революция

It is an undeniable historical truth that the Bulgarian nation affirms its conquests in the field of culture, art and literature with organic closeness and deep brotherly love for the great Russian people. Without denying the undoubted independent contribution of our people to the treasury of human thought and art, one should not underestimate the enormous contribution of Russian culture to our spiritual development. More than half a century ago, one of our greatest writers and thinkers - Pencho Slaveykov - made the following significant recognition: "Russia liberated us politically. Even children know this. But Russia liberated us mentally; to her, above all, we owe that small culture that we have for now and which is the best guarantee for the culture of the spirit in our further life and development.

The October Revolution is not just a picturesque moment in the turbulent history of mankind. With a certain set of actions, thoughts and attitudes, it radically changed the entire worldview of the man of our time. What it accomplished once again confirmed the basic principle: one moves forward by rejecting what is obsolete, by perceiving the past through new perspectives: moral, political and artistic. With its grandiose innovation, the October Revolution erased the "greatness" of the ideas, philosophical views and moral theses proclaimed by the bourgeois revolutions that preceded it. With the brightness and fury of lightning, it illuminated the backward content of philosophical concepts, layered, processed and systematized for almost a century and a half.

We are talking about the first decade after the victory of the October Revolution. Because, if it is a question of its influence at all - with all the new things that it brought to social and cultural life - this influence continues in our country, as everywhere in the world, to this day. But, it seems to me, the most interesting, historically innovative is the impact that the October Revolution - as an epochal phenomenon, as the beginning of a new era in the history of mankind - had on us in the first years after its triumph. It was then that the new ideas and solutions to problems that it suggested to Bulgarian literature, the new impulses with which it strengthened its development in the moment after the First World War - a moment of crisis and the search for new paths for artistic activity - had a turning point.

The ideas of socialism were reflected in literature long before the Great October Revolution. Their general character, social sources, and forms of influence on artistic creativity were not only diverse, but often heterogeneous. If we talk about the literature of the 19th century, socialist ideas received one or another expression in the works of Heine and G. Weert, of Hugo and Potier, Herzen and Chernyshevsky, Shchedrin and L. Tolstoy. A little later, these ideas attracted the deep attention of R. Rolland, A. France, W. Morris, B. Shaw, and many other writers. At the end of the century, at the beginning of his creative activity (1895), Romain Rolland confidently expressed the thought of the historical purpose of socialism. "If there is still - he wrote in his diary - hope to avoid the destruction that threatens present-day Europe, its society, and its art, then this hope lies in socialism." Rolland's conviction was not an isolated phenomenon - other artists of the word have expressed similar thoughts.

"The tragedy begins!" - writes Geo Milev about the bloody September of 1923. In fact, the tragedy began years before that. Bai Ganyo lit the first fuse and with political fireworks presented Alek's head as the greatest achievement in the hands of Ferdinand. This was the opening blow, the first cry of those in power - In the name of the people!" Parties and governments passed this "motto" to each other like a baton. "Lies lie, lies rule, lies steal." The new time invades and with a stunning blow proves that one cannot live only with memories and the past, throwing them overboard like ballast. The spirits of the martyrs of the Bulgarian National Revival excite, perform the insidious movement in the minds, but do not give an answer. "Power is my eternal mistress" - every political department brazenly and loudly confesses. The idols, the "collapsed idols" press their shoulders. But the Buzludzha Congress in Bulgaria is indisputable proof that living water exists. It brings "first love" to an entire generation of the Bulgarian intelligentsia, without, however, providing it with a protective armor at the crossroads. The revolutionary romanticism of a pre-liberation era does not allow for much reflection, but the end of the past and especially the beginning of the 20th century necessitates a logical reassessment, a painful search for new sources. Under other social and political conditions, this search is already a fact in Russia, France, Belgium, Germany. Ethically pure natures face chaos - hopeless and dreamy - protected only by the tormenting images of their "drunken ships", their wanderers, loners and eccentrics. The creators, the creators of spiritual freedom, embodied in poems, colors and music, turn out to be both the Achilles' heel of society and its saviors. Earthly purity is already infinitely compromised in the world of capital and the leaps of human minds from "supermen", from Maeterlinck's "Treasure of the Humble", through the multinational, fragmented internal dialogues of symbolism, through the roar of Verhaeren's "The Ringer" to Ernst Toler's "Massa-Man" - are fully justified by the brutality of the era. In Bulgaria, this era is pouring out in a very short period of years, when our progressive thought must collectively pass through populism and socialism, through symbolism, impressionism, expressionism. A review of the periodicals of just a few of the magazines such as: "Den", "Delo", "Novo Vreme", "Nash Zhivot", "Misl", "Khudozhnik" to the magazine "Cherven Smyah", to the magazine "Plamak".