pastoral

The text discusses one aspect of the receptive horizon of Bulgarian literature – the lack of active reception of such writers as Thèophile Gautier, Henri de Régnier, and Andrè Gides. The focus falls on their works which reveal a modern way of working with the pastoral code and their absence in receptive circles in our country; on the feeble interest our literature (and reading public) displays towards the pastoral in its “classical” and modern shape. The observations here are limited mostly to the cultural processes from the first half of the 20th century but I also touch upon the contemporary reception in Bulgarian translation of pastoral works as well as the critical reception of writers such as Kiril Merdzhanski.

The article traces the attitude to music in the Hellenistic Greek novels, namely the pastoral novels and tries to outline the significance of music and musical improvisation in the ancient world. It is shown against the backdrop of the representations of visual images. The text follows an excursus from there on and it is aimed at explaining the fate of music within the tradition of the aesthetics of the Enlightenment. With this purpose in mind, it considers the distinguishing between the varying signs and the divergent content of different arts as it is done in Winkelmann, Lessing and Herder. Visual art is privileged in the whole tradition of aesthetics. This is true mostly for aesthetics, which considers itself to be a philosophy of art and not a science of perceptive faculties and intuition. This tendency reaches its peak in Hegel’s “Aesthetics”.