On the national and universal in Bulgarian Renaissance literature

In 1965, the Union of Bulgarian Writers held a theoretical conference on the topic "The National Originality of Contemporary Bulgarian Literature". The main reports and many of the speeches at the conference shed light on important aspects of the problem of the national originality of any literature in general, pointed out undoubted and well-noted features of this originality in Bulgarian literature during different periods of its centuries-old development. "In this area," the writer Dimitar Dimov noted in his speech at the time, "include, for example, the questions of the essence, origin and development of national originality in our folk epic and in the history of our old or contemporary literature, the question of the relative stability or relative lability of this originality in relation to the development of the world-historical process, the question of the relationship between the achievements of our national genius in culture and the achievements of other peoples, and finally the question of the relationship between the national and the international in our contemporary socialist literature.