Толстой

In the midst of the First World War, when I was twelve years old, I first tasted the terrible and insatiable magic of fiction. Everything that was left of my uncle, who had just graduated from high school and was mobilized to the reserve officer school, I found, read and reread. It wasn't much, but it was selected. And perhaps that is what saved me from getting carried away by various crime and vulgar books, such as those my classmates were reading. One day I needed something, I assumed that it was pushed somewhere on the high shelf of the room we lived in. I put a chair down, climbed up and peeked in. I didn't find what I was looking for on the shelf, but I did find two books, probably left by my uncle. For me, this "find" was more interesting and more precious than anything else. I took down the two books and carefully dusted them off. First I grabbed the thicker book - it had dark covers and the title was barely legible. It was some kind of dramatization of "Anna Karenina", translated into Bulgarian. For the first time in my life I came across a dramatic work. I had never seen a theater, I had never seen a theatrical performance. It was a bit strange to me that this book did not talk about people, as it did in the novels and stories that I had already read, and the characters themselves talked to each other. I read this dramatization of "Anna Karenina" with great tension, but I could neither understand it properly, nor was this form of expression captivating and satisfying.

The first names of writers that I have remembered from a very early age are the names of Ivan Vazov, Pencho Slaveykov and Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Out of a sense of justice, I should also mention Mayne Reed here, although he holds a special place in my memory, also in my heart, where warm gratitude is reserved for him. My love for P. Slaveykov begins with his poem "Tsar Samuil", but even more so with my first and last meeting with him in person in the churchyard of my hometown in Macedonia in September 1908, when I was just ten years old. Lev Tolstoy holds a special place in both my memory and my heart. I do not remember exactly which of his works I read first, and as a child there, in my hometown, but it was either "Cossacks" or "Hadji Murad", or perhaps both at the same time. Along with my immediate Childish admiration, with a deep feeling of spiritual satisfaction, of clarity and completeness, I remember that even then, with my childish naivety, I felt a desire to become a writer like Leo Tolstoy. And even, with my boyish arrogance, I did not hold back and confided this desire of mine to my closest friends. At this early age we want to resemble those whom we admire the most and whom we love the most. And, when we have not deceived ourselves in our love, these feelings of ours remain unchanged throughout all our ages.

When one thinks of Tolstoy and the indelible mark that his works leave on the soul of the reader, one feels struck both by the magnificent scope of his work and by the vital truth reflected in it. We can read the works of revolutionary democrats, patiently study historical treatises, delve into the subtexts of yellowed archives of the nineteenth century, and finally, with the experience of modernity and the knowledge of historical materialism, understand the meaning of all the events of that time, but a stirring and convincing idea of ​​the dramatic human conflicts in the vast Russian land and its people of the pre-revolutionary era can only be obtained after reading the many thousands of pages of Tolstoy. Objective laws inexorably govern the course of social development. But we can hardly deny that the moral qualities in a people, created by historical conditions and its traditions in the struggle for freedom, accelerate or slow down the action of these laws. Tolstoy, having reached that supreme synthesis between the intellectual and emotional attitude to reality, from which the art of realism is born, manages to reflect with unsurpassed artistic mastery the vital drive and the deep contradictions in the Russian people in the nineteenth century. And it is precisely with this drive and with the already overcome social contradictions, with its experience of the struggle against countless invaders and with its revolutionary traditions that the Russian people today affirm life and lead all of humanity forward, respecting the rights and qualities of all other peoples. Hence arises not only the long-standing universal significance of Tolstoy as an artist and moral personality, but also his very specific contemporary significance in today's urge of the peoples towards liberation from spiritual and economic slavery, towards peace and socialism.

Staff Captain Mikhailov from the second Sevastopol story ("Sevastopol in May") by Leo Tolstoy is a modest man. His place in the sea of ​​critical writings about the great writer's work is also modest. There, the tall, stooped figure of the staff captain is almost invisible. It seems to hide behind the large silhouette of the slumbering Field Marshal Kutuzov, behind the brilliance of the restless, eternally out of breath Prince Andrei, behind the romantic charm of Hadji Murat, or finally - behind the gunpowder smoke that enveloped Captain Tushin. Of all the interesting characters of the writer, the least has been written about Staff Captain Mikhailov. There is something natural in this. Because he is one of Tolstoy's early favorites. In him, the writer concluded many of his innermost youthful observations and thoughts. But that is precisely why we will see how this character is repeatedly reincarnated with one or another of his qualities in various later heroes of Tolstoy. These latter characters overshadow the former.

The most significant thing in Kuprin's creative work is connected with the life of the Russian army at the end of the last century. He saw and artistically revealed the insurmountable weight of the then military discipline, which crushed feelings and thoughts in order to make people's souls dry and flat like barracks squares. He showed thousands of readers the age-old power of the then military hierarchy, which gradually turned commanders into tyrants and subordinates into automated executors. He peered behind the gilded prints of the so-called officer virtues and saw how hypocrisy, careerism, envy were cunningly creeping in. This quiet, modest man, a Russian tsarist officer, was forged from the same noble metal, perhaps, only not as shiny as the Decembrists, "iron men suckled by a she-wolf," as Herzen put it about them. And Kuprin managed to lift onto his weak shoulders the whole weight of cadet and cadet education, of garrison life in the backwater province, of regulations and discipline, and to rebel. There was a difficult, turning point in the writer's life: in 1893, when he failed the entrance exam to the General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg, he decided to leave the army. The young man had neither a salary nor a profession. All his life he had been in orphanages and barracks, all his life he had been taught discipline and obedience. And suddenly the officer felt that he could not take it anymore, that the regulations had become as heavy as lead, that he did not have enough air in the spacious barracks. And despite the peaceful life, the assured future, the beautiful uniforms, the garrison balls, he had to abandon all this in order to find his true essence.

And so far we have no book on Tolstoy's aesthetic views. It is a pity. Such a book would help us not only to comprehend the artistic consequences and theoretical positions of the brilliant writer, but also to penetrate more deeply into some essential and complex problems of our contemporary art. However, this topic has long attracted the attention of our science. In the works of V. Asmus, B. Bursov, S. Bychkov, K. Lomunov, L. Opulska, V. Malinkovsky and other researchers, many essential aspects of Tolstoy's aesthetic system have been revealed. But it is so broad and contradictory that from time to time it is necessary to re-check or specify some of its boundaries in order to present the general picture as reliably as possible. Only in this case can one clearly understand what of Tolstoy's aesthetic heritage belongs to the past and what continues to live actively now. The aesthetic views of the great artist are always interesting - interesting because we involuntarily connect these views with his living creative practice and in this way we can visually verify their vitality and depth. Therefore, we should far from consider Tolstoy's aesthetics only as "the self-knowledge of a brilliant artist." Such a view, which sometimes exists in our country, narrows and impoverishes its meaning. Tolstoy's aesthetic views summarize not only his own work, but also the artistic experience of Russian and world literature.

In the sharp disputes that are being waged today about socialist realism and its relationship with modernism and critical realism, the problem of the formation of the new hero acquires special significance in those authors who come to socialist realism from modernism through critical realism. The correct solution of this question makes it possible to give a more complete and true picture of the contemporary literary process - on the one hand, and on the other - to overcome as dogmatic a number of concepts and opinions that objectively diminish the role of the writer as a creative personality, detach the problem of the formation of the new hero from the ability to assimilate the great example of the classics, from questions of innovation, artistic form, etc.

The literature on Leo Tolstoy shows that each era has approached the assessment of his work with its own criterion. What seemed to the democratically minded representative of realistic literary thought of the second half of the last century, N. N. Strakhov, in Tolstoy's work to be of undeniable value, was precisely what the reactionary decadent D. Merezhkovsky considered the great writer's artistic impotence. They make no exception to this general approach to the study of L. Tolstoy's work and his late works. However, compared to the vast literature devoted to the brilliant writer, there are few publications on his late work. Nevertheless, they very clearly outline the main trends in pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russian science, which, with few exceptions, are reduced to denying the creative potential of the old Tolstoy and the artistic significance of his works - The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, After the Ball, etc.

Recently, the publishing house "Narodna Kultura" released a monograph on Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. The publication is a jubilee one - in August of this year, the entire cultural humanity solemnly celebrated the one hundred and fortieth anniversary of the writer's birth. Numerous articles and notes - original and translated - have been published in Bulgarian so far, starting from 1898, when the seventieth anniversary of Tolstoy's birth and fifty years of his literary activity were celebrated. I will recall the most significant of them - Dimitar Blagoev's review of the treatise "What is Art?" on the occasion of its Bulgarian edition in 1900, Petko Todorov's preface to Lev Tolstoy's brochure "The Times are Near", individual works by Vasil Kolarov, Vela Blagoeva, Georgi Bakalov, confessions and assessments by Ivan Vazov, Aleko Konstantinov, Stoyan Mihaylovski and others. All this and additional material collected by the author formed the basis of the monograph "L. N. Tolstoy and His Influence in Bulgaria". There is no doubt - this is the first comprehensive study by a Bulgarian literary critic on the life, literary work and philosophical-ethical ideas of the great sage from Yasnaya Polyana. Among the vast - both in size and in thought - critical literature on Tolstoy, Georgi Konstantinov's book will rank not least. Above all, it captivates and excites with the researcher's personal attitude to the many and often mutually exclusive problems and ideas that Tolstoy himself advocated during more than half a century of his most active and fruitful creative activity, and under whose pen so many amazing works of art were born.