Книжка-6

1961 Booklet 6 Contents

In recreating the image of the communist in our country there is a long and rich tradition from the past: in poetry - D. I. Polyanov, Hr. Smirnensky, N. Vaptsarov and the post-1930s; in prose - again Smirnensky, Kr. Velkov, G. Karaslavov and others. New people - new in their social consciousness, in their spiritual appearance - were formed during the years of great battles of our people against capitalism and fascism. And in order to understand the type of person - the type of revolutionary, an active historical figure - literature naturally turns to the image of the communist. Why is this so? Because the communist is not only a politically significant image, but also a bearer of the new in our time in general. What is more - right next to him walks the conscious citizen who does not yet have a party ticket, but to whom the cause of the communist party is close. Today, it is clear to readers and writers that every more substantial, more artistically convincing image of the communist always has a "cover" in socialist reality itself. And he always returns to it, reality, to serve it, but already aesthetically evaluated. This is one of the main advantages of contemporary socialist-realist literature. So far, in articles and speeches, an attempt has been made, sometimes more cursory, sometimes more in-depth, to clarify theoretically and mainly in connection with practice the problem of the communist in literature. For example, it was discussed during the national review of contemporary Bulgarian drama in 1959. And in 1960, the Writers' Union organized a three-day theoretical conference on the topic "The Image of the Communist in Literature". The purpose of this article is to dwell on some unexamined questions and, in particular, on individual literary works. Limiting the topic hides some inconveniences, and perhaps even dangers. But it also has some advantages: we will keep our focus on today, on contemporary problems.

"RLF" - Workers' Literary Front. I leaf through the yellowed pages of this veteran with excitement. Here every slogan, every article, every verse and story is colored by the flame of the class struggle. The end of 1929. The wound from the September Uprising, from the pogroms in 1925 is still alive. The headscarves of the thousands of mothers, wives and sisters of the murdered are black. Even blacker is the blackness of fascism, hanging over the entire country. But the people who survived the five centuries of Turkish slavery, the people who fought with black bullets against the Sultan's empire, the people who refused to kill their brothers at the front and sprinkled Vladaya with their blood, the people who, in the name of communism, rose up in the first anti-fascist uprising in the world - this people is awake. It is gathering strength for a new struggle, for the last decisive battle. It is enough to felt the first breath of the rising revolutionary wave in our country and abroad, to erect a camp, to rise from the fire like the legendary bird, the ranks of the fighters. And again the fiery banner is raised and taken off. The Bulgarian working class, the working peasantry and the progressive intelligentsia are writing new glorious pages in their heroic history. An important place in the fierce ideological struggle, and especially on the literary front during this period, is occupied by the newspaper "RLF", which was published from December 1929 to June 1934 in the conditions of the bourgeois fascist state, of the dominant bourgeois, fascistizing culture, in it openly and boldly proceeded to organize and unite the progressive artistic intelligentsia in the name of communism. Of course, even before "RLF" in general political and special publications the party defended Marxist understandings of literature and art, fought for affirmation and development of the seeds of socialist culture. However, never during the period of capitalism and fascism was this struggle waged so openly, so massively, offensively and effectively as in the "RLF". For this, of course, the accumulated experience and revolutionary traditions of the past played a significant role. After all, among revolutionary democrats such as Rakovski, Botev, Karavelov and others, literature and art were an integral part of the common struggle for the liberation of the people! These traditions, in the conditions of capitalist society, were continued by Blagoev, Kirkov, Polyanov.

Artistic image and signal! What is the connection between these concepts that are so distant at first glance? Is it possible to prove the hypothesis of the signal nature of the work of art? There is no doubt that these new, as well as undeveloped questions will increasingly insistently excite art theorists. Aesthetics cannot stay away from the intersection of sciences. The border areas of knowledge have become the ground for the most serious scientific discoveries of our time. Aesthetics has ceased to be far from the needs of society. Aesthetic education, according to the decisions of the XXII Congress of the CPSU, acquires a necessary general character, art receives new exceptional functions of organizer and transformer in the formation of modern aesthetic taste in every member of socialist society. Thanks to the profound revolutionary changes and new technical means of social communication, the artist received an extremely numerous and extremely diverse in social, national and individual needs and capabilities audience, art has penetrated into every home, to every individual. Public regulation and management of the process of formation and development of aesthetic taste is required. In this regard, the study of the laws of public information is of exceptional importance. The artistic image can be considered as a signal of a special kind, which is still very poorly studied by cybernetics. In this regard, aesthetics can not only receive a lot, but also give a lot to this famous ultramodern scientific discipline. This can be done both by way of a precise general definition of the artistic image, and by way of some private definitions, the disclosure of individual aspects of the artistic image. Of the general definitions, the most synthetic and closest to the requirements of modern thinking seems to us to be the definition of Todor Pavlov, given in "General Theory of Art".1 Here we do not set ourselves the task of interpreting or updating Todor Pavlov's formula.

Emanuil Popdimitrov, the symbolist and romantic poet, was one of those who first responded to the thunder of the October Revolution, one of the first to burn down his knightly castle and in poems and articles to deny symbolist art, despite the new contradictions and hesitations that arose later. But how did it happen that the October Revolution and the subsequent events in our country broke the armor of alienation and cosmopolitanism? What emotional strings did the events strike to make the music of revolutionary ecstasy sound? What were the ideological and psychological prerequisites for this? Was it due to psychological hopelessness brought to an end, to fatigue from fruitless wanderings in the above-ground heights of dreams and empty daydreaming? Or was there in the poetry itself, in the poet's very mental structure, a predisposition to dissolve into a wider world, into a more immediate and emphasized ethics? It seems to me that some contemporary critics, in their desire to deny the legacy of symbolism in our poetry, have reached a certain simplification and impoverishment of the essential part of the poet's work. They have not sufficiently understood his creative specificity. Indeed, Em. Popdimitrov is a "poet of dream visions and mystical dreams", and the imprint of symbolism weighs heavily on him, and in some of his poems there is an unenlightened sadness. But is pessimism a basic feature of his poetry and does the influence of symbolism exhaust the question of it? In his study of Em. Popdimitrov, Hr. Dudevski (On realism in the literary heritage of Em. Popdimitrov until 1923, Proceedings of the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, vol. V, 1957) speaks of realism in the poet's literary heritage, highlighting those poems in which a connection with reality is more directly felt (such as "Summer", "The Gruyn River" and many others with a love motif), regardless of the purely revolutionary poems that mark an indisputable literary turning point. Dudevski felt the vitality of these poems, although we would hardly agree to call realistic poems such as "Laura", "Clara", "Emma", "Efrosina", etc. The question, however, is whether the poems listed exhaust the essentials of Em. Popdimitrov's image. Is the absolute boundary that is thus set between them and the remaining significant part of his poetry justified; is the absolute distinction between poems of a realistic and anti-realistic nature justified?

In a letter to the newspaper "Nezavisimost" from 1874, the brothers Dimitar and Konstantin Miladinov are characterized as figures of national importance. Their names are placed alongside the names of Georgi Rakovski and Petko Slaveykov. Entire centuries and thousands of years will pass - the letter emphasizes - and their name will be pronounced with reverence in Bulgarian songs, Bulgarian fairy tales, and on the sedenki... Because "The Miladinovs are forerunners, and their followers are complements of that beginning, on which the first pages of the new Bulgarian church and civil freedom will be written..."1 Whether in this case we have a letter actually sent by an unknown patriot from Tarnovo, or whether it was also composed in the editorial office of "Nezavisimost" itself, cannot be established with certainty. However, one thing can be considered indisputable - that both Karavelov and Botev, as editors of the newspaper, at least agreed with the thoughts developed in the letter and, above all, with the assessment of the Miladinov brothers. And this is indicative enough. Moreover, these "forerunners" of the great struggle for national liberation were themselves clearly aware of the great historical task they had taken upon themselves. Therefore, they could not help but foresee the dangerous risks it posed to them as "tsarist enemies". That is why, when, before the bayonets of a numerous police convoy, he was brought to trial for the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Dimitar Miladinov did not doubt for a moment that he was being led to an open death. 3 And at the same time, it was not by chance that the younger brother made such a fervent patriotic confession to his noble patron Joseph Strossmayer: that "spreading enlightenment as much as possible and preparing the people for freedom" - he was ready to sacrifice, if necessary, himself, his blood and his life for his people. And they truly sacrificed them without hesitation, so that the hearts of grateful generations would live forever in the souls of the Navskis.

Lyuben Karavelov wrote in three languages ​​- Russian, Serbian and Bulgarian - and this is a unique phenomenon in the history of world literature. Lyuben Karavelov's literary works - novels, short stories, poems and feuilletons - are permeated by the tendency to critically expose not only the plagues of the Turkish feudal system, but also the collusion between the treacherous Bulgarian bourgeoisie and the clergy; drawing bright images of revolutionaries - fighters for the liberation of the homeland - Karavelov strives to awaken the consciousness of the masses from centuries-old backwardness, to raise them to active struggle (Doncho, "Bulgarians of Old Time", "Hadji Nicho", "Martyr", etc.). A huge influence on Karavelov was exerted by the revolutionary-democratic literature and aesthetics of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov Pisarev. In the story "Is Fate Crooked?" (1869), written in Serbian, he applied the ideological and creative techniques of the novel "What is to be done?" by N. G. Chernyshevsky. In his writing, L. Karavelov comprehensively used the creative experience of the classics of Russian and Ukrainian literature, learned from them critical-realist techniques in depicting reality, and propagated the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Chernyshevsky, Herzen, Shevchenko, Marko Vovchok, Serbia and Bulgaria. All this makes the philosophical and artistic work of Lyuben Karavelov particularly interesting and close to us. B Lyuben Karavelov adopted the basic ideas of revolutionary-democratic criticism and aesthetics during the years of his stay in Russia (1857-1866), and this is reflected primarily in his artistic works and in their sharp critical focus. But he also tried to make sense of the principles of realism and revolutionary tendentiousness in a theoretical sense. "Poetry - we read in his Manuscript Notes - as well as everything else in the mental activity of man should serve the serious goals of life, and not be art for the sake of art." 1 In his articles from this period, L. Karavelov calls for the depiction of living folk life, for the rapprochement of writing with folklore, and calls for the liquidation of the archanization of the literary language. And in Serbia (1867-1869) L. Karavelov appears as an already formed literary critic, who gave a well-founded and firm assessment of the tendencies of abstract romanticism and sentimentalism, which had distanced Serbian literature from the truthful depiction of the social struggle in the sphere of intimate experiences. Lyuben Karavelov contributed to a great extent to the turn of Serbian literature from the late 60s-70s from the blind imitation of foreign models to national originality.

The people are inseparable from their history, just as a person is from his past. You may meet people without a past somewhere, but there is no people without a history. They live with us and in us - the dead. Those who were not dead during their lifetime, who linked their lives with the fate of the people. Singers sing about them. Earth and sky, beasts and nature pity them. "The world of our dead is richer than the world of our living" - one of our writers wrote some time ago, discovering a truth. The fate of a person is the fate of the people. We work and go to the cinema, listen to the radio and talk on the phone with our loved ones on the other side of the world: we see familiar images on the TV screen, we hear their voices. In our modern everyday life, all this is completely natural and even a little banal. But do we live only with those who are around us? Is history only in museums? No, it has long since left there, it has entered the life and blood of our contemporaries, it is in their thoughts and hearts. Every day - sometimes imperceptibly - we hear voices from the past. The world of our living and the world of our Dead - this is actually one world, the world in which we live. We shake hands with some and talk, work or argue. The others look at us from portraits, stand in our way in the center of large squares and make you go around them, they float like ships, stretch out like streets, they even present themselves to you as the names of shops, cooperatives and football teams. And the cliché definition of publicists that they live with us is not an empty phrase. There is a deep meaning in their immortality. Otherwise, it would be terribly absurd that a turtle at the bottom of the ocean lives 400 years, and a person eight times less!

Some irresistibly praise him, others almost deny him, and still others with distrust refrain. Many of the reasons for such a contradictory attitude are contained in the poetry of Lyubomir Levchev himself. Here, in front of me is the first collection of poems by the Young Poet - "The Stars are Mine". "The Stars are Mine", "Strength", for honor. and Glory", Song for Garcia Lorca", "October Poems", Song for Me" - these are the cons. I list these few titles, and objections arise in me. I immediately want to make reservations. And in other poems such inexperience is evident! The young poet's power over words is still weak! Some places in his book are simply clumsy prose. The truly original is just intertwined with his capricious attempts to walk with his feet up. This is how it is, and it irritates. And the one who does not look deeply into the appearance of the poet's Lyrical Hero, who does not listen carefully to his voice, so often drowned out by unnecessary noises, will still be left with irritation. Lyubomir Levchev's book has a more complex characteristic than it might seem at first glance. There are many shortcomings, but what is good in his poems is especially good, symptomatically good, if I may put it that way - promisingly good. The second collection of poems - "Forever" even more categorically confirmed the impression of an original, interesting voice in our young poetry. It also confirmed the impression of some, already becoming organic weaknesses in Levchev's work. Let's start from the beginning. We read the program poem "The Stars Are Mine". Our hearing is still unaccustomed to these Audacity. What an insistent admonition that the stars were his! We involuntarily want to calm the irrepressible poetic cosmonaut. More modestly, young man! Can't you be quieter,

1961 Booklet 6 *** - Contents of the 5th anniversary of "Literary Thought" - 1961