secession

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.

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.