Николай Райнов – един театрален визионер
Nikolai Raynov as a Visionary of Theatre

Summary/Abstract: On the basis of four publications written by Nikolai Raynov between 1920 and 1924 the paper emphasizes the presence of a new aesthetic project in the history of theatre and literary theory in Bulgaria. In this project the Bulgarian thinker set apart the concept of "fantastic theatre" and pointed to its two basic features. "Fantastic" reality was seen as the opposite of Aristotle's or Plato's type of mimesis and the distance between the actor and his audience was shortened. As a sign of the play of the future, N. Raynov accepted the idea of "retheatricalization of life", promoted by the Russian Modernist N. N. Evreinov. N. Raynov's short story Drama illustrated the idea of a new "fantastic" theatre providing similarity with some of Evreinov's methods such as "auto-bio-reconstruction" and "theatre for oneself". Although the project was not put into practice, it is a substantial part of the Bulgarian avant-garde aesthetics that proved to be close to the European patterns of the same years.

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