Яворов

This series of letters by Yavorov touches upon a particularly significant moment in his creative career. The year he spent in Pomorie was a time of continuous creative growth. It was then that some of the poet's most significant works were written and conceived, such as "Kaliopa," "Armenians," "By the Hearth," "Hailstorm," and others. Yavorov's Anchialos notebooks record new poems almost every day, with ever new poetic ideas, evidence of an extraordinary creative fervor. The first issue of the magazine Misul ot novi vek (Thought from the New Century) begins with "Kaliopa." Dr. Krastov and P. P. Slaveykov already show a personal interest in the new brilliant talent and, with particular generosity, give him his deserved place in their magazine. They corresponded with the unknown telegraph operator and arranged for him to move to Sofia. This generous recognition undoubtedly contributed to the blossoming of the young poet's creative powers. This generous recognition undoubtedly contributed to the blossoming of the young poet's creative powers. According to his own words, half of the red collection "Poems" was written during that year, 1900. At the end of the same year, I published the collection. Even before its appearance, within a few months, I became the most popular poet in Bulgaria." (Dr. M. Arnaudov, "Towards the Psychography of P. K. Yavorov," Sofia 1916, p. 25).

There is hardly another writer in Bulgarian literature whose life and work have sparked such irreconcilable disputes as Yavorov. As soon as his name is mentioned, polemics flare up, perceptions cross paths, it is difficult to find a common language and much more difficult to find a common assessment. Not that anyone today disputes his civic and creative work as a whole - the poet and revolutionary have remained forever in the hearts and memories of the people. But there is no other great Bulgarian creator so contradictory and so difficult to explain. Moreover, his life path is so strewn with twists and turns, intersected with so many destinies; his work confuses and upsets even the most perfect schemes and artificial constructions... It slips away every time someone tries to put some decent literary uniform on him. It does not fit into it, tears it apart at all the seams and continues to exist outside it and create endless difficulties for literary historians and theorists. This is so, it seems to me, because every time we struggle to see the poet and the man not as he is, but as we want him to be. Each of us knows Yavorov so personally that he has created his own idea of ​​him. And it is natural that it will very rarely coincide completely with what we constantly read and hear about the poet. We are impatient and strictly demand that everyone see in Yavorov exactly what we see ourselves. If such coverage is not obtained, we get angry and are ready to fight for Yavorov... It is quite natural in this situation that a book about P. K. Yavorov will arouse great controversy. Even more so a book like that by M. Kremen, which enters a delicate area where so many views and interests are intertwined. How difficult it is to take an objective and correct position, how painful it is to show elementary tolerance (not uncriticality, however) towards someone else's interpretation, how tempting the temptation is to fall into the position of a person who necessarily wants from researchers only what he himself considers to be the most correct... Now the disputes surrounding this book have subsided and, as the noise has died down, I think we can now calmly, without prejudice and critically approach M. Kremen's book, to see and soberly assess both its positive and negative sides.

The dispute over Yavorov continues. The largest - after Botev - Bulgarian post awaits its new and insightful interpreters. They will recreate his social and personal drama more deeply. They will open more shells to reveal all the pearls of his work. The disputes over the poet are not from yesterday and today. They are already entering their sixth decade. While in the past they highlighted the sharp ideological contrasts in criticism itself - from the naturalizing individualism of one pole to the sectarian narrow-mindedness of the other, today the situation is completely different. The authors who are discussing have stood on a single social platform, determined by our Marxist ideology. This does not mean that old sins cannot take new forms, that relapses of one or another passion will not arise today. However, what is new in our current literary science should be the civil and moral purity of the disputes. Even in the greatest heat of polemics, the opponent should not be suspected of impure intentions, classified in the category of "dubious elements" and "unclean forces." Otherwise, the dispute degenerates and, instead of clarifying the mature issues, it pursues other, extra-literary goals. Techniques that seek only to wound the opponent more effectively, to smear his face with more mud, to discredit him in front of society cannot be the techniques of a socialist scientist.

A passionate warrior for justice. A rebellious spirit, filled with violent hatred and contempt for the gray human existence. A social poet, carried away by the heroic example of Botev, a poet who deeply felt the miserable plight of his people. And also: a willing bandit, ready to do anything - to lay down his head for the big or the small - as long as it once captured his spirit. Among the Bulgarian creators of the artistic word, he is perhaps the most complex, the most contradictory. Thus, he is often tormented by polar experiences. And this is both in the quests of the mind and in the impulsiveness of feelings. His mind is as penetrating as that of a deep thinker, resolving questions of existence. His emotionality is subtle, perfect. His ideas are like those of a sensitive visionary. His tendency to self-analysis and reflection is constant. It is as if he is searching through himself for the self-knowledge of the human, for that which hides the bottomless depths of the spirit. Although outwardly closed, "monotonous", silent, he is constantly in motion - with his proud critical mind, with his penetrating thought, with his bold, stormy emotionality. And this has been the case since his youth. Everything about this restless man speaks of considerable spiritual strength. His thought is boldly rebellious, fiercely driven, like lightning running across the Horizon. It is flexible, internally contradictory, complex and dialectical. It reminds of a drink that is both sweet and bitter - and corrosive, and has a wisely healing taste. This thought is always driven, as if it cannot stand still. It searches, gropes, invades spheres of ever new complexities. It knows both the dizzying rise and the pain of disappointment. That's why sometimes a sad, ironic mockery shines through it.

In the concluding part of his study "The Birth of the Poetic Work," Jean-Paul Weber makes the following self-confident and significant declaration: "In our thematic readings there is nothing reminiscent of the rigid generalizations of psychoanalysts or stylists, of their Oedipus complexes, oral, anal, and genital stages, or of their baroque, classical, romantic, and so on styles."1 Self-confident because, as we will see below, Weber's results differ little from the Freudian ones and because the positive aspects of the "stylists'" concepts are also lightly rejected. Significant because a representative of the latest bourgeois literary criticism is attempting to break with, or at least declaring that he wants to break with, the two most characteristic trends in art and literary criticism's non-historicism in the first half of our century. The stylistism of the formalists and "philologists" and psychologism with all its orthodox and schismatic tendencies are the two poles between which the many nuances of this non-historicism move. What polarizes them is the stylists' transcendence of artistic development beyond the will and peculiarities of the creative personality and the psychoanalysts' complete closure of the determining factors of development within the individual or "collective subconscious." And what connects them is the isolation of artistic development from the class-economic and ideological development of society. In this environment, the French literary critic and psychologist Jean-Paul Weber announced that he had achieved an approach that overcomes the limitations of both stylists and psychoanalysts.