Modernism

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.

This article focuses on critical texts, including Ludmil Stoyanov’s, in “Hiperion” journal. The writer’s complex and contradictory transition from individualism and ultimate aesthetics to a new type of humanism, democracy and social engagement is considered. Stoyanov defines the new direction as neo-romanticism, but according to author’s thesis it can also be described as neo-pantheism.

The present article places the modernity of women writers in its research focus and begins its observations with the rethinking question, what do we recognize as modernism in the late XIX – the first two decades of the XX century? The modernity of women writers remains unrecognizable to their contemporaries and even historically – the opportunity to create is aggravated by prejudices, restrictions and even prohibitions, this is a modernity beyond modernism, examined in the work of two unrecognized authors – Vela Blagoeva and Ana Karima, and both unrecognized as female presences in Bulgarian literary life, with problematic critical and collegial reception. The study highlights a number of modern ideas and concepts in each of the authors: in Vela Blagoeva – an original, non-model interpretation of historical figures, anti-racism, feminism, adventurous twists, in Karima – the first travelogue of a woman, enriched with the themes of social justice and female destiny, anti-stereotypical thinking and behavior.

The article focuses on the battle against modernism by the Marxist theory of reflection in Eastern Europe. The term reflection was in circulation as one of the key concepts of the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist aesthetics and especially of Todor Pavlov’s theory of reflection, in which literature is seen as an authentic reflection of reality, it requires the correct mirror of sober realism. The confrontation between Isaac Passy and Todor Pavlov in the early 1960s demonstrates the mechanisms of subverting the ideological state.