BOOK 6

The article is dedicated to the prehistory and the emergence of the first history of Bulgarian literature in Russia. It was a section on Bulgarian literature in the Review of the History of Slavic Literature, published in 1865 by the future academic A. N. Pypin. The process of gradual accumulation of materials necessary for its creation was delayed due to many unfavorable historical factors and lasted a little more than half a century. Such a long period was explained by the fact that the Bulgarians were under Ottoman rule, they did not have national publishing and higher schools, the relatively late start of Slavic studies in this area, and other reasons. The article compares Pypin’s work on the Bulgarian theme with the artist’s making a mosaic panel of many “puzzles”. They belonged to foreign scholars J. Dobrovsky and P. J. Shafarik, Russian researchers Yu. Venelin, V. I. Grigorovich and I. I. Sreznevsky, as well as some representatives of the Bulgarian emigration in Russia as V. Aprilov, N. Palauzov, R. Zhinzifov, etc. The first version of Pypin’s history of Bulgarian literature reflected the level of scientific knowledge of the Slavists in that time, and was distinguished by the presence of many lacunae. The second version of Pypin’s section on Bulgarian literature, published about 15 years later in the two-volume “History of Slavic Literature” (St. Petersburg, 1879–1881), was much more successful, enriched with new historical and literary facts and scientific generalizations. This History received wide international recognition and almost immediately was translated into many Western European languages. Corresponding extracts from it were translated in Bulgaria and Serbia.

The article examines some of the most problematic aspects of genre theory: the relationship between the concepts of architext and genre; the grounds for the existence of genre and its function in the social being of the work of art; the prerequisites that led to the emergence of genre as an important element of artistic communication. For a long time, genre was perceived primarily as a structural entity, serving mainly the needs of classification. Recently the idea that its function is related to the communicative essence of the artistic discourse appeared. In practice, genre fulfills the role of a discursive norm, organizing all aspects and levels of artistic impact. This circumstance also determines the role that genre plays in realizing the social functions of verbal art. Therefore, the main prerequisites that led to the emergence of genre as an important element of artistic activity are considered mainly within the framework of cultural anthropology. The most important prerequisite for the emergence of genre, according to the hypothesis defended by the article, is the appearance of the fiction related to the emergence of narration, dividing artistic discourse into two events – referential (the event that is narrated) and communicative (the event of the narration itself). It is this duality that defines any artistic discourse as fictional, regardless of whether it presents documentary or fictional events. The other two main prerequisites for the emergence of the literary genre are the nature of literature as writing, which is a specific social phenomenon, and on the other hand, the appearance of the idea of aesthetic activity, which in turn leads to the formation of such specific literary institutions as individual authorship and poetics as a manifestation of literary self-awareness.

My purpose is to show how the values ​​that guided Staiger in his attitude to literature and to society ceased to be relevant in the first half of the 1960s. I am also showing the more general shift taking place in research paradigms in literary studies and in social values. In the course of the chapter, I discuss how Staiger creates:

• his exemplary, ideal-type poetics; 

• how it is related with normative poetics, written before 1800;

• how it renews statements of normative poetics through the modern historical attitude towards literary forms.

The poetics sketched by Staiger is exemplary, but not prescriptive and restrictive; it includes modern literary forms and is open to future ones. This setting is different from the hostility that Staiger often shows toward modern literature in his publications during the same decade.

His understanding of style applies to literature and art as well as to the life of an epoch in general. He criticizes immanent interpretations, which are not based on historical knowledge of the literary work, but interpret it from the position of contemporary readers. According to Staiger, “the literary research begins only when we have reached the possibility of reading the literary work as its contemporaries.”

His concept does not allow interaction with the past, because it assumes that modernity is inferior in value, that it is not equal to “classical time”. Condemnation of modernity and modern literature is an element of the rhetorical strategy of Staiger’s texts during the 1960s. Modern art is unable to create moral models of community life, which classical art creates. Staiger’s concept is of community life, where law and personal freedom are not in conflict.

My general conclusion is that the dynamic changes in the humanities during the 1960s prompted Staiger to withdraw conceptually entirely from the contemporaneity. His approach loses its appeal, and his classicism begins to look anachronistic.

На 20 юни 2022 г. в Института за славистика, Университет Виена, се състоя Кръгла маса „Теодор Траянов всред българския символизъм / Teodor Trajanov inmitten des bulgarischen Symbolismus“. В този малък форум, проведен на границата между пандемията и „нормалното време“, се включиха видни изследователи на модернизма в българската литература: Михаил Неделчев, Иван Младенов, Елка Димитрова, Пламен Антов, Борис Минков, забележителният познавач на живота и творчеството на Теодор Траянов от периода Млада Виена Младен Влашки, както и изследователи с по-различен профил и научни интереси като Мариета Иванова-Гиргинова, Елка Трайкова, Александра Антонова, Мария Огойска, Вера Радева.

The article describes the early creative period of Teodor Trayanov, which took place as a transfer process between Vienna and Sofia. On the basis of texts and archival materials unknown to the researchers, the period is reconstructed and evidence is provided for the novelty of early Trajanov’s poetry as subject to the spirit of Viennese modernism.

The study follows two parallel but intertwining storylines. The first is the linear development of Trayanov’s poetry as a process of increasing hermetism of poetic language, i.e. a consistent, purposeful removal of all referentiality to reality. In this way, Trayanov’s poetic language comes as close as possible to the musical language, which is non-referential in nature. This is also the second highlighted plot in the article. The process reaches its final form in the book Pantheon precisely because maximum openness to external reality is conceptually assumed here; but that reality is eliminated. Trayanov’s poetic language is viewed as opposed to Liliev’s “musicality”; the musicalization of Trayanov’s poetry is of a radically different type – not melodic (song), but structural (symphonic). The personal ontogenesis of Trayanov’s poetry is designed as a literary-historical one: it is through the structural, highly rational, mathematical “symphonism” of this poetry that Bulgarian symbolism achieves its absolute end/telos.

In the article, Mihail Nedelchev’s own idea of literary personalism is developed and is applied more specifically to the symbolist poetry of Teodor Trayanov. This provides reason to call this symbolism of his “personalistic”. A lot of phraseology from poetry – mostly from the Pantheon collection – which defend the idea of turning many great poets from different literatures into national cultural heroes and personalities-emblems of entire epochs, are cited as examples of the construction of socio-cultural constructions.

Looking into the work of T. Trayanov it turns out that most of his emblematic titles appeared much later, only in the 1920s. If we exclude the vivid ornamental titles of the early twentieth century (“The Drop of Desire”, “Melancholy of the Petrified”), as well as the few surviving titles from then (“Sunflower”, “New Day”), the poet’s later titles were not spontaneously placed as the texts appeared, but were formulaic quintessences, used over a long period of time and applied with a particular aesthetic tendency in mind. Thus, Trayanov’s titles mark the changes in his poetics: there are either a small number of persistent titles, reimagined from a radically new context; or the proliferation of spring titles, a product of the ideological format of optimistic upbeat Bulgarian symbolism imposed in the early 1920s. These include titles associated with pagan-ritual origins (“Pyre”, “White Altar”, “Altar Flowers”), also titles produced by self-stylization in the spirit of German Romanticism such as “Blue Flower”, “Violet”, “Daffodils”, as well as all titles that emerged as a consequence of contextual links, correlations and affirmations in the magazine Hyperion.

The present study aims at examining the motif of death in the early work of the Bulgarian Symbolist Teodor Trayanov. The image of death in the poet’s first poems’ collection Regina Mortua (1909) was specifically studied. Worked on the anthology The Freed Man (1929), including works from the period 1905–1911, where Regina Mortua occupies the first part.

This article presents three texts by the talented, early departed critic Vasil Pundev, who closely followed the creative manifestations of Theodor Trayanov and his contemporary poets and prose writers and reflected on them on the pages of the Democratic Review and in his book Bulgarian Ly-rics of Today. Pundev’s critical view is deep and analytical, his tone is sharp, his conclusions are aguemented in detail, with almost mathematical precision, with the analysis of verse and composition also branching out into a psycho-archaeology of an imagined poet’s self. In his observations on Trayanov’s poetics, Vasil Pundev takes a specific approach, deriving his positive perception of the poet from critical comments that are mostly negative in their content.

The article represents a part of a study focused on the inheritance of modernist tendencies by the Bulgarian literature of the period between 1944 and 1989, when it was dominated by the movement of socialist realism. This continuity had not been conceptually manifested by its protagonists. It had often been deliberately underestimated and neglected by the critics and researchers who worked during the period. Also there were many cases in which it had been tendentiously distorted for the sake of rejection of some works and authors – through the frequent stigmas of “bourgeois formalism” and “decadent ideas”. Thereby, a tradition of its silencing was set, which, by inertia, was accepted to some extent even by the literary studies after 1989.

Предлагаме на вниманието на научната общност блок материали, подготвени в памет на литературоведа доц. д-р Румен Шивачев (1958–2022). Чрез него ние, колегите на учения от Института за литература на БАН, бихме искали не само да засвидетелстваме своето отношение към преждевременно напусналия ни колега, но и да отдадем дължимото към неговото научно творчество, като синтетично го представим пред научната и културна общественост.

The article is in honour of the literary critic R.Shivachev (1958–2022). It is an overview of his research contribution. A special accent is given to his works in the field of literary source study. Three books about the legacy of Dr. K. Krastev are in the focus of the article. As a conclusion a specific trait of the Shivachev's approach is figured out. His research starts from study of the written sources, then moves to concept summary and finally to particular literary study.

The article is a scrupulous review of the latest book by Assoc. Prof. R. Shivachev Perspectives Towards Early Modernity: Psychologism and Symbolism. Chapter by chapter the main author’s ideas are traced and analyzed. But the article has the ambition to transcend the review genre. By stepping on the concrete subject, the theoretical problem of the relationship between the method and its object is posed: when the method imperceptibly begins to emancipate itself from its object and sounds as an object in itself: the analysis of a certain work as a way to reveal the possibilities of the method. The bottom line: studies like this demonstrate the stand-alone va-lue of literary theory. Stopping it from being a servant of literature, an operational toolkit, and turning into an eim in itself, into full-fledged creativity.

Заявената в заглавието позиция на символа „между“ съвсем не означава, че изкуството стои на една страна, а науката в противоположната. Нямам предвид и някакво строго разграничение на самия символ като функционално автономна област или комплекс. Даже допълнително ще уточня, че в случая имам предвид само художествената литература, тъй като писмеността изобщо представлява литература, а тя се отнася както за „Фауст“, така и за Общата теория на относителността или за аксиомите и геометрията на Евклид. Струва ми се, че такава всеобхватност на символа е непостижима и за най-развития писмен език. Затова в изследването си „Ракурси към ранната модерност. Психологизъм и символизъм“ се ограничавам с художествената литература, и то само с поезията.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ROUMEN SHIVACHEV (1958–2022)