литературознание

The significant achievements of humanity in the field of culture are not the result of isolated creative processes among individual nations. Nations, even when they built walls like the Chinese, communicated with each other: they used and assimilated values ​​created by other nations, developed their own and borrowed ones further, and themselves offered their conquests in the field of culture to other nations. Thus, with joint efforts, the universal human culture was built and is being built. Nations create their literature in the same way: on the one hand, the tribal, folk, or national genius leaves its mark on it; on the other hand, however, the literary heritage of humanity and numerous manifestations of multilingual modernity are used and developed; creating their literature in this way, a nation makes its contribution to world literature, offering works to foreign readers and influencing foreign authors. We must note that the national peculiarity of individual literatures is not an obstacle to diverse influences in all directions. Literary interactions enrich literatures, contribute to their faster growth, contact with a foreign work is often a contact of flint to flint. Literary interactions are especially characteristic of our modernity due to the increased communication between peoples, the mass translations of literary works from one language to another, the study of foreign languages ​​as a necessary component of modern education. In this situation, literary studies could not and should not be limited to the facts and processes of only one separate literature. Even isolating these facts and processes, it could not present them in a full and truthful light, reach all their original sources and those streams that increase the flow of the general stream, and trace their entire meaning if they also pass into other literatures. The isolated consideration of literatures, their periods, authors and works does not allow for the discovery of a large number of phenomena, processes and patterns, which become apparent only if the phenomena, processes and patterns in several literatures are compared. Phenomena gain brightness, magnitude and relief when compared with similar phenomena.

In June of this year, at a joint meeting of the section for Bulgarian literature after the Liberation, for Russian classical and Soviet literature and literary theory at the Institute of Literature, the work "Some Problems of Humor and Satire in Soviet Literary Studies" by Velichko Valchev was discussed. The reviewer Boyan Nitchev finds that the author has diligently and conscientiously studied almost all the works of Soviet researchers published in the last ten years, who deal with the work of prominent Russian and Soviet satirists. The review in this area highlights questions about the specificity of the genre and artistic mastery, distinguishes the various shades of the comic, devotes significant space to the character of Soviet satire and its ideological positions, etc. The author focuses on the works of prominent Soviet literary scholars Ya. Elsberg, Yu. Borev, L. Ershov, V. Kirpotin, A. K. Bushmin. The reviewer finds that, in general, the first three sections of the article are informative in nature. The presentation is concise, there are no problems, and in places the content of the works under consideration is impoverished. B. Nichev evaluates the second part of V. Valchev's work as more interesting. In it, the author shows more in-depth observations and presents correct opinions. The reviewer pointed out that V. Valchev should develop this part in a broader plan, focusing on more recent published works and making more complete and comprehensive summaries. In conclusion, B. Nichev pointed out that V. Valchev's work has no specific goal and in this form is informative in nature. After serious cuts (in the first part), revision and recomposition of the material, it can be used for the review department of the Institute's Bulletin.

The interest that our literary studies show in our relations with our neighbors in the past is a proven fact. It testifies to the attention with which literary scholars in our country turn to the most beautiful and fruitful manifestations of friendship and amity between the Balkan peoples. In addition, this fact testifies to the expansion of the thematic perimeter of our literary studies; it is an expression of the aspiration of our literature to find its place in a broader literary context. Therefore, the first question that arises when we become acquainted with the recently published book on Bulgarian-Serbian literary relations in the 19th century is whether it meets the requirements of such an important and complex task. Konev's work consists of two parts. The first - "The Great Beginning" contains four chapters: 1. Literary exchange between Bulgarians and Serbs. 2. Translated and Bulgarianized works. Character and significance. 3. The creative path of P. R. Slaveykov and Serbian literature. 4. Serbian teachers in Bulgaria. Literary and cultural and educational activity. The second part, which is called "In support of realism in literature", includes the following chapters: 1. Encounters with drama. 2. Lyuben Karavelov in the development of the Serbian realistic short story. 3. Before the dawn of freedom.

In the last ten years in France, among university literary scholars, there has been a clear interest in the so-called "thematic study" of a given author's work. Moreover, the proportional number of works devoted to thematic analyses is so large that it could be rightly said that they have recently become a fashion in literary studies. This direction in literary criticism was given by Professor Charles Moron, who in his work, Introduction to Psychocriticism (1938) developed the thesis that every artist is a visionary who enchants the reader with his own special, personal world, filled with strange visions, images and pictures, always the same in the different works of the artist, which came unconsciously, but insistently intruding on his consciousness, as well as on the consciousness of the reader. This peculiar personal mythology of the artist can precisely explain the impact of the work, an impact that can hardly be understood if we are satisfied only with the external meaning of the work. The task of the researcher, according to Moron, consists in revealing this personal mythology, the secret structure, the system of symbols that a given author uses involuntarily and unconsciously, or in other words, in determining the constant dominant themes in the work. He believes that by solving this task, one can also arrive at solving one of the main problems in The psychology of art - the problem of the genesis of artistic creativity.

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.

The long-standing exceptional interest shown in our country in Soviet literary studies is beyond doubt. For the representatives of Marxism in the previous few decades it has been so obvious that it would be possible to point out to Dali at least one question of a methodological nature that concerned them and which had not previously been discussed in Soviet literary life. This is so easily explained that it is enough to simply recall it.

Professor Emil Georgiev possesses an energetic and fresh pen, he is not alien to the polemical passion of the publicist and the pioneer, and all this - as in this case - combined with a rich erudition and a Marxist worldview, assigns him a leading and leading place among the figures of our and international Slavic studies. At the same time, his long-standing work as a professor at the Department of Slavic Literatures at Sofia University helped to build a number of young Slavic scholars. One of his latest books, "General and Comparative Slavic Literary Studies", is based on lectures read to students. But Professor E. Georgiev does not stop at facts, he is not satisfied with just discovering, researching and analyzing them, but above all illuminates them in a literary-theoretical aspect and outlines the path of a general and comparative examination of literary phenomena. His book, divided into chapters-essays, each of which claims to be independent, is written on the basis of abundant critical and factual material. It is rich in valuable bibliographical and literary references, which once again emphasize its academicity. But the original interpretation and creative assimilation and generalization of the works used have helped the essays to go beyond the framework of a teaching aid and to turn the book into a significant and valuable contribution to literary science and Slavic studies. Of course, the entire diversity and breadth of Slavic literary relationships are not and cannot be under the gaze of only one scholar, to be highlighted in only one scientific work, no matter how voluminous it may be. Prof. E. Georgiev himself defines the framework of his scientific research, bringing to the fore, first of all, moments of the Bulgarian-Slavic literary community in the era of the Bulgarian Revival.

Although it has long traditions, comparative literary studies has attracted in recent years an increasingly wide circle of representatives of historical-literary, critical and theoretical-aesthetic thought. In the efforts to study the general and specific laws of literary development, to illuminate artistic phenomena from more sides, both as a result of national, concrete-historical conditions, and as phenomena in the fabric of which we find much similarity, resulting from the constant relationships with what was conquered by other peoples, comparative interpretation is proving to be increasingly effective. An indisputable contribution to this direction is made by Marxist literary studies, which, overcoming the limitations of bourgeois comparative studies in the past, in dispute with contemporary idealistic concepts and methods, places the comparative consideration of artistic processes and works on a broad socio-historical, cultural-sociological, philosophical-aesthetic basis. In this way, not only are the prerequisites and driving forces for the development of national literatures revealed, but on the basis of their study, a more complete illumination of the general processes characterizing the literary life of many countries and peoples is achieved.

Habit nullifies surprise. However, there are comparisons that never cease to surprise us even when we should already be used to them. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the September 9th People's Uprising, these comparisons are inevitable. After all, the meaning of every anniversary is to tear us away from the myopia of everyday worries - to raise us to a height from which the path we have traveled is embraced with a glance: to provoke us to reflect on near and distant prospects. And then repeatedly repeated statements begin to amaze us with their truthfulness. Things that we are used to surprise us again - by the way, also with the fact that they have become commonplace for us so quickly.

Two recent international congresses - the Belgrade Congress of the (international) Association for the Comparative History of Literature (ASIL), 1967, and the Prague Sixth International Congress of Slavists, 1968, updated the issues of comparative literary studies, confronted us with the need to clarify our attitude to this science unequivocally. At the Belgrade Congress, a proposal was adopted to prepare a collective work on the comparative history of European literatures, the Literary Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences received powers from ASIL and the obligation to coordinate the work scientifically and administratively, and in Budapest the first volume of a series of collections that examine preliminary problems is already being prepared for publication. At the Prague Congress, the Soviet delegation launched the idea of ​​writing a collective history of Slavic literatures, it seems to me, without achieving much success. Although each of the undertakings is independent in organizational terms, there is an internal connection between them. The success of the first undertaking should prompt us to develop the second: how Slavic literatures will be represented in the comparative history of European literatures will depend on the objectivity and scientific merits of Slavic literary history.