творчеството

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:

Now the prominent progressive American writer William Saroyan is 55 years old. He was born in 1908 in the city of Fresno - California, in a family of Armenian emigrants, immigrants from Western Turkish Armenia. Only three years old, William was left without a father and from an early age felt the bitterness of life. Forced to take care of the livelihood of his family, Saroyan began to work, first as a newspaper carrier, then a deliveryman at the telegraph post office, later a farm worker, office clerk, general laborer, mercenary soldier, reporter, etc. In all these professions, having contact with the broad masses of the people, the future writer was a witness to human sorrow and joy, observed the bitter fate of people in American reality and early began to live with the thoughts, misfortunes and dreams of the ordinary American. Here is the source of the deep realism in his works. The writer himself, in his latest novel "He Comes Here, He Goes There - You Know Who He Is," writes: "The poet also travels because the source of his poetry is the world and people, and he needs to see them as much as possible... He (the poet) strives to be true to the truth in his thoughts and feelings and, above all, to speak and write the truth."

As is known, already in the 18th and 19th centuries, Serbian and Bulgarian writers dedicated their works to the revival of the two peoples. Andrija Kačić-Miošić, for example, did not divide the southern Slavs. Dositej Obradović mentioned in his works not only Serbia, but also "poor Bulgaria". Vuk Karadžić was the first to publish Bulgarian folk songs, Konstantin Ognjanović worked for the spiritual awakening of the Bulgarian people, to whom he dedicated his works. Major writers such as Hristofor Žefarović and Jovan Rajić were of Bulgarian origin. They wrote their works in the Russian-Slavic language and contributed equally to the Bulgarian and Serbian spiritual and political development. During the Renaissance, an unprecedented transfer of ideas and themes from one literature to another occurred. However, when we must note the undoubted impact of South Slavic literatures in our country, especially since the beginning of the 19th century, we must also bear in mind the fact that these South Slavic literatures themselves sought models in Italian, Russian, Greek and Austrian literature, that they were in natural, natural relationships with these literatures. First of all, Dalmatian, and for a long time after that, the other Slavic literatures suffered the general influence of the European Renaissance, which manifested itself somewhere earlier, somewhere later in separate borrowings and imitations of one or another model. That is why, when we study the Serbian and Croatian literary and cultural influence in our country at the beginning of the 19th century, we cannot help but notice that this is actually a natural creative process that encompasses both countries, as well as the other Balkan peoples, that historically conditioned interconnections are taking place here, that from what we have taken in a given period, we have created qualitatively new works with which we have moved literary development forward.

According to the unanimous opinion of critics, Dimitar Dimov failed to build an antipodal world to "Nicotiana", to depict the heroic and bright beginning of our time, which could be contrasted with the dark forces of the bourgeois world. The images of workers and communists in his remarkable novel "Tobacco", with few exceptions, are far inferior in brightness and vitality to the other images in the novel. In itself, this mishap is an unhappy phenomenon in our literature, but it is too eloquent and instructive, contains too many interesting problems for us to easily pass it by, to simply register it, without making an effort to examine and explain it, to discover the mysteries and truths embedded in it, to reveal its true significance for our literature. Because often the failures of talent turn out to be more fruitful and more valuable for history than any mediocre success. They bring us closer to more truths, they reveal to us a deeper and more interesting picture of the world, there is more life, more drama and power in them than in all mediocre "achievements", in all talentless straightforwardness and innocence. Or, to paraphrase a sentence of Guizot, we can say that talent enjoys this wonderful and deserved privilege of having its errors fertilize truths.

The string of great names in contemporary German literature has thinned out. In the last decade, death has cut short the lives and creative paths of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Johannes Becher, Leon Feuchtwanger, Hans Heni Jahn, Hermann Hesse. It is true that there are still several significant companions of these writers among us (such as Arnold Zweig and Anna Zegers), but the question arises: have writers grown up in Germany in the meantime, from whose talent we could expect something representative in fiction in the future. In this connection, the name of Manfred Bühler, a young fiction writer and radio dramatist, one of the few authors in the GDR who attracts attention in the Federal Republic and the Western world, is sometimes mentioned - among many others. Of course, success coexists above all with clever organization, but Bühler, who is only 31 years old, makes demands on his readers and clearly has a gift. After studying German studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin and being a lecturer for a short time, he set out to travel the world. In the late 1950s, he visited Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria; he closely followed Bulgarian literature (e.g., the poems and epigrams of Radoi Ralin, Ivaylo Petrov's novel "Dead Excitement"). In 1960, as a worker on a fishing boat, he undertook a trip to Canada and Newfoundland, and in 1965 he was also in London. It is known how much travel contributes to the development of a person, what a school it is, because it brings us new knowledge with ease or being full of dangers. Through travel, a person overcomes his one-sidedness, prejudices, and obstacles in his development and achieves, given sufficient prerequisites, a higher level.

In the concluding part of his study "The Birth of the Poetic Work," Jean-Paul Weber makes the following self-confident and significant declaration: "In our thematic readings there is nothing reminiscent of the rigid generalizations of psychoanalysts or stylists, of their Oedipus complexes, oral, anal, and genital stages, or of their baroque, classical, romantic, and so on styles."1 Self-confident because, as we will see below, Weber's results differ little from the Freudian ones and because the positive aspects of the "stylists'" concepts are also lightly rejected. Significant because a representative of the latest bourgeois literary criticism is attempting to break with, or at least declaring that he wants to break with, the two most characteristic trends in art and literary criticism's non-historicism in the first half of our century. The stylistism of the formalists and "philologists" and psychologism with all its orthodox and schismatic tendencies are the two poles between which the many nuances of this non-historicism move. What polarizes them is the stylists' transcendence of artistic development beyond the will and peculiarities of the creative personality and the psychoanalysts' complete closure of the determining factors of development within the individual or "collective subconscious." And what connects them is the isolation of artistic development from the class-economic and ideological development of society. In this environment, the French literary critic and psychologist Jean-Paul Weber announced that he had achieved an approach that overcomes the limitations of both stylists and psychoanalysts.

The great humanist artists always stand close to the progressive ideas of their era. In our time, many of them reach socialism. And they reach it on their own path, through the internal logic of their development; the humanistic power of their talent brings them to the achievement of revolutionary justice. Emilian Stanev appeared in the 1930s. In all his works from those years there is a reflection on the fate of man. In them one can see not only the animalist artist - the subtle connoisseur and painter of nature and animals. These works tell us about the inequality between people, about the wolfish laws of bourgeois society. They are imbued with a deep sadness for the beautiful in man. But the social views of that time and the humanism of the writer did not allow him to see the real perspective of historical development, he could only express his abstract dream of a better order of the world. Later, Stanev began to see in the revolutionary changes in his country those real conditions that create an opportunity for true emancipation of the human personality. The writer was in a dispute - not a speculative-abstract, but a deeply creative one - with various modernist concepts that isolate man from society. The ideological and artistic evolution that took place in him tangibly and concretely gives answers to the great problems of the century - about the true stimuli of artistic progress, about humanism. The gradual discovery of the new world, the developing revolutionary worldview of Stanev significantly moved his artistic horizons, he saw in the revolution the realization of higher humanistic ideals.

Pencho Slaveykov is the most prominent representative of the Bulgarian ballad from the Liberation to the beginning of the present century. Above the few and unknown poets who tried to work in this field, he rises above both the number of ballads written and their artistic achievements. The lasting interest in folk art - an indispensable school for developing aesthetic taste - which Pencho Slaveykov maintained until the end of his life; the revolutionary struggles of our people, from which he took the themes of many of his works; his contact with European literature facilitated Slaveykov's aspiration to create poetry that reached the world level, without affecting its national peculiarity. This path of development turned out to be extremely fruitful and left a unique originality in his ballads.

Having hidden the order under No. 145 of February 23, 1879 of the Office of the Russian Imperial Commissioner in the pocket of his uniform as a state councilor, "the junior clerk for special orders at the Ruse governorship, Ivan Vazov boarded the Austro-Hungarian passenger steamer "Tegetov" on March 6 of this year in the afternoon and early the next morning arrived at the port of Lom-palanka, bustling with cars and people and crammed with goods. From here, Vazov rented a carriage and that same evening arrived in Berkovitsa, where he took up the position of chairman of the district court.

The First World War and the October Revolutions changed the entire course of world history and inevitably gave a new direction to art. The blow that shook and changed the world fell on the bourgeois-aesthetic thought of the pre-war decade and cleared the way for new ideological and artistic searches. In Bulgarian literature, a new, deeply reviving process of returning to real life, to the fighting cries of the street, to the baked soil of the black earth, to the life-giving juices of the earth began to mature. The October Revolution, which pushed the spiritual development of the peoples along a new path, played a fateful role for the Bulgarian people as well, determining to a large extent their further economic and cultural development. It is enough to glance at our literature of those years to feel the irresistible power of the revolution, to feel the reviving power of the new and spiritual engines.

What, in fact, does Vezhinov write about? About the anti-fascist movement, which has its historical coordinates, its documentary basis and its heroes, immersed in its everyday life? Or about man in the infinity of the world, the longevity of history? Doesn't the writer shake off the concrete excitements of the struggle too energetically? Doesn't he leave the heroes of the battles in the shadows, carried away by the desire to encompass the great contours of the human spirit? How many authors have begun and ended by showing shootings, by describing actions, by the picture of the September 9th rally? Why isn't Vezhinov absorbed in the visible? Why didn't his grandfather Shtilyan stay with his medical bag, and we hear him persistently say: "Surely something remains of us in this world - a frog, a nightingale... Otherwise, what would be the point?" Why didn't Viktor die heroically in battle, but fell ridiculously, uselessly? Why don't we hear in his dying sigh that historic "Death to fascism. Long live...", but rather the feverish: "Can you imagine a sky without stars?... You can't, of course... The stars are within us, our destiny."

At the end of last year, the book "From the Life and Work of Ivan Vazov" by Iliya Boyadzhiev and Tsocho Delev was published, State Publishing House "Narodna Prosveta", Sofia, 1968. The exposition of the life and work of Ivan Vazov is based on carefully collected and well-arranged documentation (photographs, portraits, memories, quotes, diagrams and tables). Some of the elements of this Documentation have been known since earlier, and there are some that were discovered later. But it is interesting that now both of them are placed and examined in a new light - something that is one of the merits of the book.