ONCE AGAIN ON “OCCIDENTALISM” AS AN IMAGE OF THE OTHER
ONCE AGAIN ON “OCCIDENTALISM” AS AN IMAGE OF THE OTHER

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on an understudied trend in the ideological and political life of the Bulgarian society. An analysis of the texts of Bulgarian authors from the eighteenth-twentieth centuries underlies the conclusion that they contain a number of elements of Occidentalism, i. e. of the mental and verbal structures related to the communication with the West, of the negative predisposition to the West manifested in hatred for cities and for the modern urban civilization with its literature and music, for trade and modern communications. An attempt is made to reveal the cultural, historical and geopolitical factors determining these elements. The article accounts for the circumstance that in the course of the centuries that followed the Ottoman conquest the affiliation of the Bulgarians to the community of Eastern Orthodox Christians had as a consequence the superimposition of the negative effects from the confrontation between Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism on the image of the West. The author recognizes the role of the influence of German philosophy representatives Herder, Schelling and Schlegel, which permeated the Bulgarian space via the works of Pavel Šafárik, Jan Kollar, Yuriy Venelin and the Russian Slavophiles. It is pointed out that in the early decades of the 19th century Occidentalism in the Balkans acquired an increasingly distinct geopolitical ring related to the resurgence of Russian policy in the Balkans.

• Details
• Contents