Atanas Slavov

The Outsider 1 - this was the title of the first book by the twenty-five-year-old general worker and former member of the Anarchist Union Colin Wilson, which was published in London in 1956. Wilson was not alone. With his work he was speaking on behalf of a group of radical young English authors who allowed themselves to violate the golden rule of every artist: to let their work speak for itself, and who attempted to clarify theoretically what their objections were to the conciliatory nature of the bourgeois literary tradition. However, this so shocked the defenders of good taste, or as they later called them, the "square heads", that they gave them the obligatory nickname of "angry young people". Once appointed, the "angry" did everything possible to justify their nickname. Declarations, militant tracts, literary scandals followed. Passions flared up. The "angry" published a joint anthology with the American opponents of conformity - the representatives of the so-called "beaten generation." The "square heads" were not left behind. The personal tragedy of Norman Mailer, who killed his wife, was attached like a ponytail to the flag of the movement. ΤΟ But last summer one of the "angry" - Kingsley Amis, appeared in the pages of "Encounter", turning to the past decade to admit to us that... ...one morning the whole commotion simply died down and disappeared silently and we all stood up, limited within our natural frameworks, to be judged again only on our creative qualities". And he launched into a sharp criticism of the philistine verbosity that had overblown and distorted things. 2 At the end of the decade, Colin Wilson himself condemned his fascination with empty grand phrases and the theoretical simplification of the conflicts that he sought in society. 3

It is so young that its name is still being debated. But it strives to keep pace with every other science. On the desks of the people who deal with it are manuals and reference books on differential calculus, higher mathematics, information theory, psychology, and physiology; their file cabinets are full of statistical data from mass tests, their sound libraries are teeming with recordings, in their laboratories the tape recorder is being replaced by the complex equipment of wide-ranging sound spectrograms. In just a few years, these people have done a tremendous job of clearing away the metaphoricalism in the terms and concepts that have dominated our knowledge of verse so far: today it has been experimentally established that the objectively stressed vowel does not carry any stress and that usually the sound that we feel stressed is not pronounced the most stressed; that the sound flow is objectively indivisible and is not separated into syllables or words, that the Sound itself is not uniform, but represents a whole bouquet of sounds, in which no one can yet establish exactly how our ear manages to recognize what it needs. As you can see 150 - complete chaos reigns even in our ideas about the physical nature of the verse. Yanakiev boldly puts an end to everything that has been done so far and proposes to start from A and B: a complete break with the current metaphorical use of terms, the application of exclusively scientific methods, relying solely on logic, precise formulations and dealing only with material and clearly distinguishable for everyone components of the verse composition - these are Yanakiev's principles. As a true man of science, he believes that the first step must be absolutely accurate, though small and far behind what the intuitive glimpses of aesthetes and critics have so far given us on the path to penetrating the depths of poetic Mysteries. His first step is to study - if one may so say - the anatomy of verse; to make a purely structural examination of the structure of the poem, to study the different forms of rhythm and to specify the terms by which these forms will henceforth have to be named.

It is obvious that since the work of art exists objectively, i.e. it is perceived by us as a material phenomenon (in other words - as a complex organism of speech, sounds, volumes, lines, colors, etc.) and moreover represents a work of art insofar as it reflects in its forms specific moments and forms of objective reality in its own specific way: we can approach it with the basic tools of any science: the complex system of methods and means of comparison, selection and classification. Of course, these methods have been applied since aesthetics existed as a separate discipline. Aesthetic phenomena do not lie on the surface of the work of art, and therefore, for their disclosure, the application of the so-called methods of comparative analysis is necessary. Since by its very nature the law is universal, regardless of how many objects and facts are involved (the more, the better, of course), their legal "kinship" will inevitably manifest itself in different phenomena. Observing multiple phenomena in this way will allow us to find repeatability, i.e. the first sign of regularity.

In all language communities, there are two different language systems: the Practical Modern Language (hereinafter MPL) and the Verse Speech (hereinafter CP)2. In social practice, MPL is usually used in direct communication, while CP is associated with texts of lasting meaning. The latter can be literary and non-literary: grammatical and arithmetic rules, laws of civil law and other texts that must be memorized. In fiction, MPL finds its place in the so-called “prose”, and CP in “poetry”.