Тодоров

Of the entire literary heritage of P. Yu. Todorov, his idylls and dramas represent the most valuable, the most significant part. And at the same time - the most contradictory, the most difficult to explain, because all the strengths and weaknesses of the writer's worldview and method are intertwined in it. You read "Nesretnik" or "Zmeyno" and you struggle to determine where realism ends and romanticism begins, you struggle to distinguish the democratic from the individualistic trends, to separate ours from the foreign, the commercial, the imported. Vain efforts - there is no boundary between the one and the other; qualities and shortcomings constantly flow together. Because these are qualities and shortcomings for us, from our, from a modern point of view. For the writer, both democracy and modernism are creeds, his aesthetic understandings represent a strange mixture of contradictory elements, some of which we will accept, and others we will reject completely. We would not be able to deal with this complex and delicate matter if we remained only in the views of the author's plan, if we were content only with outlining his intentions. The work of a contradictory artist is always richer than his own aesthetic views and declarations. This is also the case with P. Yu. Todorov. Because it reflects reality, the vital content breaks the framework of the literary school and often presents us with nuances and suggestions that even the author did not intend to give. In such cases, we must look at the works more broadly, evaluate them according to the ideas and images embedded in them, according to their impact on the contemporary reader, according to the objective results that are often obtained regardless of the subjective intentions of the author. This is especially necessary for the idylls of P. Yu. Todorov. Because in many cases we will value the objective result more highly than the writer's intention, we will prefer the relative independence of the artistic image to the actual intention of the creator. For us, what he created is more important than what he wanted to create.

There is a portrait of him, painted by the artist Nikola Mihaylov, which has always attracted my attention and brought me face to face with the "dilemma" of Petko Todorov. I would not say that it is the most accurate pictorial interpretation of his image. But it achieves a kind of balance between our current assessment and the enthusiastic ideas about him of contemporaries and admirers from the past. On the canvas, Petko Todorov, the "meek" Petko Todorov, sits with his hand resting on the back of his chair, focused, lost in his thoughts. This ascetic profile of a hermit perhaps hides the secrets of a late-born fanatic, whom new circumstances and other character traits have prevented from recognizing the extremes of spirit and thought. Perhaps. But everything else - from the kind, half-hidden gaze, to the long, relaxed, artistic fingers, speak of the soft character of a born intellectual. This is a man who, for all his ambitions, may never have been completely confident in himself, but who has always taken his work seriously - with that seriousness that is more like inner conscientiousness and dedication. Entangled in a web of greenish half-shadows that crawl over his arms and beard, growing into the surrounding landscape, in the painting, he seems to be a spiritualized and civilized Dragon from the world of his own idylls. The warm range of butter-green tones flows over his face, overflowing into the environment as a continuation of his thoughts, as a plastic symbol of his thirst for an eternal connection with his native nature. This is how he remained in the minds of his best connoisseurs from the past - with his eternal striving to penetrate the soul of his people and merge with their nature. This is how we can perceive him today, with all the sobriety and all the reservations that the obvious weaknesses of his work impose on us. The artist himself was apparently not unaware of their awareness, because he found a way to hint at them and balance his image with a few sure strokes: in the upper right corner of the painting, a landscape detail somehow imperceptibly creeps in, like a projection of the writer's thoughts, which irritates, "disturbs" the impression, because it carries something of the bad German taste from the time of the Secession. And this is Petko Todorov again, seen from a different side.