Issue-4

1960 Book 4 Contents

A resourceful French artist painted Rabelais's portrait in an interesting composition: behind the great satirist stand Homer and Socrates - the one the embodiment of poetry, and the other - of wisdom. In front of Rabelais's brilliant work "Gargantua and Pantagruel" one can see a "crowd" of writers who have more or less experienced the influence of his ironic laughter. Among the crowd of artists are depicted such brilliant masters of the pen as Moliere, Swift, Lesage, Voltaire, Balzac, in whose satirical works, according to the artist, the unfading tradition of the cheerful French monk lives. Whatever the extent of Rabelais's influence on the work of these writers, their satire is still so peculiar, so "theirs" that we call it "Moliere's satire", "Swift's satire", "Balzac's satire", thereby expressing its peculiarity. Every gifted author who wields a Juvenal whip in his hand, without necessarily being in the ranks of those great morons I mentioned above, has his own characteristic sarcasm, or, so to speak, as many satirists exist in literature as there is bitter laughter.

In recent years, Soviet criticism and literary studies have been characterized by very lively theoretical discussions and creative disputes. The peculiarity of these disputes lies in the fact that they are conducted not by people who hold opposing political and aesthetic positions, but by like-minded people on the main points, who discuss one or another problem and the possible ways of resolving it. Recently, a lively discussion has developed on the issue of the diversity of forms and styles in the art of socialist realism, on artistic convention, on the modern hero. The polemic about the positive hero is not the first time that this problem has not yet found comprehensive illumination in aesthetic science, and in this circumstance we cannot but see a serious drawback of our work. Now it would be a clear anachronism to argue about whether the positive hero is necessary or unnecessary, whether he should or should not be the center of attention of socialist realist artists. The participants in the creative discussions taking place in the Soviet Union are united in their determined struggle against bourgeois writers and revisionists who vainly try to ridicule and discredit the heroic, affirmative pathos of socialist art.

Existentialism, as a trend in Western philosophy after the First World War and as a circle of ideas on which a certain literary practice is based, is in its essence a typical product of a doomed social system and a crisis of public psyche. And although existentialists make desperate efforts to present their problematic as universal, dictated by the great tremors of our modernity, they cannot hide the connection of their inconsolable and nightmarish prophecies with the hopeless state of the imperialist world. In all its diversities and wings - from the Christian-philanthropic of Gabriel Marcel or the mystical Orthodox of the Russian émigré Nikolai Berdyaev to the atheistic of Jean-Paul Sartre - existentialism sounds an alarm about the fate of the individual and seeks salvation for modern man, abandoned in tragic solitude and helplessly faced with the dark and incomprehensible, destructive elements of our century. But in vain do the prophets of world catastrophe abstract the individuality of the contemporary from any public and social dependence, in vain do they isolate it in the abstract and absolute categories of fear, hopelessness and Nothingness. If we lift the veil of ghostly abstractions and nebulous, universal incantations, we will not see modern man in general, but the man of a certain social system, the crisis man of a society without economic and life security, who himself does not know how to curb the demons of atomic civilization and technology, threatening at any moment to attack him and carry him into non-existence.

It is unlikely that there will be another theoretical question that is met with as much distrust as the question of beauty and the aesthetic. The difficulties of aesthetics in its development serve as the main argument of those who do not want science to interfere in the area of ​​the beautiful and aesthetic evaluations. For the beautiful, the exquisite and the artistic "there can be no science, only criticism" - this statement of Kant has been repeated on a variety of occasions and in the most diverse variants to this day. I do not want to say that everyone who doubts the possibilities of the theory of the aesthetic is necessarily a Kantian. But the fact is that distrust of aesthetics is mainly shown by those who dispute the objectivity of beauty, the aesthetic and the artistic.

More than fifty years ago, in "Democratic Review", "Contemporary", "Osa", "Bulgarian" and other newspapers and magazines, the exquisite poems of N. Mihaylov, who began to sign himself Nikolay Liliev, appeared. There is truly something lily-like graceful in them - they are as if white, with the color of virginity, untouched by the sultry fingers of life. These are songs about the sun, about the morning, about the even Sunrise, hymns to spring. How much intoxication, how much rapture there is in this "Sun, Sun". Who today does not know "Bright Morning", "Dawn in the Dreamy Gardens", "Silent Spring Rain"? From them we can smell the serene cloudlessness of the summer morning and the blue boundlessness of the azures above Thrace.

The conversations with Kamen Zidarov about the creative process spanned five meetings, the first on March 20, 1960, and the last on April 9, 2015, at his home on 35 Vasil Kolari Street. An alert, creative person, very cheerful, infectious with sparkling wit, revealed his inner wealth to me. Kamen Zidarov talks about everything with amazing ease. The flow of speech is colorful, dotted with wit. He can talk almost without pauses for an entire hour. During the conversations, there is no external tension or effort. Only at the end of the conversation do the slightly stiff movements of his hands betray his fatigue. He achieves a natural liveliness, without completely disappearing. In such moments of fatigue, Zidarov becomes extremely funny. He can entertain guests, jump from topic to topic, tell anecdotes, laugh contagiously, and participate in all kinds of conversations, except perhaps about the creative process... And this is It seems to be one of his forms of rest. Zidarov's great discipline and love of order were evident at all stages of the survey. From the very beginning, he stated that the work would take us four or at most five meetings. The nature of the matter that would occupy us is peculiarly lengthy, and I naturally doubted that the allotted time would be sufficient. But I very soon realized how unfounded Kamen's concerns were. Zidarov grasps the questions immediately and with great conscientiousness erases them. He struggles to remember all the interesting details that relate to the production of his dramas, but he never gets bogged down in unnecessary things, does not deviate in the wrong direction. His memory is amazingly clear and accurate. The playwright quickly and very concisely clarifies the essence of the problem, dwells on the most important and interesting, and then imperceptibly, without prefaces, moves on to a new group of questions. Especially at those places in the conversation, when the story came to life under the imitative tall of Zidarov.

The literature of Bulgarians and Serbs in the Middle Ages is the best illustration of the extremely close cultural ties between the two neighboring and fraternal peoples, of the constant borrowing of values ​​from one literature, which permeate the literature of the other. Individual works, literary genres and schools, style and language are the subject of this literary communication. Having begun in the first decades of Slavic writing, it continued until the end of the 18th century, when a new stage in the literary ties between the Bulgarian and Serbian peoples began - ties of their new literatures. This long period of literary relations, of course, has its own history, periods of rise and fall, its own character and scope of action, typical manifestations, common genres and writers, characteristic stylistic and linguistic features.

Although the decadence of the West at the end of the last century marked a turning point towards decline and ruin, lights of past greatness still shone, powerful voices still thundered, interesting ideas were still born. Only half a century since Paul Valéry, we can no longer recognize anything of what was once the wonderful "Sardis" of bourgeois culture. The last great representatives of critical realism in the West leaned to the left and abandoned the sinking ship of the bourgeoisie: Anatole France, Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland and others. After them, the ruin became so widespread that it would be difficult to notice any reliable forms, trends or schools now. It is not that there are no names, but they are in most cases alienated from life. In this inscrutable whirlpool, some reliable authors have fallen and are falling, who make incredible efforts to free themselves and find meaning, a path and a goal in life. Because everything that in the West is proclaimed to be meaning or an idea turns out to be nonsense, chaos, everything that shows itself as the free development of the personality turns out to be pathlessness, wandering or trampling. in one place. To the horror of Western bourgeois ideologists, the freedom so solemnly proclaimed turned out to be not only "hungry" (in Marx's phrase) but also empty!

Recently, the first volume of the four-volume Marxist "History of Bulgarian Literature" under preparation was discussed at the Literary Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.1 The volume under discussion covers our literary and historical development from the emergence of old Bulgarian literature to Paisii Hilendarski. This scientific work is the fruit of the systematic efforts of a team of authors: Petar Dinekov, Emil Georgiev, Velcho Velchev, Ivan Duychev, Bonyu St. Angelov and Kuyu Kuev. It should be noted at the outset that all specialists and the entire institute staff greeted the first volume with marked interest, which is why its six-day discussion turned into a truly creative discussion dedicated to the characteristic problems associated with the specific features of our old literature. A serious conversation took place about the appearance, methodology, national identity, literary aesthetic essence, stylistic features, artistic criteria, literary movements and schools and all the distinctive features of our ancient centuries-old literature and culture. Almost all those who spoke expressed their views on certain aspects of this rich Bulgarian literature, made high demands on the authors' collective, gave interesting recommendations, defended familiar theses or presented new original hypotheses...