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The scientific heritage of Academician N. S. Derzhavin (1877-1953) is enormous in volume and extremely diverse in the nature of the research and the range of issues covered. N. S. Derzhavin is a scientist with a broad profile, a scientist with great erudition in various fields of knowledge. Valuable works on the methodology of teaching the Russian language in secondary school, special studies on the history of Russian literature, on folklore and ethnography of various peoples came from the pen of N. S. Derzhavin. The breadth and diversity of his scientific interests in the field of Slavic studies, his scientific activity as a historian and philologist, ethnographer and folklorist allow us to speak of him as one of the founders of Soviet Slavic studies.

The mutual relations between the old Russian Literature and the old South Slavic literatures (Bulgarian and Serbian) have long been the subject of research. In this field of science, the most has been written so far by Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian scholars. The number of studies becomes even greater if we take into account the studies in general on the cultural relations between these three fraternal peoples, whose cultural development has many common features and trends. It was a natural phenomenon at the beginning of these studies to search for and indicate the influence of the South Slavic literatures on medieval Russian literature, more precisely on the oldest period of its development. Such is indeed the beginning of their relationship, but it alone does not exhaust the nature of the mutual relations between the Russian and South Slavic Literatures. Because ancient Russia not only adopted cultural values ​​from the Slavic south, but in turn it also influenced the cultural development of Bulgarians and Serbs, works of Russian literature penetrated the old Bulgarian and Serbian literature. This process has been particularly strong since the 16th century, but such an influence also existed before the 16th century, albeit in a weaker form. This statement of the problem of the Russian-Southern Slavic cultural and especially literary relations was first given by the famous Russian Slavic scientist M. N. Speransky. Presented first in his introductory lecture "Dividing the history of Russian literature into periods and the influence of Russian literature on Yugoslavia" (Русский филологический вестинк, XXXVI 1896, vol. 3-4, pp. 193-223). Yugoslav and Russian texts "Stories about the construction of the temple of Sophia of Tsaregrad". Speransky managed to present his many years of observations on this common problem in his monograph “Toward the History of the Relations between Russian and South Slavic Literatures (Russian Monuments of Southern Slavonic Literature), published in 1923 in the Proceedings of the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (vol. XXVI, pp. 143-206). Here the author asserts: “The number of these facts - Russian monuments of one or another type of the indicated works that were in use among the South Slavs, the participation of Russian writers in the life of South Slavic literatures - although not as large as the number of South Slavic monuments in the practice of writing from the old period, is still quite significant, so that the more general question of the role of Russian literature in South Slavic literature can now be raised, just as we at the time raised and resolved the question of the role of South Slavic literature in Russian (p. 12). This correct methodological indication of Speransky is embedded in the scientific literature after him; he develops this thought in his more recent works, prepared for publication, but remained unpublished. Speransky's numerous studies rightly outline him as a scientist who not only knows best the mutual connections between the old literatures of Bulgarians, Russians and Serbs, but also who has made the greatest contribution to revealing the history of these connections. It is this assessment, perhaps, along with the observation that the problem of Russian-Slavic connections in the 11th-17th centuries, which is of great scientific interest, still needs development, that served as an occasion to publish some of Speransky's studies that remained in his archive.

The interest in the issues of Bulgarian-Serbian and Bulgarian-Croatian literary, cultural and ideological-political relations in the past is conditioned primarily by the rich content of these relations, by their scientific significance. Not only neighboring, but also with a relatively equal political fate, Bulgarians, Serbs and Croats followed very similar directions and traditions in their spiritual development for nearly a century. Even in the conditions of their political slavery they managed to use each other's experience and achievements in the field of culture to create original artistic values. The informed reader knows how characteristic in this respect is the literary activity of writers such as Konstantin Ognjanović, Petko Slavejkov, Ljuben Karavelov and Hristo Botev, Jovan Raič, Dositej Obradović, Vuk Karadžić, Jovan Sterija Popović, Ivan Kukuljević-Sakčinski, Petar Preradović, August Harambašić and others, whose works penetrated all South Slavic countries, accelerating the process of the formation and development of South Slavic literatures.

Bulgarian-Byzantine cultural and literary ties continued for several centuries. Undoubtedly, the main and dominant influence here was the penetration and influence of Byzantine literature on Bulgarian medieval literature throughout its historical development. Still as strong, although slightly transformed, it continued during the difficult period of Turkish slavery. And the borrowings and ties continued because they had a socio-economic and political prerequisite. Every nation suffered the influence of other nations and, above all, of its neighbors. Moreover, "every society lives in its own special historical environment, which can be - and indeed often is - very similar to the historical environment surrounding other nations, but can never be and never is identical with it". 1 Nations can exert mutual influence only when there are certain points of contact in their social, political and cultural life. The strength of the influence is determined by the degree of community between them. "The influence of the literature of one country on the literature of another is directly proportional to the similarity between the social relations of these countries. It does not exist at all when this similarity is equal to zero... This influence is one-sided when one people, due to its backwardness, cannot give anything to the other either in terms of form or in terms of content... Finally, this influence is mutual when, due to the similarity of social life, and therefore of cultural development, each of the two exchanging peoples can borrow something from the other."

Recently, the book by Vitaly Zlidnev "Russian-Bulgarian Literary Relations of the 20th Century" was printed in Moscow as a publication of the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Academy of Sciences, 220 pages. Vitaly Zlidnev is one of the talented students of the unforgettable N. S. Derzhavin, who continue and deepen the tradition he created for active and comprehensive research into issues of history, literature and in general the spiritual activity of the Bulgarian people, illuminating them very often and depending on the development of Russian history and literature, with which the Bulgarian people have been firmly connected since time immemorial. At the Institute of Slavic Studies, and not only there, there are about a dozen relatively young researchers who know in detail individual eras of Bulgarian history and individual our historical figures and writers... It seems to me that I will not be exaggerating at all if I say that the Institute of Slavic Studies occupies a high, honorable place in the process of mutual acquaintance of the two peoples, where its activists often participate with the unique breadth and depth of Russian and Soviet researchers, with the unique humanistic pathos characteristic of them, with the nobility of true brothers and internationalists.

The problems of the development and prospects of contemporary literature, of socialist realism, of its genesis and its general laws, of the national peculiarities of individual literatures, of their connections and interactions are acquiring extremely important significance. They are in the center of attention of writers from socialist countries, as well as of Marxist literary critics from capitalist countries. Many studies have appeared of both a general theoretical and a concrete-historical nature. Reactionary bourgeois writers are increasingly forced to turn to these problems.

The question of Russian-Bulgarian cultural ties has always deeply concerned both Bulgarian and Russian historians and literary scholars. In recent years, many new works have appeared in Bulgaria and the Soviet Union that shed light on this problem. Among them can be mentioned the studies of the Soviet scientists N. S. Derzhavin "History of Bulgaria" (I-IV t., M.-L., 1945-48), "Hristo Botev - poet-revolutionary" (M. - L., 1948), "Ivan Vazov. Life and work" (M. L., 1948), etc., by L. Erikhonov "Russian revolutionaries" democrats and public thought of the southern Slavs in the 60s and 70s of the XIX century" (M., 1950), the collective work of Soviet historians "History of Bulgaria" (vol. I, M. - L., 1953), the book "Iz istorii russko-bulgarskih otsenshih. Collection of articles" (M., 1958) as well as individual articles by many authors. At the same time, Bulgarian scholars published several serious studies, among which we should note P. Zarev's work "Bulgarian Literature" (S., 1950), G. Tsanev's "Pages from the History of Bulgarian Literature in the 19th Century" (S., 1958), V. Velchev's "The Impact of Russian Classical Literature on the Formation and Development of Bulgarian Literature in the 19th Century" (S., 1958) and other works.