Folk roots and modern anxieties: The intellectual articulation of the nation in fin-de-siecle Bulgaria and Ukraine

This study explores from an interdisciplinary point of view the attitudes of Ukrainian and Bulgarian modernists toward their respective local traditions. More specifically, it focuses on the efforts of the modernist Ukrainian and Bulgarian artistic intelligentsia to critically assess, re-invent, and appropriate available indigenous resources in order to make them meaningful in the present as part of modern public high culture. Such practices appear to have been characteristic for the nation building initiatives in ‘marginalized,’ peripheral societies. My study examines the Ukrainian and Bulgarian redactions of the phenomenon by relying on an eclectic theoretical framework that combines ideas deriving from sociology (Pierre Bourdieu), political science and social psychology (John Hutchinson, Carolyne Vogler), postcolonial literary theory (Gregory Jusdanis) and anthropology (Michael Herzfeld, Roger J. Foster and others).; The historical and socio-political developments in Ukraine and Bulgaria suggest that—at the turn of the twentieth century—the local modernist intelligentsia reacted to a particular crystallization of ethnic identity, which naturalized the peasants as the embodiment of Ukrainianness and Bulgarianness respectively. In principle, they disagreed with the adoption of such a demotic model for national identification because it inadequately promoted the institution of a modern, highly intellectual and sophisticated national culture. In both societies, therefore, Modernism developed in opposition to other approaches to nation formation and nation building. In both localities it evolved as a public moral position that allowed the creative intelligentsia to criticize the state and construe itself as an alternative force of social change and innovation.; This study proposes that Ukrainian and Bulgarian modernists engaged in a form of cultural nationalism which—through the implementation of the ideas of political liberalism, individualism, and pure aesthetics—pursued the Europeanization and Westernization of local cultural traditions. Simultaneously, they also sought to elevate the prestige and symbolical value of modern Ukrainian and Bulgarian national culture. In short, my study proposes and defends the idea that Ukrainian and Bulgarian Modernisms were not exclusively aesthetic movements, but expressions of specific, locally generated ideologies of subversion and resistance that pursued the cultural re-invigoration and political transformation of the respective national societies.