* * * The youth and maturity of a critic

When we celebrate a milestone anniversary, the emphasis falls on what remains as a contribution to our literature. With Georgi Tsanev, there is more than enough on which to place such emphasis. His restless creative youth is connected with the rise of our revolutionary literature. With his very first article (in the newspaper "Mladezh", 1922), he defended the international element of Smirnensky, who, as a devoted "son of the people", sang the "desires of all humanity" for more beauty and happiness. Bourgeois critics denied the poet's right to become a "spiritual leader, prophet and mouthpiece of his people", so Georgi Tsanev, with his characteristic temperamental pen, denounced the impartiality of critics poisoned by the "prejudices" of the old world: "How little these gentlemen are interested in the culture that the proletariat creates. And they are always ready to deny: the scoundrels lie, the sincere do not know, do not recognize, do not understand. Because they look through glasses covered with the dust of the past. In his fiery articles from that harsh and romantic time, the critic directs young poets to the "revolutionary struggles for the realization of communism", to those dreams and reveries illuminated by the immense dawn of October. He demands from them to saturate their verse with the pathos of the "heroic", of the "struggle", but on a social basis. He pleads for their direct participation in the struggle and in the lives of the toiling people, in order to feel and experience closely their moods, feelings, desires, "in order to then "recreate them sincerely, naturally, without posturing." He denies the expressionless pathos, the naked rhetoric, the revolutionary phraseology, the meager feelings and moods, the lack of convincing images. He strives for a profound poetry that warms the souls and is felt by the people as "an indispensable, sincere experience." He dreams of significant artistic generalizations in literature, of mature works that will be imprinted in the mind and ignite the imagination. He assigns to the creator the fate of a restless trumpeter of his time and demands from him all his creative fire, all his inspired soul, in order to become a worthy singer of his class, in order to embody in artistic ideas and images the great proletarian ideal - communism. Enthusiastic about the conquests of the world proletariat, pointing the way to social poetry, Georgi Tsanev turns to the young proletarian poet: "Be sincere, write when you have something to say, when you cannot remain silent - and you will give valuable works, poetic creations that will speak to the hearts of others what they have tasted of yours."