Книжка-4

1966 Book 4 Contents

Many of his contemporaries have left us his portrait: strong shoulders, a yellowish beard like a satyr's, strong fists, sometimes engaged in action, a Balkan nature in general. And he has established himself in our poetry as the most tender and soulful lyricist. His feeling gushes from innermost depths and pours out now in rapturous tones, now in quiet words, in a longing call for an unfulfilled, but still longed-for love. He sometimes feels joy, but he carefully conceals it due to the fear of some fatal predestination. He is tormented by a sad self-doubt, which soon, too soon curbs his bright impulses. His feeling pours out in dual ranges - both in rebellious murmur, and in impotent pity, and in a proud smile, and in gentle, noble suffering. This complex contradiction of his, this quiet drama of his, distinguishes him from Pencho Slaveykov and even from P. K. Yavorov.

Kiril Hristov lived a difficult life, a life filled with constant torment, eternal dissatisfaction. He had unattainable ambitions. He considered himself the called spiritual leader of the nation. But after the first great recognition he received in the 1990s, his civic and personal behavior became increasingly unpleasant to the literary community. He began to be evaluated biasedly, slander and ridicule began to pour down on him from all sides, his poetry was denied most sharply and without appeal, he himself became the object of newspaper headlines. No distinction was made between the person, his behavior and his poetry, and everything was irresponsibly denied in a heap. He lived with the consciousness of a slandered prophet. Comical gestures began to appear in his public behavior. The more hatred and dislike he encountered, the more angrily he attacked his contemporaries, participated in the wildest and most outrageous newspaper polemics and arguments, flailed left and right, and in his rage he spared no means to prove how pitiful and deranged the Bulgarian intelligentsia was, which could not appreciate and understand him, the genius and the prophet. Nothing could calm his wounded ambition, nothing could satisfy his cold pride. His soul seemed to be covered with thorns and nettles, words of icy contempt and malice towards his contemporaries did not come from his lips.

The final result of the creative process is the creation of an artistic image, which has a tangible, sensory-perceptible body thanks to the material characteristic of the type of art (words, sounds, stone, clay, wood, body movements, etc.) and which begins to exist outside the creative consciousness that created it. Today, the process of artistic creation is viewed as a duality of a kind of reflection of reality and objective, creative activity, through which the artistic image is created as a "new object of the objective world." And this duality is indicated as the most characteristic feature of the image, by means of which all its other features could be explained. It is indeed impossible to speak of the artistic image only as the content of consciousness. In the head of the writer, painter, sculptor, etc. There is only an idea, which in the creative process is developed and transformed into an artistic image - into a special reality (called by some theorists "aesthetic reality"), into an object that already opposes any aesthetic consciousness, because it exists independently of it (in what sense and to what extent, this will be clarified below). Thus, the idea, transformed into an artistic image, receives its own existence - the existence of the artistic image. The latter seems to live its own life (sometimes with a very changeable and strange fate - Hamlet, the Mona Lisa), which often transcends centuries and millennia and remains an immortal possession of humanity.

The question of literary influences on Karavelov is complex and interesting. It is inextricably linked with the entire complex of problems of the writer's creative path, of the features, place and significance of his literary work. It cannot be properly understood if we do not approach it concretely and historically. The concretely and historically approach implies a study not only of the historical moment, but also of the specific features of national development, of the national cultural process. As a writer, L. Karavelov learned from the work of strictly defined authors: primarily from revolutionary-democratic Russian and Ukrainian literature and from Gogol's work. The revolutionary-democratic direction influenced him with two of its main tendencies, manifested, on the one hand, in the works of writers who developed the journalistic genre in fiction, such as Chernyshevsky and Herzen, and on the other hand, in works that are distinguished by a peculiar national, even populist pathos. The most significant representative of the latter trend is the Ukrainian writer M. Vovchok. The influence of M. Vovchok and T. Shevchenko on Karavelov's work is particularly strong, undeniable. The task of the present work is to raise and clarify some questions about the development of the fiction writer Karavelov, in connection with the influence of the Ukrainian writer M. Vovchok, about the common trends in their work and about the differences between them.

In book 2 of Literary Thought, volume IX (1965), pp. 73-99, I presented part of a biographical-psychological survey of Kiril Hristov, which concerns some important moments in the internal and external history of his poetic work. Now I offer another part of this survey, with mainly biographical data and notes on my meetings and conversations with the poet. An important addition to this material would be my correspondence with the poet, in which questions of a biographical and psychological nature related to the origin of his literary works are often touched upon. My survey from 1914-1915, continued in 1921, mainly concerns the childhood, student life and the early period of Hristov's work. As brief as it is, it comes to supplement the poet's testimonies and confessions to other people, as well as what he published on this part in various memoirs and articles. My diary with notes on meetings and conversations with the poet is not is kept consistently, but it may have some value as a direct reflection of what the poet thought and did. However cursory and accidental these notes may be, they would contribute something to an insight into the character and work of a person who occupies a significant place in our literature of the period between 1894 and 1944.

One of the most interesting problems of contemporary art - its relationship with science - is imposed on today's aesthetics. The old functional relationship between art and society is no longer a mystery to anyone, but in the second half of the twentieth century the socio-social factor of science acquired a relative weight that it had never had before. The past century was a time of remarkable upsurge in the field of social and natural sciences. The genius of Marx and Engels transformed philosophy, political economy and history, placing them on a truly scientific basis. Archaeology also became a science. Darwin's epochal discoveries in the field of geology, Mendeleev's in chemistry, gave a strong impetus to the development of natural sciences. After experiencing Romanticism in the second half of the century, several aspects of rapprochement between artistic creativity and science began to emerge. What these aspects had in common was the use of scientific procedures in the preparatory stage preceding the creation of a work (primarily fiction). Naturally, this process was in organic harmony with the growing credit of the aforementioned sciences.

Our contemporary literary science and criticism already highlights figures who, in terms of the significance of their creative results, not only equal the objective value of what was achieved in the past by our most significant literary critics and historians, but also point to a higher, qualitatively new ideological and aesthetic development. Among them, Pantelei Zarev stands out with a true aesthetic feeling and the penetration of his research talent. The first volume of his new work "Panorama of Bulgarian Literature" is the beginning of a remarkable phenomenon in our contemporary literary science. It clearly reveals the peculiarities of Zarev's method and style as a literary critic and historian, and his great contribution to the construction of a Marxist, scientific history of Bulgarian literature, interpreting the literary process in its complexity and contradictions, with a view to its internal aesthetic laws, stands out convincingly.