Книжка-4

1968 Book 4 Contents

Among our greatest poets who worked in the 1920s, she stands out as an exceptionally great and original phenomenon. And both with the new direction of feelings and thoughts, and with their depth and sincerity. As if from birth she has always been close to life, tame of nature, inseparable from it with bookish wisdom. As if listening to her inner voice, she is called not to deviate from her ancestral feminine nature with anything that is foreign to it. And her lyrics, having denied the abstract poetics of symbolism, enriched Bulgarian poetry with a new, healthy, earthly content.

In 1965, the Union of Bulgarian Writers held a theoretical conference on the topic "The National Originality of Contemporary Bulgarian Literature". The main reports and many of the speeches at the conference shed light on important aspects of the problem of the national originality of any literature in general, pointed out undoubted and well-noted features of this originality in Bulgarian literature during different periods of its centuries-old development. "In this area," the writer Dimitar Dimov noted in his speech at the time, "include, for example, the questions of the essence, origin and development of national originality in our folk epic and in the history of our old or contemporary literature, the question of the relative stability or relative lability of this originality in relation to the development of the world-historical process, the question of the relationship between the achievements of our national genius in culture and the achievements of other peoples, and finally the question of the relationship between the national and the international in our contemporary socialist literature.

The stories "Bulgarians of Old Time", "Uncles" and "The Gerats" have preserved much of what makes up the color of our national life. The authors reproduce not only human thoughts and feelings, but also the atmosphere of the time. The stories, saturated with everyday details, have their historical conditioning. By virtue of this need for a dense transmission of the rich external world, the principle of the external plastic characteristics of the characters also plays a certain dominant role. The depiction of the circumstances that influence the life destiny of people stands out in the foreground. The character of the depiction is determined by the content of the selected vital material.

Now, after his tragic death, these poems sound like a terrible premonition. And when they were published, the reader hardly perceived them that way. Some may even have thought them premature - such poetry is usually written at the end of life. It is not surprising that others saw in them a kind of coquetry - so many poets demonstrate their maturity even in the infancy of their development! I mentioned maturity. Unusual as it may be, he died at the age of thirty-two as a fully strengthened, formed and, in a sense, completed artist. When I say completed, I do not at all think that there was nothing more to be expected from him. His achievements are well known not only as a poet, but also as a librettist and translator. And if we take into account his confessions to friends that he carried within him plots for novels that could not be realized due to his early death, when he was already psychologically prepared to move on to fiction, only then will we appreciate what misfortune befell Bulgarian literature during those dark November days of 1967.

The literature on Leo Tolstoy shows that each era has approached the assessment of his work with its own criterion. What seemed to the democratically minded representative of realistic literary thought of the second half of the last century, N. N. Strakhov, in Tolstoy's work to be of undeniable value, was precisely what the reactionary decadent D. Merezhkovsky considered the great writer's artistic impotence. They make no exception to this general approach to the study of L. Tolstoy's work and his late works. However, compared to the vast literature devoted to the brilliant writer, there are few publications on his late work. Nevertheless, they very clearly outline the main trends in pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russian science, which, with few exceptions, are reduced to denying the creative potential of the old Tolstoy and the artistic significance of his works - The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, After the Ball, etc.

More than once, both officially, at teachers' conferences, and in the press with separate articles, it has been emphasized that the topics for homework and class exercises in Bulgarian language and literature must be formulated specifically, graded in difficulty for a given class and by classes - for a given course. But precisely in this very important and complicated area of ​​training and education through written speech, there has been no unity in understandings, in requirements. The variety of languages ​​in the formulations of the topics for a given class has been and is determined not by any principles, but by purely individual preferences and inclinations of teachers, sometimes even by happy ideas or by an unfounded striving for external brilliance, for a parade form of speech, without taking into account that the thought title is unclear to the majority of those who will develop it as a topic.

"September poetry" - this is how Georgi Bakalov first, and then Ivan Meshekov and others called the poems and stories of Nikola Furnadzhiev, Angel Karaliychev and Asen Raztsvetnikov, which appeared in "Nov Pat" as the first poetic echo of the majestic and terrible September days. Over time, literary critics began to add to the "September" artists Geo Milev and the other poets from "Plamak", Krum Kyulyavkov and the other collaborators of "Zvanar", Anton Strashimirov and the budding poets and writers from "Vedrina".... For more than four decades, September has been a constant and ageless theme in our poetry and prose, and September literature - as a new, aesthetically distinct moment in literary development - one of the important problems of literary history and criticism. The most vivid and characteristic, truly "September" stage is taken (it was this that contemporaries called "September") to be the period from 1923, immediately after the uprising until the April assassination attempt of 1925. However, starting from the specific historical moment itself, from the approximately equal illumination of the September theme, from the similar or identical aesthetic positions and artistic tasks of the September artists, one could add to this characteristic stage a year or two later - after the April assassination attempt until 1927 - with Strashimirov's activity in "Vedrina".

The question of Russian-Bulgarian cultural ties has always deeply concerned both Bulgarian and Russian historians and literary scholars. In recent years, many new works have appeared in Bulgaria and the Soviet Union that shed light on this problem. Among them can be mentioned the studies of the Soviet scientists N. S. Derzhavin "History of Bulgaria" (I-IV t., M.-L., 1945-48), "Hristo Botev - poet-revolutionary" (M. - L., 1948), "Ivan Vazov. Life and work" (M. L., 1948), etc., by L. Erikhonov "Russian revolutionaries" democrats and public thought of the southern Slavs in the 60s and 70s of the XIX century" (M., 1950), the collective work of Soviet historians "History of Bulgaria" (vol. I, M. - L., 1953), the book "Iz istorii russko-bulgarskih otsenshih. Collection of articles" (M., 1958) as well as individual articles by many authors. At the same time, Bulgarian scholars published several serious studies, among which we should note P. Zarev's work "Bulgarian Literature" (S., 1950), G. Tsanev's "Pages from the History of Bulgarian Literature in the 19th Century" (S., 1958), V. Velchev's "The Impact of Russian Classical Literature on the Formation and Development of Bulgarian Literature in the 19th Century" (S., 1958) and other works.

I am afraid that these memories of mine will not please the uncritical admirers of Kiril Hristov. I will not try to balance the lights and shadows in his image - I will present the facts as they are, that is, as I perceived them, without deliberate seasoning. Memoirs are a specific literary genre - they are neither criticism nor a historical-literary assessment - although they may contain moments of both. In them, your attitude towards the poet is mixed with your impressions of the person - and even above all of the person. You think both about the peculiarities of talent and about the inclinations of the personality, about the traits of the author's character - as he manifests himself in his everyday meetings and relationships with his colleagues and with people in general - and above all, as you felt it. Hence the subjectivism of memoirs. The poet still remains a poet with his human weaknesses (he will lose something of his moral essence, but not his talent). The ancient Greeks knew this well, and they revered their gods, even though they saw human weaknesses in them and created stories about their weaknesses.

Acad. Prof. Dr. Mihail Arnaudov is one of the great Bulgarian scholars and literary historians. His name is well known not only in our country, but also abroad. For many years he was a full professor at Sofia State University and the head of the Department of General Literary History. Arnaudov was a beloved and respected university lecturer. His lectures were listened to with great interest by students. He patronized many of them in life. Acad. Arnaudov was a sweet-talking and fascinating storyteller. With his pathetic, lively and inspired speech, he always captivated the audience. The reading rooms and public universities could barely accommodate the listeners who were thirsty for more knowledge. His rare scientific erudition made a deep impression on me.

"The Alphabetical Prayer has given rise to quite lively debates in science, and yet some questions closely related to it remain open, not yet resolved. A natural prerequisite for such advancement of the issue is the presentation and publication of more materials related to the work of Konstantin Preslavsky and, above all, directly related to this remarkable work of our old literature. The primary task is not only to search for previously unknown transcripts of the "Alphabetic Prayer", but also to publish them, since the previous publications are few. And this is all the more possible for a composition like the "Alphabetic Prayer" - very short in size. Such is the purpose of the present communication - to make another previously unknown transcript of one of the first poems in old Bulgarian literature known to science.

For the modern reader, Kiril Hristov was until recently an almost unknown author; a poet with a strange and unusual fate, preserved in the minds of his descendants mainly through his ideological and artistic transgressions. His first works, which brought the poet fame and recognition, were until a few years ago a bibliographical rarity. That is why few could imagine the spontaneous approval with which critics and writers greeted his poetic debut. Because K. Hristov really began his writing career brilliantly. Moreover, he became the exponent of a social and psychological necessity, gave the first example of frank love poetry, created magnificent lyrical miniatures, brilliant little songs about the beauty of nature and the immediacy of human feeling. And the literary community gave him what he deserved

When we talk or write about our national character, about the character of the Bulgarian in its various shades and nuances, we tend to think that we can easily exhaust the question - we will say not about his modesty and hard work, about his courage and firmness, about his honesty and hospitality... But when we want to delve into the details, into the depth and essence of this problem, we suddenly encounter complex, difficult-to-solve questions, with a whole labyrinth of unexplored, unsuspected and surprisingly intertwined connections and relationships, with psychological mysteries and contradictory situations. This complexity is equally valid for scientific, historical and journalistic works that concern features of the characterology of the Bulgarian, as well as for works of art that recreate the characters of Bulgarians. We will encounter an amazing variety of interpretations, points of view, views, opinions and judgments.

The paths in science are like the paths in life - different and diverse. Some scientists look around for a long time, measure, try until they reach their scientific terrain, the Archimedean point of their scientific vocation. And then - sweat and blood to step on it, sweat and blood to plow it. Usually the fruits fall in late autumn - juicy and large, ripe and abundant, as one should expect from a good gardener. And everything would be very good if the days of human life were not counted, if not the toughness of the organism, but the demands of the work determined its duration. But before time a person is weak and fragile... That is why the phenomena of early vocation are happier: those who immediately find themselves. At the very beginning they do not shoot down stars, they cannot jump over the difficulties of their realization. Of course, scientific truth is not given to them either without prior preparation, without painstakingly acquired research skills, without professional technique. There are no easy paths in science.