наследство

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.

The archive of Lyuben Karavelov contains interesting data on the ideology and cyclopedic activity of the great figure of our national revival. Karavelov's extremely illegible handwriting made it difficult to use many valuable documents, written for the most part in Russian, and left unknown interesting conjectures, thoughts, impressions and works of the writer, public figure, and the magazine sta. Reading all the manuscripts, which will be published in the first volume prepared from Karavelov's archival heritage, completes the picture of the overall personality of their creator, while at the same time clarifying some controversial issues surrounding his ideological and creative path. Karavelov's "Memoirs", stored in the Arch. Department at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, contain a lot of information about one of the least studied periods of their author's life - his activities in Serbia. We are reprinting the manuscript authentically, allowing ourselves only to update the spelling, which is necessary for publications of this nature. Written approximately 10 years after Karavelov left Russia, when the new linguistic environment and the daily use of two more languages ​​(Serbian and Romanian) had an impact on the frequent vocabulary and grammatical construction of the previously mastered Russian language, in the mentioned document, as well as in a significant part of the others, we come across incorrectly used case forms, Bulgarianisms and unsuccessful syntactic structure of the sentence. Having become accustomed to the language of the great Slavic country, however, Karavelov used it from the beginning to the end of his life. Since the handwriting of the editor of "Svoboda" is extremely illegible, the ink on some pages has faded from the effects of atmospheric conditions and the edges of several sheets are frayed or torn, some words remained unreadable. We mark them with an ellipsis enclosed in brackets (...) Words whose interpretation we are not completely sure of are placed in square brackets, and those of them that Karavelov used in abbreviation are given in two ways - when only the initial letters of the word are marked, we put the omitted part of it in brackets, and when the abbreviation affects the middle part, we mark the entire word under the line. In many places in the manuscripts we encounter Karavelov's initials LK. He used this as a reminder for barely hinted thoughts, facts and events that he intended to develop in his further work, or in those cases when he knew some names and data.

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.

The interdependence and interrelationship between the ideological-aesthetic and literary-artistic values ​​of different eras necessitate the comprehensive study and creative use of the achievements of previous generations. To see under what conditions certain achievements of national creative thought emerged, what needs called for them, what impact they had on broadening the horizons, on directing the searches of the mind, the excitements of the heart of the people of that time on the right path, is undoubtedly a primary task of our modernity. This is all the more necessary for those achievements that emerged in transitional eras, when the paths to a new life were being traced, when the spiritual forces of the people were particularly strained in order to win and affirm the right to free national existence and development. Such an era is undoubtedly the Bulgarian Revival. In that time of political slavery and spiritual darkness, when the Bulgarian nationality was put to great trials, our small intelligentsia had to strain its intellectual and moral forces to the limit in order to give the right direction to the awakening creative energy of the Bulgarian people, to lay solid foundations for the forming national literature and culture. To search for and collect the literary heritage of these first pioneers on our cultural level, to study and illuminate it comprehensively, so that it could truly become a support for the further development of scientific and theoretical literary and artistic thought, undoubtedly represents one of the duties of today's Marxist-Leninist literary studies. Belinsky's thought - in order to understand the present and predict the future, one must study the past, a thought insistently recalled by many people in creative pursuits, should not be forgotten by today's generations.

A book that respects the scale of spiritual synthesis! Thirty years of condensation of the author's thought into one Main goal: relief compaction of the contours of the aesthetic sketch bequeathed by Marx and Engels. Double and triple casting and polishing of each fragment with theoretical significance for art and its precise incorporation into the logical structure of Marxism. Historical and conceptual analysis of the basic aesthetic concepts - from the idealistic formulation to the Marxist synthesis of their real content: theoretical substantiation of each aesthetic principle in view of the internal logic of Marxist philosophy. This approach elevates Friedlander above the narrow interpretation of the aesthetic ideas of Marx and Engels as an expression of their personal artistic judgments, devoid of theoretical significance; replacing them with the general principles of historical materialism or using them to confirm the statement that "we have yet to create a Marxist theory of artistic creativity" (M. N. Pokrovsky). Friedlander convincingly proves that the aesthetic theory of Marxism, although not formally completed and systematized, is one of the aspects of the overall revolutionary worldview of K. Marx and F. Engels, inextricably linked to their common principled party position" (4).

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?

The idea that there is no true literary historian who is not also a critic does not originate from yesterday, and yet it is very often neglected, left in the shadows. This attitude is especially to the taste of those who like to return to the "eternal dispute - is literary criticism a science or an art, or does it happily unite these two spiritual human activities. In fact, literary history does not know and does not recognize the separation of the theorist from the historian - we are talking about the historian-creator and the critic-creator - each of them in different aspects does the same thing: aesthetically evaluates the works of verbal art; one deals mainly with works from the present, the other is oriented towards the past. Another question is to what extent and how each achieves this. A wonderful, extremely useful example in this regard is the literary heritage of Professor Dr. Ivan D. Shishmanov. Getting acquainted with this heritage, our contemporary enters an ideological world where true service to science is combined in an unusual way with active social activity - the latter is the basis for the proper conduct of the former. Ivan Shishmanov is equally original and significant as a researcher of the Revival, as a folklorist, and as a historian of Western European literatures, and as a critic. Perhaps this is facilitated by the fact that his accumulation of diverse and rich knowledge is based on an original, innate talent as a writer. That is why the publication of a literary-critical essay about this great scholar of ours in "Bulgarian Writer" should be noted as very timely and useful.

I was not destined to choose the political direction of my life myself. At the end of the First World War, my father, a rebel soldier, returned from the front with the self-confidence of a Bolshevik. He created a party group in his village, participated in the September Uprising in the Harmanli region, and in 1925, already a settler in the city, became a member of the local military party organization. When I was two months old, my father was arrested (the April events), thrown into the barracks well, beaten with flails until his right femur was exposed (it was still covered only with a thin, crusty skin) and sentenced (with the confiscation of all his meager property). Similar things happened to him later, when I was older. By then I had already experienced them personally. There were hard days at home, hard years, and evenings when I heard Mom scold Dad: "If you wanted to fix the world, why did you get married, why did we have children!" "Come on, Dad," Dad would answer in the dark, "we'll fix this world and I'll take you to Moscow to see her!"

Despite the "conspiracy of silence" towards Marxism on the part of official bourgeois science, in the middle of the last century it was already a respectable reality. But his aesthetic theory was "rediscovered" only in the 1930s-1940s by Soviet scientists. This temporarily limited the perimeter of its impact on world aesthetic thought; slowed down the formation of Marxist aesthetics; exacerbated the international controversy over the theoretical significance of Marx's aesthetic concept. And the prejudices towards it, the doubts about its very existence and even about the possibility of building aesthetics on the principles of historical materialism, are more peripheral than the traditional bourgeois skepticism towards Marxism as a whole. At first glance, the late discovery of Marx's aesthetic heritage is a simple anomaly. In fact, a complex of reasons of a scientific, social, ideological, aesthetic and bibliographic nature intersect here. Together, they determine the unique fate of this heritage. Their study is the subject of this article.