avantgarde

The study examines Russian poetry of the 20th century, falling into the field of the avant-garde, and presents the features of cultural processes, the development of avant-garde trends, changes in the functions of art and language, vectors, and concepts. The boundaries of the literary phenomenon are made meaningful. The rebellion against aesthetic norms requires searching for new proportions and aspects of perception. Both the early and the second half of the century avant-garde set themselves the goal of shaking the perceiver, breaking the automatism of reading, and causing active rejection or misunderstanding. Hence, techniques related to difficult reading include “memorized” creations, “cut-off” words, a multitude of neologisms, broken syntactic constructions, and the fusion of incompatible aesthetic or thematic phenomena. The avant-garde versions of twentieth-century art emphasize resistance to the label manifestations of culture, opposing as an alternative the reduced, careless form, affirming through negation the breakthrough to the sacred and the true, the search for new positive meanings.

The article examines specific aspects of the emergence and development of avant-garde literature, in particular Italian Futurism, focusing on its links with Bulgarian Modernism. Through the analysis of “Zang Tumb Tuuum. Adrianopoli Ottobre 1912. Parole in Libertà” by Filippo Tomazo Marinetti the relation of the author and the work to specific moments of Bulgarian history is presented. It also traces the development of the sonorous exclamation “Zang tumb tumb”, which became a byword for European Futurism. Attention is also paid to the changes in perceptions of these literary-historical connections and processes.

Starting from several Eisensteinian publications from the late 1920s, this article discusses the problem of a deep, essential closeness between the language of cinema as the perfect symbiosis of language and technology (and the film camera as the perfect machine) and different modes of Eastern/Japanese traditional culture: haiku poetry, kabuki theater, traditional ukiyo-e painting, and the nature of pictographic writing itself. This “language” plot is considered as part of the large-scale turn in Western culture/ art in the early twentieth century as a radical crisis-renewal act of overcoming one’s own “classical” tradition of relation to reality. The “second” Heidegger and particularly “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer”(1953/54) was used as a philosophical paradigm of the plot.

The article insists that “the canon does not tolerate avant-gardes”. With examples from Bulgarian, Polish, Ukrainian, Austrian and Serbian poetry, the position is defended that even in the most representative “classical” anthologies of the respective literatures, avant-garde texts are usually “thrown out”, considered to be some “deviations” from the norm. Examples of such significant neglected avant-garde works are also given. The literary-historical situation is almost the same, whichever literature is concerned.

The text “About Bulgarian Meanings of Avant-garde and Avant-gardism in Literary Culture“ maintains that these two terms are fundamentally different in meaning. We can speak of avant-garde when a certain complex cultural – and not only literary – phenomenon is attached to history precisely as a cultural term (for instance, Russian revolutionary avant-garde, First and Second Polish avant-garde, etc.). Whereas we denote as avant-gardism the radical manifestations of some of the late modernisms (surrealism, Constructivism, futurism, Dadaism, etc.), seen in their completeness, somehow converged. As far as Bulgarian literature is concerned, we can speak of avant-gardism in reference to the 20s and the early 30s of the twentieth century. Yet, the only really Bulgarian phenomenon that can be defined as avant-garde is the marginalized over the years, Yambol-originated avant-garde of the early 20s. In addition, in the most recent several decades, we have been witnessing a certain not-too-well-defined neo-avant-gardism.