Misplacedness as Near-Death Experience: A Jonah Between the Ottomans and the Soviets (Yavorov, Zarkin and Their Armenian Collocutors)

Commonalities between poems by Peyo Yavorov and Georgi Zarkin suggest a Soviet-Ottoman contact zone, where the topos of 'Jonah in the big fish' symbolizes engulfment by the abyss and punishment for unfulfilled moral obligation. This topos links both poets to national hero Vasil Levski, reflecting their shared condition as agents in that contact zone. Yavorov fought for Macedonian freedom and sympathized with Armenians but was defeated by personal demons; Zarkin survived Soviet prison and synthesized Levski's tasks, bringing the contact zone into being. Armenian references deepen the genealogical link between the texts.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In this article I rationalise my historical intuition that perceptible commonalities, evolution and intentionality between two groups of texts (four poems by Peyo Yavorov and three by Georgi Zarkin) could be indicative of a Soviet-Ottoman contact zone. Moreover, I discuss my theoretical intuition that the basically spatialising concept of “contact zone” can refer to temporality and, in particular, to continuity that may be overseen or seen from an ‘outside’ as dis-continuity. To summarise the prevalently historical argument of the article: The topos of ‘Jonah in the big fish’ implies the condition of engulfment by the abyss, but also the (temporary) punishment for a (temporarily) unfulfilled moral obligation. The topos links Yavorov and Zarkin, and them both to the national hero Vasil Levski: it is a facet and maybe a symbol of their shared cultural-historical condition of agents in the Soviet-Ottoman (or Ottoman-Soviet) contact zone. Yavorov ‘semi’-fulfills the ‘present’ task of Levski; Zarkin is forced into a creative synthesis of both Levski’s ‘present’ and ‘future’ tasks. Yavorov fights for the freedom of Macedonia (as a would-be part of Bulgaria) and actively sympathises with the Armenians. Zarkin combines into a symbol a remembrance (a furious weep?) of the Armenian Genocide with an urge for liberation from a Soviet prison (from one or another of the prisons of communist Bulgaria in which he spent much of his life, and from the ‘prison of peoples’). Put within the extratextual frames which conditioned their coming into being, the two groups of texts show, and we are invited to conclude, that while Yavorov was defeated by his personal demons (which is accepted in the article as trivial for an artist in the decadent/modernist condition), Zarkin defeats his and thus brings the contact zone into being (irrespective to our (non)intention to (re)construct it). Some Armenian ‘glosses’ to the two groups of texts add depth to their genealogical link and pose some challenges to Bulgarian literary scholarship.