avant-garde

The subject of this article is one of the less known plays by Stefan Gechev - "The Fiance". The structure and the semantic potential of this play are understood as a realization of the Gechev"s conception concerning "poetic substance" which is like a equation and can have many and even opposite solutions. This specific irrational tendency in the dramatic text is analyzed in the dialog, in the Dramatis personae relations, in the diegetic space and in the fictional time. But the composition of "The Fiance" is realized in the principles of symmetry and Mise-en-abyme and the conventional topics like Truth, Fictional invention, Beauty, Existence are examined in Gechev"s work too. As one of most original ideas in the play is realized the parallelism between the characters and the elementary particles in physics and in this way the play becomes peculiar and interesting matter of scientific examination.

It has often been said that after 1900 formal modernism diminished the role of the mimetic (i.e., imitation or representation) in all arts. This article opposes such a general conclusion. Formal modernism in art did not represent any general relationship to the mimetic; rather, it questioned the traditional relationship to forms of representation within each particular art form. Although a traditional notion of mimesis indeed makes it possible to see a good deal of literature and the visual arts as less mimetic after 1900, twentieth-century music discovered unprecedented representational possibilities, which are illustrated with the case of musique concrète. In the last section, the article reflects on its thesis with a comparative perspective on the postmodernist turn in various arts.

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?