Kosta Solev Racin: Inside the Context of Macedonian Culture, as the Anticipator of the Future

Abstract

This text will focus on a particular segment of Kocho Racin’s (Кочо Рацин) overall literary production, otherwise the founder of contemporary Macedonian literature, i.e., it will focus on the following premise, namely that Racin, through his vocal views and convictions about literature
and social relations, in both his poetry and prose output, was quite ahead of his time. Henceforth, the aim of this paper is to point out the aspects deemed significant to any future theoretical, literary, cultural paradigms which may emerge from a Racin reading. Along those lines, Racin’s writings on Bogomilism, as well as his poems “Tatuncho†(Татунчо) and “Pechal†(Печал), are analyzed closely, thus examining Kocho Racin as a rather sophisticated thinker who had anticipated the coming of future discourses, such as Antonio Gramsci’s theoretical concept of hegemony, also, in part, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction theory, as well as postcolonial criticism; whereas his poetry would come to serve as an illustration of what Kenneth White terms geopoetics and nomadism. Racin’s poetry, that is to say, its definite belonging to the poetics of social realism, seems to link the two otherwise disjointed relations, particularly through the unification the collection White Dawns (Бели мугри) puts forth: the concept of cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and the Macedonian folk tradition, on
the other, thus, to a degree, anticipating the coming of the new.