Книжка-1

1969 Book 1 Contents

The literature of any people, studied in any period, represents a complete dynamic system. 2 By the system of literature I understand a certain relationship of its parts to each other: of the types of literature (translated and original, church, historical, natural science, journalistic, etc.), of its genres, of its individual works. The concept of a system of literature also includes the relationship of literature to other areas of culture: to science, religion, public thought, to various arts, folklore, etc. Finally, the system of literature also includes its relationship to the cultures and literatures of other countries and peoples. Ultimately, the system of literature is determined by its relationship to historical reality - the relationship with it constitutes the most essential part of the system. This internal structure and the relationship with the external environment surrounding literature constitute an organic whole. The system of literature, despite the fact that its individual parts are in constant equilibrium with each other, is not static. It is constantly changing. However, the permanently disturbed balance is restored again and a dynamic equilibrium exists.

Despite the "conspiracy of silence" towards Marxism on the part of official bourgeois science, in the middle of the last century it was already a respectable reality. But his aesthetic theory was "rediscovered" only in the 1930s-1940s by Soviet scientists. This temporarily limited the perimeter of its impact on world aesthetic thought; slowed down the formation of Marxist aesthetics; exacerbated the international controversy over the theoretical significance of Marx's aesthetic concept. And the prejudices towards it, the doubts about its very existence and even about the possibility of building aesthetics on the principles of historical materialism, are more peripheral than the traditional bourgeois skepticism towards Marxism as a whole. At first glance, the late discovery of Marx's aesthetic heritage is a simple anomaly. In fact, a complex of reasons of a scientific, social, ideological, aesthetic and bibliographic nature intersect here. Together, they determine the unique fate of this heritage. Their study is the subject of this article.

The First World War and the October Revolutions changed the entire course of world history and inevitably gave a new direction to art. The blow that shook and changed the world fell on the bourgeois-aesthetic thought of the pre-war decade and cleared the way for new ideological and artistic searches. In Bulgarian literature, a new, deeply reviving process of returning to real life, to the fighting cries of the street, to the baked soil of the black earth, to the life-giving juices of the earth began to mature. The October Revolution, which pushed the spiritual development of the peoples along a new path, played a fateful role for the Bulgarian people as well, determining to a large extent their further economic and cultural development. It is enough to glance at our literature of those years to feel the irresistible power of the revolution, to feel the reviving power of the new and spiritual engines.

Dobri Chintulov is our first poet who has a developed sense of the nature of various literary genres and forms. The lyrics and poems of Pushkin and Lermontov, the works of the Russian pseudo-classics and pre-romanticists (Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, etc.) awaken in him the follower, not the imitator. Acquaintance with an impressive literary tradition leads to the manifestation and progress of personal powers. As with any original talent, here too the school suggests above all that which corresponds to one's own nature. Chintulov does not experience the anxiety of P. R. Slaveykov, who has to struggle with weak literary preparation, and marks the beginning of that intimate kinship with the forms of poetic art, with the style and composition of poetic genres, without which any creativity is unthinkable. While Nayden Gerov still struggles with the principle of organization, in Chintulov the motifs find their most appropriate expression in the forms of the hymn, the elegy, and the poem.

The contemporary Bulgarian short story in its best examples interprets life phenomena from the perspective of the moral, political and social requirements of socialist society. The completely innovative life truth also determines the socialist-realistic character of the artistic truth of today's short story. The realization of this aspiration is the work of the original participation of talent, which in all cases is associated with the ability to observe and the imagination of the writer. Some argue that talent is a measure of artistic truth, which is achieved through an image realized through the prism of the personal point of view of the fiction writer. It is precisely this peculiar angle of perception of reality that allows us to draw some serious conclusions about the artistic mastery of life phenomena. For us, the short story is valuable not for the literal reproduction of life facts, but more for the ability to present life phenomena in a special light, emanating from a thoughtful and suffered attitude towards people, society and reality. Any attempt to ignore talent leads to a misunderstanding of the essence and specificity of the work of art. The process of realizing artistic truth is unthinkable without the writer's effort to affirm himself by discovering his theme, his vision of the world, and his personal manner of artistic expression. In this sense, for us, personal coloring is a path to finding the artistic truthfulness of the literary work. The realization of the modern story would be impossible without the presence in it of the complex truth about life. Pavel Vezhinov has a special place in the creation of our modern story. The theme of some still living symptoms of egoism appears for Vezhinov - the writer and the person, a main theme. Vezhinov strives in the battle against the loneliness of the human personality. In fact, he began as an artist of the social environment of the past, among which a person often loses his connection with it. The individual facts of the interrupted harmony in the relationship between personality and society are the basis for the writer, on which he artistically realizes true Dramatic states.

Everyone who has interacted with him says that he was a very quiet and kind person. But in his work we often see him angry and merciless. He boldly exposed the disgrace of the bourgeois world, deeply undermined its rotten foundations, without realizing it himself. Stefan Kostov was born in Sofia on March 30, 1879. His father, Lazar Kostov, was a prominent voivode from Bansko, who took an active part in the liberation struggles of Macedonia. There are no turbulent moments and dramatic events in the life of St. L. Kostov. His biography is quite modest. But if the biographer delve into the inner image of the writer, he will find rich material for his spiritual portrait. Stefan Kostov graduated from Slavic Philology at Sofia University. He listened with interest to the lectures of our distinguished scholars Benyo Tsonev, Miletich and Ivan Shishmanov. As a student, and for a year after graduation, Stefan Kostov was engaged in journalism. This profession gave him the opportunity to see the ugliness of political mores, which he so passionately exposed in his comedies. In 1903 he became a teacher in Sofia, at the Second Boys' High School. In 1906 Kostov was sent to specialize in Vienna. There he listened to lectures by prominent Slavic scholars Yagich, Vondrak, Reshetar, and also by K. Irechek. But these lectures did not satisfy him. "Anyway," he shared with Professor Shishmanov, "I am now a student again and will soon send you an official certificate to the Ministry. I signed up to listen to Old Bulgarian literature for 2 hours with Mr. Yagica, Old Czech literature for 2 hours with Mr. Vondrak, Serbo-Croatian literature in the 18th century for 2 hours with Mr. Reshetara, and ethics with Mr. Jodl. For now, at least, the lectures on literature do not attract me at all, because they seem very elementary in content to me and because I do not find in them at all what I am looking for. It seemed to me that they treat questions more from the field of Slavic paleography: monuments, their redactions, sources, translations, witty guesses about dates and eras when they were created are listed before me - this, indeed, gives a somewhat impression of deep learning. But as for explaining the content of a work, starting from living, social conditions. environment, time, etc. - there is no mention of all this, or very little is expected... maybe I am wrong, but it still seems to me that as long as Slav. literature remains so isolated on philological soil, it will not progress much. It suits me better to do things at home and I do most of them that way. Now I am reading about Serbo-Croatian works - history, literature, ethnography

Among the great Russian writers, sufferers and righteous, martyrs and saints, Turgenev seems to be the most fortunate, the most prosperous. Born under a lucky star, anointed by good fortune, it seems to you that he is not the son of this long-suffering, blood- and sweat-soaked Russian land, but the pampered child of generous and abundant France, which has for centuries cared for its spiritual talents, which for centuries has accumulated spiritual and material goods. First of all, this prosperity imposes itself in its crude life sense. Both Pushkin and Lermontov are representatives of the "golden youth", and they are chicks in noble nests", and they are "rocked in gentle cradles", but with how many thorns was their path covered from the first wreaths of glory to the bullets of the framed murderers. And Gogol crossed the threshold of recognition with the major-solemn chords of a triumphal march, but what a burdensome, hopeless requiem are the last days of his life. And Tolstoy grew up under the care of teachers and governesses, and he plucked flowers from the garden of life, and he adorned himself with the laurels of world fame, and he strove for harmony and balance in his life. But at the cost of so much self-torture, wandering, and convulsions. What can we say about Dostoevsky, who knew the anonymous greatness of the hero, of the fighter against official power, of the knight of social conscience, but again at the cost of a death sentence, of trembling before the scaffold, of nearly ten years of exile. What can we say about Chekhov, who was afflicted with consumption for life? What can we say about the cohorts of younger, perhaps no less gifted and far less celebrated contemporaries, who were cut down in an insultingly early manner by the harsh living conditions?

The first contacts between Bulgarians and French people are lost somewhere in the Middle Ages... After the Great French Revolution, which shook the minds of the whole world, more echoes can be found in our country (due to slavery, they are distant and indirect) of the struggles of the French people for freedom and social justice, of the ideological searches of French society. But the facts of the indirect and concrete acquaintance with French literature and the first contacts and visible influences on individual public and literary figures, mainly those who studied or lived in France, date from the middle of the 19th century. And these contacts and influences are very diverse, go through different stages, have their own interesting history. In the present notes, we focus on those of our writers from the period after the Liberation of Bulgaria from Turkish slavery until the First World War, who studied in French schools, lived in France and began their creative path in a French environment with direct acquaintance and influence of French culture and literature. And one more thing that interests us above all is the concrete facts of this acquaintance: the respective city and university, the student environment and first meetings with foreign writers, the collaboration in the French press, etc., necessary both for enriching the civil biography of the writers, and, of course, for a more complete clarification of their first literary steps and their creative image in general. The impressions are the result mainly of visiting the places where the Bulgarian writers lived and studied, of those few traces that the past decades have spared... The following could be noted in advance: both with the most direct impact of the French social and cultural environment, and with the strongest influence of the diverse French literature on our writers, they do not lose their own national and individual appearance as creators. Even when, especially in the years immediately before the First World War, in the verses of our poets, carried away by symbolism, tones sound or images appear that are very similar to those of their French teachers, they still manage to preserve their Bulgarian face.

It has become a tradition for every review of a new book studying Karavelov's work to begin with the statement that with his strong and complex personality the writer still attracts the attention of literary history and criticism today. And this statement does not sound clichéd, because it notes a significant literary-historical fact. Our modernity has precisely realized a complete edition of Karavelov's works and made a decisive contribution to Karavelov studies both with voluminous monographs and with individual studies that pose new and interesting issues. At the same time, the critical eye discovers in contemporary studies of Karavelov a more emphatically pronounced specific literary approach. In place of factual and biographical research, in place of the descriptive approach, there logically comes the aspiration for a more concrete consideration of the aesthetic and theoretical problems posed by Karavelov's work, for the study of his writing skills in relation to the laws of the Literary Process, the peculiarities of his talent, etc. Tsveta Undzhieva's book has its positive significance primarily as a phenomenon that supports this direction in the development of the science of Karavelov. It not only discovers and uses new factual material, not only enriches ideas and specifies accents, but above all seeks a solution to essential literary-historical, theoretical and stylistic problems posed by Karavelov's work. It is precisely this focus of the study that arouses interest in it and gives it its own appearance.

The merits of Boris Delchev's new book - the collection of memoir essays "I knew these people" I find in three directions: in the excitement with which the author communicates with the artists; in the erudition of the literary critic; in the conscientiousness of the scientific worker. And if all these features are expressed and collected through such a peculiar genre as the memoir essay, then the author would present us - and in our case it is so - an interesting and bright book. Moreover, here the concept of "memoir essay" is used very conditionally and should not be understood in the narrow sense. The subject of the image is not random communications or meetings, nor everyday details related to the personality of the artists under consideration: in a colorful way in Boris Delchev's essays, the memoir coexists with the actively expressed contemporary position; literary-critical assessments are intertwined with artistic journalism. The author does not seek the dimensions of moral and literary qualities of his characters through the concreteness of the situations. His ethical measure is much more voluminous and multifaceted, the concrete situation is skillfully woven as a detail of an overall picture. With each fragment, a creative profile stands out more and more brightly against a corresponding socio-historical background.

The theory of literature as the main discipline of literary science has gone too far in its development: it is about to become not only a theory of literature, but also a methodology of literary science. The problems of the methodology of Marxist literary science were left in the background for some time. Raised sometimes by individual authors, they were not always correctly formulated, which is why the results were partial, and the concepts of fiction as art one-sided. This underestimation of the methodology caused a certain stagnation in literary science and allowed the spread of the abstract-class approach, which has not been completely overcome even today. Here we must also look for the arguments of some Western literary scholars who underestimate or deny the importance of Marxist literary science.

On January 16, 1969, the Scientific Council at the Institute of Literature discussed the work of Prof. Yuri Konstantinovich Begunov - Ph.D. - Kozma Presbyter in Slavic Literatures. In addition to the members of the Scientific Council, the work of the extended meeting was attended by lecturers from Sofia State University "Kliment Ohridski", from the Higher Pedagogical Institute "Cyril and Methodius" in Tarnovo and researchers from the institutes of Bulgarian Language and Balkan Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. This interest in the work is due both to its problematics and to the broad framework in which the study of the famous "Conversation" of Presbyter Kozma is set. The result of the joint work between the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Russian Literature (sector of Old Russian Literature) in Leningrad, the work of Yu. K. Begunov is new evidence of the fruitful Bulgarian-Soviet cooperation in the field of science.