изучаване

The increased interest in our cultural heritage requires us to approach it critically, with love and understanding, with scientific awareness and civic responsibility. From a serious publication, our contemporary reader must learn when and under what specific historical conditions the work was written, what the writer's subjective creative motives were, and how to understand certain ideological and aesthetic peculiarities. The need for a critical apparatus is particularly important in the case of works whose authors have followed a complex and contradictory ideological and creative path. The comprehensive critical edition of Ivan Vazov's works is a serious attempt to present the work of the great Bulgarian classic in a form that meets the requirements of people with different interests and is at the level of the current development of our literary and archaeographic science.

Two years ago, when the various sections of the First International Congress of Balkan Studies were being outlined and a general outline of their issues was being drawn up, one could only assume the great interest that some of the planned reports would arouse. At that time, there was still no clear idea of ​​the wide boundaries of the issues that the individual branches of Balkan studies have - a complex science of the history, culture, literature, language, art and folklore of the Balkan peoples, of the historically created and increasingly intensively enriched relationships between them, of their lasting ties with other peoples and other national cultures. Now, when the congress has successfully concluded its work, we understand well how many more significant problems and questions (some of them only raised in the reports or discussions) are yet to be resolved and illuminated from modern scientific positions, in order to correctly outline all the common moments in the centuries-old development of the Balkan peoples, by overcoming the erroneous concepts and findings accumulated in the past. One of the undoubted positive results of the First International Congress of Balkan Studies is that it gave a serious impetus in this direction. And one more thing: in the days from August 26 to September 1, 1966, the congress turned the mutual collegial respect between the individual delegates into a tradition that should be strengthened by all as the main necessary condition for our further research and creative meetings. For if now, when we are at the very beginning of the more intensive and joint study of the problems of Balkan Studies, this atmosphere has ensured a calm and businesslike discussion of various, sometimes very specific, issues, tomorrow it will certainly give us the opportunity for unprecedented mutual acquaintance and study of the individual Balkan literatures and cultures.

Due to centuries of foreign oppression, the Bulgarian nation underwent a peculiar socio-historical development. Our national revival began only in the second half of the 18th century. However, cultural and historical processes have become particularly intense since then. In just one century (1762-1878), national creative thought went through several stages, only to soon rise to great heights. Continuing the traditions of the Revival, literary science from the beginning of our century quickly expanded its problematic, adopting reliable principles for a more comprehensive interpretation of cultural and aesthetic phenomena and processes. Both the great writers and critics of the Revival, and the few academically educated literary scholars after the Liberation, demonstrated a number of correct understandings regarding the diverse prerequisites for the formation of the Bulgarian national culture and literature, regarding the interrelationships and interdependence of the ideological and artistic phenomena of the individual peoples. Directing their research gaze towards the problems of our national revival, the first great Bulgarian literary historians realized that they could not be comprehensively and truthfully illuminated if one did not take into account similar processes and phenomena in neighboring countries - Greece, Serbia, Romania, Russia, with which our people communicated in different ways, through diverse forms.

Freed from the postulates of comparativity, the problem of the reception of a particular literary work in one or several national literatures naturally took one of the leading places in the interests of contemporary Marxist literary scholars. It could not be otherwise. After Marxism-Leninism permeated and enriched literary studies with its methodology and thereby turned it into an objective science, it became clear that the history of any national literature can be scientifically correctly presented and aesthetically truthfully revealed only when it is studied in connection with the history of other countries and peoples and their literatures, when the mutual connections and influences are clarified. Why? Because nothing else but the general, similar laws of historical development, which for each people (and each historical period) have their own, specific features, are the basis on which a given literary trend and influence grows and develops. This dependence was established by G. V. Plekhanov, who wrote that the influence of a given literature from one country on the literature of another is directly proportional to the similarity of the social relations of these countries.