The advantages of modern concrete-historical analysis

Atanas Natev's book "Contemporary Western Drama" appears after a number of publications by the same author on the theory of art and some problems of the new Bulgarian drama. This circumstance provides an opportunity in advance for a combination of the general aesthetic aspects of the issues with the more specific and current focus of the analysis. And I must emphasize that this feature is clearly evident in Atanas Natev's new book. Here the author has managed to examine the various works and authors with careful insight into the characteristic features, the main trends and directions of development. In relation to contemporary Western drama, the author was faced with a specific difficulty: the fact that the matter he examines is insufficiently studied in our country and is only partially known to the wider public, and even to specialists. This also defines a new task for Natev: let's call it cultural and educational, when he is obliged, along with the analysis, to follow in quite detail the content of the individual plays, retell individual episodes, actions, etc. At a different level of knowledge of this material, such deviations would seem superfluous and unnecessary additions to the aesthetics of a new phenomenon in contemporary dramaturgy. But the author was aware that he was obliged to pave the way himself, to be to a certain extent a popularizer of insufficiently known phenomena.