Книжка-4

1964 Book 4 Contents

Our people are proud of everything they have done over the past twenty years. Under the leadership of the Bulgarian Communist Party, with its inspired work and high enthusiasm, it has accomplished many heroic feats, embodied in everything that surrounds us: in the beautiful fields and gardens of our homeland, in the bubbling canals of the irrigation systems, in the factory chimneys rising to the sky, in the white buildings of the factories, in the endless electric power lines, in the black asphalt strips of the roads, and in the new homes of our cities and villages immersed in fresh greenery. The symphony of economic indicators in the days of the twentieth anniversary of our revolution sounds powerful and full, rises crescendo and solemnly. The centuries-old backwardness of our homeland has been overcome, and on the clear horizon behind the scaffolding and tower cranes, the approaches to the heights of communism are outlined.

Comrades, After our last telephone conversation, I was very worried by the message that the issue of the magazine was already under printing and only my journalistic material was waiting. From my 38 years of journalistic and writing activity and 31 years of work as a professional journalist, I know very well what this means. For me, as an author who had promised a manuscript and on whom the editorial staff relied, there could be no going back. The material, as they say in today's editorial language, must be submitted, and immediately. All deadlines have been met. Submitted, but how, when it has not been written. And not only the editorial staff, but above all the author is interested in its submission. The material was supposed to be his writerly and journalistic report and gratitude to the great twentieth anniversary of the homeland.

The editorial board of the magazine addressed the fiction writers Andrey Gulyashki, Georgi Markov and Milcho Radev with the following questions: What paths did our socialist fiction travel during the 1920s? What main moments do you see in its development (respectively in the development of the novel, the short story or the short story)? What main problems and conflicts of our time are you particularly interested in? Which phenomena of socialist restructuring, which problems of the urban and rural man, of the intelligentsia and the youth occupy you in your work? Which obsessions do you consider harmful in contemporary fiction? What kind of foreign influences is it freed from in order to develop more fruitfully? What unfulfilled duty does our fiction have to the reader? What unsolved tasks do you see before it? What aspects of the tradition do you think can be fruitfully developed by the contemporary fiction writer? In what direction do you see the innovative searches of the contemporary fiction writer? In what direction are your own searches for new ways of expression? What new elements of fiction technique, genre enrichment, and genre blending do you think are part of the concept of contemporary fiction? How are they reflected in your own work as your own preferences?

By some ridiculous and offensive habit, we living people usually pass each other without looking deeper into each other's eyes, without thinking that an invisible star shines on each of our foreheads. Only when we lose a loved one do we realize what a void has opened up around us, which will never be filled. This is probably why a French author wrote that the world of our dead is richer than the world of the living. The fate of poets is even stranger. During their lifetime, people often coexist with them without recognizing their true features. Even in the clichéd dimensions of everyday life, their peculiarities seem like funny oddities. However, when a true poet is gone, his image suddenly takes on a different light. Even his small oddities gain significance and his every whim carries a mysterious meaning. Then everyone is curious to solve the "enigma."

Although it is risky to guess, it seems to me that if Pavel Matev had not been nurtured by the socialist revolution, he would hardly have linked his fate with fiction. That grain of poetic talent that he carried within him would have frozen out amidst the cold whirlwinds of life. The socialist revolution created him - both as a citizen and as a poet. It made a fighter and a person out of the "timid peasant" who steals sunflower cakes from the yards and throws slingshots at the windows, who searches for bird nests in the thorns and wades through puddles with punctured shoes. It instilled in him responsibility before the class and the people, drew him into the ranks of the resistance, and he became a fighter, a fighter of the Communist Party, inspired by the idea of ​​human superiority. When victory came, he chose the weapon of poetic speech to fulfill his duty before those with whom he walked shoulder to shoulder. The heroic time has passed. The memory of the thousands who died remained. A grandiose construction began. Pavel Matev was inspired by the beauty of socialism and it inspired him to create. It and the memory of the dead. Thus, the revolution nursed the poet through its two different phases, and he became its singer. One unchanging commandment follows Pavel Matev - to serve it faithfully and honestly. Its path is also his, its manhood and his creative maturation. Today we would easily find a number of false tones in his first poems. But we should not forget that they were born from his aspiration to be a soldier of the party, of the revolution, of that "devotion to loyalty" that only the unworthy do not respect.

Every personal contact I have had with Dimitar Dimov has evoked in me the feeling that his whole life is a constant dichotomy between logic and imagination, between science and his vocation as an artist. At the same time a professor of veterinary anatomy and a writer, he seems to have no other dedication than the measured, methodical work of a scientist. Sometimes I have been amazed at the logic of his reasoning, devoid of the spontaneity characteristic of some other writers I know, and at the same time at his subtle observations on morals and human weaknesses, his insight into the dialectics of the human soul, his attachment to bright, colorful characters, with a personal modesty and strictness towards himself.

After his first stories, printed in the newspapers "Struya" and "Trud" in the period 1933-1935, Andrei Gulyashki published several more significant works of fiction: the novels "Don Quixote of Sylvester", "Death Sentence" and the sketches "Women". These works are without particular artistic value. They are youthful experiments. The author is still a young man - he has just turned 25, an age that is too early for a fiction writer. Usually at such an age literary influences are strongest. They can be difficult to overcome. The direct life observations, impressions, all that huge life material that a fiction writer needs to build his works, has not been collected. The originality of the artist almost always depends on the depth with which his gaze penetrates reality. Early fiction works are in most cases either autobiographical on intimate themes, or to one degree or another imitative. Exceptions like Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks" are few.

Today, no one seriously believes in astrology, this self-proclaimed sister of the exact sciences, before whose prophecies popes and monarchs once trembled. The works of the divine Nostradamus have long been only the subject of philological studies, and astrologers have become a greater rarity than both Egyptian priests and Egyptian fakirs. So it would hardly occur to anyone to look for "divine omens" in the coincidence of the twentieth anniversary of the socialist revolution in Bulgaria with the fiftieth anniversaries of some of our writers. And, of course, only in a metaphorical, and very approximate sense can the expression be used that "their horoscopes coincide", but it is precisely the deep regularity of this coincidence that gives us the right to resort to its help. And indeed. Now, as we enter a period of creative reckoning, of national celebrations and reports, the question naturally arises: what were the writers-anniversaries like before, what did they become after the people's victory over fascism and capitalism.

A doctor of economic and political sciences, who once studied civil engineering in Czechoslovakia and law in Sofia, but did not become either a civil engineer or a lawyer, who took the first doctorate in political economy at Sofia University, an unknown scholar one day - about ten years ago - showed the manuscript of his voluminous novel. At a time when three or four novels were published a year, all by established and famous authors, this young man had dared to test his strength nowhere else, but in one of the most difficult literary genres - the historical novel, - which eminent writers not only in our country but also elsewhere, not only now, but also in the past had not found the courage to touch! ... But on the other hand, how few writers of all ages and professions are seized by the ambition to show such audacity?

The dramaturgy of Kamen Zidarov is one of the major phenomena of our contemporary dramaturgy. For nearly two decades, his plays have not left the stages of Bulgarian theaters, arousing the interest of thousands of admirers of theatrical art, igniting the imagination, causing enthusiasm, educating. "Tsar's Mercy", "For the Honor of the Epaulette", "Ivan Shishman" - these are the stages of a rich creative work with a wide ideological and thematic scope. These are works that over time do not lose their relevance, the dust of oblivion does not fall on them, but on the contrary - theatergoers, spectators, and readers continue to put them on stage, watch and read. This is an unmistakable indication that the dramaturgy of Kamen Zidarov has withstood the tests of time - the truest criterion of artistic creativity, the highest award for the creator.

Nikolai Ivanovich Gnedich was a poet, a contemporary of Pushkin, and a translator who recreated the Iliad in Russian - a translation that continues to be talked about today, because it was made with great knowledge of both languages ​​and a subtle poetic taste. Decades would pass and the Gnedich family would give Russian literature other representatives. Until our days, when Tatyana Grigorievna Gnedich is the continuer of this family tradition... For several years, Byron's Don Juan has not left the stage of the Leningrad Comedy Theater. The newspapers wrote a lot about the beautiful performance and even more about the translation of the famous poem, made with incredible grace, linguistic orchestration, and beautiful verse. This translation belongs precisely to the aforementioned Tatyana Grigorievna Gnedich. The translation of Don Juan has a very interesting and instructive story. And it is as follows.

Each play represents a self-contained whole, an autonomous mechanism that draws energy for its movement from forces embedded within itself. This is a kind of "self-moving" mechanism. Here, the author is deprived of the usual function of a reproducer of the action, the role of an intermediary in tracking events and describing images. Direct authorial intervention is completely absent. In the play, the images immediately live their own independent life, "realize" themselves before our eyes without anyone's external help, through the momentary manifestation of their essence in words, actions and behavior. They "self-portray themselves". And the only means they have at their disposal to accomplish this is action. They act in order to reveal themselves, and by revealing themselves, they act.

In the Soviet Union, there has long been a lively interest in Bulgarian literature. The works of Bulgarian writers are published and widely distributed throughout the vast Soviet land. First place here is occupied by translations into Russian. By 1944, several dozen books with works by Vazov, Karavelov, Botev, Smirnensky, Geo Milev, M. Marchevsky, L. Stoyanov, etc. were published in Russian. The Russian reader became acquainted with the merits of our native literature, loved it, and began to seek it out. However, relations at that time with bourgeois Bulgaria did not contribute to the widespread translation and distribution of Bulgarian literature. The victory of the people's power on September 9 opened a new page in the relations of our homeland with the USSR. Having embarked on a new path, Bulgaria established the closest fraternal relations with the great Soviet country. Our lively cultural ties favored the distribution of Bulgarian literature in the Soviet Union. The number of translations there grew rapidly. Today, translations into Russian hold first place among all other languages. Over the past twenty years, 217 separate books of works by Bulgarian writers have been published in Russian in the USSR. A significant part of the works of our masters of the literary word are already known to the Russian reader.

While before September 9, 1944, only the translations of the most prominent representatives of our classics such as Ivan Vazov, Pencho Slaveykov, Elin Pelin, Yordan Yovkov, and in separate anthologies of about 40 other authors were known abroad, now we can state with satisfaction the fact that over the past 20-year historical period, more than 1,450 volumes of Bulgarian prose, poetry and drama have been published in 57 foreign languages ​​in a total of 24,000,000 copies.

It cannot be said that Bulgarian literature is known in Western European countries. This is most clearly demonstrated by the sometimes very strange notes that appear in some Western publications, and serious ones at that, such as "Larus Mansuel" for example, about our literature, in which, in addition to gross factual errors, we also find such assessments that directly arouse both bewilderment and a smile. Wasn't the short essay on Bulgarian literature in the luxurious edition of the large Parisian publishing house Hachet "Contemporary Literatures in the World", which was also promptly noted on the pages of "Literary Thought", really simply comical? But was there not some intention here, in the article by this author, Bernard Georges? Many things that this text contained give us decisive grounds to assume some intention.

Undoubtedly, the face of a research institute is its scientific production. It is the main indicator of the role it plays in solving the major problems that life poses to it, and of the place it occupies in the development of modern scientific thought. If we take a look at the scientific publications of the Institute of Literature that appeared after September 9, in the period from its establishment in the first years of people's power to the present day, we cannot help but admit that it is growing more and more and is shaping itself as a center of Bulgarian literary studies. An ever-increasing number of workers who deal scientifically with the problems of literature are grouping around it, the range of topics developed is expanding, the number of printed works is growing. And today, when, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Day of Freedom, our people are taking stock of what has been accomplished in all areas of socialist construction, we cannot but rejoice in the fact that the scientific team at the Institute of Literature can also add its share to the general successes. Over 60 volumes of individual books, 15 volumes of Izvestia with 150 studies and scientific reports and 7 anniversaries of the journal "Literary Thought" are the surest proof of this. To these figures should be added the large number of books and individual studies by the institute's collaborators, published outside the Academy, as well as the numerous popular scientific publications in the periodical press. In 1962, volume 1 of the projected 4-volume history of Bulgarian literature, covering the Old Bulgarian period, was published. With this, the most important and responsible task set before the institute began to be implemented in practice as a result of many years of organizational and scientific preparatory work. Its successful implementation will respond to a long-awaited need in our cultural life. Therefore, the efforts of the entire institute staff are now focused on completing the History. The draft of Volume II, which will soon be published, was discussed at a scientific level, with a great sense of responsibility. Individual chapters of Volume III are also being discussed. The nearly 20-year scientific production of the institute touches on issues from almost all areas of literary studies - literary heritage, contemporary literature, theoretical and aesthetic problems, interactions with other Slavic and Western European literatures, primarily with Russian and Soviet literature. The publications move in two main directions, which also reflect the main tasks facing the institute and which the team has tried to implement. On the one hand, we have carried out extremely useful scientific preparatory work, which is expressed in the publication of a number of collections of materials (memoirs, letters, documents) about the life and work of our writers, in the preparation of academic editions of our classics, in the compilation of detailed chronicles of their lives and creative path. The institute has also made a considerable contribution in this direction in establishing and publishing the archival heritage of a number of our writers. A valuable initiative in this regard is the creation of the series "Literary Archive", volume I of which was published in 1959 with materials by Petko Slaveykov, and now volume II is being published with materials from the archival heritage of Geo Milev. The publication of this series aims to encompass the archival heritage of an ever-increasing number of writers.