Книжка-6

1969 Booklet 6 Contents

Two recent international congresses - the Belgrade Congress of the (international) Association for the Comparative History of Literature (ASIL), 1967, and the Prague Sixth International Congress of Slavists, 1968, updated the issues of comparative literary studies, confronted us with the need to clarify our attitude to this science unequivocally. At the Belgrade Congress, a proposal was adopted to prepare a collective work on the comparative history of European literatures, the Literary Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences received powers from ASIL and the obligation to coordinate the work scientifically and administratively, and in Budapest the first volume of a series of collections that examine preliminary problems is already being prepared for publication. At the Prague Congress, the Soviet delegation launched the idea of ​​writing a collective history of Slavic literatures, it seems to me, without achieving much success. Although each of the undertakings is independent in organizational terms, there is an internal connection between them. The success of the first undertaking should prompt us to develop the second: how Slavic literatures will be represented in the comparative history of European literatures will depend on the objectivity and scientific merits of Slavic literary history.

In 1969, 500 years passed since the event that gave rise to the creation of Vladislav Grammatik's Rila Tale. This peculiar tale is one of the few works of old Bulgarian literature that are distinguished by lasting artistic significance, valid for readers both in the past and today. Written nearly 500 years ago, it was read, copied, rewritten and distributed throughout the centuries of Turkish slavery. Later - from the Revival to the most recent times - scholars-specialists in our country and abroad dedicated numerous articles and studies to it. Long debates have been held about it and different, sometimes opposing opinions have been expressed, but it is little known to the wide circle of Bulgarian readers. The main reason is the absence of a contemporary assessment corresponding to its historical and artistic significance. The 500th anniversary of the event that gave birth to the tale is a good occasion for such an assessment.

The time after the arrest of Nikola Vaptsarov until his execution poses with utmost clarity the questions about the meaning of human life and the irresistible need for self-sacrifice, about civic valor, about a dignified death, about the comradeship and moral purity of a person who enters forever into the memory of the people... His researchers will have to return to this last and tragic period of the poet's creative life. because this supreme stage further reveals the true feat of the communist artist in many ways and in a unique way. As is known, Vaptsarov was arrested on March 4, 1942, at three or four o'clock in the morning, together with his little brother Boris and their cousin Lyubcho Vezev. The previous evening they had a meeting at the poet's home (37 Angel Kanchev Street) with Tsvyatko Radoynov and stayed until 11 o'clock at night. Vaptsarov was often forced to sleep in other people's rooms so that the police would lose track of him. This absence from home began more often from the beginning of September 1941, when Vaptsarov took over the position of head of the special (mining) activity at the Central Committee of the Bulgarian People's Revolutionary Party (k). Since then, he became a professional revolutionary, carrying out the B B B decision of the party.

The word "intuition" in psychology and aesthetics is used in the sense of sudden knowledge, knowledge without the mediation of concepts and reasoning at the very moment of its occurrence. For example, a scientist arrives at the solution to the problem that concerns him, not at the moment of intellectual effort, not when he is standing at his workbench, but at a moment when he is not thinking about it, when he is walking or when he is having fun, when he wakes up from a dream or when he is thinking about the solution to a completely different problem. The riddle was solved - says Gauss - so that, as if lightning flashed before me, I myself was not able to restore the connection between what I knew earlier and what led me to the desired result. The solution to the riddle, of course, must be substantiated in order to have scientific value. It must be clarified through a chain of reasoning connecting the known with the unknown that has been discovered. This justification, however, usually occurs slowly, as one moves from step to step on the ladder leading to intellectual clarification of the knowledge gained. Kepler wrote of the discovery of his third law: "Eight months ago the first ray of light shone before me, three months ago I saw the day, and finally, only a few days ago I was honored to contemplate the radiant sun itself."

The science of artistic thinking (the creative process) has recently been increasingly insistently dealing with the issues of aesthetic impact, aesthetic experiences, aesthetic pleasure - in an aspect in which they have not been considered so far. What is it about?

Along with other unresolved issues in the history of our old literature, there is also the question of the historiographical works that it had. That is why every initiative that has been noticed recently, related to Bulgarian medieval historiography, is commendable. I am referring to the studies of Goran Todorov "The Origin and Initial Development of Bulgarian Historiography (681-1018)" and "Bulgarian Historiography in the 11th-14th Centuries"1 and Konstantin Mechev "The Bulgarian Chronicle of the Early 15th Century (Historical Content, Ideological and Artistic Appearance, the Question of Its Authorship")2. The reason for these notes is given to me by the study of K. Mechev. I say notes, since I do not intend to dwell in detail on the issue touched upon by it; I would rather just like to take a position on the question posed - To what extent can the author's thesis be accepted, according to which the famous Old Bulgarian (South Slavic) writer Isai Serski also wrote the anonymous Bulgarian chronicle from the beginning of the 15th century? I want to take a position because our science still has so many important questions to solve, which is why there is no need to divert the efforts of the few scientific workers with publications that are insufficiently argued. It is better to direct these efforts to other issues. The answer is all the more compelling, taking into account the fact that the publication is published without an editorial note, it is not presented as a discussion one.

Being is a dialectical unity of life and death. The force field in which they unfold is indivisible. Hippocrates (460-375 BC), the "father of medicine", had already realized that "nature is existence and non-existence". Engels also accepted the basic position of biology as the continuous growth of death throughout life. When it is the natural end of personal existence, this is undoubtedly not a disease phenomenon. Indeed, diseases are also subject to natural laws, but they disrupt the free flow of life more or less, for a short or a long time. In health, it unfolds in the rhythmic sequence of age transitions from birth to death. Since diseases put to sleep or even make it impossible for the full expression of the individual, man has been fighting against them for a long time. Moreover, both plants and animals resist disease according to their biological capabilities. "Natural healing" is noted in all stages of evolution, starting from the single-celled organism and ending with man. But he - unlike all other living beings - also creates a healing art, or more precisely, medicine as a science. His consciousness enables him not only to establish that he has an illness, but also to experience it as his own suffering, not only to die, but also to have his own attitude towards death. If the continuation of the existence of the personality and beyond its limits is an exciting problem of primitive cosmogony, of ancient and modern philosophy, if it is the lifeblood of religious longings and creative achievements, an inspiring impulse for self-sacrifice in social conflicts, then medicine aims to preserve life only beyond death. But the vocation of the doctor is not limited to prolonging life to its natural end through the physiological extinction of brain activity. The doctor removes or at least alleviates suffering and pain, fear and grief, anger and despair. He prevents (or tries to do so) the transition of acute illness into long-term suffering and infirmity. He helps the restoration of the organism and the personality in the urge and to regain the freedom of health. But the task of his tasks is - to protect the person from illness.

For the first time, Kiril Hristov came into contact with the Czech cultural community in 1912. On a five-star street, a few steps from the famous old local "U flek" - one of the nests of Prague intellectuals, - in a nice house with a Gothic facade, in a neat apartment on the third floor I settled in two rooms... From the very first days, through the professor of literature Jelinek, son-in-law of the old Czech novelist Irasek, and through the secretary of the Slavic Society in Prague, Forman, I became acquainted with a number of Czech celebrities and was accepted into their circle and into their clubs as an equal. The newspapers gave information about my stay in Prague, several magazines presented my portrait, translations of my poems and biographical notes. ... While getting to know the beauty of ancient and modern Prague and establishing connections with a number of cultural figures and representatives of the Czech spirit, I also began to quickly learn the language. I had planned an anthology of Czech poetry from Vráhlický onwards, from which poet I had already made some translations.

Raised in Borcha's Byala Cherkva, Veliko Tarnovo District, nurtured with the revolutionary ideas of Bacho Kiro Petrov, Tsanko Bakalov Tserkovski most closely connected his life and activities with the struggles of the Bulgarian people against bourgeois-monarchical domination, for freedom, social justice and a people's republic. Disgusted by the obscurantism in the bourgeois school, Tserkovski made long trips around the country, aiming to get to know both its natural beauties and the lives of ordinary working people. For him, community centers and libraries were the most valuable thing, as they revealed to him the history of humanity, gave him the opportunity to get acquainted with the work of the great world writers, to saturate his young and thirsty soul for struggle with progressive science, with freedom-loving human thought and culture, to find his place in life. In the Plovdiv library - writes Tserkovski - for eight whole months I was the most regular and earliest visitor.

The name of Nikolai Khrelkov was very popular in the 1930s among progressive students, who revered the writer as a consistent proletarian poet. Back then, we collected donations for him and dreamed of seeing him one day. For me, this came true in 1946, when for four years I had the opportunity to visit the poet in Gorna Banya as a collaborator on the cultural page of the weekly "Fighting Tuberculosis" that he edited. Himself suffering from tuberculosis, Khrelkov waged a stubborn battle with the "heavy social capitalist legacy," as he jokingly put it.

One of the characteristic features of the contemporary literary process is its genre diversity. This applies equally to both fiction and literary criticism. Artistic aspirations and generalizations, the searches and insights of historical-literary and critical thought find expression in various genres and forms, sometimes very heterogeneous, but nevertheless interesting as evidence of the richness of literary life, of the diversity of creative individuals, of the different paths that writers and literary critics take to reveal truths of an ideological-aesthetic, biographical-creative, moral, and emotional nature.

For almost a year now, bookstores have been offering the importance that Velichko Valchev has for readers a new work on Ivan Vazov - the most voluminous in the already impressive literature on the national poet. The author, Velichko Valchev, is a well-known researcher of the life and work of Ivan Vazov. He has published about sixty studies, popularization articles, reviews of editions of his works, translations of Vazov's works abroad, productions of Vazov's plays, etc. about our most popular classic. In addition, he has edited the poet's works, written a preface to one or another edition. Special mention should be made of the valuable volume "Unpublished Letters" of Ivan Vazov, Selected", edited and commented on by Velichko Valchev and published by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The book "Ivan Vazov. Life and Creative Path", written, as we learn from the preface, over a period of more than ten years, in a certain sense summarizes and completes the long-term studies and research of Velichko Valchev. In it, the author used, of course, not mechanically, much of what he had previously written about Vazov.

At the end of last year, the book "From the Life and Work of Ivan Vazov" by Iliya Boyadzhiev and Tsocho Delev was published, State Publishing House "Narodna Prosveta", Sofia, 1968. The exposition of the life and work of Ivan Vazov is based on carefully collected and well-arranged documentation (photographs, portraits, memories, quotes, diagrams and tables). Some of the elements of this Documentation have been known since earlier, and there are some that were discovered later. But it is interesting that now both of them are placed and examined in a new light - something that is one of the merits of the book.

The Polish literary historian Teresa Dombek has dedicated her monograph to him. As a teacher of Polish language at Sofia University for several years, she became closely acquainted with the Bulgarian literary tradition, with the development of general cultural and literary contacts between the two Slavic peoples - Bulgarian and Polish. Studying the reception of Polish literature in Bulgaria, her research gaze has focused on one of the most interesting phenomena in the history of Bulgarian-Polish literary relations - the translation and popularization activity of our prominent poet Dora Gabe. While the history of Bulgarian-Polish literary relations during the Renaissance is the subject of much research in our country, only a few studies on individual writers have been devoted to the new reception of Polish literature. Our Polish studies are still indebted to a number of issues of Bulgarian-Polish literary reciprocity.

On April 24, 1969, the public defense of Hristo Yordanov's dissertation on the topic "Veselin Andreev - Life and Creativity" took place. In the presence of the members of the scientific council, the research associates of the Institute of Literature and many citizens, the reviewers Acad. Pantelei Zarev and Prof. Efrem Karanfilov read their reviews of the proposed work, emphasizing its merits: conscientious study of the material, penetration into the contemporary problems of our literature, kinship with the work of Veselin Andreev, building an accurate portrait of a moral and creative personality. In his review, Acad. P. Zarev emphasized that he fully shared the main concept of the dissertationist: the beauty and humanism of the socialist revolution give birth to poets and communists worthy of the traditions of our literature, coming from Botev. He also pointed out that the life and work of Veselin Andreev are presented in relief and so illuminated that they are turned into a truthful apology for communist ideas. Prof. E. Karanfilov pointed out that Yordanov comes to some interesting problems about the transition between realism and romanticism, about socialist humanism in our poetry, about revolutionary optimism, etc.

On May 29, 1969, the defense of the dissertation on the topic "Georgi of Elka Konstantinova Raychev. Life and Creativity" took place. The scientific supervisor was our late literary historian and critic Minko Nikolov, and the reviewers were Prof. Stoyan Karolev and Assoc. Prof. Zdravko Petrov. The members of the scientific council, literary workers and many citizens were present. The director of the Institute of Literature, Stoyko Bozhkov, who chaired the discussion, introduced those present to the content of the presented documents and gave a characteristic of the scientific achievements of the graduate student. The head of the section at the institute, Prof. Georgi Tsanev, presented the work of Elka Konstantinova, and the two reviewers read their reviews. Both emphasized the seriousness of the work done, the penetration into the world of the writer and the difficult time of its formation and creative realization.

Lilyana Grasheva's dissertation "Artistic Peculiarities of Old Bulgarian Literature", defended on 5. VI. 1969, is an aesthetic-theoretical study of the artistic originality and aesthetic essence of medieval literature. Learning creatively from Soviet medievalists (primarily from the school of the prominent Soviet literary scholar D. S. Likhachev), the dissertationist makes the first serious attempt to systematically study and comprehend from contemporary ideological and aesthetic positions the poetics of Old Bulgarian literature. The task set requires a deep penetration into the artistic and ideological world of the Middle Ages, rich scientific-aesthetic and methodological preparation. In the defended work, the dissertationist opposes a number of traditional concepts, which are an expression of prejudices and underestimation of the pictorial merits of Old Bulgarian Literature, considering it as a historically determined type of verbal creativity. At the same time, striving to By illuminating the real ideological and aesthetic values, Grasheva avoids the temptations of the modernizing idealization and modernization of the literary material. For the first time, the dissertationist makes a broader comparison of the aesthetic and creative ideas of the Old Bulgarian writers with those of Russian, Byzantine and Western European medieval writers. She proves that the Old Bulgarian writers are fully included in the main philosophical and aesthetic line of the European Middle Ages. The most significant contribution is contained in the third chapter of the dissertation ("Principles and Achievements of Artistic Image"), which presents the author as a researcher with an independent English thought, a keen sense of the artistic specificity of literary phenomena and a rich literary culture.