Pavel Matev

At the end of this September, our living memory called us to a meeting with a beloved child of Bulgaria, with a young and modest, close and worthy fighter from the front row of the Bulgarian Communist Party, with the standard-bearer of our revolutionary socialist realist literature, who still holds, as befits him, the banner of its artistic victories. Hristo Smirnenski! Six and a half decades since his birth and four decades since his death have already passed, and the time enclosed in them has no power to reach out to destroy or sprinkle with oblivion the monument of his artistic creativity. Of course, this does not surprise anyone and would not surprise anyone - only what we call perishable and temporary is subject to the irrevocable blows of days and nights. The marble of nature can be destroyed, but nothing can destroy the marble of the soul and heart. Any, even the most massive, material monuments and colonnades can collapse - nothing can knock down monuments made without hands. And the artistic work of Hristo Smirnenski is precisely such a monument made without hands. Because Smirnenski created literature, bloodily connected with the fate of our party and our people, saturated with enormous social content, with the brilliance and power of the communist ideal and at the same time embodying in the most artistic way the most important problems, reflecting the most diverse and broad aspects of reality. He was tasked with launching a new stage in Bulgarian literature and he brilliantly fulfilled it. It should not be forgotten that this task was not easy, that its scale was determined by the era and its solution had and has historical consequences. This is precisely the essence of his innovative poetic work. In the annals of Bulgarian fiction, Smirnenski was that stonemason with a faded blouse, a dark gray cap and a bold look, who could confidently say: ... A road will be paved, friend, here, a new road in these rocks! Such living witnesses as we are, now see how necessary, important and unending this road is. We have been walking on it for years and will walk in the centuries to come, because this is the true and saving path for the literature and art of socialism and communism.