University o f London University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies Conceptions of Decay in Czech and Bulgarian National Mythology by Dessislava Velitchkova Dragneva A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2006 UMI Number: U592745 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U592745 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 I have been lucky to have an educated principal supervisor in Robert Pynsent, to whom I am grateful for his immense support and inspiration throughout my research. I am grateful to him also for his help with translating passages from German. Thanks are also due to my back-up supervisor, Tim Beasley-Murray and Kieran Williams, for their patience and support. I would not have been able to finish my thesis without the financial support of the Open Society Fund, a UCL Friends’ Programme Hardship Scholarship, and a SSEES General Bursary. If I still appear uneducated, it is entirely my fault. Modified Library of Congress Transliteration has been used in this thesis as follows: Cyrillic Transliteration Cyrillic Transliteration A a A a 0 o 0 0 6 6 B b n n p P B B V V p p R r r r G CT C c S s In Ukrainian T T T t and Belarusian H h Ti ft C c r r G a a y y u u r r 6 G 3 y y 0 u n a D d $ F f B h D d X x Kh kh E e E e In Serbo-Croat € e Ie ie and Macedonian H h E e E e U u Ts ts In Serbo-Croat In Belarusian Io io and Macedonian C c >K * Zh zh H Ch ch In Serbo-Croat In Serbo-Croat 2 2 and Macedonian c e X * J III in Sh sh J In Serbo-Croat 3 3 Z z and Macedonian s § S S Dz dz LU m Shch shch a H I i In Bulgarian Sht sht In Ukrainian Y y “b -b " * I i T T In Bulgarian A 3 * In Ukrainian bl bl Y and Belarusian I i y b b i I i I Ie ie H H I i 3 3 E e J ] J j 10 K) Iu iu K K K k H H la ia k K K lc /R a U u n A L 1 b¥v Mi. lu iu ib A> Lj U 0 9 F f M M M m V v Y V H H n n Hb rb Nj nj * Transliterated in middle of Disregarded when Contents Introduction 1. Cycles of civilisations 2. From cycles to ordering the races 3. Degeneration and nationalism 4. The context 5. National Revivals 6. The period covered 7. Sources 8. Golden Ages, Dark Ages 9. The metaphor of sleep Chapter One: Corruption of the Nation through Its Blood 1. The meanings of blood 2. Sacred homeland imagery 3. Blood-soil relationships 4. Miscegenation 4.1. Un olk and purity of blood 4.2. Aristocracy and miscegenation: miscegenation with the Gei 4.3. Miscegenation with the Jews 4.4. Miscegenation with the Greeks 4.5. Miscegenation with the Turks 4.6. Gender roles in miscegenation Chapter Two: Corruption of the Nation through Its Language 124 1. Influences on Czech and Bulgarian Revivalists 126 2. The Golden Ages of the language 133 3. Foreign languages as morally wrong 137 4. Speaking a foreign language instead of one’s mother tongue 141 4.1. Speaking a foreign language instead of Czech 141 4.2. Speaking a foreign language instead of Bulgarian 150 4.3. Bulgarian urban language decay 152 4.4. Education abroad 155 4.5. Religion as an agent of language decay 158 5. Polluting the mother-tongue with foreign words 159 6. Polluting the mother-tongue with Slav words 164 6.1. Using the morally wrong words 169 Chapter Three: Corruption of the Nation through Its Religion 172 1. Pure paganism versus corrupt Christianity 1 76 1.1. Pagan strength and athleticism versus Christian effeminacy 178 1.2 Jolly paganism versus gloomy monotheistic Christianity 179 1.3 Conversion to Christianity 185 2. Pure versus corrupt versions of Christianity 195 3. Christianity versus Islam 217 Chapter Four: National Decline through the Decline of the Morals 221 1. Urban versus Rural 223 l.lThedual nature of cities: cosmopolitanism and the focus of national history 223 1.2. Prague and morality. Degeneration through excess 224 1.3. Bulgarians and the cities 236 1.4. Filth: the Oriental; Europeanness; Jews 238 1.5. Degeneration through deficiency 247 1.6. Czech cities and Jews 251 1.7. Westernised cities 252 2. Foreign cities (Tom-off branches) 250 3. Europeanising the Oriental 265 4. Degenerate villages 272 5. Wealth and sexuality 273 6. Wealth and suicide 275 Conclusion 278 Bibliography 281 Degeneration is an explanatory instrument that helps disperse and sustain fear.1 Nineteenth-century national mythopoeia, the Czech and Bulgarian included, was focused on the creation of a sense of national belonging; in other words, it had to posit mythologies of generation. The idea that something needs to be created and preserved as a defence against others, for example other nations, however, suggests an immanent threat that it could be or had been subjected to infection, decay - or death. In this thesis I will focus on the employment of ideas of degeneration in the generation of the new myth of belonging t»* the Czech or Bulgarian nation. Notions of generation are dependent on notions of femininity, the conception, birth and preservation of the offspring; my argument is that femininity has always played the major role for generation and for degeneration, from the Book of Genesis (which provides a myth not only of generation but also of degeneration, fall and decay) onwards and that this had a profound impact on National Revivals. The story of the expulsion from Eden gave birth to analogous stories. Humanity was inevitably degenerate, since it started with the expulsion of the Garden of Eden, and, eventually, as a result of reproduction by means of miscegenation, the coition of the sons of God and the daughters of men. humankind has been by nature in a state of degeneration. Notions of decay or of its approximate synonyms, fall, decline, degeneration, or decadence, were part and parcel of the idea of existence, especially corporeal existence." Thevery idea of corporeality comprises the idea of the body’s deterioration and 1 William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.2. ' Richard Gilman informs us that the word ‘decadence’ was first used in the eleventh century in mediaeval Latin documents, Richard Gilman, Decadence. The Strange Life of an Epithet , New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, p.36. See also the ‘Introduction’ to Liz Constable. Matthew Potolsky and Denis Denisoff (eds). Perennial Decay. On the Aesthetics & Politics of D ecaden ce, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, p.2. decomposition.3 That was the experience of every human individual. In late Classical Christian philosophy, the major attribute of the body w as sin: it was the product of Original Sin and the source of further sins. With the beginning of modem scientific analysis during the Enlightenment the approach to degeneration changed and in the course of the nineteenth century this approach became distinctly medical. None the less, sexual deviation, which was the subject of some nationalist writing, while still approached generally theologically as heresy in the early nineteenth century, soon became a symptom of disease rather than an object of moral or theological disapprobation. Nineteenth-century thinking tended to concentrate on either the notion of the perfectibility of man or the inevitability of decay or on the apparent contradiction between perfectibility and decay. Writers imagined both the progress of humanity (thanks to advances in science) and humanity’s decline: science and especially advances in medicine increased the survival of the unfit; advances in medicine meant removing people from the process of natural selection. Although most studies of decay/degeneration start with the middle of the nineteenth century, Gilman in his fundamental work on ‘decadence’ traces the history of the concept from Antiquity.4 He points out that seeing the present as worse compared to the past is a component of any mvth of a Golden Age. and ' For ideas of corporeality, although not ideas of decay, see Bryan Turner. The Hodv and Soc iety Explorations in Soc ial Theory , Oxford, Blackwell, 1(>X4, pp,X-CE 4 Even scholars who devote their studies to late nineteenth-centurv degenerationism refer to Gilman’s work, see for example Charles Bemheimer, Decadent Subjects: the Idea of Decadenc e in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de siecle in Europe , edited by T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002 or his entry ’Unknowing Decadence’ in Perennial Decay. where apart from the already cited introductory essay, the following entries also draw their definition of decadence from Gilman: Marc A. Weiner, 'Opera and the Discourse of Decadence’ and Liz Constable, ' “Ce Bazar intellectuel”: Maurice Barres, Decadent Masters and Nationalist Pupils’.