Книжка-6

1967 Booklet 6 Contents

Bagryana's poems first appeared on the pages of the magazine "Contemporary Thought" in 1915. The fires of war silenced her for several years, only to reappear in "Vestnik na zhenata" in 1921, thirsty for true life, with a longing for the sacred and an unwavering attachment to the Bulgarian land.

For years, for obvious reasons, our literary scholarship has been shedding light on the creative and life path of the writer Dimitar Talev in a very uneven way. Divided by the gamut of historical events in 1944-1945, this path offers a heterogeneous ideologically and emotionally, artistically unequal and unequally grateful material for studying the author. The mature work of D. Talev, which attracts with a true abundance of ideological and aesthetic problems, social and life conflicts, of human images and motives, is quite justified in the center of the most significant studies to date on the literary work of the writer. The attention of D. Talev researchers continues to be directed today to the great ideological and artistic wealth of the four-volume historical epic, a work that has secured an inviolable place in the heart of every Bulgarian, and has won for the author the name of an indisputable master of everyday-historical narration. Before tracing the writer's overall creative development, before outlining his appearance in detail, it was imperative to understand the beauty and power of that series of novels that earned the author extraordinary popularity and recognition. The relevance of this task for the future is undoubted.

Even Marx and Engels believed that the "future" proletarian literature would appear as an organic "complete fusion of great depth, conscious historical meaning" with Shakespearean liveliness and effectiveness" of artistic depiction. This is how they imagined the essence of proletarian verbal art, which for several decades now we have been calling the literature of socialist realism. In fact, through these and similar formulations, the founders of Marxist aesthetics noted two main features of proletarian literary art: first, its deeper and qualitatively new historicity in comparison with the art of past societies and second, its ability and historical obligation to start in its artistic searches from the highest ("Shakespearean") creative achievements of the universal human genius.

The creative development of an author consists in searching for and gradually revealing what is personally his. Along the way of this search, he will naturally come into contact with what has already been created and will take from it his own. Dimcho Debelyanov appeared in our literature in the first years of our century, when the Vazov tradition was gradually being displaced by the modern literary trends of the time. Debelyanov quickly oriented himself towards them, of course, after paying tribute to the tradition.

In the sharp disputes that are being waged today about socialist realism and its relationship with modernism and critical realism, the problem of the formation of the new hero acquires special significance in those authors who come to socialist realism from modernism through critical realism. The correct solution of this question makes it possible to give a more complete and true picture of the contemporary literary process - on the one hand, and on the other - to overcome as dogmatic a number of concepts and opinions that objectively diminish the role of the writer as a creative personality, detach the problem of the formation of the new hero from the ability to assimilate the great example of the classics, from questions of innovation, artistic form, etc.

"History will have to think about which immortal figure to attribute you to!" - this is how Vazov exclaims in amazement in his remarkable "Epic of the Forgotten", when he recreates the image of Rakovski. The folk poet is as if stunned by the personality and versatility of the work of this "mad dreamer, an impossible image", seething with "giant love" and "satanic enmity", who boldly peered into the dark past to reveal the tragic present and embrace the dreamed future with his eagle gaze. For all its romantic hyperbolicity, this poetic glorification seems to most accurately capture Rakovski's extraordinary scale in ideological insights and revolutionary scope, in national impulses and efforts to serve devotedly a great idea with thought and deed, with pen and weapon. One is truly amazed by this all-encompassing, revolutionary, uniquely original, spiritually rich personality. The scope of the revolutionary, the searches of the historian, the insights of the scientist, and the visions of the poet - everything is nourished by a deeply realized and suffered national ideal, which found a kind of synthesis and expression in his entire activity. The scale and significance of this activity seem to go beyond national dimensions and remind us of the great conquests of the human spirit in general.

Few are left of those writers who forty or fifty years ago took a direct part in the creation of a great critical-realist literature in Germany. More of the great writers are now deceased - we mourn the loss of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Feuchtwanger, Döblin, Hesse, Leonhard Frank, and also Brecht, Becher and Wolf. Born in 1887 - the above-mentioned writers were either born shortly before him or were his contemporaries - Arnold Zweig knew them all and accompanied them in their aspirations; a ray of the radiance of this great age of art and enlightenment falls on him. He is one of its last torchbearers, a writer in whom spiritual breadth, traditionalism and a connection with the future are happily combined.

In the minds of the Bulgarian reader, the idea of ​​contemporary Swedish literature is almost exhausted by the works of August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf, who are known to the relatively older generation in our country. In recent years, the names of several more authors, representatives of different periods and trends in Swedish literature, have also been added to the two classic masters, whose individual works have been shown very limitedly, mostly with short stories and novellas. But Swedish literature as a whole, with its problems and tasks, with its main directions and tendencies, with its new names and works, still stands as undiscovered land not only for the ordinary reader, but also for our literary science.

The poetic originality and creative personality of the patriarch of Bulgarian literature are again at the center of Milena Tsaneva's second book about the poet - Ivan Vazov in Plovdiv" (Nauka i Izkustvo Publishing House, Sofia, 1966). One year after her literary-critical articles published in "From the Poetic World of Ivan Vazov" (1965), she again meets with readers, directing them to her monographic study of the writer's multifaceted life and fruitful creative pursuits, connected with the capital of Eastern Rumelia. Only six years - from 1880 to 1886 - Ivan Vazov spent in the center of the Autonomous Region, and they turned out to be so extremely beneficial for the creative growth and overall appearance of the people's writer.

Stoyan Iliev appeared in the literary-critical field as if suddenly. His critical works became the subject of special attention before being published in a separate book. Written in a fresh and original way, they immediately placed their author in the phalanx of the youngest literary forces, categorically establishing him as a critic with a more special aesthetic attitude, as a critic with a physiognomy. In his person, "artistic" criticism gained another talented representative. In what direction will the young critic develop further, will he increase the assets of artistic criticism, will he not repeat some of its passions - such questions were raised by his first critical appearances.

Professor Emil Georgiev possesses an energetic and fresh pen, he is not alien to the polemical passion of the publicist and the pioneer, and all this - as in this case - combined with a rich erudition and a Marxist worldview, assigns him a leading and leading place among the figures of our and international Slavic studies. At the same time, his long-standing work as a professor at the Department of Slavic Literatures at Sofia University helped to build a number of young Slavic scholars. One of his latest books, "General and Comparative Slavic Literary Studies", is based on lectures read to students. But Professor E. Georgiev does not stop at facts, he is not satisfied with just discovering, researching and analyzing them, but above all illuminates them in a literary-theoretical aspect and outlines the path of a general and comparative examination of literary phenomena. His book, divided into chapters-essays, each of which claims to be independent, is written on the basis of abundant critical and factual material. It is rich in valuable bibliographical and literary references, which once again emphasize its academicity. But the original interpretation and creative assimilation and generalization of the works used have helped the essays to go beyond the framework of a teaching aid and to turn the book into a significant and valuable contribution to literary science and Slavic studies. Of course, the entire diversity and breadth of Slavic literary relationships are not and cannot be under the gaze of only one scholar, to be highlighted in only one scientific work, no matter how voluminous it may be. Prof. E. Georgiev himself defines the framework of his scientific research, bringing to the fore, first of all, moments of the Bulgarian-Slavic literary community in the era of the Bulgarian Revival.