Plamen Antov

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.

Article discusses the thesis of the novel character of Bai Ganyu, one of the most mysterious works in Bulgarian literature, which is commonly read as a cyclic collection of short stories/fеuilletons. Here the novel-epic potential in the work is argued mainly in the “vertical“, historicalgenealogical aspect, in the traditions of romance. In parallel, the article included in the theoretical debate on the essence of the novel genre in general, using some ideas of Russian formalism, in particular V. Shklovsky.

The study, in the first place, summarizes some of the main features of the historical novel genre, with a special emphasis on its connection with the national epic novel. But this is not an ultimate goal, is made in view of the discussion of Under the Yoke (1889/1894), the Bulgarian national epic novel – whether and to what extent it is a historical novel? – In the second, more important part, the research focuses on the synchronous reception of the novel through аn analysis of two detailed critical studies, appeared simultaneously in 1896, presenting the eyes of the “young” around the “Misal/Thought” magazine. The problem of whether the essence of the “nationality per se”, the “spirit” of national history and “destiny” can be understood “from outside”, by the foreign reader, the European man, is at the center of the discussion. The structural reflections of the opposition between Literature and History in the form of the antithesis Work–Author are also studied. Namely, how in the spirit of neo-Kantian aesthetics the figure of the author Vazov is divided into an artist who difuses in the Work (in the role of a “naïve” everyday life descriptor of the era) and a poet, bearer of its philosophical-historical meta-consciousness. It is the second of them that is to blame for the failure of Under the Yoke as a historical novel (of national-epic type): the author-Vazov did not understand the broad “spirit” of the Age and History: he has humiliated, parodied History by “translating” it into the language of literary fiction/lie: Literature seen as an involuntary (and therefore “serious”) parody of historical truth. On this basis, the study formulates a genre aporia (double bind), referring to another great work from/for the same era – “Notes on the Bulgarian Uprisings”: historicity in the historical novel is possible only as an “object of desire”.

The long-story Rally by Stefan Dichev (1960), one of the favorite youth-adventure works in Bulgarian literature, is a direct subject of the article. First of all, attention is focused on the restoration of the different, diverse contexts of its creation, not as a one-time act, but as a process lasting over time: the genre fluctuations and the changes in the various editions, the illustrations and the artistic design as a book, the extremely mysterious relations with another, simultaneously created work – Diyarbakir Exiles by M. Marchevski. The unusual creation of the “Rally” is an occasion to touch in a broader context on the relationship of literature with other, neighboring discursive territories, the “translation” of the literary text into other discursive languages: illustration and art design, film adaptation, but above all comics, as far as Rally was born just as the first successful experience in this intermediate genre.

The article offers a comparative reading of two short novels – “Scott Reynolds and the Unattainable” by Emilian Stanev (1973) and “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann (1913) – ‘comparative’ primarily on a large cultural-civilizational scale, in which Stanev’s novel raises and further develops the main themes and motifs of Thomas-Man’s one. Namely, the global problem of the end of Western humanistic culture 202under the pressure of modern Technique/Machenschaft (Heidegger), collapsing towards the natural-monstrous. The similar structure and the common symbolic topoi of the two works are considered: ‘old man― child’, ‘North/West―South/East’...