A portrait of Brecht

Recently, Minko Nikolov published his new book, dedicated to the work of Bertolt Brecht - the most significant playwright of the mid-twentieth century. This fact in itself shows how important the subject of the book is, what a gap this book fills in our contemporary art studies. The work on Brecht was also necessary because of a number of fruitless disputes about Brecht's methodology, which always revolved around Brecht, around arithmetic problems and never reached the heart, the meaning of the great creative work. These conversations created an atmosphere of suspicion in connection with the name of Brecht, they made gossip out of things that should be written about with the true mark of respect - with inner passion and civic conviction. I note this not only in connection with Minko Nikolov's book, but also because of something else. Because of that scientific conscientiousness that should be present in the assessment of great contemporary writers. It is true that Brecht does not fit into the needle's eye of narrow-mindedness and spiritual laziness, but this does not mean at all that we should deprive our socialist art of a Great Creator. Brecht may not belong to the geographical latitude that is closest to us, but he is a creature of the same forces that renew the climate, the spirit of our time. The struggle for Brecht, when it is led by a Marxist-critic, is not an apology for flat rationalism, it is only an affirmation of the rational, spiritual, active communist principle in Brecht's dramaturgy.