Critique & Humanism | vol. 50 – I | No 2 | 2018 | Bulgarian Revival: Political Uses

issue editors: Albena Hranova, Milena Iakimova 2/2018, ISSN:0861-1718

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* The Issue is only available in Bulgarian.

EDITORIAL

 

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Author: Albena Hranova and Milena Iakimova

“REVIVAL”: HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY USES

The paper seeks to question the concept of the ‘Bulgarian Revival’ as a fixed, self-evident and taken-for-granted concept. Nowadays Bulgarian literary theory and historiography are experiencing in a similar way the general problematicity of the Revival concept stemming primarily from two things: firstly, this concept completely lacks neutrality, it is axiologically overladen with wholly positive connotations; secondly, the metaphoricity of the concept and the consciousness of an ‘era’ in it invariably turn out to be interlinked at its very core. This also necessitates an inquiry into the relationship between metaphor and era in the Revival concept which ensure, in different ways and for different occasions, its ability to boundlessly produce cultural continuities, whereby the metaphor blurs and transcends the boundaries and differences between the different eras. The cultural, contextual, and political ability of the Revival concept-metaphor to produce different narratives and, hence, different eras in Bulgarian history is interpreted here as a major premise for its countless historical and contemporary uses.

Keywords: revival period, metaphors and concepts, the longue durée of the Revival metaphor, Bulgarian history and culture

The paper is elaborated especially for The Political Uses of Revival: Historical Heritage and Contemporaneity Project, supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Bulgaria, 2017 – 2020.

 

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Author: Albena Hranova

Albena Hranova is professor of Bulgarian literature at Plovdiv University. She is the author of the monographs Historiography and Literature. Vols. 1 and 2 (2011), The Two Bulgarian Literatures (1992), The Literary Man and His Bulgarian Languages (1995), Approaches to the Fairy Tale (1996), Yavorov – Dialectcs and Alchemies (1998), Language and Its Speeches (2000), Bulgarian Intertexts (2002), and many papers published in Bulgarian, English, German, Czech, Croatian, and Russian.

BULGARIAN ‘SPIRITUAL REVIVAL’ IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD: MYSTIC COMMUNITIES, MORALIZING PROJECTS AND NATIONALIST AGENDAS

The paper analyzes the discourse of the so-called “spiritual revival” in Bulgaria in the interwar period, tracing back the history of various periodicals and organizations with non-material and non-secular aims. The latter are compared and opposed on the base of (non)belonging to the orthodox faith and the institutional basis of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and respectively are seen as two different responses to the increased search for moral and existential alternatives. Thus the orthodox charity promoted by parish confraternities and journals is presented as a platform for legitimizing the intervention of the Church in the social sphere after WWI, while the varied and complex network of Tolstoists, theosophers, Dunovists, Masons among others, are discussed as blending the individual mystic transformation with a return to the centuries-old folk traditions and to the practices of Christian neo-gnostic sects such as Bogomilism. The paper, however, outlined the common discursive environment of these two branches of the Bulgarian spiritual revival movement, growing from the postwar anti-liberal attitudes and projecting the development and welfare of the society in retroactive, nationalistic terms.

The paper is elaborated especially for The Political Uses of Revival: Historical Heritage and Contemporaneity Project, supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Bulgaria, 2017 – 2020.

Keywords: spiritual revival, church charity, moralism, Tolstoism, occultism, theosophy, folk mysticism, new nationalism

 

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Author: Galina Goncharova

Galina Goncharova holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridsky”. She is now an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies, Sofia University. She has held research fellowships at the Centre for Advanced Studies – Sofia and has participated in big international research projects. Her research interests are in the field of modern Bulgarian history, oral history, biographical methods, history and sociology of youth cultures and sociology of religion. Goncharova has published on generational discourses, religious practices, death and dying in Bulgaria. She is author of the monography Politics of „Generation“ (in Bulgarian). Recently she is working on a project on the generational models of informal care.

“Degeneration” and “Regeneration” in Regimes of Historicity: Biosocial Engineering in Bulgaria from the End of the XiX Century to the Second World War

The article studies the specifics of the visions of degeneration and regeneration in Bulgaria within the eugenics discourse and other intellectual and political discourses with which it interceded. Hence, certain concepts of modernity, historical time and identity are reconstructed as a result of biosocial engineering in Bulgaria at the end of the 19th century and especially during the interwar period. The analysis is structured in several sections, which address the following topics: biological images of social time as elaborated at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century; the racial anthropological perspective of the biologist Metodiy Popov towards national historical time; the psychologizations of the “national soul” envisaged as undergoing social progress and/or decay, as well as the scientific-political versions of a “New Revival” of the Bulgarian collective organism. The theme of biopolitical regeneration is interpreted as enriching the conceptual background of the “revivalist imagination” in Bulgaria.

Keywords: Degeneration, Revival, Regimes of Historicity, Eugenics, Racial Anthropology, Folk Psychology, Mental Hygiene

 

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Author: Gergana Mircheva

Gergana Mircheva is MA in Law and Doctor in Cultural Studies from the “St. Kliment Ohridsky” University of Sofia. She teaches courses in Medical Anthropology. Her research interests are in the fields of cultural studies of medicine and eugenics, bioethics, disability studies and history of modern Bulgarian culture. Mircheva has participated in Bulgarian and international projects and scientific forums and has a number of publications in Bulgarian and in English. She is the author of the book (Ab)normality and Access to Publicity: Socio-Institutional Spaces of Biomedical Discourses in Bulgaria (1878-1939) (2018).

THE PEOPLE AND ITS SOUL: NATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY AS THE WORK TO DELINEATE THE AUTHENTIC

The article examines national psychology and its development in Bulgaria in the second half of ХІХ and the first half of XX century in the context of the Revival and the notions and images of the Bulgarian associated with it. It is hypothesized and argued that thinking of national psychology as of an instrument for selective actualization of what is reckoned as original Bulgarian traits is heuristic for understanding the political uses of the descriptions of the people and its character. A specific type of discursive approach in the descriptions of the Bulgarians is identified and analyzed – one that reaffirms the value of what is Bulgarian by an utterance of negative traits. 

The paper is elaborated especially for The Political Uses of Revival: Historical Heritage and Contemporaneity Project, supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Bulgaria, 2017 – 2020.

Keywords: national psychology, people, Revival, traits, character

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Author: Simeon Kyurkchiev, Maria Martinova

Simeon Kyurkchiev is a sociologist, assistant professor in the Social Sciences department, University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy. His main interests are in sociological diagnostics of contemporaneity, focused on the problems of mental health and neuroses, psychological expertise and ontology of the subject.

Maria Martinova holds a PhD in sociology from “St. Kliment Ohridski” University of Sofia. She mainly works on topics related to healthcare and activists’ practices. She is interested in the forms of collective subjectivation and the political possibilities they open up.

Revival and Values: Thinking about Childhood in the Beginnings of the Bulgarian Society’s Modernization

The study focuses on Petar Beron’s, Raino Popovich’s, Konstantin Fotinov’s and Sava Dobroplodni’s views on childhood revealed in their writings. Moments from their works tell us their answers to question “What’s a child?”, which the beginnings of modernization had put on the public agenda. For them, children should not be seen oxi-moronically as “little grownups”. One of their strongest messages is for a new understanding of childhood and children as a stage in human development, requiring from adults specific treatment. Along with Locke, they believed that a kid’s mind is a tabula rasa focusing on its being free of the “original sin”. Childhood is “innocent”; corporal punishment should be abolished, and the other punishments should be inflicted on a strictly individual and equitable basis. Some of them were especially strong on defending the right of girls to school education. More traditional are they regarding the power distribution at home and school: free choice is the domain of adults; children don’t have enough knowledge and experience to be vested with it (reminding one of Locke again). But unlike Locke, Beron, Popovich, Fotinov and Dobroplodni seem to see the goal of moral education to be the production of subjects, not citizens. Their belief that children should be trained to re-act in mâlchanie, blagochinie, pokorenie and smirenie (roughly: reticence, respect of one’s betters, submissivness and humbleness) definitely points that way.

The paper was especially elaborated to consult the work for The Political Uses of Revival: Historical Heritage and Contemporaneity Project, supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research, Bulgaria, 2017 – 2020.

Keywords: Bulgarian 19th Century, History of Childhood, Child, Enlightenment, John Locke.

 

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Author: Nadia Danova

Nadia Danova, Dr. Habil in History, is Professor of  History at the Institute for Balkan Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Professor Emeritus since 2010). Among her publications are  the  monographs: The Image of Bulgaria and the Bulgarians in the Greek Literature (17th -19th C.) (2016), Ivan Dobrovski in the History of the Bulgarian 19th Century (2008), Konstantin  Georgiev Fotinov and the Cultural and  Political Development of the Balkans during the 19th Century (1994), The National Problem in the Greek Political Programmes in the 19th Century (1980).

Responsible parenting or funny motherhood? Dynamics and contradictions in the construction of the parental figure in Bulgaria

The article deals with the diverse public representations of parenting, mothering and fathering in contemporary Bulgaria and aims to explore some of the narratives, claims and gendered implications on which they rely. Two contradictory types of representations are analyzed – the first one is construed around the image of the responsible parent and the second one around а humorous vision of motherhood. While the responsibilizing representations are situated within a global intensive and deterministic parenting culture which naturalizes the gendered expectations towards mothers and fathers, the humorous ones produces new emancipatory visions of motherhood and femininity.

Keywords: parenting, parenting culture, gender, motherhood

 

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Author: Gergana Nenova

Gergana Nenova is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Sofia university „St. Kliment Ohridski“. Her research interests are in the field of gender sociology, sociology of childhood, family sociology and feminist theory.

Time, Narration, Politics

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Author: Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher, Professor at the University Paris VIII (Saint Denis). His research field comprises mainly the political philosophy and the aesthetics. He used to be a student of Louis Althusser with whom he took part in the authors team of Reading Capital (1968). Afterwords he distanced himself from Althusser and developed an original philosophic work including dozens of titles among which should be noted: The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991), Hatred of Democracy (2007), The Emancipated Spectator (2010), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010), Modern Times (2017).

The Serious Play and the Peculiar Actuality of Platonism

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Author: Lidia Denkova

Lidia Denkova is a philosopher and professor in the Philosophy and Sociology department at New Bulgarian University. Her keen interests are mainly in the fields of the History of ideas, Aesthetics, and Ethics. She has more than 20 translated and annotated specialized books from 4 different languages. She is the editor of the New Bulgarian University’s Press philosophy book series “What does this mean?”, which has published 15 authors (to this day.) Since 2010, she has authored the following books: A New Praise of Folly (2010), Helen and the Philosophers: Sketching a philosophy of tenderness (2013), Journeying towards the Day (2017), and the collection Benjamin Constant––the right to truth and freedom in everything (2019).

Plato and the Dialectic Play

 

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Author: Jacques Darriulat

Jacques Darriulat is a contemporary philosopher and lecturer, professor at Paris Sorbonne University (1997– 2011). He specializes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, with special interest in Renaissance painting. He is the author of the renowned book Métaphores du regard: Essai sur la formation des images en Europe depuis Giotto, published in 1993. His last book is Les Années néoréalistes (1945-1963), published by Rhuthmos in 2018. Since 2007, he maintains an incredibly informative personal website about philosophy:

http://www.jdarriulat.net/