Елка Димитрова

The text presents some ideas about how totalitarian culture affects literary history by reducing, reinterpreting, and reevaluating facts. In this case modernism is in the focus - Bulgarian modernism and its modernist and further interpretations. The main point is that totalitarian culture tended to reduce the ideological importance of modernism, as far as it saw in this trend an alternative mirror image. Thus modernism was in a way isolated rather as a chronological period of culture with certain ideological, poetical and genre features. The stress was removed from its essential importance exactly as ideology and poetics, which could have expanded its interpretation in wider cultural aspects. These speculations are based, firstly, on the self-reflection of the modernists themselves, and secondly - on certain tendencies in world literary studies to discuss modernism as a concept, broader than the movement which were chronologically fixed between approximately the middle of 19th and the middle of 20th centuries.

The study presents the conception of the project “Islands of the Unblessed. History of the Unconventional Bulgarian Literature from 1944 to 1989 in Its Socio-Cultural Context”. It is based on the idea of a kind of fragmentation of the Bulgarian literature from the period of the totalitarian regime, dictated by the non-inclusion of a number of authors and texts in the official stream of socialist realism without placing them by all means under the sign of dissidence. In this sense, twelve thematic “islands” are outlined – as areas of resistance, non-belonging, various types of marginalization in relation to the socialist canon. On the other hand, the Bulgarian literature of the period itself is presented as relatively isolated from the world – exactly because of its ideological closure.