социалистическия

So many books have piled up your table - a whole library is before you! These books contain the fifteen-year creative work of poets from several generations. Never in the past has our poetry been so torrential, never in the past has it known that so many poetic works by so many authors have been published in a period of 15 years. And how nice it is, leafing through the pages of these books in the silence of the night, to see how in many of them the gold of a new poetry shines, born, grown and developing inseparably from the new, socialist life of our country, how nice it is to feel the living pulse of this poetry in the works that successfully withstand the severe test of time!

One of the most characteristic phenomena in our literary development after September 9, 1944, is the continuous influx of young, fresh creative forces into the ranks of our poetry. It can certainly be said that never before has our poetry been enriched so intensively and on such a broad front with young, reliable creative cadres. The removal of artificial barriers between literature and the people is one of the great conquests of our cultural revolution. As is known, this is a two-sided dialectical process, which is characterized by the wide penetration of literature among the people, among the many-million readership and by the raising of the spiritual level, the aesthetic education of this reader, by the cultivation and manifestation of his creative abilities. "Art belongs to the people," says Lenin, "it must penetrate with its deepest roots into the bosom of the broad masses of the people. It must be understandable to these masses and beloved by them. It must unite the feeling, thought and will of these masses, elevate them. It must awaken artists in them and develop them."

Even Marx and Engels believed that the "future" proletarian literature would appear as an organic "complete fusion of great depth, conscious historical meaning" with Shakespearean liveliness and effectiveness" of artistic depiction. This is how they imagined the essence of proletarian verbal art, which for several decades now we have been calling the literature of socialist realism. In fact, through these and similar formulations, the founders of Marxist aesthetics noted two main features of proletarian literary art: first, its deeper and qualitatively new historicity in comparison with the art of past societies and second, its ability and historical obligation to start in its artistic searches from the highest ("Shakespearean") creative achievements of the universal human genius.

At the Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party in December 1948, a decision was made to build the foundations of a socialist society in Bulgaria. The cherished dream of the Bulgarian people was realized - in the homeland of Botev and Levski, of Blagoev and Dimitrov, the construction of socialism began. For the first time in its historical development, the working Bulgarian people freely deployed their forces and capabilities, their creative talent, because, as Lenin predicted, "only with socialism will the rapid, real, truly mass, with the participation of the majority of the population, and then of the entire population, begin a rapid, real, truly mass movement forward in all areas of public and private life". The heroic labor march of the people was led by the Bulgarian Communist Party, headed by its experienced helmsman, the legendary hero of Leipzig Georgi Dimitrov. His personality, his life and struggle path increasingly awakened the creative inspiration of writers. In October 1947, B. Bozhilov published one of the most poetic works about Dimitrov:

In recent years, some literary theorists in the West have begun to suggest that we should abandon the method of socialist realism because it has already exhausted its possibilities. They have created their own theories and schemes for socialist realism, which, of course, have easily been exhausted because these theorists ignore the history of the emergence and development of socialist realism. Art in slave society has been created over millennia, in bourgeois society over centuries, and in proletarian society over barely a century. Indeed, the pace of the construction of socialism is unheard of in comparison with the construction of other societies. But socialism is constantly under pressure from capitalism, and we are still forced to wage a fierce class struggle in the international arena. This, of course, cannot but affect the pace of the development of the new, socialist art.