Albena Bakratcheva’s new book, The Call of the Green: Thoreau and Place Sense in American Writing, reaffirms both the depth and breadth of her knowledge. In this book she probes further depths of Emerson and Thoreau and the Transcendentalist group of American writers as they attempt to connect to a sense of America as a unique physical, psychological, and cultural space. She also extends the scope of her argument to other cultural spaces: to Britain in her discussion of Thoreau’s essay on Thomas Carlyle and to Bulgaria in an interesting and important essay on connections between American and Bulgarian writers. The scope of her book also extends in time to contemporary American writers such as the cultural critic Thomas Friedman and poets Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, and Susan Howe.
Her linking of Thoreau to the British writer Thomas Carlyle was of special interest to me, because there has been relatively little written about Thoreau’s interest in Carlyle, and Bakratcheva offers many fresh insights into the topic. The chapters on the significance of naming, both Thoreau’s changing of his own name and his concern with the names of places such as Cape Cod, are also fresh and original. In some ways, however, her chapter on the history and significance of Thoreau’s reputation and availability in Bulgaria and the connection of his writing to the “velvet revolution” might be the most significant one in the book, because most readers of Thoreau do not fully understand the global reach of Thoreau’s writing.
This new book demonstrates Bakratcheva’s complete mastery not only of the full range of primary American literature texts, but also of literary scholarship about specific writers such as Emerson and Thoreau and about American literature and culture in general. There are important insights in this book, and the fact that it is being published in English will make Bakratcheva’s insights more accessible to American readers and literary critics, who will be very interested in what she has to say. I have sometimes thought that a writer can be fully understood only by a reader from his or her own culture; however, Bakratcheva’s writings about American literature have convinced me that I am wrong. She fully understands what is uniquely American about the writers whom she discusses, and her European perspective proves to be a genuine asset.