Книжка-4

1965 Book 4 Contents

A wide library hall in the House of Culture. The left side is occupied by shelves with books, carelessly stacked in various positions. On the right - wide windows that cover the entire wall and make the hall bright and conducive to peace and reflection. In the corner, a ceiling-high philodendron, whose wide leaves seem to have consciously turned towards the sun to remind them of their distant tropical homeland. At an oblong table, the two opponents sit and leaf through books and magazines. They have left the neighboring hall, where a report on poetry is being read. Yankov. (With a smile). We are completely calm here. No one will disturb our conversation. As you know, writers are afraid of the word "bibliotheca". For them, it is something like a book museum, a tomb of names worthy of respect, but suffocated by literary incense. Gorano v. (With bitterness). How easily a writer can fall behind the times! His era opens its doors wide, and he has grabbed hold of some dogma and clings to it like a blind man to a stick! I recently came across the court case of Giordano Bruno before the court of the Inquisition. As a faithful son of the Catholic Church, Bruno recognizes the dogma of the "Trinity of God", recognizes it "a priori", as a verbal exercise, but, he says, it has nothing to do with the infinity of the universe and the innumerability of the worlds". He calls the holy fathers "a constellation of pedants who, with their ignorance, arrogance and rudeness, would drive Job himself out of patience". Scholasticism is for him a "shell for souls", instead of a "grain of knowledge". Yankov. (Laughs). What is to be done! The great man is always ahead of his time. Goranov. No. There is something else here. Such is pedantic thought. It is lazy, sectarian, and lacks flight. That is why I divide writers into two types: sectarians and artists, i.e. creators. Sectarians cannot be creators because of their sectarianism, they lag behind in their development, they arrive at the airport of history when the jet machine of time has long since taken off.

Every poet has the inalienable right to a personal poetic voice and an individual artistic vision. Every lyric has the right to life, as long as the anxious blood of the time that gives rise to it flows in its poetic rhythm... Poetry, hermetically isolated from the pathos of the era, is a lifeless distillate, a sterile extract, without color, without taste and sweetness, without any attractive properties... Such poetry resembles an artificial rose, which, despite its filigree elegance, remains a dead thing. And vice versa - a lyric, bearing the mark of the restless atmosphere in which it was born, is read as a revelation. It sounds like a secret confession. Each couplet echoes in the heart inspired, truthful and strong! Each verse carries the dynamics and tragedy of the time. It is deeply imbued with the feelings and moods of the people... Every good poem grows into a page of a lyrical diary of the era. And the poet - into its prophet. A new and proud inspiration. By speaking with the wisdom of the people, the poet elevates the field of thoughts and feelings. He confesses the most intimate desires, sings with a native voice and takes on the role of an inspired herald in the struggle. To free poetry from theses and qualities is equivalent to shooting it. The artistic work of Veselin Andreev supports the truths about the enormous role of the poet and the poetic word. He brought his own vital themes into our contemporary lyric poetry. He showed the tense life of the Bulgarian partisans and became the discoverer of their heroism, suffering and pride. He pointed out the most acute conflicts of the anti-fascist era in our country, rediscovering them in the rich spirituality of the modern communist, in whose image he saw the unquenchable world of the future.

"The Reaper" is a node in Yordan Yovkov's work. It most vividly brings together the writer's contradictions. Talent, life, and the idea are constantly struggling here; rise and defeat alternate. We see how the author searches, how he expands his concepts to an all-encompassing philosophy of life, striving to outgrow the narrow-mindedness of religious views and place his work on a universal human level. It is wrong to attribute all the ideas in the novel as the author's ideas. Many of them are ideas of the characters, ideas that struggle with each other, compete, without being shared by the author. Nevertheless, they are related to the general artistic idea of ​​the work. Or, more precisely, without them it is unthinkable. It would not exist, it would not have artistic objectivity. "That's how I experienced these things in the village and that's how I felt them," says Yovkov about his novel "The Reaper." I experienced and felt - this is already a separation of the writer from the work. He looks from the position of an artist. He recreates the events, moving away from them, preserving his independence - to be truthful, honest to his feelings and life. But he was in this life. And he will be biased towards one or another of its sides. Can we separate ourselves from the essence, from the eternal human weakness - bias? We always belong to something, we exist for it and through it. It settles deep within us and colors our attitude to the world, our thoughts, views, spiritual thrills. It connects us firmly with the present or pushes us towards the past. We act or Contemplate.

It is not so strange that books outlive eras, that sometimes they enter the next era younger and fresher than they were at the time of their creation. It is stranger that books outlive their own authors, not by their longevity, but by their spirit and temperament, that they remain young and daring sometimes to remind us of the spiritual old age of their creators, of their hesitations and torments. Before his death, Voltaire sought the cooperation of the church, of that same church that he denounced in so many of his works. Gogol's "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Comrades" bears little resemblance to the first volume of "Dead Souls," and with "Confession" Tolstoy also denied "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." In the same way, old Boccaccio condemned "The Decameron" and even became a monk, but "The Decameron" did not suffer from this at all. Books are a magnificent weapon against both the whims and the fluctuations of old age. Good books are for the spiritually young.

At the beginning of 1884, for several months, three poems by Vazov were published one after the other on the pages of the newspaper "Narodniy Glas" and the magazine "Nauka". These are "Sallust's Sneeze", "Sinai Rose" and "In the Kingdom of the Samodivs" - titles that in themselves already suggest something new about the author's searches in the field of poetry. And indeed, all three works lead us into new areas of life, beyond the boundaries of folk life, from which the author had drawn material until now. Only "Sinai Rose" could be connected in a certain sense with the thematic scope of his previous poems - insofar as it depicts the fate of a Bulgarian girl, captured during the Russo-Turkish War and sold into slavery in the distant Sinai desert. But in spirit and style, this is a purely romantic work that has nothing to do with the tone and character of "Vidul", "Gramada", "Trayko and Riza", and "Zagorka". The poet who lifted the heavy burden of Trayko and called Ruska a "peony flower" is simply unrecognizable here.

I met him for the first time in the fall of 1928. The descendant of Lyuben Karavelov had just returned from abroad, from emigration. Tall, with his head slightly bowed between his asymmetrically raised shoulders, the figure of this man radiated intransigence, the valor of the unyielding. When he spoke calmly, a bribing childish gullibility and kindness flowed from his gaze. But if he happened to switch to polemics and defend his faith in the people and their right to freedom and human happiness, arrows of his revolutionary conviction would fly from his eyes. His gesture was angular and dramatic, saturated with a hidden inner tragedy, intertwined with boundless feeling for the poor, for the suffering. The sonority of his voice carried the excitement of his noble heart, the impulses of his impetuous thoughts, the accent of his charming devotion as a faithful proletarian son... A sworn devotion that consciously and unwaveringly came true over time in that tragic end of Nikolai Khrelkov, which became a measure of his moral and political stature as a communist citizen.

Our time, along with the atom and space, despite automated production and despotic regimes, has imposed an indisputable cult: man. Renaissance humanism is an unparalleled pathetic glorification of the complete real man, universally and comprehensively developed", but it is inferior in depth to the analyses that contemporary art makes of man, who proved incapable of harmony in the bourgeois era. The interest in the intimate world of the individual, the awareness of the role of the subject, of his multifaceted, inexhaustible soulfulness, bring to literature a flow of lyricism that neither drama nor epic can resist. Although the novel - this "form of transcendental helplessness (G. Lukács), with its amorphousness and incompleteness, and drama - this ideally and existentially tense genre (E. Zeiger) with its pathetic or problematic conflict, have proven, according to most theorists, to be the most suitable for recreating the reality of modern man, the fate of the lyrical" does not cease to concern specialists and is intertwined with the practice of the "epic" and the "dramatic". The frequent observations that lyric poetry is the least popular today, that modern man and modern society are alien to the lyrical - are hasty and erroneous. Statistics show that in recent years interest in lyrical creativity has been resurging, and literary studies prove that it itself is undergoing significant evolution. In France, for example, last year there were from twenty to fifty thousand poets! (Nouvelle Critique magazine, No. 158/1964). A large number of youth poetry magazines are being published and are gaining popularity. Pocket editions began to publish Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Eluard, Aragon in mass circulation. In a short time, several poetic manifestos appeared: "Poetry to Live" by Jean Breton and Serge Brando, "The Manifesto" by Pierre Garnier, etc., which, together with "Word and Vertigo" by Alain Bosquet, the discussion of the magazine "Tel Kel" on poetry (No. 17), etc., testify to an effort to limit and explain the guiding principles of a "new" poetry.

In the last ten years in France, among university literary scholars, there has been a clear interest in the so-called "thematic study" of a given author's work. Moreover, the proportional number of works devoted to thematic analyses is so large that it could be rightly said that they have recently become a fashion in literary studies. This direction in literary criticism was given by Professor Charles Moron, who in his work, Introduction to Psychocriticism (1938) developed the thesis that every artist is a visionary who enchants the reader with his own special, personal world, filled with strange visions, images and pictures, always the same in the different works of the artist, which came unconsciously, but insistently intruding on his consciousness, as well as on the consciousness of the reader. This peculiar personal mythology of the artist can precisely explain the impact of the work, an impact that can hardly be understood if we are satisfied only with the external meaning of the work. The task of the researcher, according to Moron, consists in revealing this personal mythology, the secret structure, the system of symbols that a given author uses involuntarily and unconsciously, or in other words, in determining the constant dominant themes in the work. He believes that by solving this task, one can also arrive at solving one of the main problems in The psychology of art - the problem of the genesis of artistic creativity.

V. M. Garshin is one of the most original Russian writers, a great master of the socio-psychological narrative and a sincere defender of the people's interests. He is a bright representative of the generation of the 70s - 80s of the last century, of people with a sick conscience, who suffered a collapse in their populist ideals and did not find the strength to overcome the deep contradictions of life. Throughout his life, Garshin painfully experienced social inequality between people, sought justice, but did not find the true path to struggle against the cruel bourgeois system. This impasse, characteristic of the entire Democratic intelligentsia of the 70s - 80s, led him to suicide. But although he lived only 33 years, Garshin left us such works that characterize him as a great master of the word. In a letter to Garshin, I. S. Turgenev wrote: "Of all the young writers, you are the one who inspires hope. You possess all the signs of a truly great talent: artistic temperament, subtle and true understanding of the characteristic features of life - human and general, feeling for justice and measure, simplicity, beauty of form and - as a result of everything - originality." Garshin enjoys special sympathy in our country. The Bulgarian public has always perceived him not only as a highly humane person and an original writer, but also as a direct participant in the great struggle of our people against Turkish slavery. Bulgaria played a significant role in the initial formation of public views and Garshin's artistic talent.

Georgi Gachev's book with the unattractive title "Accelerated Development of Literature" is, for me, the most attractive fruit of Bulgarian studies outside our borders. In it, Gachev demonstrates great advantages over his colleagues at home and abroad, his efforts are intertwined with some of the latest searches in contemporary literary studies. Relying on the brilliant tradition of Russian comparative literary studies and the contemporary achievements of Marxist literary theory, he makes almost the first attempt at a theoretical history of Bulgarian literature in one of the important periods of its development. Despite the complex, abstract-theoretical formulation of the questions and the purely rationalistic pathos in resolving them, the book bears a clear imprint of the researcher's personality, his spiritual searches and problems. You have to be Bulgarian for the tragic vicissitudes of our national cultural development, the fate of these figures distant in history, the weaknesses and discontinuities to arouse such fascination in you. of tradition. In general, to feel within oneself this thirst and longing for tradition, for supporting and stable forms. You have to be a foreigner to be able to look from the side, to have lived with other cultures, to be blinded by the astonishing paradoxes of a literature, the unexpected combinations, the tragicomic anachronisms and even more unexpected appropriations. Gachev has taken a voluntary and noble risk - to find the laws of a delayed and therefore accelerated cultural development, to discover the motives driving it, natural tendencies in an unnatural development. He undertakes his risky experiment on a period in the history of our literature - the end of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century - which as much complicates as it eases his task. The difficulty comes from the fact that, due to its nature, this literature knows nothing about itself, in it criticism, programs, aesthetic platforms are absent. In many respects this is not literature itself, but culture in the broadest sense of the word. With rare exceptions, its written monuments are far less interesting than the vital and spiritual adventures of their creators. In these written monuments, the creators are reflected palely and sluggishly. The difficulties are also increased by the fact that until now this period of our literary development has aroused and arouses factual, empirical interest in researchers. In our country, there is no theoretical interest in key periods, genres, trends and problems of literary development, and Gachev's work was prepared only from the factual side. Perhaps that is why for many it was a surprise, almost an unauthorized attempt and unnecessary complication.

The extremely interesting work of G. D. Gachev "Accelerated Development of Literature" gives us the opportunity to look at it and evaluate it in a broader perspective, not directly related to the problems of Bulgarian Renaissance literature. The author's main concept of accelerated development poses contemporary questions that have the prospect of becoming increasingly contemporary. Every new generation and every individual who has appeared in this world must undergo accelerated development in order to be able to perceive in a concise, abbreviated form the experience of humanity gained in its centuries-old development. That is why the author's concept is very relevant, fruitful and of great importance for those who work on the work of individual writers. For my personal work, for example, on M. Tchaikovsky's Sadyk Pasha, Gachev's book with the problems posed and solved in it is extremely useful. Because I too am faced with a vivid case of accelerated development. The ideological formation of Polish emigration to France in the 19th century poses this question with all its acuteness. Polish emigrants arrived in Paris - the most elevated cultural center of Europe at that time, from a feudal country, some even, like Tchaikovsky, from distant Ukraine, where in both everyday life and in the worldview of the people there is still too much of the folklore-epic stage of human development. And they must catch up at an accelerated pace with the level of the most advanced human thought in the fields of politics, sociology and literature, each proceeding in the perception of the new from his own unique personal experience and personal knowledge and understanding of the world, brought from his homeland.

They say that people's names are sometimes so closely associated with their personality that it is difficult to imagine a familiar person with another name. I think this is also true of good books and their characters. "Under the Yoke" cannot be named by us otherwise than as the poet called it. We cannot imagine Boycho Ognyanov and Dr. Sokolov otherwise than with the names with which they entered history. And if we nevertheless succumb to an illusion with people, then with books and literary images we are always dealing with a regularity. And this regularity, it seems to me, is the presence of that real aesthetic coating that always exists between conception and execution in every talented book, in every significant image. Milena Tsaneva has titled her first separate book "From the Poetic World of Ivan Vazov". Along with the subtitle - literary-critical articles - this title suddenly reveals both the intention of the entire book and the aesthetic scope of its content. With the title chosen in this way, the author does not promise much. And, thank God, we have had enough of pretentious titles that promise a lot but do not deliver even half of what was expected. This is not the case with M. Tsaneva. She does not undertake to study the entire mountain before mastering its approaches. She does not approach Vazov's legacy with the self-confidence of a historian, nor does she promise to be exhaustive within the framework of a monograph. Her task is more modest. Captivated by Vazov's poetic world, she wants to share with us both her joy from direct contact with some countries only from the rich, diverse and instructive world of the artist, and her excitement about some unresolved issues. A modesty worthy of respect. Because behind the apparent simplicity of the definition - literary-critical articles - lies a clearly realized aesthetic concept, which is proven by the way of specific observations and reflections on Vazov's poetic world. That is why it would be at least hasty to think that M. Tsaneva's book is simply a series of separate articles, written on different occasions and published in different places, which the author now presents to her readers collected together. Sometimes this is how it happens - different articles are collected and published as a separate book, which is united by nothing else except the two covers. A careful reading of the book "From the poetic world of Ivan Vazov" shows that she makes a happy exception. Here, the commonality that unites the individual articles is neither in the thematic object" nor in the external chronological sequence. It is elsewhere - in the unified aesthetic concept, in the original interpretation of the subject, in the special, emphatically personal author's vision and assessment. This gives the book a significance that goes beyond the framework of the literary-critical analysis of individual works and brings it closer to scientific-theoretical research, while preserving the freshness of immediate perceptions and emotional outbursts. It can be said that M. Tsaneva happily combines the "strict" view of the scientist with the restless heart of the poet. Perhaps this individual attitude of the "critical apparatus" also determines the special charm of her style - as scientific as it is expressive, equally strong in theoretical-philosophical generalizations and in specific aesthetic judgments. Being "readable", M. Tsaneva's style is not lightly essayistic. The elegance of the phrase is always based on the depth of thought, the categoricalness of the assessments, the persuasiveness of the arguments. And that is why, I will repeat again, her individual articles do not carry an anniversary gloss, but a sharp feeling of the power and beauty of the considered artistic phenomena, transformed into a convincing ideological and aesthetic analysis. And this is precisely the strength of M. Tsaneva as a connoisseur. She knows how to introduce effortlessly into the world of art, creating an emotional atmosphere in which she immerses everything - both the author and the problems considered, and the reader. And to make her notes, develop her thoughts, impose her assessments without unnecessary critical pathos, without inflated erudition and irritating ostentation. One example from the study of "Epic of the Forgotten" is enough to present the author: "Epic of the Forgotten" is a classic work of the elevated heroic-romantic style. Here the heroes appear with their halo of heroes, standing in the pose in which the monuments immortalize them. Of course, no one would undertake to recommend as universally obligatory one single approach to the image of the heroic. But still, it seems to me, one cannot fail to note that Vazov's solemn, pathetic style has its own particularly deep psychological basis.

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