Milena Tsaneva

As a poet and fiction writer, Vazov is deeply engraved in our consciousness. He entered as a playwright. But we are not at all accustomed to thinking of him as an audience and critic. Not only because the great growth of his artistic works overshadows the other aspects of his activity, but also because for years his literary and journalistic work has been consciously or unconsciously underestimated. The idea had become established that no matter how great he was as an artist, Vazov was weak as a thinker. Some could not forgive him for his fight against the circle of "Thought and the Sharp Expression of the Symbolists", others - for his unfortunate study of Hristo Botev. That was all that was known. Everything else was a vague idea of ​​some unimportant, uninteresting and largely accidental facts from the writer's life. A not very popular self-confession for a few fiery articles" against the Battenberg coup, a widespread opinion about the superficial, most often condescending-encouraging nature of the literary reviews written by the poet and a not entirely critically compiled bibliographic list, 1 in which, among other things, a number of introductory articles and anonymous newspaper notes were attributed to Vazov - this is almost all that literary scholarship of the past had noted. And it had remained in the circle of specialists. The interesting part of Vazov's literary and journalistic work - his political articles from the first decade after the Liberation - was completely ignored. None of the bourgeois writers took the trouble to leaf through the dusty pages of the newspaper Nrodniy Glas to extract from them the memory of those years when the poet was young and ardent, when he kept the great ideals of the revival intact in his heart and, with the temperamental pen of a journalist, served the same "terrible goddess of Freedom" that he sang about with youthful enthusiasm in his poems. Whatever reasons we may list, it seems to me that this silence was not accidental. The bourgeoisie needed a Vazov - polished, paraded and... weakened. It had no interest in emphasizing the full depth of his democracy, the full breadth of his patriotism, the full sharpness of his love of freedom. It was hard enough to swallow some of his poems to have a desire to create additional ones for itself. about the difficulties and with his journalism. She seemed to vaguely sense the dangers that Vazov's political articles from the first years of her reign concealed and, in any case, left them in oblivion. The progressive literary scholarship of the past was not interested in them either - it was also hindered by the prejudice that there was nothing interesting to expect from the political articles of a bourgeois writer.

Vazov's "Uncles" - a long-gone world of primitive idyll and naive aspirations. A world in which the last echo of the great events of a bygone era is dying down... Here the fashion for the malakof arrived 15 years late, and the name of Bonaparte, after a 45-year journey, first became known under the form of Gunaparti. At a time when Europe already knew Balzac and Tolstoy, here tears were still shed over "Long-suffering Genoveva" and "Alexandria". In order to thunder in the patriotic song "Proud Nikifor Asked", the sounds of the Marseillaise had traveled for 72 years. Somewhere in the Balkans, Philip Totyu's detachment is fighting. Botev has already written "At Farewell". But here the heroes are absorbed in the epic quarrel over a cap and compose "satires" against each other. The subject of the story has become the most insignificant thing that can offer us in the face of the liberation reality, that which history contemptuously closes its pages before.

The works that we usually understand under the name "poems of Ivan Vazov" are united not only by their external genre features, but also acquire a broader meaning in the process of the author's growth as an artist. Created in the short period 1879-1884, they are closely related to a certain stage of Vazov's poetic biography, expressing the regularities of an important moment in his creative development. At the end of 1879, when Vazov's first poem was published, he was already the author of three collections of poetry. Collections of poetry in which he experienced the full force of the ecstasies and sorrows of his people. But the days of upsurge and despair, of georism and ecstasies have already died down. Amid the idyllic silence of his Berkovo solitude, the turbulent feelings and pathetic outbursts in the poet's soul calm down. And those invisible processes of artistic rethinking of life experience begin, from which his future works will crystallize. What until recently was a heated atmosphere of the present is now transformed in consciousness into the past, into a memory, subordinated to the sense of historical perspective. After the period of immediate emotional reactions, the time of broad artistic generalizations and calm historical assessments comes. "Epic of the Forgotten", "Unloved-Unloved" and "Under the Yoke" could not have appeared immediately after "Pryaporets and the Gusla", "The Sorrows of Bulgaria" and "Deliverance". Between the one and the other lies the border of a historical era and crossing this border meant for the author a process of new ideological creative maturation. The transformed living environment asserts its rights, the radically changed ideological atmosphere leaves its mark. Disappointment comes in place of enthusiasm, naive faith is replaced by skeptical irony. And from this dramatic interweaving, new faith and new optimism are born... Freed from the black shadow of slavery, life shines with all its multi-huedness. The artist's outlook becomes broader and wiser, his poetic perception of the world - more complex and richer.

At the beginning of 1884, for several months, three poems by Vazov were published one after the other on the pages of the newspaper "Narodniy Glas" and the magazine "Nauka". These are "Sallust's Sneeze", "Sinai Rose" and "In the Kingdom of the Samodivs" - titles that in themselves already suggest something new about the author's searches in the field of poetry. And indeed, all three works lead us into new areas of life, beyond the boundaries of folk life, from which the author had drawn material until now. Only "Sinai Rose" could be connected in a certain sense with the thematic scope of his previous poems - insofar as it depicts the fate of a Bulgarian girl, captured during the Russo-Turkish War and sold into slavery in the distant Sinai desert. But in spirit and style, this is a purely romantic work that has nothing to do with the tone and character of "Vidul", "Gramada", "Trayko and Riza", and "Zagorka". The poet who lifted the heavy burden of Trayko and called Ruska a "peony flower" is simply unrecognizable here.