The German Art Nouveau and Its Reflections in Bulgarian Literature at the Beginning of the 20th Century. Two Literary Paths: Teodor Trajanov and Emanuil Popdimitrov

Abstract

This paper inquires into the extent to which the literary designations Symbolism and Secession are being used correctly vis-a-vis the respective literary appearances, that is to say, to what extent are they verifiable and how one in recent years by employing this terminology (through its suppression and its assertion) has manipulated the processes in literary history. So the term Secession will also be dealt with here -- as a meaningful concept for Bulgarian poetry at the beginning of the 20th century, but also as a questionable designation for the phenomena in this poetry. Based on this doubt of whether the concept Secession as founded in the literary historical writings of recent years is used, an attempt is made to prove its “reality”.
For this reason, the poetry from two representative authors -- Teodor Trajanov and Emanuil Popdimitrov -- will be called on. These two poets exhibit very different ways to Secession and its remarkable aura. Trajanov stylized his later work (the anthology “Osvobodenijat čovek”, 1929) in the spirit of the Secession, in that he revised his earlier decadent-resigned poems into an ultimate-optimistic vision of the world -- which though the postulate of the awakening and of the eternal youth had firmed up ideologically. Popdimitrov, on the other hand, lived through a development that went from the chaotically cluttered ornamentation of his youthful poems to the extended and to the wavelike descriptive line of his later work. In this way he had created a poetry of the secessionist line which gave rise not only the distinctive forms of the Art Nouveau (wings, hair, wreaths, angels, swans, and such), but also evoked a certain world-view effect. In this sense, when Trajanov deals conspiratorially with the ideology of the Art Nouveau and engraves them in his later poetry and expressly emphasizes them, the efforts of Popdimitrov starting in 1907 seem pure Art Nouveau: through a carefully reflected ornamentation, through two dimensional images, and through the idea of an interwoven reality between the “I” and the whole of the world.