Книжка-3

1969 Book 3 Contents

Belinsky wrote that the past helps us to better understand the present and suggests the future to us. By absorbing national trends in the artistic heritage and reflecting new phenomena in reality, our literature in the first years after September 9th paved the way for the later artistic peaks of our contemporary artistic creativity. Naturally, it exhibited a number of historical features - it bore the stamp of a comprehensive upsurge, breathed with the pathos of emotional display, resorted to a poster depiction of mass enthusiasm. It also had significant conquests. Works of art from that time still excite us today with their civic power, which has become a fruitful tradition in our literature. They conquer us with their active, effective, revolutionary humanism. The literature of those years and in the field of artistic mastery is an example that can be imitated in the days of our time.

At the Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party in December 1948, a decision was made to build the foundations of a socialist society in Bulgaria. The cherished dream of the Bulgarian people was realized - in the homeland of Botev and Levski, of Blagoev and Dimitrov, the construction of socialism began. For the first time in its historical development, the working Bulgarian people freely deployed their forces and capabilities, their creative talent, because, as Lenin predicted, "only with socialism will the rapid, real, truly mass, with the participation of the majority of the population, and then of the entire population, begin a rapid, real, truly mass movement forward in all areas of public and private life". The heroic labor march of the people was led by the Bulgarian Communist Party, headed by its experienced helmsman, the legendary hero of Leipzig Georgi Dimitrov. His personality, his life and struggle path increasingly awakened the creative inspiration of writers. In October 1947, B. Bozhilov published one of the most poetic works about Dimitrov:

There is no dispute - the old literatures of Bulgarians, Serbs and Rus' show some common features in content, trends, development, style, genres, writers, etc. This is precisely what gives reason in the history of the pan-European literary development to consider them as a group of literatures, to search for and point out features that represent something new in this development. To a certain extent, the latest publication of the well-known and prominent Soviet scholar and medievalist Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev - "Old Slavic Literatures as a System" is due to this indisputable commonality. More precisely, the thoughts expressed here further develop and detail his opinions expressed several years earlier. His last publication, in fact an expanded and revised report, delivered in Prague in 1968 at the VI Slavic Congress, touches on several very important problems in the history of the old Slavic literatures: 1. Phenomena of literary transplantation; 2. Old Slavonic literature as a mediator and the Slavic review (redaction) of Byzantine culture; 3. Genres and types of Old Slavonic literatures; 4. Old Slavonic literatures and folklore; 5. Old Slavonic literatures and the visual arts; 6. Old Slavonic literatures and reality.

There is no dispute - the old literatures of Bulgarians, Serbs and Rus' show some common features in content, trends, development, style, genres, writers, etc. This is precisely what gives reason in the history of the pan-European literary development to consider them as a group of literatures, to search for and point out features that represent something new in this development. To a certain extent, the latest publication of the well-known and prominent Soviet scholar and medievalist Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev - "Old Slavic Literatures as a System" is due to this indisputable commonality. More precisely, the thoughts expressed here further develop and detail his opinions expressed several years earlier. His last publication, in fact an expanded and revised report, delivered in Prague in 1968 at the VI Slavic Congress, touches on several very important problems in the history of the old Slavic literatures: 1. Phenomena of literary transplantation; 2. Old Slavonic literature as a mediator and the Slavic review (redaction) of Byzantine culture; 3. Genres and types of Old Slavonic literatures; 4. Old Slavonic literatures and folklore; 5. Old Slavonic literatures and the visual arts; 6. Old Slavonic literatures and reality.

The second Lamartine Days were for me an occasion to point out the reasons why the Bulgarian scientist comes to join your gathering. Many times since then I have glanced at Lamartine's legacy in the Paris National Library. In the silence populated with memories, I was particularly attracted by the extraordinary bearing of this great citizen of his time. All the more so since Lamartine's political thought, considered by most researchers as extraneous, remains much less known today than his literary work.

The concept of "mass culture" has long been used in the bourgeois press (and recently increasingly in the socialist press), functioning in a different sense, which further increases misunderstanding and makes people skeptical about the problem itself. Perhaps the most widespread use of this concept is in a narrower (aesthetic) sense - as a qualitative, mainly negative characteristic of cultural production for everyday mass aesthetic consumption without special artistic and intellectual claims or merits, emphasizing its impersonality and stereotypedness, uncreative way of creation, conveyor-type processing, mass distribution, easy consumerism and short life.

The question of the manifestations of the Baroque in Bulgarian literature can be considered only in connection with the manifestations of the literary Baroque in general in the Slavic Orthodox area. Therefore, it is relatively easiest to establish the character of Bulgarian historiography of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The historiography of the Orthodox Slavs itself actually offers sufficiently rich material for comparison with Bulgarian historiography.

For a quarter of a century of socialist poetry, many women poets have shown their talent, and many of them deserve attention and special consideration. The profound changes after September 9th have liberated and fully unlocked the possibilities of women in the field of poetry. The author of "The Eternal and the Holy" has created new inspired cycles and poems, in which the new time brings life-giving currents, freshness and depth. Bagryana continues to conquer and amaze us with the strongest poetic confessions. But her voice has become warm and maternally predisposing in a new way. She does not avoid either sad or joyful encounters, does not keep her heart, gives away its warmth and thus preserves her eternal youth.

There are no other two problems so closely related and almost equivalent in aesthetics as modernity and innovation. Both begin with the ability to observe reality, to select and evaluate, and end with the technical techniques of measured speech. Undoubtedly, modernity is a broader category that includes innovation. It is simply implied and very often there is no need to talk about it, it is not necessary to emphasize it specifically. Emphasizing it through deliberate efforts often leads to artificiality and posturing in poetry. It is an elementary truth that true innovation has nothing to do with pretentiousness. Contrary to superficial impressions, it is not the external arrangement of the verse that determines the innovative essence of poetry. Discovery does not depend on meter and rhymes - it can be done with or without them. Although in practice avant-garde pursuits are more closely related to free verse, exceptions are not at all rare.

In the era of the Revival, so widely and inspiredly revealed by our writers, literary historians and theorists, there is an area almost unexplored, an area in which the aspirations, feelings and tastes of the people are directly reflected. We are talking about the numerous manuscript collections and songbooks distributed in our country at the end of the 18th and 19th centuries, a part of which, although small, has been preserved to this day. They preserve those works of the Bulgarian creative spirit with which the middle and lowest class in our country - the people themselves - lived.

In Bulgarian literary and historical science after 1944, the question of the development of our literary theory and criticism is not new, it has not just arisen. As a research task, this question has been raised more than once and not by one or two Bulgarian literary historians. For various reasons, however, no work has been done in this direction. There are too few researchers who have occasionally paid attention to one or another moment in the history of Bulgarian literary criticism, theory and science. The only more systematic and comprehensive studies that have been published so far belong to Georgi Dimov, who works mainly in this scientific field.

The French moralists, to whom the late Gerard Boer dedicated a book of insightful essays a few years ago, are, compared to other French writers, little known in our country. In the past, perhaps the only one of our great writers, Stoyan Mihaylovsky, showed a constant and lively interest in the French moralists, with whose "Maxims and Reflections" he liked to embellish his original writings. But Mihaylovsky did not deal with translations, in order to give us "selected pages" at least from those authors in whom he found a rich source of creative inspiration. In our periodicals of the past, fragments of the work of the French moralists are occasionally found, among whom La Bruyere and François de La Rochefoucauld are the most famous. Joubert, Chamfort and Vovnard, who lived later than the first two, are comparatively much less known in our country. Even Mikhailovsky, who was more carried away by the "reflections" of a certain Madame Svechin and whom he often quoted in his own writings, did not seem to have shown any particular interest in Joubert and Vovnargh. The latter, who had a short life, as he died at only 32 years old (1715-1747), compared especially to La Bruyere and La Rochefoucauld, is the most optimistic: Vovnargh believed in the noble impulses of the human heart and in the purity of its passions. Last year, a young French essayist and critic, Henri Bonnier, published Vovnargh's works in two volumes at the Hachet publishing house in Paris. It is also interesting to note that Vovnargh in one of his texts criticized some of La Rochefoucauld's "maxims."

With "Two in the New Town" Kamen Kalchev enters the spiritual world of the ordinary person, reaches psychological generalizations, subordinated to a broad ideological concept. K. Kalchev proves that he is a writer with a wide range of creative interests, that he discovers something more in the thoughts and feelings of people of our time, presents the drama of the person from our society. His hero is placed in a contemporary setting, and this already determines his behavior, revealed in the aspect of social development. There is nothing tragic if the hero experiences his drama, the main thing is in the name of what he does this, what he is guided by. And Marin Maslarski is guided by humane feelings, by the thought of being useful, of being a person above all.