Historicity and realism

The emergence of Elin Pelin as an artist is connected with the historical and cultural conditions in our country at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of our century. This period places him in a temporal dependence on populism in our literature. The populist writers as ideologists were bearers of a typical peasant-petite bourgeois ideology. And since they saw their role as artists in the obligation to create literature that fulfilled social tasks, their work turned out to be closely tied to their ideological views, from which it received a predetermined direction. The peculiarities of populist ideology in a special and vivid way leave an imprint on the images created by these writers. The study of an artist like Vlaykov, for example, often requires a longer stay on his ideological beliefs, which he shared at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, when he created "Ratay", "Za chicha Stayka", "Lelya Gena", "Chronicle" and others. The desire to maintain the development of the country by preserving the small-scale peasant and artisan forms of life was present as an ideological horizon of his characters, as their worldview and psyche. This feature of Vlaiko's work and other artists writing in a populist spirit has its strengths and weaknesses. The strength lies in the fact that with their best works they became "heralds" of a broad mass of the middle and poor peasantry and raised their voice against the injustice of the political regimes after the Liberation. In this sense, their work turned out to be deeply democratic and timely. It sounded truthful with its call for justice in relation to a numerous declining class. But at the same time, the economic development of the country, which in the field of state organization was moving towards an ever greater restriction of the bourgeois-democratic principles of government, very soon led to the collapse of petty-bourgeois dreams and, along with this, to the impermanence of the populist aesthetic ideal. This ideal proved unsatisfactory in its humanistic and universal content.