Романтика

In the tense days when, for the second time after the liberation, Hainboaz entered our history with a different kind of fame, I was one of those who set out for the old Balkans to experience the birth of the new up close and to refresh themselves with the working enthusiasm of the twenty-year-olds. And since the nature of my literary expression does not allow me to recreate what I had experienced through the means of artistic expression, I had to justify my trip to the public through another type of cultural work. For more than ten days, I went around the Youth Brigades looking for those skilled in fiction, with the intention of providing them with creative assistance and at the same time establishing closer contact with the people. And indeed, we read their works, talked, argued. Thus, from my tour, which some friends mockingly called a "poet hunt," I took away many hopes and several handwritten pages of poems in which a certain literary gift was evident. A few weeks later, in a report about the experience, I found an opportunity to share my impressions with the readers and to say that not only new people were growing up in Hainboaz, but also new poets who carried within them something of the tension of the era "... I am convinced," I wrote, "that it is precisely this youth - still clumsy, still inexperienced - that will renew our country and our artistic creativity. It will create art in which the enthusiasm for work, love for the simple man, the creator of values, love for the homeland will pulsate - art that will combine in an inseparable unity the living world of objects and great ideas, great dreams for the future". And in order to point out the sprouts of a fresh imagery that promised something unsaid, I cited some of the brigadier's poems of a then unknown poet whom I had met by chance. Not long after, the author of these poems began to collaborate with our periodical, only to recently emerge as one of the sure hopes of our contemporary lyric poetry. Thus, in our fiction, as I expected, the name I had pronounced in my report, the name Ivan Radoe in...