Roumen Daskalov's book breaks new ground. It is unusual in the East European field in that it offers a thorough historiographical review, peppered with theoretical analysis, on one discrete period in a nation's history: namely the period of the Bulgarian national revival, ca. 1778–1878. Daskalov sheds needed light on this period via his foray into the uses and misuses of history by Bulgarian historians since 1878. The Bulgarian national revival is a phenomenon that has received little attention in Western scholarship, although it has played a central role in Bulgarian historical writing and national imaginings. Here as elsewhere in the East European field, the “little country” problem has resulted in a paucity of sources and hence discussion within Anglo-American academia. In Bulgarian, however, there is a great deal of scholarship, much of it constrained by the communist period and its intellectual hangover. In spite of such constraints, this literature is rich with important and interesting debates, particularly given the flood of corrective scholarship since 1989.
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