Mihail Nedelchev

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.