съвременната

Our dramatic authors in a number of their works reflected the new man in the context of modern life, of the construction of socialism. Our dramaturgy on a modern theme contained a number of socio-psychological and socio-critical elements. Its main feature was the denial of the then capitalist reality, the affirmation of the new that was coming. These works outlined the rapid development of socialist realism from the initial period after September 9 to the present day.

In the creative circles of Poland, two completely contradictory phenomena emerged after the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the 8th Plenum of the Polish United Workers' Party. One was expressed in a criticism of dogmatism and in the revelation to writers of new creative socialist perspectives. On the other hand, however, under the influence of sometimes unprincipled criticism, a process of ideological regression took place in some circles. In the midst of the criticism, revisionist voices spoke out, placing political issues at the center of their attacks: the attitude of the authorities towards the masses, the role of the party in society, the importance of socialist ideology in practical state and public life. Even individual authors came to the conclusion that in order to avoid mistakes, one must act without relying on any ideology, on the basis of a technologically practical attitude towards social issues. These revisionist views found their most vivid expression in Leszek Kolakowski's essay "The Priest and the Fool", in which the author tries to prove that man is faced with only one basic alternative: to adopt the attitude towards life of a priest or a fool. And Kolakowski proved all the advantages of the fool's attitude. All kinds of systems and ideologies limited freedom and conscience with dogmas, stiffened the mind - the only expressor of human dignity. The main mistake in the past was to put history in the role of the former god, to replace facts with assessments, while only the mind, unconstrained by any systems and dogmas, ready to mock the accepted order, could judge the facts. For Kolakowski, the "fool's attitude" meant a technological attitude towards problems, it was a revisionist transition to the positions of bourgeois neopositivism. I will dwell in detail on this "revelation" of revisionism, to understand the essence of the revisionist manifestations in Poland during the years 1956-57 and so that we can also grasp those positive phenomena that have been observed in Polish cultural life for the past three years.

There is nothing more important for the value of a work of art, for its significance, for its lasting impact than whether it gives a true picture and a true expression of its time. Whether, with its own specific means, it reflects the new moments in life that have brought about the changes that give uniqueness to the historical moment, and also the features that are typical of man in general, or the historically conditioned unity of the particular, the variable and the general, the permanent. The social function of a work of art is therefore expressed in the fact that at the moment of its emergence and immediate impact it brings people knowledge of the unknown or not depicted by artistic means and that in this way it contributes to their worldview orientation and forms in them a new emotionality and aesthetics; that even in the next era, even if it is completely different, radically changed, the work of art becomes a document of past life, which remains an integral part of the content of the present, and has its own value for the future. In answering the question posed at the beginning, we interpret and measure the value of the work of Sophocles and Shakespeare, of Cervantes and Stendhal, of Tolstoy and Gorky, of Villon and Mayakovsky. In answering this question, we also evaluate contemporary Czech literature, Czech literature of the last fifteen years after the Second World War. It seems that this question concerns primarily the theme of literature. But in reality it does not concern only it, although it is precisely the theme that is a sufficiently sensitive indicator of the extent to which a work of art, with its ideological content and attitude, as well as its artistic expression and style, represents an expression of its time and contributes to shaping its physiognomy.

It is not surprising that it was precisely after the 20th and 22nd Congresses of the CPSU, in the relaxed atmosphere of the literary front, that the problems of humanism in contemporary literature were raised broadly and insistently. These problems became the subject of a several-day discussion in Moscow, organized by the Union of Soviet Writers and the M. Gorky Institute of World Literature. While in the West art is experiencing a rapid process of dehumanization, which Jean-Paul Sartre also spoke about in one of his interviews, in our country, in the socialist countries, the humanistic tasks of literature and art are growing. The construction of communism - the highest and most complete ideal of humanism - must be ensured in a moral attitude. The highest goal of our social development is the all-round and harmonious development of the human personality, the creation of such conditions in which the abilities and talents, the best moral qualities of a free person, fully blossom and are revealed. And this undoubtedly enriches our art, develops humanistic ideas in it.

At the beginning of our century, a great change took place in Cuban literature, due to the intervention of North American imperialism in the political and economic life of the country. The appearance of the "evil of the twentieth century" in our homeland, with its negative aspects, helped to establish in the people a higher political consciousness - a consequence of the struggle against the new enemy - which found reflection in the work of writers and poets, moved by the problems of the young Cuban nation. This change became clear in the fact that from the patriotic themes arising from the wars of liberation against Spanish Caesarism, which continued, with brief intervals of apparent lull, from 1868 to 1898, considered more with nationalist passion than with political objectivity and enveloped in the sentimental breath of romanticism, our best writers moved on to the development of a theme that had its roots in the social problems of the island nation that had just been created on May 20, 1902. That is to say: from a literature that generally reflected the outbreaks of the struggle of Creole society for liberation from Spanish domination, it almost unexpectedly entered a literature that fought in the public field and now reflected both patriotic demands and the forms of class struggle.

During the time of the cult of personality, quite a few significant works were written, which are the pride of contemporary Bulgarian literature. And the senseless nihilism that existed among a certain part of the youth in relation to the previous period must be resolutely rejected. At the same time, it cannot be ignored that these successes could have been even greater if it were not for the conditions of the cult, which instilled dogmatism, stereotyped thinking, and hindered the normal development of literature. According to the words of Todor Zhivkov, "dogmatism as a theory and practice introduced stiffness, schematism, patterning, and stagnation into creative work."

The editorial board of the magazine addressed the fiction writers Andrey Gulyashki, Georgi Markov and Milcho Radev with the following questions: What paths did our socialist fiction travel during the 1920s? What main moments do you see in its development (respectively in the development of the novel, the short story or the short story)? What main problems and conflicts of our time are you particularly interested in? Which phenomena of socialist restructuring, which problems of the urban and rural man, of the intelligentsia and the youth occupy you in your work? Which obsessions do you consider harmful in contemporary fiction? What kind of foreign influences is it freed from in order to develop more fruitfully? What unfulfilled duty does our fiction have to the reader? What unsolved tasks do you see before it? What aspects of the tradition do you think can be fruitfully developed by the contemporary fiction writer? In what direction do you see the innovative searches of the contemporary fiction writer? In what direction are your own searches for new ways of expression? What new elements of fiction technique, genre enrichment, and genre blending do you think are part of the concept of contemporary fiction? How are they reflected in your own work as your own preferences?

Each play represents a self-contained whole, an autonomous mechanism that draws energy for its movement from forces embedded within itself. This is a kind of "self-moving" mechanism. Here, the author is deprived of the usual function of a reproducer of the action, the role of an intermediary in tracking events and describing images. Direct authorial intervention is completely absent. In the play, the images immediately live their own independent life, "realize" themselves before our eyes without anyone's external help, through the momentary manifestation of their essence in words, actions and behavior. They "self-portray themselves". And the only means they have at their disposal to accomplish this is action. They act in order to reveal themselves, and by revealing themselves, they act.

Tradition and innovation is a problem that has been discussed the most in the history of literature. This problem is infinitely broad and connected with the very essence of literature. When talking about it, one must take into account the questions of the national and cosmopolitan character of a literature, the traditions in this literature, the mutual influences between individual writers and individual literatures, schools and creative individualities, literary fashions and snobbery, the contemporary sensibility and worldview of the writer, the changes in the consciousness of the contemporary in view of social changes, the nationality and party affiliation, the role of social ideals, etc. In our country, this question is often understood narrowly and is limited mainly within the form of the means of expression.

Between the two world wars, the idea became widespread that modern analytical prose, expressing an observation of complex human phenomena, was incompatible with the rural world, limited to traditional manifestations, incapable of renewal and entering the higher zones of the spiritual. The evolution of modern literature has been a process from the village to the city, from the simple to the complex. Such an opinion was once substantiated by Eugene Lovinescu, with the corresponding aesthetic motivations, and later Camil Petrescu formulated it in a decisive way. He wrote that an epic of the Proustian type, such as he would have desired and which is necessary in the era of philosophical relativism and rapid progress in the field of psychology, could not be created by depicting individuals whose manifestations are known in advance according to the laws of an extremely banal mechanism. George Calinescu gave an answer to this question, which is still very relevant today. The peasants, the critic said, have a certain attitude to the problems of existence and even to the universe, they have their own philosophy, expressed, however, in specific forms, interesting for literature that is interested in human destinies. The analogy seems distant and perhaps exaggerated. From here, however, it is important to remember that a modern epic, which walks with the progress of art and is interested in the inner peace of man, who passes from one type of civilization to another and separates, sometimes dramatically, from old inertias, cannot ignore the peasant world, whatever its means of studying the material.

Often in our arguments about contemporary Bulgarian drama we tend to fall into extremes. In moments of good mood we only praise it, in bad moods we pour reproach after reproach. The gesture of excessive tolerance in such cases suddenly turns into caustic and witty malice. However, if we abandon the paradoxes and one-sided analogies with the work of today's greatest European playwrights, we cannot help but acknowledge several important facts. First, after September 9, 1944, an internal explosion took place in Bulgarian drama. It came along the line of ideas, and this is already certain evidence of significant changes in the very nature of drama. Since drama is an active history of society, it could not remain aloof from the problems that were posed by the September 9th people's revolution. Even more. It found itself at the center of the socio-political struggles that decided the fate and future of the Bulgarian people. In this sense, it also appeared as a continuation of the basic spirit of our native dramaturgy - of its social tone and commitment. And yet, here one more circumstance must be taken into account. While in poetry, fiction, painting, even in the theater we had bright examples of ideological communist art - Smirnensky, Vaptsarov, Karaslavov, Zhendov, Danovski - in dramaturgy the peaks of social pathos after Vazov were marked by the art of Yavorov at the end of the ten years and that of St. L. Kostov in the thirties. That is, by the creativity that did not set as its goal the uncompromising and effective struggle against the bourgeois world, more precisely, that did not fight in the name of the most progressive ideal of the era. The only more categorical example in this regard is Vaptsarov's play "The Ninth Wave", but it, unlike his innovative communist poems, conscientiously follows the spiritual structure of the classical Ibsen line in modern dramaturgy.

If we look for the reason for the new phenomena in contemporary fiction - the expansion of the ideological and thematic circle of the reflected phenomena, the changes in the problematic, the new illumination of the image of the contemporary, the intensified process of artistic searches - we will inevitably come to changes in the aesthetic positions of the contemporary writer, to his expanded artistic and sociological vision. It is an indisputable truth that the aesthetic attitude is historically concrete and objectively conditioned by the general level of development of social existence and consciousness. The generalized experience of the writer of recent years naturally pushes him towards a new self-consciousness, towards new conclusions about the relationship of man to nature and society, towards new assessments of reality. From the positions of an expanded idea of ​​the beautiful, which included the experience of the last decade, from the positions of an aesthetic ideal liberated from dogmatic thinking, he strives to give a broader idea of ​​​​modern man, of the beautiful in man and his life.

The stories "Bulgarians of Old Time", "Uncles" and "The Gerats" have preserved much of what makes up the color of our national life. The authors reproduce not only human thoughts and feelings, but also the atmosphere of the time. The stories, saturated with everyday details, have their historical conditioning. By virtue of this need for a dense transmission of the rich external world, the principle of the external plastic characteristics of the characters also plays a certain dominant role. The depiction of the circumstances that influence the life destiny of people stands out in the foreground. The character of the depiction is determined by the content of the selected vital material.

"I love you, my dear Fatherland! I love your Balkans, forests, screes, rocks and their clear and cold springs! I love you, my dear land! I love you with all my soul and heart, even if you are doomed to severe suffering and misfortune! Everything that has remained good and holy in my orphaned soul so far is all yours! You are that blessed land that blooms, that is full of tenderness, with radiance and greatness. You have taught me to love and to cry over every human misfortune. And this is already a lot for one person!" These words were spoken by Lyuben Karavelov more than a hundred years ago, but it seems that even now we feel their sincerity. The Revival writer does not try to theorize, to search for bright images, original thoughts, unusual stylistic devices. He speaks simply and naturally about what lies on his soul, and his declaration sounds like a confession, and the inner excitement has imbued ordinary words with immediate freshness. This freshness has not faded to this day.

One of the interesting facts that characterizes the development of our national literature in the period after September 9, 1944, and especially in the last two decades, is the growing interest abroad in the work of our writers and, along with this, the increasingly active exchange between the People's Republic of Bulgaria and other countries - socialist and non-socialist - in the field of culture.