„Прогресисти и консерватори“: литературноисторическа оптика

The text examines B. Penchev's latest monograph "Progressives and Conservatives. Temporal patterns in Bulgarian literature from the late 1940s to the 1970s" as a possible contemporary literary-historical attempt on the recent past. Through the outlined and dominant thematic-problematic cut, the monograph creates the picture of more than 30 years of Bulgarian literary development processes, both in a diachronic plan, leading back to the interwar international times, and in a synchronic one, positioning them in (Western) European and Soviet cultural parameters. Unraveling multiple plots—literary, critical, and philosophical—that are constantly intersecting, intertwining, and relativizing between each other, the study covers in a fragmentary yet broadly intertextual manner some cultural-historical "native" and "foreign" phenomena. They arrange a voluminous, conceptual puzzle that is both self-contained and dialogical with scientific positions that are currently established as authoritative in the field. By combining theoretical discourses with literary-historical precision, the examined metatext moves along the razor's edge of the subjective and the objectifying.