Toncho Zhechev

A few years ago, a fellow villager of mine, a passionate hunter, took me hunting with him. But it was only towards evening, when we were returning, that he signaled that he had seen something and whispered to me to stop and be silent. He aimed at the telephone wires. Two turtledoves were huddled on them, as if contemplating the increasingly pale, crimson west. One of them flinched and unexpectedly quickly left its companion. The other did not even notice, remaining motionless. At that moment a roar came from the rifle. The bird flew up in some last effort and fell rapidly, almost vertically, to the ground. Even the poor and dry vegetation of the stubble hid it. When my friend brought back the still fluttering bird, with its eyes painfully closed, in a moment we both looked at its half-open beak with shame. My fellow villager immediately came to his senses, picked up the turtledove, and began to tell incredible hunting stories. He was obviously thinking about what had happened as much as his wife had about the hen after he had cut off the rough woodcutter's head. I listened absently and remembered that moment B And Emilian Stanev's story, when the shot-shot squeaking jug flew in the same way, and the forest hid it from his eyes in order to conceal a murder. It was clear to me that my companion saw nothing particularly wrong with what had just happened, this story no longer concerned him. And why did Emilian Stanev seem to be haunted by such memories, why did he want to free himself from someone's intrusive gaze, why did he always talk about... murder in such cases? Was it not because of our gullibility that we mistakenly accepted these stories as "hunting"?

Georgi Gachev's book with the unattractive title "Accelerated Development of Literature" is, for me, the most attractive fruit of Bulgarian studies outside our borders. In it, Gachev demonstrates great advantages over his colleagues at home and abroad, his efforts are intertwined with some of the latest searches in contemporary literary studies. Relying on the brilliant tradition of Russian comparative literary studies and the contemporary achievements of Marxist literary theory, he makes almost the first attempt at a theoretical history of Bulgarian literature in one of the important periods of its development. Despite the complex, abstract-theoretical formulation of the questions and the purely rationalistic pathos in resolving them, the book bears a clear imprint of the researcher's personality, his spiritual searches and problems. You have to be Bulgarian for the tragic vicissitudes of our national cultural development, the fate of these figures distant in history, the weaknesses and discontinuities to arouse such fascination in you. of tradition. In general, to feel within oneself this thirst and longing for tradition, for supporting and stable forms. You have to be a foreigner to be able to look from the side, to have lived with other cultures, to be blinded by the astonishing paradoxes of a literature, the unexpected combinations, the tragicomic anachronisms and even more unexpected appropriations. Gachev has taken a voluntary and noble risk - to find the laws of a delayed and therefore accelerated cultural development, to discover the motives driving it, natural tendencies in an unnatural development. He undertakes his risky experiment on a period in the history of our literature - the end of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century - which as much complicates as it eases his task. The difficulty comes from the fact that, due to its nature, this literature knows nothing about itself, in it criticism, programs, aesthetic platforms are absent. In many respects this is not literature itself, but culture in the broadest sense of the word. With rare exceptions, its written monuments are far less interesting than the vital and spiritual adventures of their creators. In these written monuments, the creators are reflected palely and sluggishly. The difficulties are also increased by the fact that until now this period of our literary development has aroused and arouses factual, empirical interest in researchers. In our country, there is no theoretical interest in key periods, genres, trends and problems of literary development, and Gachev's work was prepared only from the factual side. Perhaps that is why for many it was a surprise, almost an unauthorized attempt and unnecessary complication.

Isn't it too inappropriate to open this question again? Haven't we been forced to "originality" for years, which has left us behind in a number of areas of science and life? A number of people have prejudices about the topic itself. But anyone who has followed literary life in recent years will not deny that it is becoming necessary, often dominating the press, criticism, and conversations. These conversations have even acquired the specific hue of self-disclosure and self-knowledge, so complacency and skepticism become inappropriate. This is no longer a dialogue, as it is now fashionable to say, but a kind of public monologism, since we are touching on very intimate matters. Among the many reasons for the maturation of these problems in our literary development in recent years, I will point out the following: The tendencies of socialist development of constant rapprochement of the peoples in the USSR and the gradual erasure of national differences are formulated in the Program of the CPSU. Development in this direction is a complex and lengthy process. Nations, as Marxism teaches, are permanent historical communities, subject to constant change. Their true rapprochement, as well as the elimination of differences between them, must go through a comprehensive socialist flowering of national cultures, through the disclosure of their entire vital and creative potential. ..... The elimination of national differences - says the Program of the CPSU - is a significantly longer process than the elimination of class boundaries... The Party does not allow either ignoring or exaggerating national peculiarities." On the subject of the national question, Lenin warned that "an unconditional requirement of Marxist theory in the consideration of any social question is its formulation within certain historical frameworks, and then... taking into account the specific peculiarities that distinguish a given country from others within the limits of a historical epoch."

In the short period of victory and disappointment in the struggle for spiritual independence, between 1870 and 1873, Petko Slaveykov wrote three poetic works that became the crowning glory of his poetic work - "Don't Sing to Me", "My Cruelty Has Broken", and "The Spring of the White-Legged Woman". During these years, he wrote other poems, but they repeat the motifs known until then in his poetry, they do not carry the dazzling novelty of the aforementioned ones, both in spirit and in expression.

At first glance, the fate of Hristo Radevski and his poetry is clear, but difficult to understand. A revolutionary poet in spirit and expression, Radevski's fate is not like the fate of Bulgarian revolutionary poets. They usually leave before life has begun to clarify or make sense of their pathetic symbolism, before life has begun to unravel the exact, real meaning of their words. Stalked on Okolchitsa, felled at the military shooting range or caught by a ridiculous accident, they have ignited the imagination of subsequent generations with the painful and sweet theme of the place of their fiery souls in the other times that have come. Radevski is one of the few who can see the full unfolding of the forces whose soothsayers and conjurers they were, to see with joy and surprise the new world that lived in their dreams, and which they fearlessly and loudly called. Some are inclined to see in such a confluence of life's circumstances a silent passing of Fortune. Why? Does the encounter with the lasting truths of life require less courage, manliness, and strength than death for them?