Румяна Л. Станчева

The article analyses Modernism in the light of Dance, as a topic with a comprehensible aesthetic and philosophical meaning. The article also discusses the connection between Dance and Modernist aesthetics, stressing its individual uncommon character. The article begins (1) with a review of the philosophical views on Dance in the 19th and 20th centuries (Nietzsche, Huizinga, Freud). This is followed by (2) Modernism and Dance as criticism of modern life, and especially the fatal woman in the writings of Schnitzler, Wilde, Matei Caragiale, Tchavdar Moutafov; (3) Dancing and Transcendent Flight - Cendrars, Ion Barbu, Geo Milev, Luan Starova; (4) The structure of novels by Anton Strashimirov, Rebreanu, Cartarescu, Mile Nedelkovski.

Discussed by his contemporaries through the opposition "own or foreign", identified by the next generations as a writer from the so-called "Balkanist" literary line, in his short satirical stories, the Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912) demonstrates his sense for the oriental backwardness of the mores, from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Even though Caragiale’s critics associate him for his supposed foreign origin and claimed that made him overly critical of Romanian society, he was not afraid to expose the falsity and to ridicule the Bucharest self-proclaimed elite with their pretentions standing in stark contrast to their trickster approach to life and their nationalist disposition. The "foreign" Caragiale, with his sense of the peculiarities of the Romanian world, has created remarkable humorous and satirical images of "his own” compatriots and of life in the small Paris.