symbolism

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.

The present study aims at examining the motif of death in the early work of the Bulgarian Symbolist Teodor Trayanov. The image of death in the poet’s first poems’ collection Regina Mortua (1909) was specifically studied. Worked on the anthology The Freed Man (1929), including works from the period 1905–1911, where Regina Mortua occupies the first part.

The article is a scrupulous review of the latest book by Assoc. Prof. R. Shivachev Perspectives Towards Early Modernity: Psychologism and Symbolism. Chapter by chapter the main author’s ideas are traced and analyzed. But the article has the ambition to transcend the review genre. By stepping on the concrete subject, the theoretical problem of the relationship between the method and its object is posed: when the method imperceptibly begins to emancipate itself from its object and sounds as an object in itself: the analysis of a certain work as a way to reveal the possibilities of the method. The bottom line: studies like this demonstrate the stand-alone va-lue of literary theory. Stopping it from being a servant of literature, an operational toolkit, and turning into an eim in itself, into full-fledged creativity.

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 article highlights a symbolic absence, namely the lack of femininity in certain lyrical works by the poets Pavel Matev, Mladen Isaev and Vladimir Bashev. For this purpose it will proceed from clarifying femininity and its location, and will also clarify works by Peyo Yavorov, in which femininity corresponds directly to sexuality. In the article will be marked and sub-step to the symbolism of the female hair.