The novels of Anton Stashimirov

In the 19th century, the novel assumed a leading role in the hierarchy of literary genres. The prose of commodity relations, the businesslikeness of bourgeois daily life, demanded a comprehensive study of social mores, an analytical penetration into the social nature of the new order. The noble dreamers of romanticism, the proud and unyielding rebels, the Prometheans at odds with heaven, fell to the ground, bruised themselves, and opened their eyes. They were surrounded by a prosaic reality in which vulgarity had banished the ideal, and brazen material interest had replaced high impulses. It was the art of the epic, of critical analytical canvases, that had to give a complete picture of the new relations that had been established. The writer increasingly became a doctor of social sciences, a historian of social and public types. And since literature is called upon to explore essences, to analyze morals, to write their history - then naturally the novel will enter into its full rights. It is the most stable fortress of the "objective" in literature. Through it, the art of critical realism mastered a wide public terrain, tested the principle of the concrete-historical approach to human character, and showed limitless possibilities for a comprehensive portrayal of the individual as a product of the typical social environment. The development of the novel in different national literatures underwent a series of reversals depending on the infinite diversity of historical-national conditions and according to the peculiarities of national psychology and traditions. The literary process also proceeds with its own significant differences with the formation of the main directions, genres and styles in Bulgarian literature. The centuries-long foreign yoke, the slow and painful establishment of capitalist relations in our country, left a mark of belatedness in the cultural self-affirmation of the Bulgarian nation. When the great European literatures were already tasting the bitter fruits of disappointment, of lost illusions regarding the nature of the new society, Bulgaria was experiencing the most romantic period of its national revival, the infantile enthusiasm of the Chetnik struggle and later of the April Uprising.