Народният поет като мит
National Poets and National Mystifications

Summary/Abstract: The material subsumed under the topic of the “national poet” involves several important and interconnected areas of study: intellectual and literary history, canon formation and reception theory, and that broad field of social and culture studies that deals with collective and symbolic representations, with collective memory, and with myth and mythmaking. An interdisciplinary focus presents its own special challenges, but the matter is complicated by the fact that, apparently by default, the topic has been left to literary historians, and in the main to those who in today’s idiom would be labelled “nationalist.” Whatever the other ramifications, it is evident that the discourse surrounding “the national poet” is somehow immanently autarchic – and this applies as well to recent scholarship that is not avowedly nationalistic. The traditional national scholarship, generated as it is by the symbolic-collective sense of, and social need for asserting identity, is, understandably, predisposed or indeed programmed to look inward and to keep what is outside at bay or at least out of focus. The comparative focus, that contextualization that is essential for seeing the phenomenon clearly and analytically has been largely absent. And it is a structured absence. In every national tradition the attention paid to the national poet has been immense and continuous, but it is precisely the comparative discussion that has been lacking – and made all the more obvious by the fact that the neighboring cultural, historical, and typological models have been so close at hand.

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