Albena Bakratcheva has produced a passionate and erudite account of the formation and development of American Transcendentalism from an artistic, but also to a great extent philosophical, perspective. She has interwoven in a lucid text the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional sources that gave rise to this unique syncretic movement. This book is a brilliant example of how a scholar, belonging to a “neutral” European culture, can successfully practice a method of interpretation, both rational and intuitive, in order to penetrate into the depths of a seemingly remote tradition.
In her writing, Bakratcheva outlines the original source of the term “transcendental,” shedding light on its transformation in mid-nineteenth-century American usage. She situates this notion in the nexus of Puritanism, Enlightenment Rationalism, and the specific New England view of life, emphasizing the impact made on the Transcendentalist movement by Unitarianism. Special attention is paid to the overcoming of the fashionable mood of British Romanticism, proving, in the result, the intellectual maturity and practical adequacy of the Transcendentalist approach. The author views inspiration and piety as the kernel of the creative endeavor of the Transcendentalist group members, leading to the emblematic concepts of “the poet-priest” and “the American scholar”–a synthetic unity of artistic and intellectual zeal, religious devotion, and unorthodox life style.
Summarizing the essence of Transcendentalism, Bakratcheva observes that “within the New England context, bearing the apparent tendency of being personified by and bound up, to the maximum degree, with the Puritan tradition of the American East, [this notion] unfolds its irrationalism in relatively clear opposition to already insufficient philosophical and religious statements …”