Krastyo Kuyumdzhiev

More than fifty years ago, in "Democratic Review", "Contemporary", "Osa", "Bulgarian" and other newspapers and magazines, the exquisite poems of N. Mihaylov, who began to sign himself Nikolay Liliev, appeared. There is truly something lily-like graceful in them - they are as if white, with the color of virginity, untouched by the sultry fingers of life. These are songs about the sun, about the morning, about the even Sunrise, hymns to spring. How much intoxication, how much rapture there is in this "Sun, Sun". Who today does not know "Bright Morning", "Dawn in the Dreamy Gardens", "Silent Spring Rain"? From them we can smell the serene cloudlessness of the summer morning and the blue boundlessness of the azures above Thrace.

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.

Kiril Hristov lived a difficult life, a life filled with constant torment, eternal dissatisfaction. He had unattainable ambitions. He considered himself the called spiritual leader of the nation. But after the first great recognition he received in the 1990s, his civic and personal behavior became increasingly unpleasant to the literary community. He began to be evaluated biasedly, slander and ridicule began to pour down on him from all sides, his poetry was denied most sharply and without appeal, he himself became the object of newspaper headlines. No distinction was made between the person, his behavior and his poetry, and everything was irresponsibly denied in a heap. He lived with the consciousness of a slandered prophet. Comical gestures began to appear in his public behavior. The more hatred and dislike he encountered, the more angrily he attacked his contemporaries, participated in the wildest and most outrageous newspaper polemics and arguments, flailed left and right, and in his rage he spared no means to prove how pitiful and deranged the Bulgarian intelligentsia was, which could not appreciate and understand him, the genius and the prophet. Nothing could calm his wounded ambition, nothing could satisfy his cold pride. His soul seemed to be covered with thorns and nettles, words of icy contempt and malice towards his contemporaries did not come from his lips.

As often happens in the history of our new culture, we are in a paradoxical situation: we declare ourselves the heirs of the classical Bulgarian culture of the Middle Ages, the center of Slavic culture in general for certain historical periods, but we do not know it well. We are simply proud of the alphabet and old literature, we use catchphrases to prove that in the history of human culture we did not exist yesterday, and in our veins there is something of the blue blood of ancient cultural dynasties. But what do we know about Old Bulgarian literature? At school we learned about Presbyter Kozma, who "delivered some kind of discourse against the Bogomils (he was a reactionary and an obscurantist, because the Bogomils are progressive), and about Chernorizets Hrabar (he wrote something about the features and letters). Scientists argue about him whether he was not Tsar Simeon (this somewhat influenced our imagination - a great king, brilliant like Solomon, ruler of nations, but he puts on black hair and writes some writings in dark cells!). But in general, there is hardly a more boring subject at school. At university we learn the conjugations of verbs, we even try to spell the letters from some gospel (those terrible letters!). That is, so to speak, all our education on Old Bulgarian literature. We are so uninterested in it that we have even thrown out everything that reminds us of the Old Bulgarian language from spelling and orthography. We want to say, what do we care about various Nosovk and Ierov, there is no such thing in our modern language, let's leave them to the priests and philologists; our culture is folk, democratic, everyone should have easy access to it, it would be a manifestation of conservatism to treat a dead language and incomprehensible letters with care, even if our own history is reflected in this language and these letters!

When reviewers want to pay a big compliment to a critical or literary book, they say that it is "a pleasure to read" or reads like a novel. I do not believe that this is one of the main qualities that the author of such a book claims. Here the reviewers simply make a logical error - they exchange the places of our interest in a given issue with the slight pleasure that we can get from some fascinating reading, they translate a new concept into an older language. Therefore, I will not say that Georgi Konstantinov's book "An Extraordinary Friendship" (I have already heard such an opinion) is read easily, as a work of fiction. It simply reads as an interesting documentary, and in no case would I replace its content precisely as a documentary with the most skillful fiction construction. Incidentally, Georgi Konstantinov has also shown a certain fiction dexterity - he has arranged the documents at his disposal in such a way that the sequence of events and facts, their logical and plot connections, can be traced. But that is not what is important. It is important for us that we can feel the unique breath of authenticity, of personal testimony in history. The taste for the documentary, accurate, factual reproduction of historical events has been increasingly imposed in our country lately. It seems that we already prefer a letter, a memory of a living participant in events to any romantic imagination. Fiction seems to be starting to lose in a competition with history; History is increasingly imposing itself and dominating our consciousness, it seems to us more extraordinary and more fantastic than the greatest flights of fantasy, it seems to have the ambition to displace art, philosophy, and "mythology". Haven't you noticed that recently the memoir is the most sought-after, most preferred reading material? Of course, in the world historical process, and especially in our development since 9. IX., we will find many explanations for this "demythologizing", for this striving to unveil, deheroize, "historicize" history, for this desire to see how it was made, but these reflections would take us too far.