The Communists in the Work of Dimitar Dimov

According to the unanimous opinion of critics, Dimitar Dimov failed to build an antipodal world to "Nicotiana", to depict the heroic and bright beginning of our time, which could be contrasted with the dark forces of the bourgeois world. The images of workers and communists in his remarkable novel "Tobacco", with few exceptions, are far inferior in brightness and vitality to the other images in the novel. In itself, this mishap is an unhappy phenomenon in our literature, but it is too eloquent and instructive, contains too many interesting problems for us to easily pass it by, to simply register it, without making an effort to examine and explain it, to discover the mysteries and truths embedded in it, to reveal its true significance for our literature. Because often the failures of talent turn out to be more fruitful and more valuable for history than any mediocre success. They bring us closer to more truths, they reveal to us a deeper and more interesting picture of the world, there is more life, more drama and power in them than in all mediocre "achievements", in all talentless straightforwardness and innocence. Or, to paraphrase a sentence of Guizot, we can say that talent enjoys this wonderful and deserved privilege of having its errors fertilize truths.