Issue-5

1960 Booklet 5 Contents

Fifty years ago, on the day of Leo Tolstoy's death, I wrote an article that defined my attitude and admiration for the life and work of the great writer. And then, as today, Tolstoy is for me a poet and artist, a great painter of the human soul, an interpreter of events and history, a subtle describer of nature. His novels of that time, the article says, "are epics, just as immortal as the poems of the blind Theosophist". In Tolstoy's work from beginning to end we see one, great loving soul, melting with grief for the sufferings of the poor earthly inhabitant - the wronged man". The article says: "The human race had one comforter - that was Tolstoy. With his death, it was as if some old high mountain had collapsed, which protected us from the cold winds and snowstorms of the era". When we read Tolstoy's novels, stories, and short stories, we have the feeling that the stormy ocean of life rages beneath us, which he tames like some all-powerful magician. Throughout his long life, Tolstoy fought for the truth that Others suppress, against power, public opinion, church fanaticism, and tsarism, so that the truth he reveals turns out to be stronger than anything. Questions about art dominated Tolstoy's thoughts from the early to the last years of his life. He rejected the idea of ​​art as a metaphysical play of beauty, a mysterious divine revelation and inspiration, as a means of pleasure - he considered art a way to bring people, humanity, together, uniting human souls in common feelings and aspirations.

In the midst of the First World War, when I was twelve years old, I first tasted the terrible and insatiable magic of fiction. Everything that was left of my uncle, who had just graduated from high school and was mobilized to the reserve officer school, I found, read and reread. It wasn't much, but it was selected. And perhaps that is what saved me from getting carried away by various crime and vulgar books, such as those my classmates were reading. One day I needed something, I assumed that it was pushed somewhere on the high shelf of the room we lived in. I put a chair down, climbed up and peeked in. I didn't find what I was looking for on the shelf, but I did find two books, probably left by my uncle. For me, this "find" was more interesting and more precious than anything else. I took down the two books and carefully dusted them off. First I grabbed the thicker book - it had dark covers and the title was barely legible. It was some kind of dramatization of "Anna Karenina", translated into Bulgarian. For the first time in my life I came across a dramatic work. I had never seen a theater, I had never seen a theatrical performance. It was a bit strange to me that this book did not talk about people, as it did in the novels and stories that I had already read, and the characters themselves talked to each other. I read this dramatization of "Anna Karenina" with great tension, but I could neither understand it properly, nor was this form of expression captivating and satisfying.

The first names of writers that I have remembered from a very early age are the names of Ivan Vazov, Pencho Slaveykov and Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Out of a sense of justice, I should also mention Mayne Reed here, although he holds a special place in my memory, also in my heart, where warm gratitude is reserved for him. My love for P. Slaveykov begins with his poem "Tsar Samuil", but even more so with my first and last meeting with him in person in the churchyard of my hometown in Macedonia in September 1908, when I was just ten years old. Lev Tolstoy holds a special place in both my memory and my heart. I do not remember exactly which of his works I read first, and as a child there, in my hometown, but it was either "Cossacks" or "Hadji Murad", or perhaps both at the same time. Along with my immediate Childish admiration, with a deep feeling of spiritual satisfaction, of clarity and completeness, I remember that even then, with my childish naivety, I felt a desire to become a writer like Leo Tolstoy. And even, with my boyish arrogance, I did not hold back and confided this desire of mine to my closest friends. At this early age we want to resemble those whom we admire the most and whom we love the most. And, when we have not deceived ourselves in our love, these feelings of ours remain unchanged throughout all our ages.

When one thinks of Tolstoy and the indelible mark that his works leave on the soul of the reader, one feels struck both by the magnificent scope of his work and by the vital truth reflected in it. We can read the works of revolutionary democrats, patiently study historical treatises, delve into the subtexts of yellowed archives of the nineteenth century, and finally, with the experience of modernity and the knowledge of historical materialism, understand the meaning of all the events of that time, but a stirring and convincing idea of ​​the dramatic human conflicts in the vast Russian land and its people of the pre-revolutionary era can only be obtained after reading the many thousands of pages of Tolstoy. Objective laws inexorably govern the course of social development. But we can hardly deny that the moral qualities in a people, created by historical conditions and its traditions in the struggle for freedom, accelerate or slow down the action of these laws. Tolstoy, having reached that supreme synthesis between the intellectual and emotional attitude to reality, from which the art of realism is born, manages to reflect with unsurpassed artistic mastery the vital drive and the deep contradictions in the Russian people in the nineteenth century. And it is precisely with this drive and with the already overcome social contradictions, with its experience of the struggle against countless invaders and with its revolutionary traditions that the Russian people today affirm life and lead all of humanity forward, respecting the rights and qualities of all other peoples. Hence arises not only the long-standing universal significance of Tolstoy as an artist and moral personality, but also his very specific contemporary significance in today's urge of the peoples towards liberation from spiritual and economic slavery, towards peace and socialism.

The problem of the originality of realism of the 20th century and its relationship to other creative methods attracts the keen attention of literary critics, since it is organically connected with the current and vital issues of our time. The experience of every national literature can serve to resolve this problem. Some generalizations, supporting or supplementing our ideas about the peculiarities of the world literary movement of the 20th century, can also be made on the basis of material taken from the literature of Bulgaria. In 1912, A. M. Gorky noted the characteristic feature in the development of Bulgarian literature - the exceptional intensity of the processes taking place in it. It was in this connection that he wrote: "After five centuries of oppression by foreign nationalities, Bulgaria returned to life, bright with individuality, full of creative forces and quickly took its rightful place in the family of cultural nations." Indeed, in Bulgarian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such phenomena arose and sometimes manifested themselves with great force, which, when taken into account, are of interest of a fundamental nature - they contribute to a broader understanding of both the general regularities and the diversity of national forms in the world literary process. It is characteristic, for example, that the literature of critical realism in Bulgaria, as well as some other countries of Central and Southeastern Europe (unlike a number of Western European countries) at that time was not on the line of decline, but on the line of rise: in the 90s of the last century, Bulgarian critical realism entered the phase of its flowering, establishing itself as the strongest literary trend. At the same time, developing in conditions of heightened class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat already entering the historical arena, Bulgarian literature acquired other features largely similar to those processes that took place in all European literatures in the era of imperialism.

The emergence of Elin Pelin as an artist is connected with the historical and cultural conditions in our country at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of our century. This period places him in a temporal dependence on populism in our literature. The populist writers as ideologists were bearers of a typical peasant-petite bourgeois ideology. And since they saw their role as artists in the obligation to create literature that fulfilled social tasks, their work turned out to be closely tied to their ideological views, from which it received a predetermined direction. The peculiarities of populist ideology in a special and vivid way leave an imprint on the images created by these writers. The study of an artist like Vlaykov, for example, often requires a longer stay on his ideological beliefs, which he shared at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, when he created "Ratay", "Za chicha Stayka", "Lelya Gena", "Chronicle" and others. The desire to maintain the development of the country by preserving the small-scale peasant and artisan forms of life was present as an ideological horizon of his characters, as their worldview and psyche. This feature of Vlaiko's work and other artists writing in a populist spirit has its strengths and weaknesses. The strength lies in the fact that with their best works they became "heralds" of a broad mass of the middle and poor peasantry and raised their voice against the injustice of the political regimes after the Liberation. In this sense, their work turned out to be deeply democratic and timely. It sounded truthful with its call for justice in relation to a numerous declining class. But at the same time, the economic development of the country, which in the field of state organization was moving towards an ever greater restriction of the bourgeois-democratic principles of government, very soon led to the collapse of petty-bourgeois dreams and, along with this, to the impermanence of the populist aesthetic ideal. This ideal proved unsatisfactory in its humanistic and universal content.

Of the entire literary heritage of P. Yu. Todorov, his idylls and dramas represent the most valuable, the most significant part. And at the same time - the most contradictory, the most difficult to explain, because all the strengths and weaknesses of the writer's worldview and method are intertwined in it. You read "Nesretnik" or "Zmeyno" and you struggle to determine where realism ends and romanticism begins, you struggle to distinguish the democratic from the individualistic trends, to separate ours from the foreign, the commercial, the imported. Vain efforts - there is no boundary between the one and the other; qualities and shortcomings constantly flow together. Because these are qualities and shortcomings for us, from our, from a modern point of view. For the writer, both democracy and modernism are creeds, his aesthetic understandings represent a strange mixture of contradictory elements, some of which we will accept, and others we will reject completely. We would not be able to deal with this complex and delicate matter if we remained only in the views of the author's plan, if we were content only with outlining his intentions. The work of a contradictory artist is always richer than his own aesthetic views and declarations. This is also the case with P. Yu. Todorov. Because it reflects reality, the vital content breaks the framework of the literary school and often presents us with nuances and suggestions that even the author did not intend to give. In such cases, we must look at the works more broadly, evaluate them according to the ideas and images embedded in them, according to their impact on the contemporary reader, according to the objective results that are often obtained regardless of the subjective intentions of the author. This is especially necessary for the idylls of P. Yu. Todorov. Because in many cases we will value the objective result more highly than the writer's intention, we will prefer the relative independence of the artistic image to the actual intention of the creator. For us, what he created is more important than what he wanted to create.

Debelyanov has a direct emotional relationship with art, a pure intimate connection with it. It attracts him primarily with its specifically aesthetic qualities, and he perceives works of art more with his heart than with his mind. As an artist, he is excited by the general problems of aesthetics. However, the tendency to participate in literary discussions through the press, to impose views and assessments on the public, is alien to him. Literary-theoretical and critical work in general does not attract him. Therefore, every newly discovered literary material that has come out from under the poet's nose is of serious interest to the researcher. The three articles offered here - About an Old Song, "Letter from the Village" and "The Last Outlaw" - are currently the only known developed literary works and, along with the "literary notes" in the magazine "Zveno" (1914), provide direct data on Debelyanov's aesthetic views. They express thoughts and views that with irrefutable force shatter the legend of the "purebred" symbolist Debelyanov and reveal his true attitude towards modernism. In the light of these materials, previously familiar statements acquire a different, true meaning. Written in a clear and emotional language, they reveal the innermost ideas of the post, its aesthetic ideal. The articles, especially the first two, have not only literary and historical value. The issues raised in them still retain their relevance today, because they are related to the ethics of writing and the attitude of art to life. The interpretation that Debelyanov gives them, regardless of the contradictions of thinking, imposes itself with its moral idealism and straightforwardness. And although written at a different time and from different positions, they sound contemporary in many respects. The central question in the first article is the question of the conditions of creative work and the ethics of the writer under the conditions of capitalism, which by its nature is hostile to art and condemns the honest artist to misery and humiliation.

The archive of Lyuben Karavelov contains interesting data on the ideology and cyclopedic activity of the great figure of our national revival. Karavelov's extremely illegible handwriting made it difficult to use many valuable documents, written for the most part in Russian, and left unknown interesting conjectures, thoughts, impressions and works of the writer, public figure, and the magazine sta. Reading all the manuscripts, which will be published in the first volume prepared from Karavelov's archival heritage, completes the picture of the overall personality of their creator, while at the same time clarifying some controversial issues surrounding his ideological and creative path. Karavelov's "Memoirs", stored in the Arch. Department at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, contain a lot of information about one of the least studied periods of their author's life - his activities in Serbia. We are reprinting the manuscript authentically, allowing ourselves only to update the spelling, which is necessary for publications of this nature. Written approximately 10 years after Karavelov left Russia, when the new linguistic environment and the daily use of two more languages ​​(Serbian and Romanian) had an impact on the frequent vocabulary and grammatical construction of the previously mastered Russian language, in the mentioned document, as well as in a significant part of the others, we come across incorrectly used case forms, Bulgarianisms and unsuccessful syntactic structure of the sentence. Having become accustomed to the language of the great Slavic country, however, Karavelov used it from the beginning to the end of his life. Since the handwriting of the editor of "Svoboda" is extremely illegible, the ink on some pages has faded from the effects of atmospheric conditions and the edges of several sheets are frayed or torn, some words remained unreadable. We mark them with an ellipsis enclosed in brackets (...) Words whose interpretation we are not completely sure of are placed in square brackets, and those of them that Karavelov used in abbreviation are given in two ways - when only the initial letters of the word are marked, we put the omitted part of it in brackets, and when the abbreviation affects the middle part, we mark the entire word under the line. In many places in the manuscripts we encounter Karavelov's initials LK. He used this as a reminder for barely hinted thoughts, facts and events that he intended to develop in his further work, or in those cases when he knew some names and data.

From the partial publications that were made in the periodical press over the past two decades, we already knew about the literary conversations that the late Professor Spiridon Kazandjiev had with Yordan Yovkov, and in general we had certain impressions of them. However, these impressions were based on partial acquaintance with the text and were naturally fragmentary in nature. That is why the recently published book "Meetings and Conversations with Yordan Yovkov", which contains almost entirely the diary of Professor Kazandjiev (I say almost, since some passages have been omitted from it), now comes to satisfy our curiosity and introduce us to the spiritual world of one of the great Bulgarian writers. Yordan Yovkov, as is known, was neither particularly talkative nor particularly accessible. He did not easily fall into revelations and did not like literary confessions. Therefore, it was difficult to penetrate his creative laboratory and find out what his assessment of people, events and books was. This is precisely what determines the value of the diary "Meetings and Conversations with Yordan Yovkov": it speaks of facts and moods that we cannot glean from any other source - facts and moods that shed light on some very important aspects of the author's life and work.

Many more works are appearing in the field of literary criticism. At least that is the case in our country. The battlefield of literary criticism is also much livelier. If we look into the past, we will see that it has a far richer heritage compared to our theater criticism. The scientific and aesthetic level of literary criticism in our country is also higher. If we open the pages of our press, we will find that review work was the main manifestation of theater criticism. Aesthetic issues were quite often neglected because of sociological findings about the theme and images in the play and superficial, artisanal or amateur assessments: "Some people faithfully convey their image, but others do not play well." That is why the appearance of the book - a collection of articles - Drama and Stage" by Professor Lyubomir Tenev is a welcome phenomenon. Indeed, it is already a manifestation, and one of the rare ones, in the actual field of theatrical aesthetics. The main distinction that gives aesthetic maturity and purposefulness to the articles in this collection is Tenev's aspiration and ability to proceed from the specifics of art as an independent human activity, to respect dramaturgy and theater as "creation according to the laws of beauty" (Marx). The skill of criticism is expressed in the "feeling", the perception and understanding of the aesthetic phenomenon as an indivisible, organically interdependent unity of ideological content and means of expression - as opposed to their mechanistic comparison and opposition in illustrative analysis. In the author's aesthetic analysis, "form is essential", i.e. It is sought in the very nature of the artistic reflection and reproduction of reality. This is a difficult but correct path in Marxist aesthetics, because it is consistent with the specific, complex dialectical process of creativity. It is the antithesis of both vulgarizing and simplistic criticism, as well as aesthetic criticism. By following this path, L. Tene convincingly proves to us that the problem of conflict is still open to all drama, that a significant conflict is not created only with marked images and with the opposition of social forces if it does not pass through man, if it does not encompass his ideas, thoughts, feelings and actions. Therefore, we find his verdict on the production "When Thunder Strikes, How the Echo Fades" fair, since the director K. Iliev has supported the external presentation of the text, the search for abstract psychology and eternal truths. Borrowing means of theatrical expression from another theater or elements of one solution for the stage solution of another play, completely different in character and style, is not at all a sign of innovation. "When everything is done not for the whole, but for the individual, in such cases we get a demonstration of the means of expression without internal connection and organic conditioning, and

In his article "Hristo Botev in Russian Criticism and in Russian Translations" ("Literary Thought", No. 1, 1960) L. Erikhonov, while making a cursory review of my works, 126 also dedicated to Hristo Botev, draws the reader's attention to only one circumstance. Namely - L. Vorobyov, who in his works from 1950-1953 so fiercely fought against the desire to present Botev as a Proudhonist and Bakuninist, in 1957-59, without any apparent reasons, changed his position and now presents the great revolutionary-democrat as a follower of anarchism. From this follows the conclusion about the sad evolution in the researcher's views, i.e. about the unprincipled change of his positions. If Leonid Erikhonov had proceeded from objective data or if he had not shown oversight, this note would not have been needed. But, unfortunately, Erikhonov distorts the facts.

There are translated books that are quickly forgotten. There are also those that remain in our consciousness, create new worlds before us and permanently captivate us. These notes will try to explain a charm, so fresh and so beautiful, so strong and so bright - the charm of Halldor Laxness, the great Icelandic writer, creator of "Independent People". In 1902, a boy was born in Reykjavik. He showed great talents and for many years bumped into the stone walls of many philosophies and faiths, until one day he went out into the wide field - facing the dark North Sea and the Icelandic wilderness. Before that, the boy had traveled many countries, stared in awe at the centuries-old monuments of civilization, denied his impenetrably backward homeland, only to return one day and discover the famous skald Egil Skalagrimsson, to fall in love with sagas and legends, to see the harsh face of the harsh truths of life and experience the divine thirst to transform them into art. The boy had already become a man, and abroad he had come to love his homeland, because he had seen it in its true dimensions and magnitude. And a man can say with a firm, confident voice The people slept in the mountains, inhabited by fairy creatures and elves, and in this virgin land, where every valley reminds of our history, every wilderness is a symbol of our innermost feelings, we live today as if reborn children of nature, gifted with sincerity who speak in a divine language, and above us the morning sky dissolves, predictions and signs burn in the forest... In the most remote places lives an unwavering striving for spiritual development. In the present generation there is no sense of satisfaction, this plague bacillus of stupidity in stagnation. Everything is in ferment. People want a deeper, richer spiritual life. In every young Icelandic heart lives a joyful foreboding

Several areas of our national culture and literature are associated with the name of Nikolay Liliev, in which the late man worked silently and apostolically for decades. One of our great poets, Liliev has embedded his name in the pantheon of prominent masters of Bulgarian verse. Despite the symbolism, under his human, noble and sophisticated pen, songs of beauty and humanity rang out. In them, the Bulgarian language revealed its musical and sound magic, and our verse became a more flexible, more elegant and more reliable instrument for expressing subtle states of mind. Academician Liliev has special merits for the founding of the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He was one of its first organizers and for years took the most active part in the work of the Institute with his extensive literary knowledge and linguistic culture. Death found the poet as a playwright at the Sofia National Theater, where his great art of translation was unfolded. Having mastered several European languages ​​to perfection, Liliev gave a series of brilliant translations of famous works of classical and contemporary dramaturgy. Thanks to his subtle artistic feeling, foreign works sounded on our native stage with all their richness. His articles and statements on the issues of artistic translation contained many accurate and subtle observations. Until his last days, he did not leave his post as a playwright, bent over the text of new plays or guiding young playwrights with his competent word.