Книжка-1

1962 Book 1 Contents

Humanity is facing new great prospects, illuminated by the decisions of the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Congress demonstrated the living embodiment of the creative thought of Marxism-Leninism in guiding ideas. Since its adoption of a program for economic construction, for the development of social relations and culture, we feel how today's socialist society is gradually approaching communism. With its decisions, the Congress raised to a great height precisely that active work of thought that transforms theory into practice, and practice into theory. With the program for the construction of the communist society long dreamed of and suffered by mankind, the grandiose vision is connected in a single whole with the creative daily work, with the organizational work that is currently necessary. The program expands and enriches our concrete ideas about the shape of future society. It points to the enormous progress that will be made in the field of economics and social relations. It continued the scientific development of the questions of socialist democracy, of the role and significance of Marxist-Leninist ideology, of the political, moral, and aesthetic re-education of the people. One of the important tasks of the congress was practical measures for the final elimination of the harmful consequences of the cult of Stalin's personality. It is impossible to move forward, to new conquests, without eliminating everything that was layered during the cult of Stalin's personality and which prevented the creation of normal conditions for the creative activity of the masses and the individual, for the development of the forces and capabilities of the collective in the construction of communist society.

Literary criticism in its centuries-long development has often suffered from biased theories and tendentious verbiage. We speak too much against dogmatism and schematism, which during the time of the cult of personality inflicted severe damage on the creative thinking of the critic and the writer. But these two ailments of shaky creative health are neither a monopoly nor exceptionally characteristic phenomena precisely for us, who strive to open the doors to the future as widely as possible, to tell the truth about life and history, to stir up the spiritual and physical powers of people. Dogmatism and schematism are three hundred times more characteristic of Western decadent philosophy and aesthetics. Where historical horizons are lost, darkening in the shadow of rising supermen and in bloody sunsets, defined as the fatal end of European culture, pessimism and skepticism are taking root more and more widely. And it is precisely this philosophy of spiritual darkness that conditions presupposed theories that kill creative and critical thought, immerses pure truths in murderous gibberish, speculates with eternal concepts, absolutizes certain biological traits or human weaknesses and elevates them into eternal and irreparable properties of human nature.

Much has been written about Don Quixote. There is rarely a great poet, thinker, writer, statesman, even a scientist who has not spoken about him on some occasion. And here - the most fantastic of all literary heroes has become a solid, unshakable reality. Long ago, more than three centuries ago, the Spanish hidalgo ceased to be a literary image and became not only a living person, but something more: a household name, a concept, a word in the languages ​​of all peoples, a symbol of human qualities. And this does honor to those sober, wise, logical minds who have directed their penetrating gaze at the drunken, unwise knight and have given him their praise throughout the centuries. We are not talking only about poets. Don Quixote has long been their true brother in spirit. There is rarely a great poet who has not sung sad or joyful verses about this ecstatic sufferer. Even in our literature, such poets as Raztsvetnikov and Liliev sang with love about the knight. But for good honor, not only poets, but also essayists, writers, critics paid their tribute to the funny hero. And not only writers. Also philosophers - and the greatest ones. Idealists Hegel and Kant wrote about Don Quixote. Marx and Engels spoke enthusiastically about the novel. Lafargue emphasizes that "Don Quixote was Marx's favorite book. Ever since Don Quixote was born, interest in him has not subsided. This joyful, beautiful phenomenon is no less interesting than the image of the hero himself. e But here the question arises: should we still write about Don Quixote today? First of all - because everything has already been said about him. It could only be repeated and compiled. And secondly: in the age of machines, robots, the cold triumph of logic, is it not an archaic obsolescence to write about an obsessive dreamer who cannot distinguish a barber's basin from a knight's helmet?

With the plays "Guilds" and "At the Bottom" a new stage in the work of Maxim Gorky begins, connected with the growing revolutionary upsurge in Russia with the first rumblings and the approach of the 1905 revolution. During this period, the author of the romantic hymns about the madness of the heroes" and about the flaming heart of Danko, the realist writer, revealed the tragic fate and spontaneous protest of the barefoot people against the corrupting influence of the guild, proprietary morality - he becomes more and more closely associated with the revolutionary movement, intervenes in political struggles against the Russian autocracy and gradually connects with the Leninist wing of Russian Social Democracy. He becomes a stormtrooper, the herald of the revolution, the first proletarian writer of world significance in whose work the principles of socialist realism are formed. It was at this time that he fully realized his long-standing dream - to create art that arouses heroic emotions, reaching the widest circles, calls for the reorganization of the social order. In the play "Guilds" Gorky for the first time in world literature created the image of a proletarian fighter - the train driver Nile with his optimistic life-affirming philosophy, which acts like thunder over the troubled guild swamp. In Nile's words "The owner is the one who works", "Rights are not given - rights are won", "There is no such train schedule that cannot be changed" speaks of a new proletarian class, which has gathered strength for decisive political battles. Gorky takes stock of his early work and in the play "The Bottom". He frees himself from any romanticization of the free and protesting barefoot people; now they are already unfortunate victims, having lost everything that can be lost, but remaining sensitive to the call for human dignity, for the greatness of man. The famous words "Man - this is magnificent! Man - this sounds proud!" spread with incredible speed all over the world and shake the packed theaters in European capitals. They are spoken by some pitiful fragments of the human race, sunk in rags, from the darkness of their pit - this temporarily emphasizes the active humanism of the play even more strongly. At the same time, as an outlet, Gorky rejects passive compassion, the comforting lie of heavy suffering, exposes the philosophy of powerlessness, which seeks reconciliation with reality as a means that helps the masters of power to plunder their victims even more cruelly.

As a poet and fiction writer, Vazov is deeply engraved in our consciousness. He entered as a playwright. But we are not at all accustomed to thinking of him as an audience and critic. Not only because the great growth of his artistic works overshadows the other aspects of his activity, but also because for years his literary and journalistic work has been consciously or unconsciously underestimated. The idea had become established that no matter how great he was as an artist, Vazov was weak as a thinker. Some could not forgive him for his fight against the circle of "Thought and the Sharp Expression of the Symbolists", others - for his unfortunate study of Hristo Botev. That was all that was known. Everything else was a vague idea of ​​some unimportant, uninteresting and largely accidental facts from the writer's life. A not very popular self-confession for a few fiery articles" against the Battenberg coup, a widespread opinion about the superficial, most often condescending-encouraging nature of the literary reviews written by the poet and a not entirely critically compiled bibliographic list, 1 in which, among other things, a number of introductory articles and anonymous newspaper notes were attributed to Vazov - this is almost all that literary scholarship of the past had noted. And it had remained in the circle of specialists. The interesting part of Vazov's literary and journalistic work - his political articles from the first decade after the Liberation - was completely ignored. None of the bourgeois writers took the trouble to leaf through the dusty pages of the newspaper Nrodniy Glas to extract from them the memory of those years when the poet was young and ardent, when he kept the great ideals of the revival intact in his heart and, with the temperamental pen of a journalist, served the same "terrible goddess of Freedom" that he sang about with youthful enthusiasm in his poems. Whatever reasons we may list, it seems to me that this silence was not accidental. The bourgeoisie needed a Vazov - polished, paraded and... weakened. It had no interest in emphasizing the full depth of his democracy, the full breadth of his patriotism, the full sharpness of his love of freedom. It was hard enough to swallow some of his poems to have a desire to create additional ones for itself. about the difficulties and with his journalism. She seemed to vaguely sense the dangers that Vazov's political articles from the first years of her reign concealed and, in any case, left them in oblivion. The progressive literary scholarship of the past was not interested in them either - it was also hindered by the prejudice that there was nothing interesting to expect from the political articles of a bourgeois writer.

The periodicals from the era of our national revival often surprise us with the insight and sober ideological and aesthetic sense of the first Bulgarian Literary Critics. In them, next to the angry correspondence against the centuries-old slave system or the naive poetic work of some teacher, we often come across reviews of original and translated works of art or articles of a theoretical nature. Sometimes they are laconic and informative, sometimes detailed and categorical. Their authors are not always original. In most cases, they even popularize ideas and beliefs created and adopted in other countries dozens of years earlier. But even when they paraphrase or borrow textually, our literary pioneers do so not in order to be proclaimed by the ignorance of their compatriots as talented thinkers or as founders of movements and schools, but because of the utilitarian spirit of the time and for tactical considerations before the official political authorities. However, both as popularizers and as original The Bulgarian Renaissance writers and literary figures always lived with the problems and creative pathos of our literature. The influence of Russian realistic thought on their literary-critical views is undeniable. However, we do not set ourselves the task of tracing how and to what extent it was realized, we will limit ourselves to pointing out that almost all Bulgarian Renaissance writers were able to soberly use what they had learned both as writers and as literary critics. This is evident above all from their articles and notes, in which some of the problems of realism as a creative method in fiction are raised and examined. The literary-critical views of Karavelov, Botev, Nesho Bonchev, which reflect a relatively more mature stage in Bulgarian criticism, will not concern us in this case. By referring only at certain moments to some articles by our established literary critics, we will try to trace the concepts of Other Renaissance writers on our literary development, in order to see that the struggle for realism in Bulgarian literature until the Liberation was a struggle not only of individual, albeit great, writers, but a collective work of an entire literary generation. And since realism finds its fullest expression in literary prose, we will limit ourselves to indicating how literary criticism then greeted the first attempts in the field of "Bulgarianized" and original fiction, how some of our writers understood their tasks, what tasks they assigned to narrative creativity.

What are the main stages in the development of the mutual relations between the Slavic Literatures? 2. What does comparative Slavic literary studies contribute to the development of literary theory and practice? 3. What are the main problems of the comparative study of the South Slavic Literatures? 4. What are the forms of influence of one literature on another (based on material from Slavic literatures)? 5. What is the role of the assimilation of foreign literary works in the periods of formation of Slavic national literatures? 6. What is the role of the Russian revolutionary democrats in the emergence and development of materialist literary thought in Slavic countries? 7. What phenomena from Slavic literatures have had an impact on the development of non-Slavic literatures? 8. Can some common typological features and common stages in the development of satire in Slavic literatures be identified? B 9. What is the significance of the study of the relations between Slavic literatures and other arts? 10. What is the role of the creative individuality of the writer in the general process of literary development (with regard to Slavic literatures from different eras)? 11. How to create a unification of literary terminology? 12. When did literature for young people arise in the individual Slavic literatures?

In his original contemporary play "When the Roses Dance", Valery Petrov takes up with gentle sincerity, with subtle soft humor, with ease and grace the eternally young problem of love. The spirit of youth, this cheerful spirit, born in May, reincarnated in the image of the Young Man, wants to awaken the youth in the Old Man. Will he succeed? The dispute begins as a joke. The Young Man proves the existence of true love. With magic, with songs, music, ballet and with the destinies of several couples in love. The roses, these precious flowers that the Old Man guards day and night and cannot protect, suddenly come to life before his eyes. They not only teach and sting, but can dance, yearn, suffer and... run away. Roses are intended for lovers. Having begun with roses, the love theme imperceptibly expands and grows into a theme for young and old perceptions in contemporary life. It turns out that in Every person has both an old man and a young man who are in constant struggle. What does it mean to be young? The answer to this question constitutes the second plan of the theme of love, the undercurrent of the action in "When the Roses Dance" - because not only in love, but in thousands of places, our damned old age fights with youth. . . The Young Man is tireless in his passionate urge to protect youth. This is an image that is constantly transforming. He instantly takes off his symbolic clothes, acquires flesh and blood. With his soft intimacy and sparkling witty lines, he is an unusually lively and vital positive hero, as well as fantastically ethereal, elusive, alluringly diverse, surprising. He is the backbone of the play, the defender of the main theme, the conductor of the "spring pantomime", in which, along with jokes and magic, the sad and cheerful melodies of love and wisdom sound. And the Old Man? Maybe this is just a contrasting symbolic image, constantly opposing the views of the Young Man and in the end will be rejected by life, ridiculed? Yes, indeed, at first he shows a petty stingy passion, distrust of people. But the most interesting thing about this character is his transformation and especially his unusual experiences on the way to the police station, where he leads the Young Man, who has plucked three roses for his beloved.

Brecht's penetration into the individual socialist countries has its own history. First came the interest in the writer as an innovator who broke with the canons and opened new horizons for revolutionary art. Then - at different intervals - followed the translations and the first productions of Brecht's plays. Today, the dividing wall of some dogmatic postulates that could not fit Brecht into the framework of socialist realism has been finally demolished. The experience of the original playwright is being studied and summarized. From the phase of guesses, he passes into the phase of research, which aims to acquaint us with all the values ​​of contemporary world literature. Over the past two or three years, in-depth studies on the principles of Brecht's Creativity have appeared in the Soviet Union, along with reviews of new performances of Brecht's works in Soviet theaters. A few months ago, readers received the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Brecht. Its author is Bernhard Reich, a German emigrant to Moscow since 1926. Reich's book, voluminous and documented, accompanied by photographic material from various productions of Brecht's plays, is distinguished by several advantages. It is an attempt at solid research and at the same time a personal memory and personal assessment of Brecht's work. Its author was among the young Brecht's entourage in Munich after the First World War. He observed his first directorial performances, and retained personal impressions of the characteristics of Brecht's individuality and method of work. Reich, however, was not tempted by the temptation to endure all his work in a subjective and memoiristic plan. He tried to study and interpret Brecht's theatrical aesthetics comprehensively, to understand both its theoretical positions and its stage realization. He did not * B. Reich Teatralnoe - Brecht, essay on creativity, ed. 1960. Society, Moscow, 124 was satisfied only with the analyses of individual works, and he united his observations in a special section on the theatrical mission of the innovative writer. Thus, the analytical exposition did not prevent the personal accent, the researcher's own voice, from sounding there too.

"Radyanske literaturoznavstvo" ("Soviet Literary Studies") is a bimonthly magazine, an organ of the T. G. Shevchenko Institute of Literature at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and the Union of Ukrainian Writers. "Radyanske literaturoznavstvo" has been published since 1957. It is the peer of "Literary Thought". In nearly five years, the magazine has gained wide popularity, becoming a necessity for literary critics, teachers, students, and everyone interested in issues of literary studies. The magazine has attracted a large number of contributors from all over the country. Along with writers from Kiev, it also publishes lecturers from universities and pedagogical institutes in Lviv, Kharkov, Odessa, Kherson, Dnepropetrovsk, etc., teachers working in 130 different cities and villages of the republic, and contributors from abroad. On the pages of the magazine we find the names of prominent Ukrainian literary scholars, and alongside them the names of young, novice literary critics and historians. We will focus here on one anniversary of the magazine - the fourth, published in 1960. But since limiting ourselves to just one anniversary does not allow us to draw any conclusions about the nature of the magazine and the general directions of its development, we will refer to places and articles published in other anniversaries. At the same time, a more detailed examination of one of the anniversaries allows us to make the review more specific.

On January 4 of this year, an expanded meeting of the Scientific Council of the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences was held, at which the scientific work carried out in 1961 was reported. In the report, delivered by the director of the Institute, Corresponding Member G. Tsanev, both the scientific-organizational and scientific-research activities of the institute were thoroughly examined, the achievements and weaknesses of the institute staff in fulfilling the tasks on the scientific plan were indicated. Now, after the historic decisions of the XXII Congress of the CPSU and the November Plenum of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, the rapporteur pointed out, conditions have been created for a complete overcoming of dogmatism and citationism, for creative discussions on issues of literary theory, history and criticism based on Marxist-Leninist teachings. The creative discussions and disputes, always conducted in a communist party spirit, will help clarify many problems, will raise our literary studies to a higher level, will help create highly artistic socialist-realist literature. Mr. Tsanev consistently addressed the individual tasks of the annual plan. During the year, work continued on the four-volume history of Bulgarian literature. The first volume - Old Bulgarian Literature - discussed back in 1960, has already been finally edited and prepared for publication. It will be published by the end of the current year. Volume two - Renaissance Literature - was to be discussed by the end of 1961. Unfortunately, one of the members of the author team did not fulfill the obligations undertaken in a timely manner and another author had to be sought to write these chapters. The volume will be finally completed by March and its discussion will begin immediately - first by the author's team, and in June it will be put up for wide discussion in order to be published by the end of the year. Most of the chapters of volume three have also been written, which will also be discussed by the end of the current year. Work is also underway on volume four. During the year, a significant part of the contributors have worked on individual topics related to the development of Bulgarian literature in its various periods, on the connections of our literature with the literatures of other peoples, on individual writers and literary phenomena, as well as on more general or more special theoretical questions. The development of topics affecting the development of our literature from its inception to the present day helps to one degree or another to clarify the nature of the literary process, to reveal the ideological and artistic wealth of individual creators, and to use them to create new, full-fledged socialist-realist works.