Ivan Paunovski

It is difficult to read a book in which quotations occupy a significant part of the content. However, these are not quotations that a specialist, contrary to the practice established in our country, should avoid due to their general notoriety. Ivan Tsvetkov quotes an extraordinary number of times, but he quotes things that are known to a limited number of literary scholars. Or they are new even to them, something that does not surprise anyone, since the author is undoubtedly the best expert on the material related to the topic "Gorky and Bulgarian Literature". Of course, there can always be people who will underestimate this positive quality of the author's erudition with the objection that such "collection" can be carried out by a moderately qualified writer or simply by a dilettante. In general, this may be the case, but in this case it is not at all the case. For the simple reason that when it comes to Gorky, dilettante prefer a completely different type of activity, least of all research. In this way, the deep and comprehensive connections of the great writer with our Literature for half a century and more and with our cultural and social life in general are at best only declared and very little is shown through the traces that the literary process has left us. That is why Ivan Tsvetkov's book does not at all fill a void, "as the reviewers like to express themselves. On the contrary, it energetically pushes aside the general newspaper articles and other similar materials that have occupied an excessively large territory, in which Gorky's name is associated only with the most superficial and rhetorical recognition of his importance for us and with five or six facts that are remembered and known only because they are constantly repeated to us. Finally, what should Ivan Tsvetkov start with, except for collecting the material buried by our inattention?

Russian literature has captivated the masses with such great dramas that the case of the hero of the novel "The Double" seems to them quite insignificant. But despite this, for more than a hundred years now, the great controversy surrounding this novel and the nightmarish incident with the titular councilor Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, which occurred on the Fontanka embankment in the capital city of Petersburg, in November, in rain and snow, late at night... Leaning on the railings that had been erected along the Fontanka, Yakov Petrovich was experiencing perhaps the most terrible moments of his life. Having just been thrown out of the house of the state councilor Berendeyev, he was ready to disappear altogether, to collapse into the ground, to cease to exist, to turn into dust... But none of this happened, but an extraordinary and puzzling incident occurred: the titular councilor met his double on the banks of the murky and even black Fontanka River.