The feuilletonist Aleko Konstantinov and the traditions of Russian literature

The problem of the connections of Bulgarian writers with the world masters of the artistic word and more specifically with the Russian ones is of important methodological and practical importance. Today everyone agrees that in the development of Bulgarian literature - classical and contemporary - bright examples of typological and contact phenomena are found. That is why it is especially necessary to indicate the nature of this influence and it is with each individual author, since this will shed additional light on the literary process as a whole. In this sense, the legacy of Aleko Konstantinov hides very interesting, still incompletely studied literary material. His work shows its own specific features, and along with them also carries the common: close acquaintance with the works of Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol and Turgenev, Nekrasov and Shchedrin, as well as some basic principles in the aesthetics of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov - help our author to grow as a significant national writer. But they only guide him! Because, as I said, Aleko Konstantinov is an original Bulgarian satirist and feuilletonist. First and foremost, he relies on our national literature, no matter how scarce it was in terms of works and traditions at that time. All his works grow on our soil, they are an exciting echo of the social quests of our people in the 80s and 90s of the last century.