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There are translated books that are quickly forgotten. There are also those that remain in our consciousness, create new worlds before us and permanently captivate us. These notes will try to explain a charm, so fresh and so beautiful, so strong and so bright - the charm of Halldor Laxness, the great Icelandic writer, creator of "Independent People". In 1902, a boy was born in Reykjavik. He showed great talents and for many years bumped into the stone walls of many philosophies and faiths, until one day he went out into the wide field - facing the dark North Sea and the Icelandic wilderness. Before that, the boy had traveled many countries, stared in awe at the centuries-old monuments of civilization, denied his impenetrably backward homeland, only to return one day and discover the famous skald Egil Skalagrimsson, to fall in love with sagas and legends, to see the harsh face of the harsh truths of life and experience the divine thirst to transform them into art. The boy had already become a man, and abroad he had come to love his homeland, because he had seen it in its true dimensions and magnitude. And a man can say with a firm, confident voice The people slept in the mountains, inhabited by fairy creatures and elves, and in this virgin land, where every valley reminds of our history, every wilderness is a symbol of our innermost feelings, we live today as if reborn children of nature, gifted with sincerity who speak in a divine language, and above us the morning sky dissolves, predictions and signs burn in the forest... In the most remote places lives an unwavering striving for spiritual development. In the present generation there is no sense of satisfaction, this plague bacillus of stupidity in stagnation. Everything is in ferment. People want a deeper, richer spiritual life. In every young Icelandic heart lives a joyful foreboding

The present notes on the latest English novel are by no means exhaustive and are intended rather to outline some common and interesting features in the literary life of contemporary England. They are limited to four or five works by younger novelists: "Happy Jim" by Kingsley Amis, "A Place at the Top" by John Brain, and "This Is Love, After All" by Stan Barstow, "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" by Alan Sillitoe. All these authors belong in spirit to one trend - they are more or less among the so-called "sirdites" or "angry young people" - and they are connected by a certain community in concepts, and even in their means of expression. Whatever shortcomings the "angry ones" may have, however justly they may suffer attacks on many points, they have nevertheless managed to assert themselves in English literary life and even, in a certain sense, to occupy a commanding position, to set its tone. With all reservations, they remain, both as a whole line and as separate achievements, the largest, central phenomenon in English literature of the last few years. On the one hand, they are very indicative of the moods and psychological reactions of the young English intelligentsia, they expressed a certain stage in the development of its thinking; on the other hand, both criticism and the large circulations of the above-mentioned novels point to them as the best among all the rest of the production. That is why it would not be entirely arbitrary to limit an analysis mainly to them - it would indeed not illuminate the whole problem, but it would cover the core of the problem. Of course, it should be immediately reminded once again that this is not a comprehensive review of the English novel and that a number of novelists known to our reader, such as Graham Greene, James Aldridge, Jack Lindsay, are beyond their scope.

Of the three greatest epic works by Y. Yovkov, The Reaper, The Farmstead on the Border, and The Adventures of Gorolomov, the latter turned out to be almost completely outside the interests of literary criticism and literary history. The two short articles by M. Arnaudov,2 the study by G. Tsanev in the first anniversary of "Art and Criticism," the attempt at an ideological assessment of the work contained in the book by Iv. Meshekov, as well as the interesting review by P. Dinekov - this is in fact almost everything that has been written so far about this novel. Among other articles and historical and literary works, apart from individual notes, we do not find a single work that represents an attempt to clarify the ideological and artistic meaning of the work. How can such indifference on the part of critics and literary historians be explained? Two reasons have an influence: first - the novel was published in fragments for seven years, and second - it remained an unfinished work. Chapters I-IV were published in books II-V of the magazine "Bulgarian Thought" from 1931, and chapters V-X in books II-VII of the same magazine from 1937. In the manuscripts remaining after the writer's death, an almost illegible and stylistically underdeveloped sketch of the eleventh chapter was found, which was read with great effort by Dr. D. Yovkova and printed in the already mentioned magazine "Art and Criticism".

In recreating the image of the communist in our country there is a long and rich tradition from the past: in poetry - D. I. Polyanov, Hr. Smirnensky, N. Vaptsarov and the post-1930s; in prose - again Smirnensky, Kr. Velkov, G. Karaslavov and others. New people - new in their social consciousness, in their spiritual appearance - were formed during the years of great battles of our people against capitalism and fascism. And in order to understand the type of person - the type of revolutionary, an active historical figure - literature naturally turns to the image of the communist. Why is this so? Because the communist is not only a politically significant image, but also a bearer of the new in our time in general. What is more - right next to him walks the conscious citizen who does not yet have a party ticket, but to whom the cause of the communist party is close. Today, it is clear to readers and writers that every more substantial, more artistically convincing image of the communist always has a "cover" in socialist reality itself. And he always returns to it, reality, to serve it, but already aesthetically evaluated. This is one of the main advantages of contemporary socialist-realist literature. So far, in articles and speeches, an attempt has been made, sometimes more cursory, sometimes more in-depth, to clarify theoretically and mainly in connection with practice the problem of the communist in literature. For example, it was discussed during the national review of contemporary Bulgarian drama in 1959. And in 1960, the Writers' Union organized a three-day theoretical conference on the topic "The Image of the Communist in Literature". The purpose of this article is to dwell on some unexamined questions and, in particular, on individual literary works. Limiting the topic hides some inconveniences, and perhaps even dangers. But it also has some advantages: we will keep our focus on today, on contemporary problems.

The general statement that the most important, combative variety of literary critical thought - operational criticism - lives an anemic life, stagnates in one place, does not fulfill its primary tasks on time and at the required level has become a worn-out phrase. More and more names of critics, who until yesterday actively participated in the literary process and, to the best of their ability, assisted the emergence of new works and phenomena, today appear on the covers of studies of long-established and universally recognized writers, of studies of faded Bulgarian and European trends. We are slowly coming to terms with the fact - as interesting as it is revealing - that we already have, let's say, a richly argued, fascinatingly written book on French existentialism and the contemporary Western "anti-novel", while at the same time, there is almost no deep, penetrating and courageous research on Bulgarian novels published in the last few years. If, for example, someone wishes to familiarize themselves with the assessments of Bulgarian literary criticism for the novels published in 1961, they can be sure that they will not be particularly hampered by the abundance of opinions. A short review of "Ohrid Spring" by D. Sprostranov in "Plamak", a short review of "Skazanie za vremeno na Samuila" in "Literaturni novini", two short, but true and in many respects convincing reviews of "Martvo valnenie" in "Literaturni novini" and in "Septemvri", can be a few more semi-critical, semi-advertising notes in peripheral newspapers and magazines - and that's all! Namely, this year saw the publication of novels that deserve serious, comprehensive and intelligent conversation - sometimes pleasant, sometimes bitter.

In our country, tribute is still paid to an unpleasant and undesirable inertia that has not been experienced since the time of the cult of personality. Namely, little is written about famous Western authors (usually in the order of simple notes) or nothing is written at all. In this way, our public too often remains unfamiliar with the essence of this or that new phenomenon, with this or that book in a particular national literature. But in any case, despite the official silence, rumors and "evaluations" about books and writers are carried through the "literary ether", and often superlative ones. Therefore, one of the successful and proven methods to assess the real aesthetic, innovative or pseudo-innovative value of one or another famous author is for our literary thought to regularly and competently enlighten the Bulgarian public about the creative phenomena that at a given moment "scandalize" the French, English or American reader. In this way, on the one hand, we will have a clear and rich idea of ​​the literary life abroad, and on the other hand, the path of impure speculations and exaggerations surrounding the latest book by Françoise Sagan or Samuel Beckett will be cut off. In this sense, a book like "The Crisis in the Modern Western Novel" by Minko Nikolov is a good phenomenon, which in principle should be congratulated, accepted and encouraged. Such critical manifestations enrich the "assortment" of our literary literature, broaden our view and horizons, and, as strange as this may seem at first glance to lovers of dogmatic-sectarian thinking, they make us internally more resistant to the truly decadent phenomena in Western art and Western literature. In terms of composition, M. Nikolov's book includes eight chapters that are independent in character, internally united by one main idea - the idea of ​​showing the essence of the crisis in the modern Western novel. Some of the essay chapters ("The Revolution in Art and the Novel", "Existentialism and Novelists", etc.) are dedicated to individual phenomena and literary movements, while others ("The Lawgivers" Joyce and Proust, "The Cult of Kafka", "The Lessons of Thomas Mann") are dedicated to individual authors and their novels.

"For us Spanish writers, there is only one kind of escape - escape into reality." The quote is borrowed from the book by the young Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, "Problems of the Novel." Although formally this thought contains a paradox, a thorough examination of contemporary Spanish literature shows that "escape into reality" is its defining direction. And since this tendency is most clearly expressed in prose: fiction and drama, the subject of this article will be the new Spanish novel. The Spanish novel of the last ten years - this is enough to specify the concept of new. As for "Spanish", it should be noted at the very beginning that no one is able to exclude from Spanish literature, through censorship and prohibitions, the émigré writers who work in Paris, Mexico or elsewhere. They are Spanish writers like all the others, not to mention: perhaps more than all. Their works, published abroad in Spanish or other languages, form, together with what is published in Spain, the shape of contemporary Spanish literature.

The literary press of each country widely reflects those issues of a literary, literary-critical, socio-cultural and philosophical-ideological nature that most excite a given society at a given time. In order to grasp the more important of them, without stopping at the one-day issues, we must naturally take a broader view of time. This review traces some of the more important problems that have attracted the attention of Polish critics, writers and the Polish cultural community in recent months and have found their expression in the pages of the Polish literary press. Due to the great diversity and variety of the issues, we will limit ourselves here only to those issues that concern fiction and the novel in particular.

Having shown her poetic talent in several poetry collections, Blaga Dimitrova entered fiction with the novel "Journey to Yourself". Her creative powers received a boost from the turning point - September 9, 1944, which coincided with her youth. She enthusiastically joined the general construction - she participated in the foreman movement, and in 1952-53, she spent almost two years on construction sites in the Rhodope Mountains. Her creativity is a living echo of what she saw and experienced. Her novel should not be considered in isolation from her poetry - it is organically connected to it. Construction and its characters are the subject of depiction in both poetry and the novel. This is especially true for the collection "Songs for the Rhodopes", which in a certain sense is a preparation for the novel. The same basic mood emanates from it - love for the fatherland and for man, faith in the future, admiration for the new people who create this future. It often contrasts the heavy and sad past, the historical fate of our people with the present, and even more so with the expected good future. In this collection, the prototypes of some of the characters in the novel can already be seen.

The most important problem of a historical novel, as well as of any work of art, is its attitude to the present. Every significant historical novel is indicative of the moods, aesthetic principles, tastes and preferences of its time. To discover the modern in history, to draw the reader's attention to one or another of its sides, to one or another aspect of well-known and usually not new historical problems - this is an individual creative work. The category of subjectivity retains its place in our aesthetics as the writer's right to an original creative interpretation of the topic on the basis of the objective-materialist approach to history. This is a subjectivity of a new quality, which has nothing to do with the arbitrariness of subjectivism, since the writer does not oppose himself to the deep and enduring social moods, but, on the contrary, strives to express them as clearly and fully as possible.