Rozaliya Likova

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?

If we look at the stories published in the literary press over the past few years, what is striking is the fact that young authors are less and less satisfied with bare declarations, with the noisy and placard expression of ideas, that the tendency to call things by their real names, to bring the writer closer to reality, is becoming more and more necessary. Approaching life is no longer a slogan, but a starting, artistic ideological position, without which a real work of art cannot be created. Far behind are the fictional, sugar-coated heroes, the dead virtues. The optimism in a number of stories about everyday work is born as a result of a more concrete look at reality. More and more sought-after, exceptional conflicts give way to characters and experiences, to heroism that is born in everyday life, in the sphere of small, everyday incidents, in the ordinary working life of people. Two main starting points move the young people on their creative path: personal observation, the desire to gather direct life material, and a great faith in man, in socialist justice. On the basis of this realistic view, the combination between the truthful reflection of difficulties and the heroism of labor, between realism and romantic pathos, is increasingly clearly outlined.

A writer with a high aesthetic culture, with serious care for style and language, Konstantinov stands apart from writers with openly expressed militant anti-fascist sentiments. Deeply embedded in his convictions is the thought that moral laws surpass political passions. But behind the calm contemplation of his books one feels a man with a civic, social conscience, tormented by questions about man and human existence, in love with life and suffering for its imperfection. A subtle poetic feeling makes him responsive to any suffering, to human life and to nature.

If we look for the reason for the new phenomena in contemporary fiction - the expansion of the ideological and thematic circle of the reflected phenomena, the changes in the problematic, the new illumination of the image of the contemporary, the intensified process of artistic searches - we will inevitably come to changes in the aesthetic positions of the contemporary writer, to his expanded artistic and sociological vision. It is an indisputable truth that the aesthetic attitude is historically concrete and objectively conditioned by the general level of development of social existence and consciousness. The generalized experience of the writer of recent years naturally pushes him towards a new self-consciousness, towards new conclusions about the relationship of man to nature and society, towards new assessments of reality. From the positions of an expanded idea of ​​the beautiful, which included the experience of the last decade, from the positions of an aesthetic ideal liberated from dogmatic thinking, he strives to give a broader idea of ​​​​modern man, of the beautiful in man and his life.

Already in the "RLF", during the fourth and fifth anniversaries, Vezhinov contributed stories that are distinguished by their freshness, originality, and the search for his own style. Most of them, in terms of motives and ideological tasks, do not differ from stories with agitational issues on the most ominous political topics. What is special about them, despite the fact that the author is still searching, has not yet found his topic, is the writer's style, his vital observation, which breaks the narrow plot framework. Even in these stories, a writer is visible who, like St. Minkov, struggles with the routine in the artistic form, with the artistic print, with the outdated artistic vision. The tendencies that bring him closer to St. Minkov, are felt in the widespread use of episodic, lightly shaded images, in the author's already emerging ability to create picturesque images with bright distinctive features and their own artistic atmosphere, in the constant smile, in the search for the artistically original, in the ability to build an atmosphere using insignificant but vivid everyday needs.