among the whole lot of possible choices at the time hardly seems a product of sheer chance. Functionally speaking, there was much in common between this English novel and the popular Bulgarian religious or moralistic tract of the period. They shared a territory of factual relevance: i.e. facts were facts and sometimes took the shape of extreme circumstances verging on wonders. It does look like a paradox, but in the early history of contemporary Bulgarian literature fiction seems to have been the functional link between the religious tract and the secular nonfiction. The latter appeared firstly through periodicals, but in the 1850s the book form was already a not too uncommon phenomenon. And the British connection in this delicate cultural point is obvious enough.
Tsarigradski vestnik, the newspaper that published "Robinson Crusoe", was one of the very few Bulgarian periodicals between the years 1848 and 1860, and truly the one with the widest circulation.