Georgi Tsanev

Tradition and innovation. Two terms that hardly ever leave the pages of literary periodicals in socialist countries today. So much is explained about their relationship, so many disputes are waged around them - that many are probably tired of it already. "Amen to this banal topic" - you will hear some people say here and there. But literary life constantly - and sometimes too insistently - poses the banal topic.

We are talking about the first decade after the victory of the October Revolution. Because, if it is a question of its influence at all - with all the new things that it brought to social and cultural life - this influence continues in our country, as everywhere in the world, to this day. But, it seems to me, the most interesting, historically innovative is the impact that the October Revolution - as an epochal phenomenon, as the beginning of a new era in the history of mankind - had on us in the first years after its triumph. It was then that the new ideas and solutions to problems that it suggested to Bulgarian literature, the new impulses with which it strengthened its development in the moment after the First World War - a moment of crisis and the search for new paths for artistic activity - had a turning point.

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.