CULTURE

What happens when two experienced psychoanalysts with interest in film analysis decide to speculate about what really happened in the final hours of one of the 20th century's ultimate movie stars? The answer is one of the latest plays on Bulgaria's theatre stage, Marilyn Monroe's Final Hour. Dr Vivian Pramataroff-Hamburger and Prof Dr Andreas Hamburger have applied both their professional experience, imagination and sense for the dramatic to give their idea of what happened to Marilyn Monroe on 4 August 1962, just hours before she was found dead in her bed.

When we said we might open a guest house, everyone thought it was crazy. The property oozed golden charm but Podgoritsa was in none of the guidebooks. There were no mountains or seaside resorts anywhere near, so we had to persuade the foreign tourists to make a special trip, to see for themselves. And come they did.

The throngs of tourists jostling for a better view of the Mona Lisa have become so overwhelming that the Louvre is already planning to exhibit it in a separate space. Such obstacles are not encountered when viewing Ahinora, a painting of a woman with eyes as enigmatic as Mona Lisa's smile, created by one of Bulgaria's most prominent painters.

Painted in 1925 by Ivan Milev (1897-1927), Ahinora mesmerises with her oversized, green eyes: feverish and fixed with fear, amazement or curiosity about something or someone beyond the frame.

Picasso's musing that every child is an artist is both true and exaggerated. Young children create art instinctively and with great enthusiasm – it is their way of exploring the world and the capabilities of their senses and fingers, to understand and express their emotions.

A film was playing on the tiny screen above the driver – it was about a beautiful woman looking for the right husband and ultimately finding him. Or maybe it was about a handsome man looking for the right wife, but not before the final credits. To make it even more fun, the film was split into novellas which opened with colourful lettering and wedding music. All the actresses looked like Jennifer Lopez, or maybe she was in it herself, who knows? The question required the kind of focus that Galya was unable to spare.

Since ancient times, the arts have been passed down from teacher to student – an established line of professionals who learned composition, themes and techniques from their elders, developed their own styles, made their own discoveries and then passed on their experience to the young. This practice nurtured traditions, spawned schools, inspired change and spawned new art forms.

An exciting exhibition, Thinking in Materials, at the Sofia Press Gallery, explores the idea of continuity through the influence of a master painter over a group of students he trained in the early 2000s.

ANDREA

a

summer with its easy wins

summer with its plans

made at the drop of a hat

everyone’s willing

to give in to warmth

the holiday is today

let’s seize it

go through summer’s open doors

and its garden shadows

the first freezing gust of wind

is easily dismissed

summer an abyss of hope

in which year after year

you collapse ever downward

summer the warmest of life’s seasons

z

summer

summer

Beginning

it’s light out I tell you

there’s still lots more

my beautiful bird

is far away I can see it

flying away again

I love without being loved

Human

to A

I’m at 2130 metres above sea level

This story took place on the New Year’s Eve of my last winter in Bulgaria. Together with my wife and daughter, I greeted 1997 in a rented one-bedroom apartment in a windy, ugly suburb of Varna. I don’t remember this day to have heralded аnything new and different for us.