Антихрист: Ницше и Янко Янев, оригиналът и епигонът
Antichrist. Nietzsche and Yanko Yanev: the Original and the Epigone

Summary/Abstract: The article is focused on the specific veneration that the Bulgarian poet and philosopher Yanko Yanev felt for Nietzsche, in memory of whom, in 1926, he published a book entitled Antichrist, conceived, planned and written to express Yanev’s complete agreement and identification with the German philosopher. In the book, Yanev lends the aura of divinity to Nietzsche. The article points out that this book was preceded and followed by other works specifically devoted to Nietzsche and discussing the impact of the latter’s legacy on the world many years after his death.Yanev’s early philosophical-poetical works, published in the journal Listopad, present this Bulgarian author in a way that has led him to be viewed, by the public at that time, as a sort of Nietzsche of the Balkans. Interpretations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra are central to Yanev’s thought. But even in his earliest works devoted to Nietzsche, certain discrepancies between Yanev and his favorite author begin to appear. The shade of difference stems from the fact that Nietzsche is very definite in his anti-Christian assertions, while the Bulgarian author does not seem aware that he is going beyond Nietzsche’s stark negation and is in fact seeking a synthesis of contraries – in the terminology of Dostoyevsky (another author whom Yanev holds in reverence), a synthesis of the Divine-Human and Human-Divine. We see this gradually deepening change in Yanev’s articles in the newpaper Pryaporets in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In other words, regardless of what Yanev’s initial intentions might have been, the “prestigious connection” expressed by this Bulgarian reading of Nietzsche’s works consists, in fact, of a synthesis between the Nietzschean Übermensch and the Christian God-Man.

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