Йовков

From the partial publications that were made in the periodical press over the past two decades, we already knew about the literary conversations that the late Professor Spiridon Kazandjiev had with Yordan Yovkov, and in general we had certain impressions of them. However, these impressions were based on partial acquaintance with the text and were naturally fragmentary in nature. That is why the recently published book "Meetings and Conversations with Yordan Yovkov", which contains almost entirely the diary of Professor Kazandjiev (I say almost, since some passages have been omitted from it), now comes to satisfy our curiosity and introduce us to the spiritual world of one of the great Bulgarian writers. Yordan Yovkov, as is known, was neither particularly talkative nor particularly accessible. He did not easily fall into revelations and did not like literary confessions. Therefore, it was difficult to penetrate his creative laboratory and find out what his assessment of people, events and books was. This is precisely what determines the value of the diary "Meetings and Conversations with Yordan Yovkov": it speaks of facts and moods that we cannot glean from any other source - facts and moods that shed light on some very important aspects of the author's life and work.

Of those among whom he began and continued his creative path, only three or four remain. They are the only ones who can testify to the truth of those distant years. In this journey through the past, things and people suddenly emerge - clear, categorical, devoid of any ambiguity, having acquired their true weight, without the need for any interpreters. The miracle of human memory returns to us that complete, self-existent world, the most real because it is the one of the time, in which even when we ourselves participated, we now remain more spectators than actors. For the dead, time has stopped, they do not age, and in our memory their existence remains more alive, because they are unchangeable. And for us, who knew Yordan Yovkov for almost a quarter of a century, from 1913 to 1937, he will forever retain his sharply outlined image, the same in the different aspects of those different years. He is the reserve lieutenant or captain in a marching greatcoat during the war years; he is the lonely man, sitting at his little table against the wall, in the upper section of the former Tsar-Liberator confectionery, and whose narrowed eyes thoughtfully pierce the smoke of his cigarette. He is all in that muffled, flowing, throaty laughter that gushes uncontrollably and infectiously amidst some always interesting border guard or hunting or military incident, sprinkled with those wonderful Turkish wisdoms for which he had a weakness and told by him with unattainable expressiveness and wit. It is in that phrase (inserted later in a feuilleton) with which, when he once explained why the socialists won the elections, he presented the peasant voter in front of the ballot box, who pushes a cap over one eyebrow, blinks mischievously and laughs: "Wait until I cast a red ballot, let's see what comes out!.. It is also in those words with which, before his departure for an official position in Bucharest, he answered my question - whether he was not sad that he was going to Romania, which had seized his beloved Dobrudja - words, and which echoed from the voice of his Seraphim -: "You know, I love them - the Vlachs..."

In September 1920, Yordan Yovkov was appointed by order of Prime Minister Alexander Stamboliyski as a clerk at the Bulgarian legation in Bucharest, where he spent about six years holding various positions: "press assistant", "secretary", and finally, as a "reward" for his conscientious work, due to the "lack" of the necessary qualifications, he had to fulfill the duties of... Dragoman". Despite his official employment and his difficult financial situation, in the Romanian capital he worked with true inspiration and for the joy of Bulgarian culture - he completed "The Song of the Wheels", wrote "Stara Planina Legends" and began "Evenings at the Antimov Inn". Yovkov's life in Bucharest, as his letters and the memories of his friends testify, was difficult and joyless. The plenipotentiary ministers at that time were Todor Nedkov, General Iv. Fichev, Georgi Kyoseivanov and Svetoslav Pomenov, who treated the writer with disdain and looked at him almost as an ordinary official, something more - as an imbecile. On various occasions, the writer wrote letters to his friends in his homeland, shared with them his difficult fate and rewarded them for small favors. Some of these letters were published in books and magazines and are known to the Bulgarian reader. (See Grigor Vassilev, "Yordan Yovkov", 1940 and "Unpublished Letters of Yordan Yovkov" magazine "Literary Thought", vol. 5, 1957).

There are three masters of the short story in our literature: Vazov, Elin Pelin and Yovkov. How do they write? How are they made? "Is it possible?" and "All Souls' Day", "A Bulgarian Woman" and "Shibil", "Andreshko" and "Midnight Guest"? It is a banal truth to say that the question is very interesting and that it has a bearing on all aspects of a writer's work, not least of which is style. Practically, what is more interesting is that it is preceded by another question: where to begin to unravel the figurative fabric of a story in order to see how it is "made". Undoubtedly, a work of art is an organic whole - wherever you start, you will reach everything, you will encompass the whole. But each genre has its own specific structure, and when you take it into account, the work is made much easier. Alexei Tolstoy says that architecturally the short story should be built on the fifth and "but" (..., but...). And indeed, in Vazov - grandfather Yotso goes blind, but the liberation of Bulgaria gives him a second set of eyes; in Elin Pelin - the bailiff is preparing to rake the barn of the poor man Stoichko, but Andreshko plays the judge and saves his life; in Yovkov - Sali Yashar wants to do something, but he understands that "the cars he makes, do something". The formula is not only witty: it hits the heart of the short story as a genre - its structure, its plot-composition scheme. The short story takes the incident - the character - the problem at the moment when the incident occurs, the character changes, the problem is resolved - at the turning point, when one thing turns into another. Alexei Tolstoy's comma and the note express precisely this "contrapuntal" structure of the story. That is why the short story is eventful and when it is only psychology, epic and without a particular plot, it is conflictual, without being a drama: it gives the setting, illuminates the intersection, reveals the change. That is why, perhaps, in no other literary genre does the question - how the work is constructed - acquire such specific importance.

How does Vazov - this master painter of the visible world - paint what is invisible? How does he convey the soul movements of the characters and the atmosphere of the event, in other words - the lyrical-psychological filling of the story, in comparison with the other two narrators and especially with Elin Pelin? - In principle, in the same way: as a witness and observer. When the "soul" of the character, of the event or of the landscape needs to be revealed, the author takes the floor to describe and explain it. Naturally, before the author, the characters themselves do this, insofar as they are characterized by their actions and lines: Vazov is the master of lines and dialogue and would remain untouchable if Elin Pelin were not his equal rival in this respect. Both of them master the characterological possibilities of lines to perfection. But not all mental movements can receive adequate expression in the replica, not to mention the ideological-emotional, spiritual filling and meaning of the situations, actions, the moment, especially in the short story with its strictly defined possibilities. What and how much can characters like grandfather Yotso or grandmother Iliytsa, or Stancho and Stoilka, or Lisichkata say about themselves, even when they are Elin Pelinovi villagers? As for nature, objects and animals, they are silent at all. The author must help them. The question here is – how?

Returning to Yovkov - after Vazov and Elin Pelin - always awakens a keen sense of his unique character as an artist. When we compare Vazov and Elin Pelin, it is natural to deal with similarities and differences, to speak of a natural step forward in the development of the short story. When we get to Yovkov, all this starts to sound too general and approximate. The step forward is present here too. But with him it is not only a step forward, but also a step "aside". The similarities and differences here turn out to be more indirect and deeper, precisely because they are intricately mediated by Yovkov's artistic individuality. Indeed, Yovkov also relied on Vazov - at least to the extent that Elin Pelin also relied on him. And Yovkov, although he writes stories about ten years after Elin Pelin, strictly speaking, has no other national school and no other heritage behind him, except the Vazovs, and no other example alongside him - except Elin Pelin. And yet Yovkov stubbornly, centimeter by centimeter, for twenty years in a row, breaks his artistic path further and further away from the Vazov-Elin Pelin highway. And the reader feels that the separate comparisons between them and him would yield even less than between Vazov and Elin Pelin, if they had not gone through the understanding of the whole; that before being decomposed into similarities and differences, - precisely Yovkov more than anyone else - must be felt in his peculiarly secluded, in comparison with the first Two, almost closed artistic system.

The name of one writer almost always points us to the name of the other - so much so that we feel connected in time and in the nature of their work. Elin Pelin and Yovkov are almost the same age: the former is three years older than the latter and lived twelve years after him. Both were born and raised in a village, but in different Bulgarian regions that are not similar. Elin Pelin is from Western Bulgaria, a child of a stubborn Shopian environment, among which he built his basic worldview and character, although after his twenty-third year (1900) he lived only in the capital, while Yovkov has longer and stronger roots in the village. The latter was nursed and spent his childhood in the wilderness of the Balkans - Zheravna; - and his adulthood - in flat Dobrudzha, near the border, where he taught until the Balkan War, so that he spent about thirty years of village life.

"If They Could Speak" perhaps more directly than any other of Yovkov's works confronts the reader with a peculiarity, mentioned several times recently as the "objectivity" of the depiction, of the verbal drawing. In fact, this so-called by us objectivity represents one of the aspects of the question of the structure and functions of the verbal image in Yovkov. The resolution that he gives it is as important as it is characteristically Yovkovian. And an analysis that has affected in one way or another the structure and composition of the work as a whole (the "macro-image") cannot fail to focus on the structure of the "micro-image" - of the individual linguistic image and its function in the whole. These are questions of the verbal fabric of the artistic work, taken from their specifically stylistic side. While the composition and the general structure of Yovkov's story undergoes a relatively more complex development, Yovkov's verbal pattern develops, so to speak, in an ascending line: this is the progressive unfolding of the same pictorial tendency from "Ovcharova's Complaint" to "If They Could Talk". The path is long - from 1910 to 1936 - but straight; the difference is enormous, but natural and inevitable.

Iskra Panova presented her first book to readers. In it, she speaks her mind in a new way in our contemporary literary studies. Without departing from the best in the tradition of literary studies, she sweeps up independent terrain in an area where long-standing traditions are still absent in our country... Breaking ground in the complex field of stylistic analysis of the work of art, Panova has long thought through each step of her innovative work. She is not in a hurry to theorize about the results of her work, but she does not underestimate them either. She is not in a hurry to make generalizations, but she does not hide the rational in her difficult experiment. She proclaims less her guiding principles, which she relies on in her aesthetic analyses, but in return she gives her own arrangement of her scientific observations, derived according to the laws of an objective criterion. But no matter how discreet an author she turns out to be, she sheds abundant light on the complexity of the problem, draws her own conclusions, takes into account the complexity of the artistic evolution of the individual artist, in the three classics and reveals a number of regularities in the development of the literary process in Bulgarian literature from the recent past.

Even while publishing separate excerpts from his book about Yordan Yovkov in the literary press, Simeon Sultanov reminded us of a writer, loved and forgotten, declared during his lifetime a living classic of Bulgarian literary prose... Always reminiscent of this Yovkov, who is well known today to every educated Bulgarian. And even then, the separate fragments of his book attracted the eye of the curious reader, who understood the insights and inspiration of the critic, who can talk to the writer's characters as if they were living people, who can discover, without artificial pathos and learned eloquence, the simple charm, poetic wisdom and greatness of one of the most original Bulgarian writers.

The current stage of the development of Bulgarian literary studies is characterized by the awareness of the ever-growing need to specify the methodology, to build a secure basis for a private and general theoretical interpretation of the artistic facts, in order to be able to cope with all possible deviations from scientific truth, accumulated by both vulgar sociology and subjectivist criticism, which in a number of its manifestations demonstrates its militant anti-scientificity. By the way, there is one aspect in which subjectivism and vulgar sociology converge as much as possible: along with the claim to the indisputability of their assessments, the representatives of both directions showed disregard for the specificity of the work of art. This found expression in the arbitrary interpretation of the text, in a misunderstanding (underestimation and overestimation) of its structural features, and hence - underestimation of the function and semantics of both the whole and its elements.