Emiliyan Stanev

The article examines a main problem of late modernity in the 20th century: Technology as an atavistic shadow of Enlightenment rationality. As a force created by man but escaped from his power, which produces a new funda- mental slavery for the late modern das Man (in Heidegger’s sense). The article consists of two parts, unfolding two parallel but merging plots. The first part outlines the universal context of the era immediately after the end of WW II with an emphasis on Heidegger’s “second” philosophy (after die Kehre), the deepest critical self-reflection of late/crisis modernity in the mid-20th century and then: the basic idea of Technik/Machenschaft as an enslaving factor. The second part of the article examines how the same problem, which arose simultaneously but independently in the current Bulgarian reality in the 1960s and 1970s, was discussed by a representative part of Bulgarian prose: the “rural” writer Yordan Radichkov, the “urban” one Pavel Vezhinov, but above all Emilian Stanev, who, like Heidegger at the same time, paradoxically combines strongly right-wing ethno-conservatism and far-left eco-ideology.

The text reveals the reckless human attempt to skip the a posteriori – a priori gate and on the side of the finiteness and immediacy of the occasional existence, to deny the infinity of the divine being. Two remarkable authors ‒ Friedrich Nietzsche and Emiliyan Stanev ‒ take this road and frustrate in their efforts to establish the moral rightfulness of the antichrist, including via loading themselves with this ungrateful existential role.

The article offers a comparative reading of two short novels – “Scott Reynolds and the Unattainable” by Emilian Stanev (1973) and “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann (1913) – ‘comparative’ primarily on a large cultural-civilizational scale, in which Stanev’s novel raises and further develops the main themes and motifs of Thomas-Man’s one. Namely, the global problem of the end of Western humanistic culture 202under the pressure of modern Technique/Machenschaft (Heidegger), collapsing towards the natural-monstrous. The similar structure and the common symbolic topoi of the two works are considered: ‘old man― child’, ‘North/West―South/East’...