Angel Todorov

There has been much debate about the role and significance of fiction, and indeed of art in general. In sharp contradiction to the main and main trend of Bulgarian literature, realism, not a few critics and literary theorists in the past sought to tear writers away from the life of the people, to distract them from the main tasks of our national development. Vain efforts! Life is so strong that even on the pages of the magazines that carried out these theories in the most drastic form, Misl and Zlatorog, their most talented contributors perceived and depicted true images of life - more than once in contradiction with their own ideological and political positions. The case of Bloody Song by Pencho Slaveykov is characteristic: at the center of the poem he places Mladen as an exponent of the ideas of the writer himself (along with the fact that this hero is an exponent of one wing in the national-revolutionary movement) - with a hesitant acceptance of the uprising and with a strong admixture of late individualistic views, artificially included in that era. And yet it is not Mladen who imposes himself on the minds of the readers, but the Voivode (Benkovski), although in many cases he is presented in the poem in an unfavorable light. Even more vividly stand out before us are images such as Boycho Ognyanov in Vazov's novel Under the Yoke and a number of heroic images in Epic of the Forgotten: their political pathos is high, as it is the fruit of the deep and sincere convictions of the writer, who grew up socially in the struggle for national liberation. For a long time, the Revival-revolutionary heroes were at the center of the literary works of our best writers; In this way, these writers highlighted the testaments of the Revival in order to oppose them to the entire bourgeois reality that was being created in our country with all its negative sides. But even when Bulgarian critical realism, following its positive, denunciatory tasks, had to bring to the forefront the Baiganiovites and the Vazov Gorolomovites, as well as the number of negative characters in the works of Vlaykov, Mikhailovsky, Elin Pelin, Stamatov, Stefan Kostov, Yovkov, Svetoslav Minkov and others, the positive hero was always felt, present in their works. Sometimes - as in Yavorov - it was the writer himself, whose angry figure stands above the denunciatory pages.

The memory of Krum Velkov takes me back to the distant 1932, when I was secretary of the Sofia organization of the Union of Labor Writers. (There were no other organizations in the country like this union, but we had conceived them as groups of young literary cadres, and therefore in the "center" we had a "central leadership" and a "Sofia organization".) We had a meeting in one of the rooms of the "Maika" school (behind the Courthouse). I was just calling on the comrades to sit down and begin the agenda, when Todor Pavlov came to me, to the rostrum, with an unknown younger man. "Meet Keshish Parvan," said uncle Todor to me. I remembered this name from someone who had spoken under this pseudonym in Bakal's magazine "Nov Pat" in 1924-1925. It turned out that Keshish Parvan was Krum Velkov from Pernik, who after being expelled from high school worked as a locksmith and machinist and participated in the September Uprising in 1923 in the city of Preslav. He had written a novel about this uprising and was now carrying it - on the recommendation of Todor Pavlov, we, the then communist writers from the active ranks of the literary front, had to read it and find a way to publish it. I read it in the next few days, Georgi Karaslavov and other comrades read it, and we all agreed that the novel was very good. We decided to publish it as a book issue of our newspaper "RLF".

The Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship is multifaceted - in politics, in economics, in culture, including in literature. It, our literary friendship with the Russian people and with the other peoples of the Soviet country, has deep roots and is a peer of the cultural history of our two countries. It is no coincidence that copies of the oldest Bulgarian manuscripts, dating back to the beginning of our writing, are found in a number of Soviet libraries. With affection we read in the ancient "Alphabetical Prayer" - this foundation of all Bulgarian poetry - verses addressed to the entire "Slavic tribe". This common appeal over the centuries rightly acquired a main focus on the largest Slavic people - the Russians, who became the support and foundation of the cultural development of all Slavic and many non-Slavic peoples. When I was in Ukraine in 1959, during the decade of Bulgarian culture, Kiev writers and literary scholars proudly pointed out the places connected in distant historical memory with the Bulgarian writer Grigoriy Tsamblak: we imagine him living among his colleagues from Kiev at the beginning of the fifteenth century, how in meetings with them they spoke the then common literary Slavic language - and yet they knew that he was Bulgarian, and spoke words of praise for the Bulgarian literary work, already famous throughout the world. Five centuries of slavery did not obscure, but strengthened the literary community of our peoples: the names of Botev, Karavelov, Nesho Bonchev and our other revivalists are most closely associated with Russian culture. Both during the six decades of bourgeois Bulgaria and during the two decades of Fatherland Front Bulgaria, this area of ​​cultural and literary friendship accumulated new and new facts and phenomena, and established itself as a law of our literary development. Today, Soviet literature is for us that beacon which illuminates with bright flashes our entire literary life.

The discussion of the problem of tradition and innovation is one of the most meaningful manifestations of our institute, related to the very foundations of aesthetics and art. Both Alexander Obretenov and Georgi Tsanev put this problem on a Marxist-Leninist basis. I liked Obretenov's thought that not everything that differs from the old is innovation. Also the emphasis on communist ideology as the basis of innovation.

"Tears of Lily" - pale and in many cases clumsy imitations of the sentimental direction in Heine's lyrics - Pencho Slaveykov wrote in his hospital bed in 1886-87. He himself repeatedly pointed out the weakness of this poetry of his, in order to highlight "Epic Songs" as the mature beginning of his work. But in Slaveykov, as in our poetry at its beginning (until Karavelov and Botev), we can notice that where this beginning is in the spirit and form of written poetry, it is still clumsy and inept - and once the poet has touched the living source of all poetry, folk poetry, his verses resonate with the power of a fresh artistic image. Thus, even before he had modeled his literary experiments ("Momini Salzi") on a book model, Slaveykov in 1885 was inspired by folk-poetic images and wrote his poem "Lud Gidiya". It is no coincidence that when he later collected his poems for "Epic Songs", he put "Lud Gidiya" in the first place in this collection... For several centuries, the people have created the image of the cheerful man of art, who plays the tambourine with intoxication from aesthetic pleasure. This image is picturesque: the young Stoyan hung this empty tambourine on his belt" and as he played, "the brides broke the robbery - the old hurks crushed" - and even the judge, to whom the people complained that they could not do their work because of the "empty tambourine", was carried away by the power of art. Instead of judging the young gypsy, "they became kadiyas to play - you're a furley binish in a chamber - you're a furley hat on beams"....With such a relief-shaped and elaborate folklore image, the young poet, barely 19 years old, wrote a poem inspired by it. The verse, close to the folk-syllabic, easily succumbed to him.