Бисера Дакова

1999 Книжка 2 По следите на изгубените думи

“Hudozhnik” Magazine is examined both as an entire artificial fact and according to the spirit of the critical period of 19th-20th century – the Gesamtkunstwerk. Captured here is how the spontaneous genre disruption is spread over the pages, the accent is on the aesthetic and unrepresentative prose. If poetry resembles actual philosophical and lyric standards, prose keeps its distance from the indiscreet individual norm, removing the fence of its own sensitively stereotyped decadent language. The finds in these not so talented readings do not deal just with criticism: the only mono Nietzsche hero is slightly removed by the person of the moods, of the mind status, of the so called Stimmungsmensch – the appearance of whom establishes new philosophical paradigma – the philosophy of life, die Lebensphilosophie. The sensuousness, the body, the subconscious, “it” (es) – these are categories schematically announced in the “Hudozhnik” prose since the beginning of the 20th century, i.e. in the period before the Wars. Having understood the sense and showing it like a discussion and a correction of Nietzsche’s principles famous on our territory, the prose of writers like Ivan Yotov, S.D.Chakalov and Raicho Raichev, the Homo Novus might be defined as a new tendency, anticipation of the aesthetical researches and processes of the 1920s. In fact, the finds and pathos are entirely harmonious with the European late 19th and early 20th century – the strengthening of Freud’s and Bergson’s conceptions and the destructive role against the old Nietzsche ones.

The study aims at illustrating the contradictory processibility in postulating the own - the stages of its heterogeneity, polemical tension and disunity. National ideology is not a construct imported just from the outside to fill a blank space; it is rather a result of the transformation and mitigation of previous, established, existant visions of self-knowledge and self-experience. The axiologies of the Bulgarian reveal their weak, debatable and downright vacillating character in a period which is usually thought to lay and use them synonymously and axiomatically. The national conception of the world appears to be a creation of local stereotypes with different accents and semantics (D. Voynikov), or, on the contrary, a creation of surmounted behavioral prejudices following the Europeanizing / Christian / Slav model (I. Bogorov). After the translation of „Janissaries" and „The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe" (1849) I. Bogorov is no longer apologetic in his accounts of the Bulgarian, but gives a new critical meaning to it in the light of the „West-East" and „barbarity-civilization" oppositions, which structure both of the translated texts. Noticing the chaos, decentralization and disunity of the „Bulgarian places", Bogorov actually discovers the Orient in these territories, spots it in the way it is put in „Janissaries" - as an embodiment of the Janissarian / fanatical / antediluvian-ritual / uncommunicative-concealed. Whereas the civilization he would like to see adopted in this „places" understood as comfort is shifted to „The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe" (personal hygiene, functional home order, social life, enterprise, impulse to domesticate people and things). The characters in Voynikov's comedy „The Phoney Civilization" (1871) to a great extent look predetermined by the cultural visions of Bogorov that are shared in „A few days walk around the Bulgarian places" (1868). They could be perceived as their personified discredit. Through the naive-pathetic rejection of Bogorov's notions and through the mechanical return to the „simple" identity of the deux ex machina principle Voynikov lays the national identity as a unified and unique reality which can not be avoided. The dominants of the Bulgarian identity main body however look strikingly similar to the dominating specificities of the Orient fixed by Bogorov in „A Few Days...". In Voynikov they already function as a „trademark" of the Bulgarian. In that sense the Orient's fundamental categories which Bogorov assimilates through the translation of „Janissaries" (the female shyness and hiding from the world, the closed home, the standstill, etc.) are seen in Voynikov's comedy as founding pillars of Bulgarian identity, while the typical oriental vices (rakiya and tobacco abuse) are freed from blame, seen in the light of the comical. Resembling the dictionary conspectus the present study attempts to cover a few dominant symbols of the Orient that are interpreted negatively or positively by the two writers (naturally referring to other authors and texts of the Bulgarian national revival as well). It goes from the abstract (shame, home, road) to the concreteness of life, since it is exactly in the macrosymbols of life such as needle, rakiya, tobacco, clothing that the polemical correspondence of Voynikov to the travel-writing of Bogorov is most distinguishable, as well as what becomes apparent is the conservative ideology upon which „The Phoney Civilization" lies - in fact a deformed-travestied projection of Bogorov's cultural pretensions to the „Bulgarian places".

The study of Teodor Trayanov's "Hymns and ballads" (1912) attempts to restore the book's authentic poetry which seemed erased forever by the proper styling in teleological perspective in 1929 ("The Free Man") and later arbitrarily reduced by two works (1966 and 1981). Until now the interpretation of Teodor Trayanov's poetry had been based on the 1929 canonical text, as well as on the unreserved confidence in the lyric entities - created later by the editors Lyudmil Stoyanov (1966) and Ivan Sestrimski (1981) - entities that were principally subordinated to given criteria and were a serious violation of the author's will. The insoluble plait of representatives of Trayanov's text and solid critical perception have found the incontrovertible idea of monolithic and misunderstood poetry where the dramatic double turns were excluded in advance. In this firm interpretative scheme of the book "Hymns and ballads" lies the unenviable place of a transition unit - it is called to mark the first symptoms of a more fresh and constructive attitude to the world. Relying entirely on the original edition of "Hymns and ballads" (1912) the present paper gradually enters in a text reality the structural basis of which is the poetical contrast: between neuropathologic decadence (Felix Doörmann) and Jugendstil (Richard Dehmel), between melancholy and ecstasy, between ominous intonation resembling Schopenhauer's style and the intensive living along Nietzsche. The study shows that this "transitional" and plain book contains poetry representative of the period until 1912 in a manifest and clear way and brightly defined individualism and the expressionism born it its bosom. It suggests at least two stories to follow: surmounting the suffering I, the enthusiastic, irresistible, and vital WE, and the transfiguration of the ritual language into rude, expressive, and barbarian lexis. In this sense "Hymns and ballads" (1912) apostrophizes the idea of the frozen in Teodor Trayanov's poetry, painfully revealing the dramatic way to modernity, which Trayanov experienced prematurely.

The review of the monograph by A. Vacheva tracks how trivial topic of female poetry in Bulgaria interwar period, unfolds in the fundamental issues of the women writing in general. The study of Vacheva ends with intractable interrelation of gender and ideology, since it tends to conceive the female experience in writing, fixing the validation and deletion of the current Bulgarian writers from the canon, which is a priori powerful, patriarchal and similar to male-subordinated. The study concerns also the essential problem for the historiography of women's writing and creativity in our country. By reviving the picture of Bulgarian literature from the most stable decade in recent history (the 30s of XX century), a decade marked by female identity - urban - bourgeois, A. Vacheva actually describes a history of identification and recognition of significant figures in our literature produced by women. In this sense, her research could be defined as testing for entries and exits, to legitimize or to erase the author's characters of the prestigious literary field.

The review is dedicated to the monograph of Violeta Ruseva "Bulgarian symbolism: modus of distinctness" (Veliko Tarnovo, 2014) - a respectable literary historical study of Bulgarian symbolism, not seen as a complete artistic phenomenon, but as a "mobile hermeneutical field." The main aspect in the study is the denial of chronology and the trust in the historical, in "laconic fact." The symbolism is not tracked in its exhaustion and completeness but through emblematic poetry books and notorious periodical synthesis ("Vezni" magazine) - as stored, transported and newly regenerated cultural memory in the decade after the Wars.

The analysis is the first comprehensive look at the failed novel by P. Vezhinov and more exactly in its first authentic Stalinist version from 1952. The text tracks in details the ideological profiling of the characters, tied to gender and lifestyle, as well as the erasement and the concealment of these two realities in the novel, their perverse, "negative" events. Highlighted in the foreground is the intriguing identity between lordly / household / feminine / female. Apart from the precise ideological scheme, carefully thought out in the novel, there is an attempt to note also toposes and spaces issuing grueling, hoary, gloomy atmosphere in Bulgaria in the 50s of the twentieth century. Instead of final conclusions, the text ends with proposals for three film versions, as interpretations of the failed novelistic narrative of P. Vezhinov, that might be seen as emblematic of the three types of cultural (movies) conjectures.