Litterateur's guilt and responsibility in society and history (surveying Russian 'emigr'e newspapers of Bulgaria, 1920s - 1940s)

The article is an “idiographic” (in the sense of W. Windelbandt) introduction into a broader enquiry purposed at assessing the significance of the discourse of responsibility in the symbolic economy of Russian émigré community of Bulgaria in the 1920s - early 1940s and at verifying the hypothesis of centrality of that discourse. That is, before inspecting the frequency, status and ‘hearability' (potential to produce resonance) of cases and stances within which the question of “who, before whom, and for what is responsible?” is formulated, the author focuses on the contents of such questions, on the semantics of “responsibility” in particular, and outlines some vivid and potentially typical cases. The article implicitly assumes that a newspaper is a kind of snapshot of the symbolic economy of the community involved, hence the choice of sources to be investigated. The author's acquaintance with the Russian émigré periodicals of Bulgaria determined his focusing first on the following two newspapers: the rightist-liberal “Rus'” (1922-28) and the ‘rightist avant-gardist' “Za Rossiju / Za Novuju Rossiju / Za Rodinu”. Those sources enabled group cases on the postulated agent of responsibility: firsltly, a ‘representative of an educated society' (or, in terms of Bourdieu, an agent of the cultural field) and, secondly, a litterateur (an agent of the subfield of literature). The semantics of such cases does not contradict the hypothesis - formulated elsewhere - that in the 1920s a rightist-liberal and in the 1930s a right- wing avant-gardist consensus in understanding “responsibility” were established. This article states that the main difference between the decades in question is the egression ‘prospectivity' (the property of addressing the future) in understanding responsibility, as well as disentanglement and hierarchisation between “responsibility for the present and the future” and responsibility for “preservation of (cultural) values”. The sources allowed the author to distinguish a kind of ‘zone of consensus' between what could be called the generations of the 1920s and of the 1930s; an imperative for mutual (intergenerational) responsibility is felt in this zone. As for the responsibility of litterateurs, the accent is shifted from concern about rehabilitation of literature not present in the literary canon because of the leftist radicalism of pre-revolutionary intelligentsia to (stimulating the) the creation of literary works to make the core of a future literature of the rightist radicalism. The difference can be interpreted as a historical change within the field of ideology, brought by the conservative revolution of the early 1930s, during which the rightist-liberal individualism lost its ideological and cultural appeal, while the position of avant-garde in the sense of Bourdieu was taken by the culture of kenotic activism from the right. The process went along with a change in the constellation and hierarchy between different views on the function of literature; This change is not studied in this article, though it gives reasons to consider the rise of rightist radicalism in the form of rightist avant-garde movement (in the traditional art-history meaning of this word). Newspapers witnessing agents and processes oppositional and marginal to the ones analysed here (e.g., the formation of a pro-Soviet rightist avant-garde, the Mladorossy party; and of conservative opposition whose intentions crystallised in a bunch of Russian Fascist organisations), as well as the 1936-1943 developments in the ideological / cultural / literary fields remained beyond the scope of this article, too.