FERDINAND COBURG IN GALICIAN SATIRE.

Abstract

The Bulgarian theme for Galician satire became relevant in the last decades of the 19th century. in connection with a vacant position for the monarch's throne in Sofia. For the kingdom of Galicia, getting a real leader who would always be in the capital Lviv was a barely possible distant prospect, the region belonged to Austria-Hungary, which allowed various national-political currents here according to the ancient imperial principle of "Divide and rule" and no further than cultural-administrative autonomy. Therefore, Galician journalists and cartoonists, as creative people and from the position of ordinary people, envied the events in Bulgaria. True, some are for good, some are for evil. Ukrainian independent writers (T. Romanchuk – "Zerkalo" magazine) enthusiastically depicted the Slavic peoples of Central and Southern Europe near the throne of Queen Slava. As followers of the leader of the Cyril and Methodius Society T. They rightly saw in Shevchenko the historical roots of Slavic civilization in the Moravian state and the Bulgarian kingdom, and not in modern autocratic Russia, which was depicted as a brutal gendarme with a whip.

Galician Muscophiles portrayed the situation in Bulgaria differently as paid supporters of the accession of all Slavs (by any means, benevolent or by force) to Russia. They considered it a great threat if relatives of the Russian Romanovs occupied the throne of Bulgaria. That is why the greatest arrows of satire flew at the maternal representative of the royal Orléans dynasty, Ferdinand Coburg. He was depicted both in the form of a parrot, and in the form of a clown, and as a mother's son behind the already old Klementina, with a toy Eiffel Tower or with a children's net for butterflies (Magazine "Scarecrow") and in the image of Hamlet (magazine "Schutek"). Those images are rich and varied, emphasizing the weak features of a statesman. However, what betrays the confidence and perseverance of the Bulgarian monarch, even from the pen of a pro-Russian cartoonist, is his large nose with a hump. The number of caricatures of the Prince of Coburg at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. XIX century became greater than the German Chancellor Bismarck and the Russian Tsar.