романтизмът

The problem of the originality of realism of the 20th century and its relationship to other creative methods attracts the keen attention of literary critics, since it is organically connected with the current and vital issues of our time. The experience of every national literature can serve to resolve this problem. Some generalizations, supporting or supplementing our ideas about the peculiarities of the world literary movement of the 20th century, can also be made on the basis of material taken from the literature of Bulgaria. In 1912, A. M. Gorky noted the characteristic feature in the development of Bulgarian literature - the exceptional intensity of the processes taking place in it. It was in this connection that he wrote: "After five centuries of oppression by foreign nationalities, Bulgaria returned to life, bright with individuality, full of creative forces and quickly took its rightful place in the family of cultural nations." Indeed, in Bulgarian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such phenomena arose and sometimes manifested themselves with great force, which, when taken into account, are of interest of a fundamental nature - they contribute to a broader understanding of both the general regularities and the diversity of national forms in the world literary process. It is characteristic, for example, that the literature of critical realism in Bulgaria, as well as some other countries of Central and Southeastern Europe (unlike a number of Western European countries) at that time was not on the line of decline, but on the line of rise: in the 90s of the last century, Bulgarian critical realism entered the phase of its flowering, establishing itself as the strongest literary trend. At the same time, developing in conditions of heightened class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat already entering the historical arena, Bulgarian literature acquired other features largely similar to those processes that took place in all European literatures in the era of imperialism.

On June 12 of this year, senior research associate at the Institute of Literature Krastyo Genov successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic "Romanticism in Bulgarian Literature". The defense took place in the large hall of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where, in addition to the members of the Scientific Council at the Institute of Literature, researchers from other institutes, higher education institutions and many citizens were present. In their written reviews, Prof. Emil Georgiev, Prof. Pencho Penev and Prof. Georgi Dimov made a detailed analysis of the dissertation work.

Krastyo Genov's book "Romanticism in Bulgarian Literature" was published in 1968, and a year before that it was defended as a doctoral dissertation. The author has consistently defended some of the fundamental positions expressed in it in recent years in a number of his publications in the field of Bulgarian Renaissance literature, and most fully in his work "From Paisius to Botev", published by "Nauka iizkustvo", 1966. When evaluating his new book, one must take into account the fact that in our country there is almost no generalizing or more comprehensive research on the main trends and methods in Bulgarian Renaissance literature, in particular on the manifestation, scope and specificity of Romanticism in it. Apart from some of the more famous studies by Ivan Shishmanov and Boyan Penev in the past, the well-known article by Petar Dinekov "The Problem of Romanticism in Bulgarian Literature until the Liberation", written in connection with the Fourth International Congress of Slavists in Moscow, Pantelei Zarev's work "Panorama of Bulgarian Literature" and several other smaller publications, the bibliography of special studies on the subject offers almost nothing else original and significant. Of course, this does not mean that other studies on the issue of Romanticism in Bulgarian literature have not been conducted in Bulgarian literary scholarship on the Revival; the studies on Chintulov and Rakovski, on Drumev and Botev are well known. However, the conclusions in the relevant studies from the past are too general, and in the more recent ones - contradictory. Even in the second volume of the academic history of Bulgarian literature, different opinions on this fundamental issue have found expression.