Вазов

Ivan Vazov has left us a lot of information about his life and work. However, there are quite a few unclear questions and contradictory information in his biography. This article sets itself the task of clarifying some moments in the poet's life, some of which are interpreted incorrectly, and others have not been presented for consideration in our press at all. Here we will focus on the question of Vazov's first attempts at the time he spent in Romania during his first trip to participate in the Bulgarian Central Charity Society, correcting some information about Vazov himself along the way. And it is natural that in clarifying these questions, we should first of all proceed from the information that the poet himself has left us. However, this information must be compared and checked repeatedly. Because the uncritical attitude towards them has led to the current situation - to allow not only in popular works, but also in some serious studies about Vazov, gross factual errors and inconsistencies.

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.

There are three masters of the short story in our literature: Vazov, Elin Pelin and Yovkov. How do they write? How are they made? "Is it possible?" and "All Souls' Day", "A Bulgarian Woman" and "Shibil", "Andreshko" and "Midnight Guest"? It is a banal truth to say that the question is very interesting and that it has a bearing on all aspects of a writer's work, not least of which is style. Practically, what is more interesting is that it is preceded by another question: where to begin to unravel the figurative fabric of a story in order to see how it is "made". Undoubtedly, a work of art is an organic whole - wherever you start, you will reach everything, you will encompass the whole. But each genre has its own specific structure, and when you take it into account, the work is made much easier. Alexei Tolstoy says that architecturally the short story should be built on the fifth and "but" (..., but...). And indeed, in Vazov - grandfather Yotso goes blind, but the liberation of Bulgaria gives him a second set of eyes; in Elin Pelin - the bailiff is preparing to rake the barn of the poor man Stoichko, but Andreshko plays the judge and saves his life; in Yovkov - Sali Yashar wants to do something, but he understands that "the cars he makes, do something". The formula is not only witty: it hits the heart of the short story as a genre - its structure, its plot-composition scheme. The short story takes the incident - the character - the problem at the moment when the incident occurs, the character changes, the problem is resolved - at the turning point, when one thing turns into another. Alexei Tolstoy's comma and the note express precisely this "contrapuntal" structure of the story. That is why the short story is eventful and when it is only psychology, epic and without a particular plot, it is conflictual, without being a drama: it gives the setting, illuminates the intersection, reveals the change. That is why, perhaps, in no other literary genre does the question - how the work is constructed - acquire such specific importance.

How does Vazov - this master painter of the visible world - paint what is invisible? How does he convey the soul movements of the characters and the atmosphere of the event, in other words - the lyrical-psychological filling of the story, in comparison with the other two narrators and especially with Elin Pelin? - In principle, in the same way: as a witness and observer. When the "soul" of the character, of the event or of the landscape needs to be revealed, the author takes the floor to describe and explain it. Naturally, before the author, the characters themselves do this, insofar as they are characterized by their actions and lines: Vazov is the master of lines and dialogue and would remain untouchable if Elin Pelin were not his equal rival in this respect. Both of them master the characterological possibilities of lines to perfection. But not all mental movements can receive adequate expression in the replica, not to mention the ideological-emotional, spiritual filling and meaning of the situations, actions, the moment, especially in the short story with its strictly defined possibilities. What and how much can characters like grandfather Yotso or grandmother Iliytsa, or Stancho and Stoilka, or Lisichkata say about themselves, even when they are Elin Pelinovi villagers? As for nature, objects and animals, they are silent at all. The author must help them. The question here is – how?

Lermontov's works were known in Bulgaria even before the Liberation of the country, but they gained wide popularity only later. The generations of the 1980s and 1990s were introduced to them in high school. According to contemporaries, often after noisy disputes in literary circles, they sang in chorus "Вы хожу один я на доругу", recited many poems by the great poet by heart - in Russian, as was fashionable at the time. Lermontov's work is known to the Bulgarian intelligentsia directly in the original. This is due, on the one hand, to Bulgarians - Russian graduates, and on the other - to the introduction of Russian as a mandatory subject in the schools of free Bulgaria. "When visiting Bulgarian public and private libraries, it is a common occurrence to find Russian books and especially classical works of Russian literature, including the works of M. Yu. Lermontov," wrote P. Zabolotsky in 1914. "This fact must be taken into account when talking about the acquaintance of Bulgarians with Lermontov, since only getting to know the translations of Lermontov's works and the Russian scientific literature on Lermontov in Bulgarian cannot give us a correct idea of ​​the degree of his fame among the Bulgarian educated public, which does not feel the need for translations from Russian, since it has the opportunity to read him in the original."

The works that we usually understand under the name "poems of Ivan Vazov" are united not only by their external genre features, but also acquire a broader meaning in the process of the author's growth as an artist. Created in the short period 1879-1884, they are closely related to a certain stage of Vazov's poetic biography, expressing the regularities of an important moment in his creative development. At the end of 1879, when Vazov's first poem was published, he was already the author of three collections of poetry. Collections of poetry in which he experienced the full force of the ecstasies and sorrows of his people. But the days of upsurge and despair, of georism and ecstasies have already died down. Amid the idyllic silence of his Berkovo solitude, the turbulent feelings and pathetic outbursts in the poet's soul calm down. And those invisible processes of artistic rethinking of life experience begin, from which his future works will crystallize. What until recently was a heated atmosphere of the present is now transformed in consciousness into the past, into a memory, subordinated to the sense of historical perspective. After the period of immediate emotional reactions, the time of broad artistic generalizations and calm historical assessments comes. "Epic of the Forgotten", "Unloved-Unloved" and "Under the Yoke" could not have appeared immediately after "Pryaporets and the Gusla", "The Sorrows of Bulgaria" and "Deliverance". Between the one and the other lies the border of a historical era and crossing this border meant for the author a process of new ideological creative maturation. The transformed living environment asserts its rights, the radically changed ideological atmosphere leaves its mark. Disappointment comes in place of enthusiasm, naive faith is replaced by skeptical irony. And from this dramatic interweaving, new faith and new optimism are born... Freed from the black shadow of slavery, life shines with all its multi-huedness. The artist's outlook becomes broader and wiser, his poetic perception of the world - more complex and richer.

At the beginning of 1884, for several months, three poems by Vazov were published one after the other on the pages of the newspaper "Narodniy Glas" and the magazine "Nauka". These are "Sallust's Sneeze", "Sinai Rose" and "In the Kingdom of the Samodivs" - titles that in themselves already suggest something new about the author's searches in the field of poetry. And indeed, all three works lead us into new areas of life, beyond the boundaries of folk life, from which the author had drawn material until now. Only "Sinai Rose" could be connected in a certain sense with the thematic scope of his previous poems - insofar as it depicts the fate of a Bulgarian girl, captured during the Russo-Turkish War and sold into slavery in the distant Sinai desert. But in spirit and style, this is a purely romantic work that has nothing to do with the tone and character of "Vidul", "Gramada", "Trayko and Riza", and "Zagorka". The poet who lifted the heavy burden of Trayko and called Ruska a "peony flower" is simply unrecognizable here.

Returning to Yovkov - after Vazov and Elin Pelin - always awakens a keen sense of his unique character as an artist. When we compare Vazov and Elin Pelin, it is natural to deal with similarities and differences, to speak of a natural step forward in the development of the short story. When we get to Yovkov, all this starts to sound too general and approximate. The step forward is present here too. But with him it is not only a step forward, but also a step "aside". The similarities and differences here turn out to be more indirect and deeper, precisely because they are intricately mediated by Yovkov's artistic individuality. Indeed, Yovkov also relied on Vazov - at least to the extent that Elin Pelin also relied on him. And Yovkov, although he writes stories about ten years after Elin Pelin, strictly speaking, has no other national school and no other heritage behind him, except the Vazovs, and no other example alongside him - except Elin Pelin. And yet Yovkov stubbornly, centimeter by centimeter, for twenty years in a row, breaks his artistic path further and further away from the Vazov-Elin Pelin highway. And the reader feels that the separate comparisons between them and him would yield even less than between Vazov and Elin Pelin, if they had not gone through the understanding of the whole; that before being decomposed into similarities and differences, - precisely Yovkov more than anyone else - must be felt in his peculiarly secluded, in comparison with the first Two, almost closed artistic system.

"If They Could Speak" perhaps more directly than any other of Yovkov's works confronts the reader with a peculiarity, mentioned several times recently as the "objectivity" of the depiction, of the verbal drawing. In fact, this so-called by us objectivity represents one of the aspects of the question of the structure and functions of the verbal image in Yovkov. The resolution that he gives it is as important as it is characteristically Yovkovian. And an analysis that has affected in one way or another the structure and composition of the work as a whole (the "macro-image") cannot fail to focus on the structure of the "micro-image" - of the individual linguistic image and its function in the whole. These are questions of the verbal fabric of the artistic work, taken from their specifically stylistic side. While the composition and the general structure of Yovkov's story undergoes a relatively more complex development, Yovkov's verbal pattern develops, so to speak, in an ascending line: this is the progressive unfolding of the same pictorial tendency from "Ovcharova's Complaint" to "If They Could Talk". The path is long - from 1910 to 1936 - but straight; the difference is enormous, but natural and inevitable.

Having hidden the order under No. 145 of February 23, 1879 of the Office of the Russian Imperial Commissioner in the pocket of his uniform as a state councilor, "the junior clerk for special orders at the Ruse governorship, Ivan Vazov boarded the Austro-Hungarian passenger steamer "Tegetov" on March 6 of this year in the afternoon and early the next morning arrived at the port of Lom-palanka, bustling with cars and people and crammed with goods. From here, Vazov rented a carriage and that same evening arrived in Berkovitsa, where he took up the position of chairman of the district court.

One of the most characteristic features of the new Bulgarian literature is that it is born and develops in organic unity with the national socio-historical and cultural-moral processes. Its first representatives lived and created with a clear awareness of its great role in the development of national self-knowledge, they sought various forms and means to direct creative thought on the right path. The era from Paisius to Botev, an era in which the foundations of our national literature were laid, is incomparably grand in civic pathos and creative tension, in intellectual-spiritual insights and artistic conquests. The struggle for political and cultural independence - understood in all its comprehensiveness, depth and meaning, is accompanied by an equally stubborn struggle for sound national aesthetic and artistic principles. With artistic speech, with cultural-publicistic and literary-critical articles, with writings of the most diverse genre and thematic aspects, people, possessed by creative impulses, strive to create a nationally distinctive literature, in tune with the needs of life, passionately fight against the primitive and retrograde in social and aesthetic understandings. A rare dedication and foresight characterize the work of these pioneers of national literary thought. The artistic and critical-theoretical traditions established by them have served as a support and inspiration for later works.

An original way for our national poet Ivan Vazov to express his public feeling and duty is the flyer with the poem "Don't!". From the possible references made, it was found that our literature does not mention the existence of a flyer with this work. This is not the first time that Ivan Vazov has resorted to such printing and distribution of his poems. As Kiril Hristov notes, many of the poems included in "Pryaporets Gusla" were scattered in manuscript form in Bucharest. "One of them, namely "The Battle Has Begun, Our Hearts Are Beating," was sung in some places in the Srednogorje Mountains when the April Uprising was announced in 1876. The same fact is confirmed by Yurdan Todorov.

The poetic originality and creative personality of the patriarch of Bulgarian literature are again at the center of Milena Tsaneva's second book about the poet - Ivan Vazov in Plovdiv" (Nauka i Izkustvo Publishing House, Sofia, 1966). One year after her literary-critical articles published in "From the Poetic World of Ivan Vazov" (1965), she again meets with readers, directing them to her monographic study of the writer's multifaceted life and fruitful creative pursuits, connected with the capital of Eastern Rumelia. Only six years - from 1880 to 1886 - Ivan Vazov spent in the center of the Autonomous Region, and they turned out to be so extremely beneficial for the creative growth and overall appearance of the people's writer.

Iskra Panova presented her first book to readers. In it, she speaks her mind in a new way in our contemporary literary studies. Without departing from the best in the tradition of literary studies, she sweeps up independent terrain in an area where long-standing traditions are still absent in our country... Breaking ground in the complex field of stylistic analysis of the work of art, Panova has long thought through each step of her innovative work. She is not in a hurry to theorize about the results of her work, but she does not underestimate them either. She is not in a hurry to make generalizations, but she does not hide the rational in her difficult experiment. She proclaims less her guiding principles, which she relies on in her aesthetic analyses, but in return she gives her own arrangement of her scientific observations, derived according to the laws of an objective criterion. But no matter how discreet an author she turns out to be, she sheds abundant light on the complexity of the problem, draws her own conclusions, takes into account the complexity of the artistic evolution of the individual artist, in the three classics and reveals a number of regularities in the development of the literary process in Bulgarian literature from the recent past.

In "I Live in Berkovitsa," the folk poet tells of his life in this small but beautiful mountain town. of his service as chairman of the district court, of the people he befriended, of the walks through the beautiful mountain scenery that helped restore his shaky health from the turbulent life in the then malarial Ruschuk, where he served in the Governorate as a "junior clerk for special orders." e On days free from work - the poet writes in these memories - I made joyful outings on horseback with a young group of Berkovci, with the doctor and the governor through the dense beech forests that cover the skirts and sides of the Stara Planina, intoxicated by the sound of the crystal mountain streams, by the breath of the grasses and flowers, by my youth and by everything, everything". .. *"Kom reminds me, however, of a crime - Vazov continues further - that we committed with the district governor. It still haunts my soul and now I will confess it (A. T. - Vazov wrote this memory 31 years after the event, if we judge by the date placed under this memory, published in the newspaper "Speech"). We found three beams set on Kom, which formed a kind of narrow high pyramid, built with stones and supported by transverse trees. We wondered what this thing was. A shepherd told us that Serbs had placed it as a sign on the border between Serbia and Bulgaria... And, overcome with patriotic indignation, we overturned the unfortunate wooden pyramid through the guards. A few days later, a Russian topographic officer told the governor that some mischievous people had pushed the trigonometric sign on the Kom! In the novel "New Land", Part III, Chapter VIII ("The Pyramid") Vazov tells of this "crime", but attributes it to Dikiy Barin, an image that he also uses in the humorous story "Mitrofan and Dormidolsky" in the person of Dormidolsky. The prototype of both characters is the judge Ivan Stoyanov, called "Grandpa Ivan" by the Berkovitsa residents, with whom Vazov lives in the house of Zlatish Hasan.

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.

For almost a year now, bookstores have been offering the importance that Velichko Valchev has for readers a new work on Ivan Vazov - the most voluminous in the already impressive literature on the national poet. The author, Velichko Valchev, is a well-known researcher of the life and work of Ivan Vazov. He has published about sixty studies, popularization articles, reviews of editions of his works, translations of Vazov's works abroad, productions of Vazov's plays, etc. about our most popular classic. In addition, he has edited the poet's works, written a preface to one or another edition. Special mention should be made of the valuable volume "Unpublished Letters" of Ivan Vazov, Selected", edited and commented on by Velichko Valchev and published by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The book "Ivan Vazov. Life and Creative Path", written, as we learn from the preface, over a period of more than ten years, in a certain sense summarizes and completes the long-term studies and research of Velichko Valchev. In it, the author used, of course, not mechanically, much of what he had previously written about Vazov.

At the end of last year, the book "From the Life and Work of Ivan Vazov" by Iliya Boyadzhiev and Tsocho Delev was published, State Publishing House "Narodna Prosveta", Sofia, 1968. The exposition of the life and work of Ivan Vazov is based on carefully collected and well-arranged documentation (photographs, portraits, memories, quotes, diagrams and tables). Some of the elements of this Documentation have been known since earlier, and there are some that were discovered later. But it is interesting that now both of them are placed and examined in a new light - something that is one of the merits of the book.