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Ernesto, a large industrialist or something like that, puts a record on his new American gramophone, an ideal automaton with a complex mechanism. When Ernesto presses the button on the membrane, instead of obediently landing on the edge of the record, it rises into the air, makes a kind of paralytic movement and with a dry metallic click returns to its original position. Like all ideal mechanisms, the automaton at a certain point refuses to serve its purpose. A little later, Ernesto is in his luxury car with his wife and two children. He is a rich, happy man who has fulfilled himself. But somewhere at the bottom of his soul, a dissatisfaction has settled. This dissatisfaction tempts him to throw himself from a high cliff into the sea with his luxury car and his entire family. His not-so-good knowledge of the terrain and a hesitation that lasted a tenth of a second save him. Instead of in the waves, the car stops at a beautiful ravine, from which Ernesto, his contented wife and his joyful sons contemplate the calm element of the ocean. Alberto Moravia's new book of short stories "The Automaton" is built on moments in which the main characters realize their dissatisfaction, their inferiority, their automatic existence, their inability to live and enjoy what they have achieved. Men or women, young or old, they are faced with their deeper essence, with their true reality, which they have not known, with which they cannot cope. These are usually moments of imbalance, as in the plot of the story given above, moments of automatic and unconscious life, not controlled by the will.

For years, for obvious reasons, our literary scholarship has been shedding light on the creative and life path of the writer Dimitar Talev in a very uneven way. Divided by the gamut of historical events in 1944-1945, this path offers a heterogeneous ideologically and emotionally, artistically unequal and unequally grateful material for studying the author. The mature work of D. Talev, which attracts with a true abundance of ideological and aesthetic problems, social and life conflicts, of human images and motives, is quite justified in the center of the most significant studies to date on the literary work of the writer. The attention of D. Talev researchers continues to be directed today to the great ideological and artistic wealth of the four-volume historical epic, a work that has secured an inviolable place in the heart of every Bulgarian, and has won for the author the name of an indisputable master of everyday-historical narration. Before tracing the writer's overall creative development, before outlining his appearance in detail, it was imperative to understand the beauty and power of that series of novels that earned the author extraordinary popularity and recognition. The relevance of this task for the future is undoubted.