свят

Botev is a person in whose chest burns a Promethean fire, the fire of freedom. He is guided in life by great passions - he loves and hates strongly, he always keeps us in the world of inspired revolutionary ideas. And when he writes about love longing, about jealousy, and when he expresses some life anxiety, his thought goes beyond the boundaries of the narrowly personal. His spirit listens intently to sounds other than those that attract the soul of a person in love with himself. He is lured by visions other than those that disturb the ordinary person. We can say: what is awarded by history is dear to him, what attracts him is what he represents humanity with. And his poetry took Heights unsuspected before him.

Many collections of poetry begin with dedications. Often this is the most sincere, the strongest poem in the book - a secret assessment of the journey, dictated by a sense of duty fulfilled or by the pangs of a rebellious conscience. Dedication - these are the poet's tablets, on which his civic and artistic credo is ardently written. These are manifestos of an aesthetic creed, excited promises to readers, to the people, to himself. Alas, poets do not always remain at the height of their aesthetic creed, they are not always able to resist their promises. On their own path, on the path of their cherished "Dedication" only true poets walk, and only then when their talent is elevated by a passionately searching, free creative spirit. Oh, this world must suffer, it must be reborn in you, and every thing and image around you must be recreated by your heart.. ("Dedication")

"If They Could Speak" perhaps more directly than any other of Yovkov's works confronts the reader with a peculiarity, mentioned several times recently as the "objectivity" of the depiction, of the verbal drawing. In fact, this so-called by us objectivity represents one of the aspects of the question of the structure and functions of the verbal image in Yovkov. The resolution that he gives it is as important as it is characteristically Yovkovian. And an analysis that has affected in one way or another the structure and composition of the work as a whole (the "macro-image") cannot fail to focus on the structure of the "micro-image" - of the individual linguistic image and its function in the whole. These are questions of the verbal fabric of the artistic work, taken from their specifically stylistic side. While the composition and the general structure of Yovkov's story undergoes a relatively more complex development, Yovkov's verbal pattern develops, so to speak, in an ascending line: this is the progressive unfolding of the same pictorial tendency from "Ovcharova's Complaint" to "If They Could Talk". The path is long - from 1910 to 1936 - but straight; the difference is enormous, but natural and inevitable.

"I am sad that I am leaving without having given the people what they should have"... - these are the last words of the writer Georgi Raichev, spoken in the hospital room a few hours before his death. There is nothing more painful and depressing for a creator than the consciousness that he has not fulfilled his task, that he has not given his people all his strength, all his talent, all his heart... Georgi Raichev dies with such a tragic consciousness of an unfulfilled duty, tormented by the thought that he has wasted something of himself, something of his talent. Is there any reason for the writer to make such a confession in the last moments of his life? Did he really not create "what he should have" and what he could have created? The author of "Tiny World", "Lina" and "Sin" occupies a prominent place in our fiction. He is not one of our greatest writers, but he is one of the most original and diverse. Nature has generously endowed him with a true, subtle sense of what is significant in life, and with a bright, original gift for embodying the manifold manifestations of the human spirit, and with a true, artistic sense of color and language... But the overall creative development of Georgi Raichev convinces us that he has not fully realized all his talents. Only in his most beautiful works, and they are not very numerous, does he remain true to himself. It is not uncommon for him to betray his talent, take foreign, steep and impassable paths that tire him with their sharp turns, their dangerous winding paths and their insurmountable obstacles, unnecessarily enslave himself to fashion, throw himself headlong and recklessly into contradictory passions that suck out much of his vital creative forces. It seems that he did not want to remain within the limits of his capabilities, he strove to break them and go beyond their limits and beyond the limits of Bulgarian literature. This ambition of his to surpass in the field of fiction not only his predecessors and contemporaries, but also himself, is perhaps his most positive trait. In this respect, he is very similar to another of our writers, who is his first teacher and mentor in the literary field - Anton Strashimirov, whose work also arouses a disturbing feeling of something unfulfilled. But Strashimirov is by nature spontaneous and contradictory, extremely active and deeply social. His rebellious spirit draws him not only into contradictory literary whirlwinds, but also into all the social hurricanes of the era. His insatiable curiosity pushes him towards the most diverse activities.

Bogomil Raynov's story "Roads to Nowhere" belongs to the series of works by our most restless and searching fiction writers, in which, based on a liberated aesthetic ideal and an idea of ​​today's man enriched by the experience of the last decade, our complex and dramatic modernity is depicted. It captivates us with the sincere civic anxiety and anti-dogmatic pathos with which the author poses the problem of the harmony between the individual and the environment, which was disrupted during the cult of personality, of the freedom of thought and scientific research, of the self-awareness and creative realization of modern man. A writer with a clearly expressed active attitude towards reality, with a sharp analytical mind and a subtle sense for the current social conflicts and ideological and moral issues of our heroic and exciting modernity, Bogomil Raynov could not remain on the sidelines of the conversation that has begun in our literature in recent years on the most vital issues of modern life. "Modernity - this is us we - shares B. Raynov. Everyone defines their attitude towards it in their own way. The writer does it with his books. The problem of modernity - or rather a piece of it, is also reflected in my latest book "Roads to Nowhere. Why did I write it? This was necessary for me, I felt obliged to take my position on some phenomena of modernity, phenomena with distant roots in the past and with a belated, short-lived flowering in our time: careerism, slander, servility. Literature is always a battle for something better, against something that challenges it". The position that Bogomil Raynov takes in this story is a position of honesty, of 1 Bogomil Raynov, Roads to Nowhere, story, 1966 2 See Trud newspaper, issue 16, 1966 136 moral vigilance and the free citizen Danish conscience. The story "Roads to Nowhere" is one of those works of fiction whose artistic significance is determined primarily by the truthful recreation of the tense spiritual atmosphere of our decade, of the characteristic of our time, above all ideological and moral purposefulness of the intellectual pursuits of modern man. It is one of those works that many trust because they discover episodes from their own spiritual biography in them. It attracts us because with some of its moments it gives us a key to penetrating the mystery of the tragic end of personalities who, with their deeds and moral charm, have become our spiritual idols.

Poet, fabulist, feuilletonist, author of aphorisms, epigrams, travelogues, memoirs, literary and theatrical articles, works for children, Dimitar Podvarzachov is truly a complex nature, distinguished by his bright creative individuality. Having spent a difficult childhood as an orphan, nurtured with the ideals of the Narodniks, with his first poems (printed in "Na dezhda" and "Bulgarian Collection") he attracted the attention of Iv. Vazov, who assigned the young poet Nedezdi. In his literary collection "Rays of Poetry" 1901, G. Bakalov included poems by Podvarzachov with emphasized critical realism. "Among the poems of Podvarzachov's young works - he writes in the preface - they are distinguished by greater artistic endurance and originality, above all they meet the most important requirement of democratic and humane creativity." Having fallen under the influence of populist-socialist ideas at the beginning of the century, the young poet later deviated from this solid realistic beginning, his poetry became impoverished of militant thoughts and moods, and in a number of his works he sang not of the people's suffering, but of his personal woes. This is evident from the titles of the poems "Sorrow", "Without a Path", "Abyss", "Curse", "Grave", etc., printed in the magazines "Khudozhnik", "Savremennik" and in the magazine "Zveno" edited by him, 1914, written in the spirit of symbolist poetry. But Hr. Radevski rightly claims: "Symbolist motifs are not very characteristic of him. Podvorzachov is above all a humorist, an active judge of social struggles, and the poetry of symbolism is characterized precisely by alienation from public life" ("Art and Criticism", 1939, vol. 8). Podvarzachev did not close himself off in the knightly castles of solitude, did not enclose himself with icy walls, did not escape from the crowds. He lived with the anxieties of his time and established himself as a poet, humorist and satirist. When the first years of our century were at their brightest, D. Podvarzachov edited several humorous publications ("Bulgaria", 1904-1909, "Osa", 1909-1910, Smyah", 1911-1914), where he included humorous works of a markedly satirical nature. This already clearly speaks of the poet's lively connection with the people. The only book he published during his lifetime, the collection of feuilletons "How the Devil Reads the Gospel" (signed with his most popular pseudonym, Hamlet Prince of Denmark), confirms the idea that the poet valued his humorous works above all - he established himself as one of our most prominent fabulists and feuilletonists.

Even while publishing separate excerpts from his book about Yordan Yovkov in the literary press, Simeon Sultanov reminded us of a writer, loved and forgotten, declared during his lifetime a living classic of Bulgarian literary prose... Always reminiscent of this Yovkov, who is well known today to every educated Bulgarian. And even then, the separate fragments of his book attracted the eye of the curious reader, who understood the insights and inspiration of the critic, who can talk to the writer's characters as if they were living people, who can discover, without artificial pathos and learned eloquence, the simple charm, poetic wisdom and greatness of one of the most original Bulgarian writers.