Емануил Попдимитров и списание „Хиперион”
Emanuil Popdimitrov and Hyperion Magazine

Summary/Abstract: The magazine Hyperion was the largest-scale and longest-lasting mouthpiece for Bulgarian modernism after World War One. The publication presented a moderate brand of late Bulgarian modernism, which excluded the avant garde’s explosive works. Symbolism, post-symbolist realism with a tendency towards the primitive, neo-romanticism, vitalism – these were the basic currents that intersected in Hyperion, while occasional avant garde appearances were not lacking. On the magazine’s pages, symbolism and post-symbolism, modernism and contra-modernism cohabitated both through parallel lines, as well as through complex interweavings in individual authors and words. The presence of Emanuil Popdimitrov was emblematic in this sense. In Hyperion, Popdimitrov published poetry, prose and theoretical articles on philosophical-aesthetic themes. His contribution in all three genres was representative not only of the magazine’s image, but also of the tendencies within Bulgarian literature and Bulgarian intellectual life in the 1920s. Popdimitrov ranks among Hyperion’s ideologues and was a part the intellectual circle that formed around the magazine. His articles in Hyperion, in which he makes an attempt to give his own reading to Henri Bergson’s intuitivism and vitalism, opened new horizons in Bulgarian humanistic thought after World War One and exercised substantial influence on the search for new artistic approaches in the literary and visual arts in Bulgaria. Popdimitrov’s poetic contributions to Hyperion represent a transition from symbolist to post-symbolist poetics. The excerpt of his literary prose published in the magazine is demonstrative of the interweaving of genres and the poetological tendencies in Bulgarian prose in the corresponding period. The critical reception of his work in the pages of Hyperion, where he was perceived dually, both as “our own” and as “foreign,” is examined as a characteristic outline of Popdimitrov’s image. Popdimitrov’s publications in Hyperion are characteristic of the development of the author himself, as well as of Bulgarian literature and culture between the two world wars. They personify the impulse towards a new type of humanism and the elevation of the personality towards an “ethical individualism,” which entered into synchronicity with European and global philosophical-religious and aesthetic attitudes in the period between the two world wars.

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