Resources for the Study of Twentieth-Century Bulgarian Literature

Abstract

It is generally a good idea to define terms, but in this case it is imperative to do so, since Bulgarian litterateurs do not periodize the subject by centuries and the term 20th-century Bulgarian has no currency among scholars, critics, and writers in Bulgaria. Both the bourgeois and the Marxist scholars distinguish between stara (old, medieval) and nova (new, modern) Bulgarian literature, the watershed being usually but by no means uniformly seen in the middle of the 18th century and Paisij's Istorija slavjanobalgarska. Within the new literature the dividing lines are usually seen in the liberation of the country in 1878, the end of World War I, and since the coming to power of the Communists, 1944.1 Based on political rather than literary developments, the accepted periodization presents a particularly serious difficulty with its 1878-1918 segment. While the impact of the liberation was manifestly great on politics and economics, on literature it was minor. For years after 1878 Bulgarian literature remained on the same track it had found during the national revival: a Bulgarian type of narodnicestvo which drew its ideology of service to the people from native sources, beginning with Paisij, as well as from the Russian narodniJestvo which many Bulgarians had come to know while studying in Russia. No one personified this continuity better than Petko R. Slavejkov, who had been drawn into a long and multifaceted career of narodnicestvo by his reading of Paisij in 1842 and who continued to wield his pen in the cause of populism, democracy, and nationalism long after 1878. The man who carried Bulgarian literature along the established track well into the 20th century, however, was Ivan Vazov, a young face on the literary stage in the 1870's, whose talent blossomed out in the ensuing decade and established him as Bulgaria's greatest writer and poet. His response to each new turn of the nation's life was made from established, vazro'denski positions and values and in unpretentious literary forms and language that won him a wide popular audience. The work that made him the central literary figure by 1890 was Pod igoto. It appeared in Sbornik za narodni umotvorenija, nauka i kni'nina, then edited by the young professor of literature Ivan Si'manov, who was imbued with the same vazrozdenski views and values. The literary establishment dominated by Vazov was, however, not without its mavericks and challengers, and the decade of the 1890's witnessed increasingly vocal and well-articulated challenges to its traditionalism, its affirmation of the way of life and virtues of small-town Bulgaria, its simplicity of language, its ethnocentrism, and its nationalism. They came from two very different directions. In 1891 a young aesthete, Krast'o Krastev, back from Leipzig with a doctorate, founded a monthly journal, the first literary journal in Bulgaria. His guiding principle was that art must be judged by universal criteria on its aesthetic merits and that pure art, art for art's sake, was of a higher order than art with a social purpose. At first tolerant of Vazov,