Георги

In the extensive activity that G. Bakalov develops for the popularization and establishment of Russian literature in our country, a particularly important place is occupied by the work of N. A. Nekrasov. The Marxist critic has known and loved the poet of Russian revolutionary democracy since early adolescence. He admires his highly ideological art, is inspired by his deep love for the people, by his passionate hatred for their enemies. Like Nekrasov, he values ​​in a literary work above all its ideological content - its connection with life, with the revolutionary ideals of the time.

Once Karaslavov reproached Zhendov that he, Smirnensky's best friend and comrade, had not thought of making at least one portrait sketch of him from life. Surprised by the sudden comradely reproach, the artist was embarrassed and sincerely replied: "How could I have known that he was a brilliant poet! Smirnensky was more ordinary than everyone else around me and no one suspected that one day his name would thunder throughout the four corners of Bulgaria." This short confession of our remarkable caricaturist contains an exceptional truth. So would anyone be able to notice and single out their close friend as something exceptional in the comradely collective, among which he is every day? Hardly! Therefore, Zhendov's wise answer can with full reason be set as the Motto of Georgi Karaslavov's entire book - Meetings and Conversations with Nikola Vaptsarov." Indeed, which of Vaptsarov's closest comrades (and the author was among them) could have imagined that one day Vaptsarov's name would travel to the four corners of the five continents and spread the glory of our small people? Which of them could have even for a moment assumed that Every moment of the poet's life, every creative impulse, idea and dream, every object he touched, every vital detail, every gesture even, . . would attract the curious attention of his millions of admirers? And precisely because no one noticed the extraordinary personality in their proverbially modest comrade, that is why they did not think of recording at least one of his conversations with all its colorful details. Nor did his artist friends think of making a portrait or a sketch from life. Should we reproach them in turn? It is hardly necessary. Nor is it appropriate now, with the appearance of an entire book of memories about Vaptsarov, in which the preface emphasizes: "Yes, even then in his work Vaptsarov had outgrown everyone, had risen to a level that we, his closest comrades, could not see. (p. b). And on the next page it is added: "But Vaptsarov was so modest, so "ordinary", so close to us, that we could not see and measure his gigantic stature during his lifetime."

The author of the present had a conversation in December 1943 with Georgi Raichev in order to print my conversation along with a dozen others in a book under the title "Meetings and Conversations", published by Hr. Cholchev. However, the Anglo-American bombings on January 10, 1944 buried the book in the "Economic Development" printing house on Bacho Kiro Street. The conversation with Georgi Raichev has been preserved thanks to a proofreading. We are transmitting it without any changes.

Georgi Dimitrov's statements on literary issues represent not only a very interesting and important page from his multifaceted and rich life as a communist revolutionary of global significance, but they are also extremely valuable documents, the in-depth study of which makes it possible to clarify and resolve some of the basic problems of our literary development.

No one in Bulgaria has contributed as much to the affirmation of the true image of the artist Maxim Gorky, to the correct interpretation of his revolutionary work, as well as to its translation and dissemination, as Georgi Bakalov. From 1901, when he translated and published in Varna the first booklet with Gorky's story "The Pitiful Turk and the Woodpecker", until his death in 1939, he remained a tireless researcher and popularizer of Gorky, and did this with the greatest awareness, breadth and insight. His activity in this field is a true feat. It is enough to recall the case of the translation and dissemination of the novel "Mother" and the translation of almost all of Gorky's plays. I think that in his own development as a Marxist critic and theorist of new literature, his articles on Gorky, along with those on Smirnensky, stand out as the most creative, the most free from vulgar-sociological impurities and sectarian extremes. In both cases, G. Bakalov maintains the creative line, advocates the broad Leninist view and fights against primitive dogmatic concepts. Gorky, as well as Smirnensky, was one of the springs from which Bakalov drew life-giving water for his method, for his critical activity. They helped him to break away from rectilinear ideas and be more artistic, to rely on his critical sense and taste, on his direct contact with art. In addition, Gorky's aesthetic views - his numerous statements about the Russian classics, the cultural heritage and the new Soviet literature - helped Bakalov to free himself from some narrow and sectarian stratifications, from the Plekhanovian mechanistic view and to perceive literary creativity, the historical-literary process with all their dialectical complexity, diversity and specificity. The importance of constant contact with Gorky for the evolution that Bakalov underwent in the 1930s, after overcoming sectarianism, especially for his new attitude towards heritage is undeniable. It is no coincidence that in his famous program article in the second half of the 1930s "Depict the Heroic", most vividly reflecting his new thinking and the decisive urge to break the sectarian shackles, he referred to Gorky, to his call for the creation of heroic art and to examples from his 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?

In literature, as in ordinary life, one has casual acquaintances, very often people of considerable cultural value, whom, either due to a lack of spiritual affinity or due to an unfavorable combination of circumstances, one has not been able to get to know, appreciate and include in the circle of one's relatives and friends. For many years, Georgi Raichev was just such a casual acquaintance for me. Of course, like all young people of my generation who were interested in fiction, I heard this name very early - back in the blissful times of my adolescence, when it seemed to me that I held the world in my hands. Even then, I had the opportunity more than once to read what Raichev published in periodicals and to leaf through his books - "The Little World", "Queen Neranza", and that "Song of the Forest", which gave rise to talk about him once again. However, these meetings were random in nature and I don't know why they didn't arouse in me a more lasting interest in the writer's personality and work.

Georgi P. Stamatov, born in Russia and spending the first thirteen years of his childhood there, then lived in Bulgaria for 55 years, to which are added another five years as a student in Switzerland. After studying at the Military School, his short service as an officer and his studies in law, from 1902 onwards Stamatov became a judge and then more fruitfully displayed his writing talent. He served in Sofia, Plovdiv, Tran and for the longest time in Kyustendil. His official career as a judge in the Kyustendil District Court, extracted from the court archives, is as follows: from August 1, 1905 to September 31, 1907, from February 1, 1908 to January 31, 1911, from March 1, 1914 to July 31, 1919, and from October 1, 1919 to May 31, 1921.

From the literary circle "Luch" in Yambol (1912) to Geo Milev's "Plamak" (1924), Georgi Sheitanov traveled an interesting path of a revolutionary and poet, for whom struggle and poetry are inseparable, because in them lies true life - life even in death. Nurtured by revolutionary ideas in their most extreme manifestations, while still a high school student, Sheitanov set out on the thorny path of rebellion and struggle. A violent, irreconcilable young man, he could not tolerate either the feldwebel discipline in the school of that time, or the hollow authorities, or the injustices in life. The son of a farming family, raised in the poor neighborhood of Kargona, from childhood he saw the weight of the people. Books opened his eyes. From books he learned that misery and oppression would be eliminated when the slave rebelled. And so Sheitanov leaves high school and takes the path of struggle. His first "action" is to set fire to the district court in his hometown in order to destroy the cases of his fellow defendants. Later, he himself will call this and other similar actions of his "quixotic", from which the first period of his turbulent and short life, filled with many twists and turns, is woven. Because revolutionary experience will tell him that only mass action and struggle of the working people, armed uprising and revolution are the only ways to overthrow the predatory and oppressive capitalist system...

Before us is one of the poet's early poems: "After the Interrogation" from his first collection of poems "My Songs". It is crafted sparingly. The point blossoms from the sparse emotional atmosphere at first glance. The sincerity of the experience overcomes the abuse of external effects. The words seem to have no other meaning than the ordinary one, but acquire the power of suggestion.

A warm friendship has connected Georgi Raichev and Nikolay Liliev since 1908. Then the twenty-six-year-old Raichev left the dusty provincial offices forever and arrived in Sofia with the foolish thought of becoming a "great writer". But the capital did not welcome him with open arms, but with complete indifference and unemployment. With seventy-four leva in his pocket, a large suitcase full of manuscripts and a head clouded by the vague ideas of modernism, he wandered helplessly through the cold city, quickly running out of money and starving for several months. The only people he knew and cared about him were the two poets from Stara Zagora, Nikolay Liliev and Dimitar Podvarzachov. They diligently looked for work for him and finally managed to appoint him as a clerk at 111 Sofia Boys' High School "Gladstone", where Liliev was a teacher in the commercial department and Podvarzachov was a secretary. Raichev deeply valued their friendship until the end of his life. From the remote province, he suddenly found himself in the very whirlpool of cultural life in our country, among the elite of our then spiritual intelligentsia.

In the first half of the current year, the Scientific Council of the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences decided to award the scientific degree "Candidate of Philological Sciences" to the senior lecturer at the Faculty of Slavic Philology of Sofia University "Kliment Ohridski" - Georgi Mitrev Markov and to the full-time postgraduate student at the Institute of Literature - Atanas Vassilev Slavov.

In our political history, the image of Georgi Kirkov - the Master - is one of the most charming. Those who have seen or listened to him, from whatever background they come from, could not remain indifferent to the subjugating power of his word. Kirkov also respects with his books, which will always be republished. Because in them lives an entire period of the history of the party, an entire encyclopedia of thoughts and predictions. At a time when many other advanced countries are far from socialism, Bulgaria, which has just regained its sight, is illuminated by the first dawns of Marx's teachings. The Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party, created by Blagoev, is one of the earliest proletarian parties in the world. Even in the time of abbots and peasants, the first apostles of socialism predicted the path of economic and social development and sowed the seeds of Marxist enlightenment. No, these were not just seeds, they were sparks that, if they hit a stone, would be extinguished, but if they found awake and dissatisfied souls, they would blaze in uncontrollable torment. Along with Dimitar Blagoev, Georgi Kirkov is “the first trumpeter for the awakening and organization of the Bulgarian proletariat,” as his then young student and successor Georgi Dimitrov called him in the speech at his grave. Kirkov’s contributions to the building of the Marxist party are enormous. The unwritten history of the Bulgarian socialist movement fills an entire chapter with his activities; with a number of his manifestations (especially during the wars and the October Revolution) he also stands out as an actor of the international workers’ movement.

G. Dimitrov's statements about literature and art, his assessments of cultural manifestations in our artistic life are not accidental and isolated. They are determined by the great importance, role and specific social function of art. G. Dimitrov is characterized by a subtle sense of the historical originality of artistic phenomena. Therefore, he always turns to the problems that have arisen with the greatest acuteness from the course and development of society. For example: his thoughts on the superintendent, illuminated in the report of the VII Congress of the Comintern, are an example of a creative concrete-historical approach. And this undoubtedly had a particularly important significance not only for the correct direction in the party policy on this issue, but also became a broad platform for the unification of honest talents throughout the world in defense of culture against the barbarism of fascism and the falsification of the heritage.

"History will have to think about which immortal figure to attribute you to!" - this is how Vazov exclaims in amazement in his remarkable "Epic of the Forgotten", when he recreates the image of Rakovski. The folk poet is as if stunned by the personality and versatility of the work of this "mad dreamer, an impossible image", seething with "giant love" and "satanic enmity", who boldly peered into the dark past to reveal the tragic present and embrace the dreamed future with his eagle gaze. For all its romantic hyperbolicity, this poetic glorification seems to most accurately capture Rakovski's extraordinary scale in ideological insights and revolutionary scope, in national impulses and efforts to serve devotedly a great idea with thought and deed, with pen and weapon. One is truly amazed by this all-encompassing, revolutionary, uniquely original, spiritually rich personality. The scope of the revolutionary, the searches of the historian, the insights of the scientist, and the visions of the poet - everything is nourished by a deeply realized and suffered national ideal, which found a kind of synthesis and expression in his entire activity. The scale and significance of this activity seem to go beyond national dimensions and remind us of the great conquests of the human spirit in general.

It is well known that not all the works of the rich Byzantine literature have survived; some of them are known only bibliographically, and others only from Latin or Old Church Slavonic copies. As an illustration of this idea, at least as far as Old Church Slavonic literature is concerned, the name of Georgi Skylitsa, a Greek cultural and public figure of the 12th century, is usually mentioned. In addition to his other works, he is also the author of a life of Ivan Rilski, which is now not known in its original Greek version, but only in Slavic. "1 It is assumed that it was written "between 1166 and 1183, when the relics of the saint were taken to Hungary, and for this reason the latter event is not mentioned in the life"

Georgi Markov's new book presents the author to us as a well-oriented literary critic, who makes conscious and in-depth efforts to reveal the specific laws of literary creativity, to penetrate the secrets of artistic mastery, into the world of the writer. The fruit of theoretical thinking, the book has a close proximity to the sphere of art. It does not give abstract logical interpretations and analyses, but rather approaches them concretely, in connection with the artistic features of literary works. The author's growth is evident. 1 G. Markov, Life Truth and Artistic Truth, ed. Narodno Prosveta, Sofia, 1968. A few years ago he published the book "Questions of Literary Analysis". If we compare it with the current one, we will see many common problems and at the same time - a big difference in their development. A manifest aspiration towards a complex research approach, towards a modern scientific level. Georgi Markov's theoretical interests are directed primarily towards the problems of ideology and artistic analysis, towards revealing the complex relations between literature and reality. These issues, which have a fundamentally important methodological significance for clarifying the essence of artistic creativity, have always been little developed so far, and there are many unresolved problems in connection with them. In the past, a considerable tribute was paid in this area to schematism and simplification, to vulgar sociology. To this day, many theorists are often satisfied only with general definitions and formulations, without detailing and arguing in essence. However, in his new book, G. Markov approaches the problems from different aspects, seeks the root causes of the phenomena, connects theoretical issues with examples from various literary works, mainly by Bulgarian poets and writers.

No one in our country has contributed so much to revealing the true face of the great Gorky, to the correct interpretation of his revolutionary work, to its translation and popularization, as Georgi Bakalov. For nearly forty years he has been his tireless translator and passionate critic, editor and publisher. This multifaceted and diverse activity of Bakalov has been the subject of research more than once in our country, and recently in the Soviet Union. Very rich and new material was presented in their articles and works by A. Todorov, 105 St. Karakostov, Zh. Avdzhiev, Iv. Tsvetkova, the Soviet Bulgarian scholars V. Zlidnev and L. Erikhonov.

The First World War and the October Revolutions changed the entire course of world history and inevitably gave a new direction to art. The blow that shook and changed the world fell on the bourgeois-aesthetic thought of the pre-war decade and cleared the way for new ideological and artistic searches. In Bulgarian literature, a new, deeply reviving process of returning to real life, to the fighting cries of the street, to the baked soil of the black earth, to the life-giving juices of the earth began to mature. The October Revolution, which pushed the spiritual development of the peoples along a new path, played a fateful role for the Bulgarian people as well, determining to a large extent their further economic and cultural development. It is enough to glance at our literature of those years to feel the irresistible power of the revolution, to feel the reviving power of the new and spiritual engines.

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.

In Bulgarian literary and historical science after 1944, the question of the development of our literary theory and criticism is not new, it has not just arisen. As a research task, this question has been raised more than once and not by one or two Bulgarian literary historians. For various reasons, however, no work has been done in this direction. There are too few researchers who have occasionally paid attention to one or another moment in the history of Bulgarian literary criticism, theory and science. The only more systematic and comprehensive studies that have been published so far belong to Georgi Dimov, who works mainly in this scientific field.

When in 1926 the name of Georgi Karaslavov was noticed, it was difficult to guess how the young talent would shine. He was heading towards the village that had been plunged into sorrow and angry silence after the April days of 1925. He also wrote about the lives of children from the outskirts of the capital, who, with the loss of many human dignity, resemble the Gavrosh family from Smirnensky's "Winter Evenings". He also told about the moral resilience of the fighters from the construction proletariat in the vicinity of Prague, led by a conscious political avant-garde ("Spor Zhilov"). He also created quite a few images of urban intellectuals - folk teachers, dreamers and realists, who died at the stake of the revolutionary struggle. However, Karaslavov's main personal theme gradually became clear and it remained the village until the end. The village with its transparently serene natural pictures, spring and winter moods, the village with its cruel possessive ambitions, with the drama of the sharpened class struggles. It, this post-war, already changed village, different from Elin Pelinovoto and Yovkovoto, sounded like a constant melody - restrained, but strong and noble. Two terrible forces rage in it: the power of property, which gradually, mechanically destroys humanity; the power of its negation, inspired by the tenderly embraced world of the desire for liberation.

Vladislav Grammatik is the most prominent representative of our literary life in the 15th century, and especially in its second half, when the roar of weapons had already subsided and when the Turkish attacks were directed west of Bulgaria. Although a number of articles and studies have been written so far about the life and work of Grammatik, there are still many unresolved or incorrectly illuminated questions. On the other hand, all this has not been collected in one place and thus the image of the writer has not been outlined more comprehensively. In this situation, it was necessary to proceed to writing a more comprehensive study, in which not only would the previous achievements of science regarding the life and literary heritage of Vladislav Grammatik, scattered in various publications, would be collected, but also new material would be attracted, certain issues would be reassessed, etc. In the light of these circumstances, the appearance of Georgi Danchev's work is fully justified.

When reviewers want to pay a big compliment to a critical or literary book, they say that it is "a pleasure to read" or reads like a novel. I do not believe that this is one of the main qualities that the author of such a book claims. Here the reviewers simply make a logical error - they exchange the places of our interest in a given issue with the slight pleasure that we can get from some fascinating reading, they translate a new concept into an older language. Therefore, I will not say that Georgi Konstantinov's book "An Extraordinary Friendship" (I have already heard such an opinion) is read easily, as a work of fiction. It simply reads as an interesting documentary, and in no case would I replace its content precisely as a documentary with the most skillful fiction construction. Incidentally, Georgi Konstantinov has also shown a certain fiction dexterity - he has arranged the documents at his disposal in such a way that the sequence of events and facts, their logical and plot connections, can be traced. But that is not what is important. It is important for us that we can feel the unique breath of authenticity, of personal testimony in history. The taste for the documentary, accurate, factual reproduction of historical events has been increasingly imposed in our country lately. It seems that we already prefer a letter, a memory of a living participant in events to any romantic imagination. Fiction seems to be starting to lose in a competition with history; History is increasingly imposing itself and dominating our consciousness, it seems to us more extraordinary and more fantastic than the greatest flights of fantasy, it seems to have the ambition to displace art, philosophy, and "mythology". Haven't you noticed that recently the memoir is the most sought-after, most preferred reading material? Of course, in the world historical process, and especially in our development since 9. IX., we will find many explanations for this "demythologizing", for this striving to unveil, deheroize, "historicize" history, for this desire to see how it was made, but these reflections would take us too far.

One of the characteristic features of the contemporary literary process is its genre diversity. This applies equally to both fiction and literary criticism. Artistic aspirations and generalizations, the searches and insights of historical-literary and critical thought find expression in various genres and forms, sometimes very heterogeneous, but nevertheless interesting as evidence of the richness of literary life, of the diversity of creative individuals, of the different paths that writers and literary critics take to reveal truths of an ideological-aesthetic, biographical-creative, moral, and emotional nature.

On May 29, 1969, the defense of the dissertation on the topic "Georgi of Elka Konstantinova Raychev. Life and Creativity" took place. The scientific supervisor was our late literary historian and critic Minko Nikolov, and the reviewers were Prof. Stoyan Karolev and Assoc. Prof. Zdravko Petrov. The members of the scientific council, literary workers and many citizens were present. The director of the Institute of Literature, Stoyko Bozhkov, who chaired the discussion, introduced those present to the content of the presented documents and gave a characteristic of the scientific achievements of the graduate student. The head of the section at the institute, Prof. Georgi Tsanev, presented the work of Elka Konstantinova, and the two reviewers read their reviews. Both emphasized the seriousness of the work done, the penetration into the world of the writer and the difficult time of its formation and creative realization.