Poetika „ďábelského“ na hranici mezi děsivým blouzněním a groteskním šklebem: nad prózami bulharského diabolismu (1. část)
The Poetics of the “Devilish” on the Border between Terrifying Delirium and Grotesque Grin (On the Prose of Bulgarian Diabolism - Part 1)

Summary/Abstract: The study reflects the literary-historical definition of Bulgarian Diabolism, which Bulgarian, but also German and Czech literary scholarship (Thomas M. Martin, Zlatina Jeřábková) has been intensively dealing with since the 1980s. Diabolism is the result of the confrontation of Bulgarian post-war literature with Western European (Neo)Romanticism and Expressionism (the phenomenon is partly known in the German and French environment) and is directly related to the terms “Black/Gothic novel”, “Frenetic literature”, “Horror novel” and with the names of E. T. A. Hoffmann, E. A. Poe, T. Gautier, S. Przybyszewski, G. Meyrink or H. H. Ewers. To this day, there is a debate about the essence of diabolism – whether it is a special literary movement or current (current researchers rather reject such a definition), or whether it is necessary to look at it genre-motifically as a manner based on an Avant-garde (Expressionist) foundation, on which quite disparate elements are syncretically (hybridly) grafted from various aesthetic-ideological inspirations sources (the author of this study also identifies with this concept). Already in the 1920´s and 1930´s, the circle of Bulgarian Diabolists settled on a quartet represented by novelists Minkov, Poljanov, Rajchev and Mutafov, and with the novel Sărceto v kartonenata kutija (The Heart in the Carton Box, 1933) also Konstantinov, who wrote a work parodying diabolist poetics together with Minkov. More detailed attention is paid in particular to the antecedents of diabolism (Ivanov-Cheren [1880–1912], Zhelyazkov-Balder [1887–1912], Goryanin-Virsaviev [1885–1959]) and the forgotten novelist with distinctly diabolistic aesthetic sensibilities, Mikhailov (1896–1965).

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