Bogomil Nonev

Literary criticism in its centuries-long development has often suffered from biased theories and tendentious verbiage. We speak too much against dogmatism and schematism, which during the time of the cult of personality inflicted severe damage on the creative thinking of the critic and the writer. But these two ailments of shaky creative health are neither a monopoly nor exceptionally characteristic phenomena precisely for us, who strive to open the doors to the future as widely as possible, to tell the truth about life and history, to stir up the spiritual and physical powers of people. Dogmatism and schematism are three hundred times more characteristic of Western decadent philosophy and aesthetics. Where historical horizons are lost, darkening in the shadow of rising supermen and in bloody sunsets, defined as the fatal end of European culture, pessimism and skepticism are taking root more and more widely. And it is precisely this philosophy of spiritual darkness that conditions presupposed theories that kill creative and critical thought, immerses pure truths in murderous gibberish, speculates with eternal concepts, absolutizes certain biological traits or human weaknesses and elevates them into eternal and irreparable properties of human nature.

It is customary to say that the main questions that we should address when examining our contemporary literature are whether the writer is firmly connected to life, whether he stands on sincere party positions, whether he reflects in his work the problems and characters characteristic of our era, whether he transforms into an exciting work of art those incredible changes that have taken place in socio-political life, in the psychology of the people, in the landscape of the country. These should really be not only the main questions, but also the starting points in all discussions of our contemporary literature. But the more books are published, the more names of young poets, fiction writers or playwrights appear on the literary horizon, the more it becomes customary to raise alarming cries that the writer stands far behind life, that he is moving aside from the general victorious course of our communist times. We have a considerable annual production - an average of fifty books of short stories, novels, essays. Among them we will meet convincing works and inept attempts, works written with a sure pen and literary blunders, which in most cases delight with their unfeigned sincerity, inner excitement and noble ambition, rather than with their literary qualities. We will also meet with the incarnations of the scheme, with soulless and artisanal written books, with tedious repetitions that bring nothing new to our literature. But what we can safely say is that all these books recreate plots drawn from the time in which we live, they concern the problems of socialist man, the struggles of our people for the construction of the new society. Another question is what artistic power, internal scale, aesthetic suggestion these books possess. If we want to get to know this "united and multifaceted" world, about which we so often speak, we will not find it in just one author, nor in just one book. On the contrary, we will establish that in the problematics of our contemporary prose there are many gaps, many more and different aspects of life have not found artistic reflection in our literature. First of all, we will mention that there are no books about the life and way of life of people from socialist structures. We will constantly have to talk about these gaps, to direct our writer to the key themes of the time, to demand a full and deep artistic transformation of reality in literature.

At the beginning of this century, the famous physicist Hautermans discovered that nuclear explosions are the source of the great solar energy. This is a brilliant insight that later gave rise to unprecedented results in the development of modern sciences. They give reason to many people to call the time in which we live - the atomic age. TOR Hautermans returns in his memories to his youth, when he reached the conclusion of his several years of research and reflections. And he tells of that day of joy from the scientific discovery, in which the imagination quickly draws new perspectives and scientific programs for work, as if bathed in the sunshine, giving rise to new hopes and the will to penetrate the depths of the secrets of nature. "But that same evening," he continues, "I went out for a walk with a beautiful girl. When it got dark and the stars, in all their splendor, began to appear one after another, my companion exclaimed: "How beautifully they shine, don't they?" I puffed out my chest and said importantly: "Since yesterday I know why they are glowing." But it immediately became clear to me that my statement did not move her at all. It was possible that she simply did not believe me. But, it seems to me that at that moment she did not feel the slightest interest in any problems.

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.