The debate on Bulgarian symbolism in the 1970s and 1980s and the matter of the boundaries and context of national literature

Abstract After 1944, for a long while, Bulgarian Symbolism was branded as “decadent” and there was little research on it by Bulgarian scholars. It was not until the late 1960s, and during the 1970s and 1980s, that a significant and intense increase in attention to the movement itself emerged, redefining the map of Bulgarian literary history. Studies not only posed the question of Symbolist poetics as an object of the then-current scholarly debate, which compensated for the lack of such debate in the decades before, but also indirectly turned this into one of the critical cores of the polemic unfolding in Bulgaria after the 1960s about “national originality” in literature. The debate on Symbolism, which is the focus of this paper, shows the breakthroughs, hesitations, and paradoxes that accompanied the establishing of the place of national culture in intercultural dialogue. The problem is that national was often identified as social (in its late socialist interpretations), and, in this way, an inevitable but very dangerous identification with state ideology appeared. On the other hand, the understanding of the Symbolists’ desire to turn poetic language into a universal literary code presupposed for the researcher the integration of national culture into world culture through the prism of the synchronicity of literary communication, which was unrestricted by objective chronology. Studying Bulgarian Symbolism led to more comparative research, as well as the number of poems translated, thus modifying the understanding of the boundaries and context of national literature in the 1970s and 1980s.