Grigor Markov

We are talking about the principles by which fiction is selected and published in our literary magazines "September" and "Plamak". Because more than one or two books from the previous anniversaries (especially "September") have the character of a literary almanac rather than a living literary publication.

In our country, tribute is still paid to an unpleasant and undesirable inertia that has not been experienced since the time of the cult of personality. Namely, little is written about famous Western authors (usually in the order of simple notes) or nothing is written at all. In this way, our public too often remains unfamiliar with the essence of this or that new phenomenon, with this or that book in a particular national literature. But in any case, despite the official silence, rumors and "evaluations" about books and writers are carried through the "literary ether", and often superlative ones. Therefore, one of the successful and proven methods to assess the real aesthetic, innovative or pseudo-innovative value of one or another famous author is for our literary thought to regularly and competently enlighten the Bulgarian public about the creative phenomena that at a given moment "scandalize" the French, English or American reader. In this way, on the one hand, we will have a clear and rich idea of ​​the literary life abroad, and on the other hand, the path of impure speculations and exaggerations surrounding the latest book by Françoise Sagan or Samuel Beckett will be cut off. In this sense, a book like "The Crisis in the Modern Western Novel" by Minko Nikolov is a good phenomenon, which in principle should be congratulated, accepted and encouraged. Such critical manifestations enrich the "assortment" of our literary literature, broaden our view and horizons, and, as strange as this may seem at first glance to lovers of dogmatic-sectarian thinking, they make us internally more resistant to the truly decadent phenomena in Western art and Western literature. In terms of composition, M. Nikolov's book includes eight chapters that are independent in character, internally united by one main idea - the idea of ​​showing the essence of the crisis in the modern Western novel. Some of the essay chapters ("The Revolution in Art and the Novel", "Existentialism and Novelists", etc.) are dedicated to individual phenomena and literary movements, while others ("The Lawgivers" Joyce and Proust, "The Cult of Kafka", "The Lessons of Thomas Mann") are dedicated to individual authors and their novels.