THE POETRY OF VESNA PARUN AND BLAGA DIMITROVA BETWEEN IDEALISM AND DOUBT
Études balkaniques (Sofia) 2024, N 3, DOI: https://doi.org/10.62761/645.EB.LX3.05
Marijana BIJELIĆ
University of Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract: Since there are some important similarities as well as meaningful differences between the poetic oeuvres of the selected authors, the paper provides a comparative and a contrastive analysis of selected poems by Vesna Parun and Blaga Dimitrova. It focuses on a relationship between idealism with “absolutist” tendencies, insistence on perfection and on the ideal as a way of coping with negativity. Lyrical subjects in the poems are conceived as completely open to the unending work of desire. The lyrical subject in the poems by Parun is much more sensual, while Dimitrova’s one shows a strong tendency toward reflectiveness and abstraction. Their idealism is usually articulated through traditional symbols, such as birds, stars and the idealised topoi of childhood and nature, with love being their obsessive theme. Such a constellation is a basis for duality of the lyrical subject placed between the ecstatic projections and a tragic decomposition. Self-transcendence through love is the main ideal (that) the lyrical subject hopes to achieve, whereas its other side is the uncompromising tragic self-destruction the subject chooses so as to preserve the ideal from its loss and from the threatening meaninglessness.
Keywords: desire, (neo)symbolism, idealism, the absolute, the tragic