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Although the decadence of the West at the end of the last century marked a turning point towards decline and ruin, lights of past greatness still shone, powerful voices still thundered, interesting ideas were still born. Only half a century since Paul Valéry, we can no longer recognize anything of what was once the wonderful "Sardis" of bourgeois culture. The last great representatives of critical realism in the West leaned to the left and abandoned the sinking ship of the bourgeoisie: Anatole France, Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland and others. After them, the ruin became so widespread that it would be difficult to notice any reliable forms, trends or schools now. It is not that there are no names, but they are in most cases alienated from life. In this inscrutable whirlpool, some reliable authors have fallen and are falling, who make incredible efforts to free themselves and find meaning, a path and a goal in life. Because everything that in the West is proclaimed to be meaning or an idea turns out to be nonsense, chaos, everything that shows itself as the free development of the personality turns out to be pathlessness, wandering or trampling. in one place. To the horror of Western bourgeois ideologists, the freedom so solemnly proclaimed turned out to be not only "hungry" (in Marx's phrase) but also empty!

In the history of our old literature there are still details to be clarified, some previous assumptions to be re-evaluated, there is a great need to search for and publish new materials on individual writers or periods. But when one proceeds to re-evaluate previous conceptions, it is necessary that the argumentation be more comprehensive and more convincing, so as not to introduce unnecessary or premature disturbances into the course of our literary history, which has to solve such important tasks, to clarify more fully the content, the problematics and the significance of old Bulgarian literature.