литературно

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.

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.

In the history of Bulgarian literature, Vasil Drumev occupies a certain place not only as a fiction writer and playwright, but also with his versatile critical activity. His literary-critical, cultural-historical and other articles create for him a name of a gifted and educated man of letters, who worked with love and understanding for the development of national literature, science, culture. He is one of the few Renaissance writers who received a relatively more systematic education and had the opportunity to study the literatures of other nations for a longer period. Thus, the natural talent of the author of the first Bulgarian novel, the aspiration that possessed him since adolescence and to serve the spiritual revival of his people with his pen find favorable conditions for maturation and development. And if the talented writer had not changed his calling precisely in the heyday of his creative powers, if he had not accepted the spiritual dignity, he would undoubtedly have enriched our national artistic and theoretical-critical thought to a much higher degree.

I predict that the reader will be perplexed when he reads the title of this article: is it possible that such general theoretical questions as the formation of the artistic image and the division of literature into genera and types can be solved or examined on the limited material of a literature for one decade and taken at that not in its best era: because in the 1840s of the 19th century, neither Botev, nor Vazov, nor Karavelov, nor Petko Slaveykov, nor Rakovski, nor even Chintulov had yet appeared on the literary horizon in Bulgaria. The literary field is mainly occupied by poets such as Neofit Rilski, Neofit Bozveli, Rayno Popovich, Konstantin Ognyanovich, Naiden Gerov and others.

The breadth of the concept of history in its present sense in itself determines the complexity of the task that confronts the compilers of works on the history of literature. Solving this task requires, above all, an exceptionally competent penetration into the spirit of the time about which one writes and into the spirit of the time in which one writes. For we can be less and less satisfied with literary histories that are reduced to stating facts and commenting on events, proceeding from literary works. We are talking about something significantly more complex: showing literature as an expression of spiritual, social and economic processes in their progressive development. This means that literary history has radically changed its role and purpose, trying to penetrate deeply to the foundations of social phenomena, creative impulses, etc. Objectivist registration can no longer be its distinguishing feature. It now aims to provide a broad panorama of the literary and spiritual life of peoples in different eras, to shed light on literary, and hence social, sociological problems from our point of view. It is true that literary history has its own methods and literary creation is examined in it with different intentions than poetics examines them. But in its current state, literary history already has a significantly comprehensive and generalizing character and connects a number of defining elements from individual literary sciences. If we decide to look for general historical works on Slavic literatures, written from such an aspect, they will turn out to be very few. And one of them, which in some respects strives to meet these requirements, is the two-volume "Essays on the History of Slavic Literatures" by Prof. Dr. Emil Georgiev.

Half a year before leaving with his detachment for his homeland, Hristo Botev, together with Stefan Stambolov, published a small book with a title as unpretentious and modest as his entire appearance: "Songs and Poems by Boteva and Stambolova". This was the only attempt by the revolutionary writer to take a look at his creative path, and only in the field of poetry. The search for and publication of his entire literary work remains a task for generations, a great and responsible task that has not been finally solved to this day. What has been done in the past and what is the status of the issue of Botev's literary heritage today?

In his "Prolegomena ad Homerum" published in 1795, Friedrich Wolff, while denying the sole authorship of the "Iliad", notes that in this form the poem is unfinished and that it could be continued with a description of the subsequent events of the "Trojan cycle". Among the many protests and objections that met this idea, Hegel's rebuff was particularly sharp and categorical: "Then... the third question arises about the unity of the completeness of the epic work. I have already pointed out that this thesis becomes very important, since in recent times the notion has begun to be considered permissible that the epic can be arbitrarily completed or continue to develop further, as long as it pleases. Although this view is supported by sound-minded scholars-researchers, e.g. F. A. Wolf, it remains crude and barbaric, since this view actually amounts to denying the best epic poems the true properties of works of art" (Hegel's quote). One hundred and fifty years later, in his study "The Origin of the Novel-Epic," A. V. Chicherin 3 argued that works belonging to the great epic types (e.g., Tolstoy's "War and Peace") were not completed and could not be completed, since the wide scope of artistic reality, the large number of characters, the large number of problems

The current stage of the development of Bulgarian literary studies is characterized by the awareness of the ever-growing need to specify the methodology, to build a secure basis for a private and general theoretical interpretation of the artistic facts, in order to be able to cope with all possible deviations from scientific truth, accumulated by both vulgar sociology and subjectivist criticism, which in a number of its manifestations demonstrates its militant anti-scientificity. By the way, there is one aspect in which subjectivism and vulgar sociology converge as much as possible: along with the claim to the indisputability of their assessments, the representatives of both directions showed disregard for the specificity of the work of art. This found expression in the arbitrary interpretation of the text, in a misunderstanding (underestimation and overestimation) of its structural features, and hence - underestimation of the function and semantics of both the whole and its elements.

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."