Дебелянов

Debelyanov has a direct emotional relationship with art, a pure intimate connection with it. It attracts him primarily with its specifically aesthetic qualities, and he perceives works of art more with his heart than with his mind. As an artist, he is excited by the general problems of aesthetics. However, the tendency to participate in literary discussions through the press, to impose views and assessments on the public, is alien to him. Literary-theoretical and critical work in general does not attract him. Therefore, every newly discovered literary material that has come out from under the poet's nose is of serious interest to the researcher. The three articles offered here - About an Old Song, "Letter from the Village" and "The Last Outlaw" - are currently the only known developed literary works and, along with the "literary notes" in the magazine "Zveno" (1914), provide direct data on Debelyanov's aesthetic views. They express thoughts and views that with irrefutable force shatter the legend of the "purebred" symbolist Debelyanov and reveal his true attitude towards modernism. In the light of these materials, previously familiar statements acquire a different, true meaning. Written in a clear and emotional language, they reveal the innermost ideas of the post, its aesthetic ideal. The articles, especially the first two, have not only literary and historical value. The issues raised in them still retain their relevance today, because they are related to the ethics of writing and the attitude of art to life. The interpretation that Debelyanov gives them, regardless of the contradictions of thinking, imposes itself with its moral idealism and straightforwardness. And although written at a different time and from different positions, they sound contemporary in many respects. The central question in the first article is the question of the conditions of creative work and the ethics of the writer under the conditions of capitalism, which by its nature is hostile to art and condemns the honest artist to misery and humiliation.

The first to encounter his name in print were the readers of the magazine "Savremennost" in the autumn of 1906. The magazine was rather nondescript. Its loud name was probably chosen to remind us that the editors St. Donchev and G. Savchev, whom no one knows today, had the "new literary trends" at heart, i.e., symbolism. At that time, in the minds of some intelligentsia, susceptible to literary fashion, decadence was a sign of modernity. But in the cycle "Dedication" by the new poet Dimcho Debelyanov, there is no decadent "modernity" to be seen. The poems are not shrouded in a symbolic fog, they are clear, traditional". "The inspirations come from elsewhere - from the poet whose personality fills the young man's heart with adoration - Pencho Slaveykov. At that time, Dimcho Debelyanov, born in 1887, was nineteen years old. He had just graduated from the first Sofia male gymnasium. In the gymnasium, he earned a reputation as a warm-hearted and talented young man. Many loved him - for his bribing immediacy, although he was also inclined to solitude, for his directness, for the pure fervor with which he spoke and declaimed. One of his speeches on the feast of Cyril and Methodius was long remembered. He made an even deeper impression with his recitation in "Slavic Discourse" of Vazov's poem "Come and See Us". This time he even gained the attention of the monarch Prince Ferdinand himself, who had come to the solemn student matinee. And no wonder. Dimcho was not at all embarrassed by Coburg. Turning to him, he boldly threw the angry denunciations of the people's poet into his eyes:

How Dimcho Debelyanov worked on his poems, how the creative process unfolded for him, how the poet managed to "subjugate" the word to his poetic temperament, to infuse it with his own melodies of the soul, how the individual theme, image, feeling was born in him - the answer to these questions is determined not least by the specific analysis of the numerous corrections in his own poems.

Dimcho Debelyanov and Nikolay Liliev met in the summer of 1907 in the village of Dolna Banya, Ihtiman region. There, Liliev worked at the Srebarnikovi sawmill - he kept the commercial books. Dimcho Debelyanov - a young man, almost a teenager, who had just graduated from high school, arrived during the holidays to visit his sister Maria Grigorova. He had already read several of Nikolay Mihaylov's printed poems and immediately became friends with him.

Many of his contemporaries have left us his portrait: strong shoulders, a yellowish beard like a satyr's, strong fists, sometimes engaged in action, a Balkan nature in general. And he has established himself in our poetry as the most tender and soulful lyricist. His feeling gushes from innermost depths and pours out now in rapturous tones, now in quiet words, in a longing call for an unfulfilled, but still longed-for love. He sometimes feels joy, but he carefully conceals it due to the fear of some fatal predestination. He is tormented by a sad self-doubt, which soon, too soon curbs his bright impulses. His feeling pours out in dual ranges - both in rebellious murmur, and in impotent pity, and in a proud smile, and in gentle, noble suffering. This complex contradiction of his, this quiet drama of his, distinguishes him from Pencho Slaveykov and even from P. K. Yavorov.

In the first half of the current year, the Scientific Council of the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences decided to award the scientific degree "Candidate of Philological Sciences" to the senior lecturer at the Faculty of Slavic Philology of Sofia University "Kliment Ohridski" - Georgi Mitrev Markov and to the full-time postgraduate student at the Institute of Literature - Atanas Vassilev Slavov.

The creative development of an author consists in searching for and gradually revealing what is personally his. Along the way of this search, he will naturally come into contact with what has already been created and will take from it his own. Dimcho Debelyanov appeared in our literature in the first years of our century, when the Vazov tradition was gradually being displaced by the modern literary trends of the time. Debelyanov quickly oriented himself towards them, of course, after paying tribute to the tradition.

The early death of Dimcho Debelyanov (killed on October 2, 1916 near Demir Hisar during the First World War) is not a barrier to his not having a clear vision for poetry. Frost scorches the youth of our elegiac poet, but the voice of this youth - both intimate and sincere, both inconsolable and ecstatic - we hear in his songs. The star of this poet - an angel expelled from heaven, rises in the poetic firmament with great brilliance. This star shines even now above his forehead, above us, and above all those who love poetry and cannot live without it.

Dimcho Debelyanov established himself in our poetry as the continuator of a poetic tradition, established through the work of Vazov, Pencho Slaveykov, Yavorov, Kiril Hristov. At the time when Debelyanov began his career as a poet, poems were written in the usual rhythms of the syllabic system. Vazov had already imposed it and had used all its rhythmic schemes, trying not to go beyond their framework. He had, to a certain extent, "engraved the word in the step". Most of the poets of that time did not seem to feel that the accepted rhythmic schemes could be diversified. We leave aside, of course, Yavorov, who was a true innovator in terms of the technique of verse. He not only did not allow the usual stress of the word to be changed because of its place in the verse, nor did he allow it to be damaged, but he was the first to consciously and with a swing begin to diversify the rhythm of his verse and made the rhythmic movement an expression of the deepest inner content. Yavorov pointed out the entire musical wealth of Bulgarian poetic speech and the possibilities for the rhythmic refreshment of the syllabic system. The path that D. Debelyanov bravely set out on had already been paved. Debelyanov's creative period closed between the years 1906-1916. This was the time when in our country a struggle was waged in poetry against realism, accepted as obsolete, and when the belated echoes of French symbolism is making its way.