романът

Existentialism, as a trend in Western philosophy after the First World War and as a circle of ideas on which a certain literary practice is based, is in its essence a typical product of a doomed social system and a crisis of public psyche. And although existentialists make desperate efforts to present their problematic as universal, dictated by the great tremors of our modernity, they cannot hide the connection of their inconsolable and nightmarish prophecies with the hopeless state of the imperialist world. In all its diversities and wings - from the Christian-philanthropic of Gabriel Marcel or the mystical Orthodox of the Russian émigré Nikolai Berdyaev to the atheistic of Jean-Paul Sartre - existentialism sounds an alarm about the fate of the individual and seeks salvation for modern man, abandoned in tragic solitude and helplessly faced with the dark and incomprehensible, destructive elements of our century. But in vain do the prophets of world catastrophe abstract the individuality of the contemporary from any public and social dependence, in vain do they isolate it in the abstract and absolute categories of fear, hopelessness and Nothingness. If we lift the veil of ghostly abstractions and nebulous, universal incantations, we will not see modern man in general, but the man of a certain social system, the crisis man of a society without economic and life security, who himself does not know how to curb the demons of atomic civilization and technology, threatening at any moment to attack him and carry him into non-existence.

There is hardly another writer in Bulgarian literature whose life and work have sparked such irreconcilable disputes as Yavorov. As soon as his name is mentioned, polemics flare up, perceptions cross paths, it is difficult to find a common language and much more difficult to find a common assessment. Not that anyone today disputes his civic and creative work as a whole - the poet and revolutionary have remained forever in the hearts and memories of the people. But there is no other great Bulgarian creator so contradictory and so difficult to explain. Moreover, his life path is so strewn with twists and turns, intersected with so many destinies; his work confuses and upsets even the most perfect schemes and artificial constructions... It slips away every time someone tries to put some decent literary uniform on him. It does not fit into it, tears it apart at all the seams and continues to exist outside it and create endless difficulties for literary historians and theorists. This is so, it seems to me, because every time we struggle to see the poet and the man not as he is, but as we want him to be. Each of us knows Yavorov so personally that he has created his own idea of ​​him. And it is natural that it will very rarely coincide completely with what we constantly read and hear about the poet. We are impatient and strictly demand that everyone see in Yavorov exactly what we see ourselves. If such coverage is not obtained, we get angry and are ready to fight for Yavorov... It is quite natural in this situation that a book about P. K. Yavorov will arouse great controversy. Even more so a book like that by M. Kremen, which enters a delicate area where so many views and interests are intertwined. How difficult it is to take an objective and correct position, how painful it is to show elementary tolerance (not uncriticality, however) towards someone else's interpretation, how tempting the temptation is to fall into the position of a person who necessarily wants from researchers only what he himself considers to be the most correct... Now the disputes surrounding this book have subsided and, as the noise has died down, I think we can now calmly, without prejudice and critically approach M. Kremen's book, to see and soberly assess both its positive and negative sides.

The bombings have long been a thing of the past. They are only a memory that awakens with a distant but disturbing echo, at some new shot fired from an ambush from afar with a sniper's scope. But the time was different at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It is shaken by dynamite explosions. Individual terror penetrates not only the circles of nihilists and anarchists, but also among revolutionary organizations for national liberation. The terrible chorus of explosions tears the atmosphere of Europe, disturbs the digestion of the calm bourgeois, disrupts his enjoyment of Straussian melodies. The epicenter of these small volcanic eruptions is hidden somewhere in Petrograd and Moscow, where emperors, grand dukes and ministers from time to time fly through the air, and fear gnaws the hearts of their deputies. And although the shadow of the eternal Azev dances like a firecracker on the embers of the explosions, although their temperature never manages to ignite a revolutionary fire, they create a specific Decor of the era.

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.