Vladimir Svintila

The collection "From the History of World Literature" (edited by Prof. Emil Georgiev and Dr. Georgi Dimov, Publishing House of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia 1962), conceived around 1959, has finally come out of print. Regardless of the delay, this is a good event. And it would be even better if the Literary Institute decided to make a non-periodical edition of similar collections, which would be published once or twice a year. Our literary research activity has good traditions in the field of Western European, ancient and Slavic literatures - it is enough to remember the names of Shishmanov, Krastev, Mich. Arnaudov, Al. Balabanov. And in recent years, work in this area has not subsided, but remains, unfortunately, limited to university publications. Finding readers outside the university environment is, however, vital for literary scholars who do not get space for their special studies in literary journals, which are limited in scope and related to more topical issues. So the question of contact with a wider audience remains unresolved for the time being.

Ernesto, a large industrialist or something like that, puts a record on his new American gramophone, an ideal automaton with a complex mechanism. When Ernesto presses the button on the membrane, instead of obediently landing on the edge of the record, it rises into the air, makes a kind of paralytic movement and with a dry metallic click returns to its original position. Like all ideal mechanisms, the automaton at a certain point refuses to serve its purpose. A little later, Ernesto is in his luxury car with his wife and two children. He is a rich, happy man who has fulfilled himself. But somewhere at the bottom of his soul, a dissatisfaction has settled. This dissatisfaction tempts him to throw himself from a high cliff into the sea with his luxury car and his entire family. His not-so-good knowledge of the terrain and a hesitation that lasted a tenth of a second save him. Instead of in the waves, the car stops at a beautiful ravine, from which Ernesto, his contented wife and his joyful sons contemplate the calm element of the ocean. Alberto Moravia's new book of short stories "The Automaton" is built on moments in which the main characters realize their dissatisfaction, their inferiority, their automatic existence, their inability to live and enjoy what they have achieved. Men or women, young or old, they are faced with their deeper essence, with their true reality, which they have not known, with which they cannot cope. These are usually moments of imbalance, as in the plot of the story given above, moments of automatic and unconscious life, not controlled by the will.

In German idealist aesthetics, Hegel occupies a middle position in time and in the range of problems between Kant, Schiller, Schelling, on the one hand, and Schopenhauer, Herbart, Schleiermacher, on the other. Hegel starts from the position of Kant and Solger, for whom aesthetic activity is not theoretical, but practical (something practically realized in its perfection), so that art belongs not to theoretical philosophy, but to practical philosophical thought. Following Schelling and Solger, Hegel finds no place for art in the "Phenomenology" and "Philosophy of Spirit", where the forms of theoretical thinking are analyzed. For Hegel, art is not representative of abstract creations, it represents the concrete concept, a form of realization of the freedom of the spirit - immediate, sensually subjective knowledge. Therefore, artistic fantasy (a concept inherited from Schiller and the Romantics) does not act like the passive, receptive imagination, but seeks the rational in the real (objective) and the inner truth of the object. “The rational in the object,” writes Hegel, “which the artist has chosen must not alone arouse his consciousness: the artist must have well considered the essential and the truth in all their extent and depth.