руската

The name of Hristo Botev became widely known in Russia in connection with the April Uprising. The Russian press in June-July 1876 repeatedly mentioned the name of Hristo Botev in numerous correspondences dedicated to the Bulgarian uprising as one of the prominent figures of the liberation movement in Bulgaria. Naturally, there were also significant exaggerations and inaccuracies in the newspaper reports, which are explained not only by ignorance, but also by the desire to present Bulgarian events to Russian society in a certain light. These newspaper notes are interesting insofar as they contain information about the revolutionary poet.

At the 18th International Congress of Slavists, the issues of Russian classical literature were widely discussed in accordance with its role and significance among other Slavic and non-Slavic literatures. The reports were numerous, with a different range of problems and appearance, written from different ideological and methodological positions. They nevertheless lend themselves to a certain degree of classification and grading. The first group of reports includes those that treated the most general problems of Russian classical literature (D. D. Blagoi, Dr. Nedelkovich). Their main task was to reveal the reasons that conditioned the emergence of this very important stage in the general centuries-old life of Russian literature, to establish some of its basic regularities, the main lines of its development, its appearance, place and significance. A central place is occupied by the clarification of the reasons for the emergence, development and demise of literary trends in their complex interrelation. Comparison with the corresponding moments and features of Western literatures is an important feature of these reports, which contributes to their greater completeness and justification of the theses. The authors of another group of reports (F. Seely, V. Velchev, B. Kreft, L. Niro, D. Grishin, E. Krag, I. Blankoff) have focused their attention on the study of very specific issues in the work of individual Russian writers or their mutual influences. Their goal in principle is to bring new moments into the clarification of the creative physiognomy of one or another writer, to shed light on controversial or insufficiently clear problems of his individual works, to show in a new aspect some aspects of his ideological and aesthetic concepts, to focus attention on some features of his style. The existence of such reports is justified by the need to develop specific problems, without which large generalizations are impossible. The presentation of a fairly large number of such reports, however, led in this case to a certain deviation from the main problems that should have been discussed in depth at the congress. A significant number of reports dealt in detail with the relations of Russian literature with other literatures (N. Krutikova, G. Dimov, T. Gane, V. Edgerton, Alb. Kovacs, etc.). Here, an important place is occupied not by the study of direct, immediate borrowings, but by the fundamental questions of the exchange and assimilation of artistic and theoretical experience between Russian literature and a number of Slavic and some non-Slavic literatures.

The interests of our great poet and cultural figure Pencho Slaveykov in Russia, Russian literature and Russian culture appeared in his earliest years, and deepened and developed throughout his life. At different times and on different occasions, he gave not quite the same assessments of individual writers, poets and literary critics, and even expressed contradictory thoughts. But this is the fleeting, episodic aspect of his work, of his life. Characteristic of his entire creative development, of his literary and aesthetic views, of his mature artistic taste and preferences, is his understanding and deep conviction that Russian literature is leading, that Russian writers utter new truths, that their work is original and unique, that the path to great art leads through Russian literature. Pencho Slaveykov received the correct direction of his interests in Russian literature first from his father, and then from other of his predecessors, writers and poets: Karavelov, Botev, Drumev, Vazov. It grew and took shape in the first years after the Liberation, when the atmosphere in our country was filled with the influence of Russia, an influence represented in many ways by progressive-minded Russian specialists and public figures working in Bulgaria.

After Stambolov came to power, the former head of the liberal government, Petko Karavelov, who had been expelled from the political arena, was forced to engage in cultural and educational activities. He founded a society in Sofia for the dissemination of useful knowledge among the people and the development of their taste, which began publishing in 1888 the magazine "St. Clement Library", named in honor of the oldest enlightener, Kliment Ohridski. During the period of acute book famine in Bulgaria and the flooding of the book market with low-quality literature, the magazine sought to provide the general reader with exemplary works of world literature. Russian writers occupied a predominant place in the magazine. Its pages were dotted with the names of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Lermontov, Tolstoy. Readers get acquainted with little-known or completely unknown authors: with the poems of Batyushkov, Koltsov, Pleshcheev, I. Kozlov, with the stories of Shchedrin, Korolenko, Garshin, Karonin-Petropavlovsky. "The St. Kliment Library managed to become a conduit of Russian socio-literary influence in Bulgaria during the developing Stambolov reaction, when the official newspaper Svoboda carried out unbridled Russophobic propaganda and insisted on selecting special literature by Western authors for the younger generation. The populist writer T. G. Vlaikov, in his memoirs of the 1980s and 1990s, spoke of the magazine as very good and valuable for its time. "1

The problem of the connections of Bulgarian writers with the world masters of the artistic word and more specifically with the Russian ones is of important methodological and practical importance. Today everyone agrees that in the development of Bulgarian literature - classical and contemporary - bright examples of typological and contact phenomena are found. That is why it is especially necessary to indicate the nature of this influence and it is with each individual author, since this will shed additional light on the literary process as a whole. In this sense, the legacy of Aleko Konstantinov hides very interesting, still incompletely studied literary material. His work shows its own specific features, and along with them also carries the common: close acquaintance with the works of Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol and Turgenev, Nekrasov and Shchedrin, as well as some basic principles in the aesthetics of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov - help our author to grow as a significant national writer. But they only guide him! Because, as I said, Aleko Konstantinov is an original Bulgarian satirist and feuilletonist. First and foremost, he relies on our national literature, no matter how scarce it was in terms of works and traditions at that time. All his works grow on our soil, they are an exciting echo of the social quests of our people in the 80s and 90s of the last century.