‚Die Erfindung der Gegenwart‘

Summary Slaveykov’s fictitious anthology On the Isle of the Blessed (Na Ostrova na blaženite, 1910) is among the most recognized and discussed works in Bulgarian literature and literary history. This literary project is often labeled “extraordinary” in its conceptual and projective power, and continues to generate new interpretations up to the present day. The focus on the Isle’s singular status in Bulgarian scholarship does however obstruct the view at times, regarding its entanglement in what could be called a European matrix of mystification practices and poetics, reaching from Scottish romanticism (James Macpherson’s Ossian project) to the scandalous forgeries of the Slavic national renaissance (the infamous Czech manuscript controversy for example), and onto the modern mask play, as represented for instance in Valery Bryusov’s Russian Symbolists (Russkie simvolisty, 1894–1895). The latter examples are examined in more detail, regarding intertextual and structural parallels with Slaveykov’s imaginary Isle. The article forwards the hypothesis that Slaveykov, explicitly aware of his precursors and their mystification models, no longer strives to “invent a tradition,” but, on the contrary, aims at simulating contemporaneity. Thus this contribution has a double aim: Firstly, to convey a comparative survey and analysis of the Isle of the Blessed within European contexts. Secondly, it intends to relate Slaveykov’s sophisticated poetics of forgery and pseudo-translation to contemporary research in this field, which understands literary fraud as the ground on which concepts of fictionality flourish in the first place.

Sentimental Frauds

The 2006 class action against James Frey, concerning his fabrications in A Million Little Pieces, was the first suit of its kind in the United States. There is nothing new about false memoirs, so what can explain the lawsuit? When the book was promoted on “Oprah's Book Club,” viewers were invited to respond emotionally, and saw their responses as a form of testimony. Those responses produced a sense of betrayal and inauthenticity when Frey's falsehoods were revealed. This view finds support in the eighteenth‐century sentimental novel, which similarly linked readers' reactions to the author's emotional authenticity. Fraud was an ongoing concern for sentimental novelists, some of whom used elaborate editorial to ploys to disavow responsibility for the text, while others populated their novels with fraudulent characters, intended as foils for the protagonist. An investigation of these novels helps to reveal the implications of the Frey case for future claims of literary fraud.

The Urban Theme in Recent Soviet Russian Prose: Notes Toward a Typology

Late in Doctor Zhivago, after its lyrical nature descriptions and idyllic back-to-the-earth retreats in rural Varykino, we run into the following startling passage:These notes were found later among his [Zhivago's] papers: “When I came back to Moscow in 1922 I found it deserted and half destroyed. So it has come out of the ordeals of the first years after the revolution: so it remains to this day. Its population has decreased, no new houses are being built, and the old ones are left in disrepair.But even in this condition it is still a big modern [sovremennyi] city, and cities are the only source of inspiration for a new, truly modern art.The seemingly incongruous and arbitrary jumble of things and ideas in the work of the Symbolists (Blok, Verhaeren, Whitman) is not a stylistic caprice. This is a new order of impressions taken directly from life. Just as they hurry their succession of images through the lines of their poems, so the street in a busy town hurries past us, with its crowds and its carriages at the end of the last century, or its streetcars and subways at the beginning of ours. Pastoral simplicity does not exist in these conditions. Its pseudoartlessness is a literary fraud, an unnatural mannerism, a bookish phenomenon, not inspired by the countryside but taken from the shelves of academic archives.