Nikola G. Nikolov

Elin Pelin's artistic mastery has already been written, but what has been said is still not enough. The history of the story "Lepo" is indicative of the direction of development of the great fiction writer, his growth as a writer with an original approach and view of our rural reality from the end of the last and the first decades of the present century. A comparison of the different editions of the story leads not only to a more accurate understanding of it, but also to a more complete clarification of Elin Pelin's artistic mastery, illuminates some moments of the creative process: the wear and tear of the product, the embodiment of the idea in verbal form.

The theory of literature as the main discipline of literary science has gone too far in its development: it is about to become not only a theory of literature, but also a methodology of literary science. The problems of the methodology of Marxist literary science were left in the background for some time. Raised sometimes by individual authors, they were not always correctly formulated, which is why the results were partial, and the concepts of fiction as art one-sided. This underestimation of the methodology caused a certain stagnation in literary science and allowed the spread of the abstract-class approach, which has not been completely overcome even today. Here we must also look for the arguments of some Western literary scholars who underestimate or deny the importance of Marxist literary science.