Пламен Антов

The text interprets the “high” national-ideological use of history, which emancipates itself from myth in the parameters of the collective mind. The text makes this on the background of the entire process of imposing the scientific approach to history from Paisiy on. An essential problem of the text is how during the late Bulgarian Revival the national literature produces and exploits the myth of the Bulgarian Golden Age. An attempt for revealing the mechanisms of this process is made. In its ideological centre is the producing of the image of the April rebellion from 1876 as the Bulgarian initial cosmogony action and the time of the national liberating fights from the 1870s as the Bulgarian Golden Age insisting on its permanent reproduction. This mechanism is studied through the presence of the historical fact of Unity from 1885 in the “high” national-ideological literature (Ivan Vazov and Zakhari Stoyanov) as an attempt of palingenetical remake.

The study examines the complex structure of Aleko Konstantinov's Bay Ganyu. Analysed here is the intricately organized voice network that is disposed at two levels - the level of the narration and the level of the narrated: the voices of the character, the narrator, the author, as well as the complicated hybridizations between them. Taken into consideration is the dynamics between the spoken and the written modality of the narrative, and the relations between the different expression types in the work and the different addressees that they produce. The structure of Bay Ganyu reveals a problem that is especially important to the total realism of the 1890s - the aspiration for valorization of the "truth", the life authenticity at the expense of the "artistry", the fiction. But in contrast to other works, Bay Ganyu discusses the problem mainly by the specific multiplication of the speaking institution's hypostases. By studying the inner dynamics of the narration, the paper proves that Bay Ganyu is a unique work because of its ambiguous author and character placing and because of the overcomplex statute of the speaking voice, which covers the whole range between fictional and real. The character Bay Ganyu is hardly restrainable into the self-sufficient fiction of the work's reality and the Author is constantly keen on entering the fictional, on metamorphosing into a character. Between these two poles a dynamic system is developed of narrating and commenting modes that are complexly inserted in one another, synchronically imposed or observing each other as mentors. Through a scrupulous analysis of the text, the study reveals and examines five modes of narration terminologically named as follows: character-narrator; primordial narrator; omniscient narrator; publicistic narrator; voice of the author himself. From this position posed here is the problem of the gradual substitution of the protagonist for the occurence presented by him. Examined as well are the effects of this transformation upon the work's figurative system.

The cardinal ambition of the text is to investigate the genetic commitment of the Modernism, and in particular of the Sezession poetics, with deep archetypical structures. The key role of Romanticism in this genealogy has been elucidated in detail, i.e. the transformation of myth folklore codes into literary ones. The problem is examined through a comparative reading of two poems, emblematic of Bulgarian poetry whose intertextual connection was established long ago - the romantic ballad "Hadji Dimitar" (1873) by the poet-revolutionary Hristo Botev and the poem "The Sun Dies Out" (1905), a sezession work by the most eminent representative of the early Modernism in Bulgaria Peyo Yavorov. The text studies the way in which Yavorov inherited and transformed not only the model of Botev, but - through it - the universal archaic archetype of the sacrificial heroic death in the middle of a monumental natural-cosmic chronotop. Beyond this archetype, the research restores the hidden presence of a second, more primitive one - about the battle of the hero against the chthonic female monster. In this way the "female" sex of the sezession Мonster in poem "The Sun Dies Out" has been determined, and its origin postulated through the folklore figure of the "samodiva" (wood nymph) in "Hadji Dimitar". Some other problems are examined in parallel. The manifested "political modernity" of the national Romanticism in Botev is pointed out, his engagement with the actuality, with the topical and concrete conditions of the national Renaissance, as well as the "mental modernity" of Yavorov's secession, which manifests itself, on the contrary, through a refusal of an external engagement with the political. This "mental modernity" has inherited,on another level, the absolute universalism of the archaic archetype. In such a way is substantiated the thesis of the regressive nature of the Modernism and the deeper "primitivism" of the modernist Yavorov in comparison with the romanticist Botev. This subject is situated in another, more particular, interpretative prospect. Through it has been traced - in a poetic-biographical aspect - the self-mythological potency of both poetic models - Botev's and Yavorov's.

The article starts with the reception of symbolic poetry by its contemporaries (Vazov, P. P. Slaveykov, St. Mladenov), a reception which uses a distinct medical, clinical figurativeness, and studies the issue of the references of symbolic language and its relations to ordinary logic. Symbolic language is examined as a particular language area where laws which are not subordinate to communicative functionality function, an area bordering on nonsense, madness and the psychopathological. This destroyed referential is termed "hypertrophy of symbolic language". It happens at the expense of the concrete psycho-biographical Ego, confessions available in the text, an Ego which the critics of symbolic poetry misunderstand. The study investigates the rupture between the poetic abstract Language and the concrete, biographical, socio-historical and psychological entity, the poet"s Soul. The purpose is to prove that what is usually considered a "metaphysical soul" is actually a strict language construct. It corrects the generally used notion that Modernism sets the Ego in the pivotal point of the creative act. Actually, Modernism operates with language, not with the Ego. It examines the ontological loss of the Ego in the collective element of the Language understood as a "structural and cultural unconscious" (Ricoeur), a loss which Symbolism realizes. The study postulates that the Language not the Ego is the absolutedominant in symbolic poetry. The Language is an only event. Poetry is reduced to its own physiology. The process is followed mainly through moments from the works of P. K. Yavorov, D. Debelyanov and T. Trayanov. The special role of heterogeneous phenomena as humour and wars (1913-1918) for the opening of symbolic language to the reality in Bulgarian poetry is examined too. The article discusses the symbolic language in Bulgarian poetry as a central, transitory stage between the traditional type of reflective lyrical poetry and the avant-garde, a stage when an important rupture between World and Language happens. Symbolic language is presented as a mirror which radiates an image, but does not reflect it. Therefore, the Madness of the symbolists is Culture, Language, not Nature. The madness of symbolic language and the madness in expressionism are differentiated: the former is the madness of Language, while the latter is the madness of the consciousness which the poetic language articulates.

Starting from a previous article by the author published in 1994, the present study develops two theses, one of which encompasses the other. The first thesis states that the Vazov"s novel "Under the Yoke" (1888/1889) is a total paradigmatic Bulgarian novel. Not simply chronologically the first novel, setting a classical standard in Bulgarian literature, but the novel which organically combines all genetic components of the novelness/romanceness, even mutually incompatible or opposing each other components. Two of them are considered in this study. The first is the "popular-carnival" which is subliterary. Here we recall a 20 years old paper, in which the author considers "Under the Yoke" to be a popular-carnival book (according to Bakhtin), not to be a novel in the modern, "Hegelian" meaning of the term. Moving away from this original thesis, the present study is archeologising the opposite novelistic direction in Under the Yoke" - the modern-novelistic, Romantic, which is downright literary and even meta-literary in essence. In its pure form this meta-literary component, explicitly presented for a thorough discussion, is discovered in the micro-subject of "Kandov". The chapters are analyzed in detail proving the key position they occupy in whole architectonics of the novel. At the end it is emphasized the complicated and multi-stratified way the modern-novelistic, bourgeois-romantic concepts associated with the novel are discussed, including in the meta-consciousness of the novel. The most important point is considered to be the justification of the second basic thesis, which is the following: By developing the "Kandov" line in the mentioned six chapters, Vazov transformed in 1888 the literary substance of the Romantic into something which, a quarter of a century later, will become topical for the mainstream of the Bulgarian literary process. The "Kandov" story anticipates the essential elements of decadence and symbolist-secessionist poetics which will enter Bulgarian literature only through Yavorov and his language-Sleeplessness (1905-06). Direct linguistic (poetological) analogies are drawn between the "Kandov" case and some central, constituent topoi in the poetics of the literary decadence and symbolic-secession imagery. (However - NB! - the study considers not the subjective intents of the author Vazov, but the happenings in the field of language and in the self-consciousness of the novel, archeologising the genre consciousness, including its literary-unconsciousness.) The paper, constructed as a dialectical triad, in its last, third part, considers "Under the Yoke" as a dialectical synthesis of two mutually opposing trends. At the same time it exteriorizes the problem in philosophical-historical aspect. The subject "Kandov" is seen as an ideology-language hetero-interfusion - an expression, an articulation of a principal discussion, central for the Late Bulgarian Revival: "Bulgarian"/"our own" against "European"/"alien".

The article considers a specific tendency in the newest Bulgarian literature, related to the historical novel, at that in its large-scale type, close to the traditions of the classical national epopee: "Refugees" by Vesela Lyahova (2013) as well as some novels by Vladimir Zarev on contemporary themes, but finalizing a multivolume epical narrative - "The Law" (2013) and "Destruction" [Downfall]. These are voluminous works, which by its own way refresh the experience of the historic novel-epopee in its classical type, seemingly tendentiously ignoring the topical postmodern context. - From the other hand, a central position in this tendency is occupied by Milen Ruskov's novel "Summit" (2011), which openly is in this postmodern context, culminates and closes the accumulations of the "high" Bulgarian postmodernism of the poetry of the 1990s: language plays, rewriting of the History, de-monumentalizing of the national-ideological metanarrative as well as of the literary canon which produced it. Despite its difference, these novels are seen as a collective attempt for the long awaited epical reflexion on the radical changes after 1989 year, as a literary philosophy of the history through the national idea's lens. The study undertakes a wide socio-historical and philosophical excursion in order to consider the crisis of the national state as a symptom of the crisis of all grand narratives, historical by character, which are a representation of a general crisis of the collective identity, designating the end of the Modernity. The neo-nationalistic wave after 1989 year is commented on and especially from the beginning of the 21st century - nationalism of new, after-post-modern type, severely fragmented and mixed with neighboring realms such as the religious one, which sweeps away all kinds of prophecies for some Hegelian end of History and designates a renaissance of the collective identification. Through a historical-nationalistic prism, the discussion about the "high" and "low" postmodernism, about their incompatibility end even antagonism, is deepened and adduced in a maximum wide field - simultaneously as substantial qualities in a common dialectical subject and in their historical-developmental sequence. As a shift from the language of the "high" postmodernism toward the next stage of "low", popular after-postmodernism. A stage, which is simultaneously post-, but also (contra-)regressing back toward one pre-modern authenticity. In this way the novels of Zarev and Lyahova are seen simultaneously as non-postmodern and post-postmodern in their dialectical, uroboric coincidence: whether and to what extent their traditional, "classical" language is a deficiency or a surplus, overreaching, stepping across? - Do we have to deal with an authentic naivety, or with irony raised to the second power, i.e. masked as a naivety? Are there quotation marks? (The quotation marks in the "Summit" are more than obvious.) - The answer is in the lack of answer. In the slipping out oscillation between two positions, between original and copy. The identity itself is this, which creates the difference. The same paradox is projected in a wider scheme over the nature of the "low", late post-postmodernism of the mass culture. A (possible) paradox of the language dialectic is enacted - about the relative boundary between post- and pre-, which exactly one second post- may possibly realize.

The article focused on the shortest and marginal work in Vazov’s cycle Epopee of forgotten, a top title in the national myth-poetic narrative. It proves that this marginality is seeming. A range powerful mythogenical energies works furtively under it through several of its characterizations like dramatic form and ballade heritage.

The paper considers the special attention of the “high” intellectual, literary critic and social philosopher Tsvetan Stoyanov to the “low” forms of the fiction/novel genre – humour and crime. The answer is: the both precisely guarantees a top freedom of identifications. To the highest degree “softening-up” of the discourse in the belles letters sphere, in the first stage, but in the second – to the modern irony through which the Stoyanov’s fiction prose stays in the political sphere and operates with it. The political situation is object to not a clear, unambiguous obstructions, but a ambiguous and sly discourse games. The both spheres – political-ideological and its parody – are mixed in the crime story The Case with the Professor (1966) by a very complicated manner and therefore almost imperceptibly. This work is examined in detail to explicate the mechanism through which Tsvetan-Stoyanov’s fiction presents in the genre. And how, in the frame of genre, it operates with ideological values – pro and contra simultaneously. The novel is a parody of crime genre in its strong ideological soc-version and full valued, complete, “earnest” crime-spy reading simultaneously. The Stoyanov’s fiction prose operates with the big imperative of the Ideology in the same dual, double-faced way: not directly and unambiguously (“dissidently”) opposing from outside, but by means of an ambiguous, polysemantic, full of suggestion, slippery, slipping out, serious-ironic narrative which plays on the edge. Not radical self-excluding, but co-sharing, complicity, partnershiping in a cunning duplicity of the game –inside and outside simultaneously, but not leaving the area outlined by the its own rules. A try to outwitting of the clumsy mono-discourse of the Ideology through shaking, breaking up of the meanings in the frame of the game itself. Stoyanov remains to the end within the word/speech relying on its slyness within the framework of the dialogue. This operative strategy works simultaneously within genre’s and ideology’s field unbreakable connected within autonomous “inner space” of the work. – But this strategy is seen as regularly followed from the social-biographical figure of the modern “playing intellectual” whose perfect personification is Tzvetan Stoyanov.

The article starts from two translations of historical (Roman) dramas during the Bulgarian Revival – “Belisarius“ and “Cremutius Cordus“ – and two theatrical performances – “Long-suffering Genoveva“ and “Belisarius“ (Lom, 1856) – to discuss the problem of ideological effectiveness of theater during the Revival epoch compared to literature. Theatrical performance in its entirety (mise-en-scène, sceneries, properties, and especially the “alive“ play) is seen as essential, languagelly relevant to the voluminous, multi-layered naive-folk thinking, pre-aesthetic and prehistoric, as opposed to the flat ideological logos of the modern one. – The unpretending, weak writer and theatrical worker Kr. Pishurka is the personification of the first type of thinking, and Botev – the genius of the epoch – of the second type.

The article starts from the well-known disjunction “love or struggle/self-sacrifice in the name of the motherland”, characteristic of the national romanticism of the XIX century (Petőfi, Botev). However, the article directs its comparative efforts in another direction – not in the international, but in the interdiscursive, mythopoetic plan. Botev, of course, is at the center of the comparison. Not only as a lyrical voice but in the whole syncretic volume of the personal heroic myth, where the prophetic poetic speech, giving rise to biographical reality, is inseparable from the biographical gesture, which in itself is “living” poetry: relations such as the poem “Farewell” and the voyage with the steamer “Radetzky”, the poem “Hadji Dimitar” and own death оn the Balkan. The dialogue between the poem “To my first beloved” and the pre-death letter to the wife (“My dear Venetа, know that after the homeland...”) is also placed here, in the same order. – But the article prefers not the opposition, but the conjunctive intertwining and finds it in the most incredible place – “To her”, considered the weakest, marginal, non-Botev poem in the monolithic poetic corpus “Botev”, a Spanish drama about love, jealousy, and bloody revenge. In the spirit of the Revival preference for allegorical shifts, this trivial sentimental-adventurous plot is inscribed in the high biographical-poetic “text-Botev”: а threat of “jumping” across the Danube “with a naked knife in the hand” and killing the old husband, kidnapper of his beloved/homeland. – But the real comparative plot is forthcoming, because the autobiographical-heroic narrative “To her”, it turns out (Iv. Paunovski), has its probable prototype in the Crastyu-Pishurkov’s “Koutkoudyachka / Нen-croaking” (the poem “Fight of Roosters”), an emblem of the most helpless verse-knitting of this era, repeatedly ironized with fierce sarcasm by Botev himself. It is here, in this inverted parody, that the article sets its second heuristic horizon. – The conclusion: what the poet Botev does not know, the work “To her” itself knows and remembers, keeps deep in his genre crypto memory.