Orientalism

The military and scientific French expedition in Egypt, guided by Napoleon Bonaparte, lies at the root of the Modern reception and assimilation of the ancient Egyptian culture. The expedition creates a fundamental myth with long-lasting consequences – the will to investigate in depth the dimensions of European culture. In the article, which is a part of a large scientific project, the author retraces how the ancient Egyptian culture was represented during the 19 c. in works of the French writers Nerval and Flaubert and of the painters Gérôme, Vedder, Leopold Müller. The author discusses Eduard Said’s thesis that the belles lettres in 19 c. and the Orientalistic paintings support the creation of a discourse of domination towards the East. However, only a few works confirm such a that, most of the paintings and the literary works on an Oriental topic cannot plainly confirm Said’s thesis. Bernsen draws the conclusion that the Orientalistic paintings, as well as the literary works, require a differentiated interpretation. Arts present the pretentions of the West European discourse of domination, called Orientalism, both critically and playfully. The texts of Nerval and Flaubert, as well as the pictures of Vedder and Leopold Müller initially manifest a suspicion towards the pretentions for domination of the West European civilising discourse when encountering the Orient, and then they deconstruct this discourse.

The paper discusses the construction of the concept of the oriental woman (the exotic “other” woman) in West European paintings and literature. It analyses the ways and means through which “Eastern erotica” develops into a cultural mythologem as well as the reasons why the erotic is increasingly used in the construction of the concept of the exotic in West European art in the 18th and 19th century. What is also given thought and careful consideration is the specificity of the Romantic notions of exoticism and exotic local colour (exotisme et couleur locale exotique).

This paper presents the satirical works of Vasil Popovich (1833-1897), most of them unpublished in his lifetime, and analyses them in the context of their time – the debates about the standard language, about literature and the Bulgarian Literary Society from the end of 19th century. In the focus are also the conflicted relations of V. Popovich with Ivan Vazov, Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan, Vasil D. Stoyanov, and Konstantin Jireček. The tension between them is interpreted as a manifestation of their competition for symbolic capital and for gaining an important position in society and literature. As a supplement, at the end is added an unpublished text by V. Popovich from 1887, written in an imitation of Oldbulgarian/ Church-Slavonic language as a personal letter.