ideology

The article analyses Ivailo Pertov"s novel - "Sentence death" (1991) - and searches an answer of the question why the Bulgarian political novel remained unwritten. Some genre features of the political novel are outlined in historical and contemporary plan. It"s highlighted, that the real political novel is a novel-thinker, not an activist party agitator. It"s author is the civil society, not the political parties.

Article is a theoretical study of literary sketch"s transformations from the point of view of its genre peculiarities in the era of socialism. The main accent is put on texts published in Bulgarian mass media and literary magazines (like Plamak and Septemvri) between 1944/45 - 1970. Communist ideology"s influence over literature is looked through the topics of the creating "new man" in the "new communist society", processes of industrialization, internationalism and battle with the "world of capital". Modern left social visions are presented in ideological clichés of totalitarian ideology. At the same time, they are admitted by literary theory as an important part of Bulgarian literature and proclaimed as elements of a theoretical construction with mythological projections - so-called "socialist realism". In these processes sketch widely presented political point of view of ruling party and became an instrument for pervasion of ideological messages in people"s everyday life.

The survey of the source traditions of European nationalism started with ancient notions of ethnocentrism and exoticism, the separation between self and other, between ordered society and wilderness. Into these ancient attitudes play circulating "ethnotypes": conventional commonplaces regarding the mores and manners of foreign peoples. The relationship between country, population and character is further spelled out as a result of the rise of republican and democratic thought (resulting in the idea that the population (known increasingly as the "nation") is welded into a whole (a "public") by a communal solidarity and by shared civic virtues such as love of the fatherland, and on that basis deserves to exercise a constitutional mandate. At the same time, the notion of culture turns "inside out" from a general one (culture opposing nature) into a comparative-contrastive one (mutually opposing cultures). The concept of nationality gains a political-constitutional importance as well as a defining function in establishing why and how countries and societies differ from each other. These developments and source traditions between them form the root system, the ingredients as it were, of the ideology of nationalism. Over the period 1795-1915, these will be welded together in the pressurized atmosphere of the Napoleonic Wars, and coalesce into that ideology which sees humanity as naturally divided into nations, each with their different culture and character, each deserving a separate nation-based sovereignty, each commanding the overriding allegiance of their members.