Камелия Спасова

The paper explores the divergent concepts of mimesis in the works of Bulgarian orthodox Marxist philosopher Todor Pavlov and Yuri Lotman, founder of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. With his Theory of Reflection, completed in Moscow in 1936 as an elaboration of Lenin’s ideas of knowledge, Pavlov became one of the major proponents of the understanding of mimesis as reflection, which for decades defined the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist aesthetics in Eastern Europe. Beginning with the 1960s, Lotman’s conceptualization of dual code structures begins to work in the direction of reloading the mimetic theory beyond the official discourse. Lotman explicitly states that his methodological wager is an attempt to join the formal-structural paradigm of Roman Jacobson and the contextual-dialogical paradigm of Mikhail Bakhtin, which makes his position a synthesis of the two schools that challenged the theory of reflection dogma.

In 1926, Italian Futurist Tommaso Marinetti received the radical Manifesto of the Fellowship Fighting against Poets. It was sent by Bulgarian avant-gardist Kiril Krastev, whose literary circle, Crescendo, was putting into question the normative dichotomy between Young and Old, modernists and traditionalists, constitutive of Bulgarian literature. In every national literature or Weltliteratur, there are anomalies, malfunctions, and exclusions. This essay analyses a particular anomaly – the Crescendo literary circle and its (im)possible existence. We define distext as something that does not belong to a particular context or that breaks with(in) the cultural conditions of possible or actual emergence. Our analysis raises several theoretical and historical questions: how radical is the manifesto in relation to the Western European avant-garde; does it have any influence outside its local distextual context; what is its connection to Dada movement; and most importantly, what does this anomaly say about the history of Bulgarian literature and its peripheries?

In the chapter “Contemporary Myth-Making and Myth-Unmaking” from the book “Between Deadlock and Humanism. On Some Phenomena of Modern Western Literature”, published postmortem in 1967, Minko Nikolov delineates two divergent trends in Bulgarian critical thought during the 1960s in the Eastern Bloc. These tendencies constitute a good prism through which to interpret the critical debate on Zhechev’s “The Myth of Odysseus”. The trend of myth-making relates completely to Toncho Zhechev who constructs a modern myth of “return to homeland”, encompassing ancestors, family, village, tradition, or more broadly, a mythological, cyclical conception of time. The reverse trend of myth-unmaking in this context is attributed to Iskra Panova, Minko Nikolov, and the intellectualist vein in general. This article focuses on the debate between “intellectualism” (modern critical thinking) and “impressionism” (essayistic creative thinking) as preceding the structuralists/impressionists polemic in the 1970s. The basis of the intellectualists-impressionists conflict is an authentically Bulgarian-European axis that continues haunting our public discourse.