Crescendo

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?