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Dear readers, "Literary Thought" has established itself as an authoritative journal on issues of aesthetics, literary theory, literary history and literary criticism. The journal has received recognition not only in our country, but also abroad. In the coming year, the editorial board will make efforts to maintain the high level of the journal and to illuminate a number of new issues of literary history, literary theory, aesthetics and literary criticism on the pages of the journal. Problems of our literary development during separate periods will be examined, as well as artistic features in the work of prominent representatives of our literature - Karavelov, Botev, Vazov, Slaveykov, Yavorov, Aleko Konstantinov, Elin Pelin, Smirnenski, Vaptsarov and others... The journal will feature portraits of prominent contemporary writers, as well as critical assessments of the nature and features of the more significant works of art. "Literary Thought" will continue to include research papers on theoretical problems of style and artistic method, literary movements and genres, poetry studies, the language of artistic creation... The editorial board's concern will be to familiarize our readers with the problems that are being discussed in socialist countries and in the West. "Literary Thought" will continue to fight for scientific illumination of the processes of the development of contemporary art both in our country and abroad. The magazine will be useful to anyone interested in issues of fiction, to high school teachers, students and pupils. It will continue to be a valuable advisor to our contemporary writers in their creative work. Annual subscription - 2.60 leva. FROM THE EDITORIAL OFFICE

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.

Hristo Smirnenski carries on the wings of his poetry the indomitable rush of the revolutionary storm and the most daring dreams of the sunny day of humanity. The very movement of the many-faced life has found in his poetry an inspired poetic embodiment, capable of greatly affecting the mind and heart of man. Deeply and realistically embracing the main features of the revolutionary era, the dark spots in the cruel dying world of capitalism and the whirlwind flight of the oppressed lowlands to the gates of communism; reflecting in unique pictures and images the very storm of the emerging socialist world, embodying the trembling enthusiasm and unshakable faith in the victorious march of the Great October Socialist Revolution and in the future day of humanity, Smirnenski's work opened new horizons in the development of Bulgarian literature. The scope of his poetic talent is so wide, the enchanting figurative wealth of his works has so deeply summarized the development of Bulgarian literature, so close is the connection of his poetic visions with the people's life and dreams for the future, that it contributes to the unshakable force of laying the foundations of socialist-realist art in our country without much toil and detours. With his life and work, Smirnenski brilliantly showed that the fusion of the writer with the revolutionary aspiration of the masses, placing his heart and lyre in harmony with communist ideas, in the service of the revolution and the liberation struggle of the people, fertilizes his talent, stimulates his creativity, elevates his thought. After Smirnenski, a great writer in Bulgarian literature could only be the one who stands on the positions of realism, on the side of the struggling people. This enormous contribution of Smirnensky had a beneficial effect in two directions: on the one hand, it opened the broad road of socialist revolutionary literature, united democratic writers on the basis of the anti-fascist struggle; on the other hand, it dug a deep chasm for modernism, which could no longer find fertile ground for flourishing in our country. The entire Bulgarian revolutionary literature, supported and guided by the Communist Party, followed the path outlined by Smirnensky. Along this path, learning creatively from Smirnensky, Bulgarian literature created works that are unfading in their poetic power and inspiration, in their insight into the life and pathos of the struggle.

There is almost no researcher of the work of Hristo Smirnensky who would not point out the importance of the October Socialist Revolution and the young Soviet poetry in the ideological and creative evolution of the poet. Moreover, usually the question of influence is connected with the question of the genesis and development of Smirnensky's artistic method. Recently, efforts have been directed precisely at such a wider range of problems. This, of course, does not mean that all questions have been exhausted. At least the lack of a comprehensive monograph on the poet so far does not convince us of the opposite. In these brief notes I would like to draw attention to some facts from our literary life in 1919-1923 - the time when Hristo Smirnensky created his most mature works. I am referring to the articles that appeared on the pages of the party periodicals - the newspapers "Mladezh" and "Narodna armiya", the magazine "Novo vreme", advocating the issues of the construction of proletarian culture. B .. Let's mentally travel back forty-three years. The first years of Soviet power, the interventionists have just been expelled. The first steps are being taken in the construction of the new system. The construction of a new culture, a new literature is being started. Everyone is convinced that they must be truly new, just like the new revolutionary fighter and winner of the civil war. In order to embody this new hero in art, new forms, new means of expression are needed. Sometimes new artistic forms are presented as adequate to the revolution. These are forms that set millions of hearts in motion.

During the time of the cult of personality, quite a few significant works were written, which are the pride of contemporary Bulgarian literature. And the senseless nihilism that existed among a certain part of the youth in relation to the previous period must be resolutely rejected. At the same time, it cannot be ignored that these successes could have been even greater if it were not for the conditions of the cult, which instilled dogmatism, stereotyped thinking, and hindered the normal development of literature. According to the words of Todor Zhivkov, "dogmatism as a theory and practice introduced stiffness, schematism, patterning, and stagnation into creative work."

The theory of "Art for Art's Sake" has been around for more than a century, but the questions it raises and the struggles that surround it have perhaps never been as decisive for the development of art as they are today. What is the essence of art? Should it serve something other than itself? Is "pure beauty" not its only goal, or, in order to acquire social significance, must it submit to the great moral tasks that society sets for it? What is the role of the artist: to become the creator of autonomous artistic values ​​that will be enjoyed by a small elite of spiritual aristocrats, or to be in the vanguard of the great battle for social renewal? The theory of "Art for Art's Sake" has its answers to these fateful questions, and these answers lie at the foundation of the formalist art of the bourgeois world, as it has developed from the last century to the present day. Therefore, to describe the socio-psychological atmosphere in which this aesthetic concept was formed, to reveal its social and theoretical essence, to indicate the problems it posed and solved, and to assess them both in the context of the relevant historical situation and in view of contemporary requirements, is undoubtedly a topical task that our aesthetics and art studies cannot and should not ignore. The present article is an attempt in this regard. It sets itself limited requirements: to examine the theory of "Art for Art's Sake" as it developed in France - its true homeland - and only within the framework of that generation of writers and artists who first gave it the appearance of a specific aesthetic doctrine and first used it as a weapon, or more precisely, as a cover for their hatred of bourgeois society and culture. The representatives of this generation did not form a single school. These were artists, different in temperament, inclinations and tastes, different in the nature of their work and therefore different in their place in the history of new art. What united them was their common understanding of art and its tasks, of its relation to morality, politics, religion, science, nature, to reality in general. This understanding was not the result of a strictly thought-out theoretical work.

The most significant thing in Kuprin's creative work is connected with the life of the Russian army at the end of the last century. He saw and artistically revealed the insurmountable weight of the then military discipline, which crushed feelings and thoughts in order to make people's souls dry and flat like barracks squares. He showed thousands of readers the age-old power of the then military hierarchy, which gradually turned commanders into tyrants and subordinates into automated executors. He peered behind the gilded prints of the so-called officer virtues and saw how hypocrisy, careerism, envy were cunningly creeping in. This quiet, modest man, a Russian tsarist officer, was forged from the same noble metal, perhaps, only not as shiny as the Decembrists, "iron men suckled by a she-wolf," as Herzen put it about them. And Kuprin managed to lift onto his weak shoulders the whole weight of cadet and cadet education, of garrison life in the backwater province, of regulations and discipline, and to rebel. There was a difficult, turning point in the writer's life: in 1893, when he failed the entrance exam to the General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg, he decided to leave the army. The young man had neither a salary nor a profession. All his life he had been in orphanages and barracks, all his life he had been taught discipline and obedience. And suddenly the officer felt that he could not take it anymore, that the regulations had become as heavy as lead, that he did not have enough air in the spacious barracks. And despite the peaceful life, the assured future, the beautiful uniforms, the garrison balls, he had to abandon all this in order to find his true essence.

No one in Bulgaria has contributed as much to the affirmation of the true image of the artist Maxim Gorky, to the correct interpretation of his revolutionary work, as well as to its translation and dissemination, as Georgi Bakalov. From 1901, when he translated and published in Varna the first booklet with Gorky's story "The Pitiful Turk and the Woodpecker", until his death in 1939, he remained a tireless researcher and popularizer of Gorky, and did this with the greatest awareness, breadth and insight. His activity in this field is a true feat. It is enough to recall the case of the translation and dissemination of the novel "Mother" and the translation of almost all of Gorky's plays. I think that in his own development as a Marxist critic and theorist of new literature, his articles on Gorky, along with those on Smirnensky, stand out as the most creative, the most free from vulgar-sociological impurities and sectarian extremes. In both cases, G. Bakalov maintains the creative line, advocates the broad Leninist view and fights against primitive dogmatic concepts. Gorky, as well as Smirnensky, was one of the springs from which Bakalov drew life-giving water for his method, for his critical activity. They helped him to break away from rectilinear ideas and be more artistic, to rely on his critical sense and taste, on his direct contact with art. In addition, Gorky's aesthetic views - his numerous statements about the Russian classics, the cultural heritage and the new Soviet literature - helped Bakalov to free himself from some narrow and sectarian stratifications, from the Plekhanovian mechanistic view and to perceive literary creativity, the historical-literary process with all their dialectical complexity, diversity and specificity. The importance of constant contact with Gorky for the evolution that Bakalov underwent in the 1930s, after overcoming sectarianism, especially for his new attitude towards heritage is undeniable. It is no coincidence that in his famous program article in the second half of the 1930s "Depict the Heroic", most vividly reflecting his new thinking and the decisive urge to break the sectarian shackles, he referred to Gorky, to his call for the creation of heroic art and to examples from his work.

Ernesto, a large industrialist or something like that, puts a record on his new American gramophone, an ideal automaton with a complex mechanism. When Ernesto presses the button on the membrane, instead of obediently landing on the edge of the record, it rises into the air, makes a kind of paralytic movement and with a dry metallic click returns to its original position. Like all ideal mechanisms, the automaton at a certain point refuses to serve its purpose. A little later, Ernesto is in his luxury car with his wife and two children. He is a rich, happy man who has fulfilled himself. But somewhere at the bottom of his soul, a dissatisfaction has settled. This dissatisfaction tempts him to throw himself from a high cliff into the sea with his luxury car and his entire family. His not-so-good knowledge of the terrain and a hesitation that lasted a tenth of a second save him. Instead of in the waves, the car stops at a beautiful ravine, from which Ernesto, his contented wife and his joyful sons contemplate the calm element of the ocean. Alberto Moravia's new book of short stories "The Automaton" is built on moments in which the main characters realize their dissatisfaction, their inferiority, their automatic existence, their inability to live and enjoy what they have achieved. Men or women, young or old, they are faced with their deeper essence, with their true reality, which they have not known, with which they cannot cope. These are usually moments of imbalance, as in the plot of the story given above, moments of automatic and unconscious life, not controlled by the will.

Now the prominent progressive American writer William Saroyan is 55 years old. He was born in 1908 in the city of Fresno - California, in a family of Armenian emigrants, immigrants from Western Turkish Armenia. Only three years old, William was left without a father and from an early age felt the bitterness of life. Forced to take care of the livelihood of his family, Saroyan began to work, first as a newspaper carrier, then a deliveryman at the telegraph post office, later a farm worker, office clerk, general laborer, mercenary soldier, reporter, etc. In all these professions, having contact with the broad masses of the people, the future writer was a witness to human sorrow and joy, observed the bitter fate of people in American reality and early began to live with the thoughts, misfortunes and dreams of the ordinary American. Here is the source of the deep realism in his works. The writer himself, in his latest novel "He Comes Here, He Goes There - You Know Who He Is," writes: "The poet also travels because the source of his poetry is the world and people, and he needs to see them as much as possible... He (the poet) strives to be true to the truth in his thoughts and feelings and, above all, to speak and write the truth."

Recently, Minko Nikolov published his new book, dedicated to the work of Bertolt Brecht - the most significant playwright of the mid-twentieth century. This fact in itself shows how important the subject of the book is, what a gap this book fills in our contemporary art studies. The work on Brecht was also necessary because of a number of fruitless disputes about Brecht's methodology, which always revolved around Brecht, around arithmetic problems and never reached the heart, the meaning of the great creative work. These conversations created an atmosphere of suspicion in connection with the name of Brecht, they made gossip out of things that should be written about with the true mark of respect - with inner passion and civic conviction. I note this not only in connection with Minko Nikolov's book, but also because of something else. Because of that scientific conscientiousness that should be present in the assessment of great contemporary writers. It is true that Brecht does not fit into the needle's eye of narrow-mindedness and spiritual laziness, but this does not mean at all that we should deprive our socialist art of a Great Creator. Brecht may not belong to the geographical latitude that is closest to us, but he is a creature of the same forces that renew the climate, the spirit of our time. The struggle for Brecht, when it is led by a Marxist-critic, is not an apology for flat rationalism, it is only an affirmation of the rational, spiritual, active communist principle in Brecht's dramaturgy.

The Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship is multifaceted - in politics, in economics, in culture, including in literature. It, our literary friendship with the Russian people and with the other peoples of the Soviet country, has deep roots and is a peer of the cultural history of our two countries. It is no coincidence that copies of the oldest Bulgarian manuscripts, dating back to the beginning of our writing, are found in a number of Soviet libraries. With affection we read in the ancient "Alphabetical Prayer" - this foundation of all Bulgarian poetry - verses addressed to the entire "Slavic tribe". This common appeal over the centuries rightly acquired a main focus on the largest Slavic people - the Russians, who became the support and foundation of the cultural development of all Slavic and many non-Slavic peoples. When I was in Ukraine in 1959, during the decade of Bulgarian culture, Kiev writers and literary scholars proudly pointed out the places connected in distant historical memory with the Bulgarian writer Grigoriy Tsamblak: we imagine him living among his colleagues from Kiev at the beginning of the fifteenth century, how in meetings with them they spoke the then common literary Slavic language - and yet they knew that he was Bulgarian, and spoke words of praise for the Bulgarian literary work, already famous throughout the world. Five centuries of slavery did not obscure, but strengthened the literary community of our peoples: the names of Botev, Karavelov, Nesho Bonchev and our other revivalists are most closely associated with Russian culture. Both during the six decades of bourgeois Bulgaria and during the two decades of Fatherland Front Bulgaria, this area of ​​cultural and literary friendship accumulated new and new facts and phenomena, and established itself as a law of our literary development. Today, Soviet literature is for us that beacon which illuminates with bright flashes our entire literary life.

The work of Georgi Konstantinov comes to satisfy the growing interest in the personality of the poet Liliev. Liliev's poetry - gentle and ethereal, musical and airy, graceful and timid, died down along with the decline and overcoming of symbolism in our literature. New problems have emerged in modern times, and manly and strong artists have grown up. Who today reads "Hymns for the Superman" by Pencho Slaveykov, "Bulgarian Ballads" by Teodor Trayanov? Who is excited by "Regina Mortois"? In these works, the poets failed to find the key, they did not see "the truth that makes sense to write about", as B. Brecht expressed it in his essay on "The Five Difficulties". At the beginning of the century, our literature suffered heavy losses. Many artists were prisoners of a decadent aesthetics and philosophy hostile to realistic art. Liliev's talent also wandered in the labyrinths of symbolism. He closed himself in his own gloomy poetic tower. He burned the last bridges to hope and became a Sad Loner. Today we cannot help but be aware of the pessimistic beginning in Liliev's poetry. Through the mists and with difficulty the dawns of his native Thrace, the silver rays and the bright morning of life shine. But through the vague and semi-airy outlines of this symbolic Lyric, the virtuoso perfection of Liliev's verse is visible, transformed into a sonorous, expressive and gentle instrument. With its imagery and melody, with its virgin purity and snowy whiteness, this verse occupies a certain place in Bulgarian lyric poetry. The modern socialist reader finds in the poetry of the pale lilies hidden treasures of humanity and sublime ethics, a reverence for beauty and nobility, which still excite today.