"Твоята смърт" и "безразличната смърт": човекът на война пред лицето на смъртта, 1915-1918 г. и кризите на модерната идентичност
“Your death” and “indifferent death”: The man at war facing the death, 1915-1918. and the crisis of the modern identity

Summary/Abstract: 1. This article studies the behaviour of the man at war facing the death through the theoretical approach of Ph. Àrriès and based on the analysis of soldier letters, diaries, notes of war psychologists at the front, war reports and registers of Department of Censure about the disposition of combatants. Outlining the connotational layers of the two main figures articulating the human life experience: “Your death” and “indifferent death”, the article describes the situations producing the identity crises of modern and patriarchal individual, where the spontaneous war experience is articulated in the images of “death-frustration”, “horrible-death”, “death-destruction”, and “heroic-death”. After that it displays the figurative experience of the death through the discursive evaluations of war experience (1915-1918), in order to reveal the way of constructing the images in which the other has been put, images which reconstruct the personal known and/or unknown-unknowable one’s self, causing the sharpest identity crisis of the modern individual: the problematic communication with the one’s self and the surrounding world. 2. This article deals with the discursive practices of the post-war memoirs and the symbolic production of the official mourning ceremonial culture in order to display the ideologies through which it is sought the decrease of the gap dividing the experience from the discourse of the experience on the bases of the theoretical approach of the social history. Ideological efforts which “tame” the death, rethinking it through the structures like “Honourable Mourning”, “Patriotic Inheritance” put in the figures “Fallen for the Fatherland”; structures through which it is accepted and transferred the reality of the dear human victims at the levels of symbolic and real capital, correspondingly high moral status of the relatives and survival and searching for pensions and help from the government.

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