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The significant achievements of humanity in the field of culture are not the result of isolated creative processes among individual nations. Nations, even when they built walls like the Chinese, communicated with each other: they used and assimilated values ​​created by other nations, developed their own and borrowed ones further, and themselves offered their conquests in the field of culture to other nations. Thus, with joint efforts, the universal human culture was built and is being built. Nations create their literature in the same way: on the one hand, the tribal, folk, or national genius leaves its mark on it; on the other hand, however, the literary heritage of humanity and numerous manifestations of multilingual modernity are used and developed; creating their literature in this way, a nation makes its contribution to world literature, offering works to foreign readers and influencing foreign authors. We must note that the national peculiarity of individual literatures is not an obstacle to diverse influences in all directions. Literary interactions enrich literatures, contribute to their faster growth, contact with a foreign work is often a contact of flint to flint. Literary interactions are especially characteristic of our modernity due to the increased communication between peoples, the mass translations of literary works from one language to another, the study of foreign languages ​​as a necessary component of modern education. In this situation, literary studies could not and should not be limited to the facts and processes of only one separate literature. Even isolating these facts and processes, it could not present them in a full and truthful light, reach all their original sources and those streams that increase the flow of the general stream, and trace their entire meaning if they also pass into other literatures. The isolated consideration of literatures, their periods, authors and works does not allow for the discovery of a large number of phenomena, processes and patterns, which become apparent only if the phenomena, processes and patterns in several literatures are compared. Phenomena gain brightness, magnitude and relief when compared with similar phenomena.

The interest that our literary studies show in our relations with our neighbors in the past is a proven fact. It testifies to the attention with which literary scholars in our country turn to the most beautiful and fruitful manifestations of friendship and amity between the Balkan peoples. In addition, this fact testifies to the expansion of the thematic perimeter of our literary studies; it is an expression of the aspiration of our literature to find its place in a broader literary context. Therefore, the first question that arises when we become acquainted with the recently published book on Bulgarian-Serbian literary relations in the 19th century is whether it meets the requirements of such an important and complex task. Konev's work consists of two parts. The first - "The Great Beginning" contains four chapters: 1. Literary exchange between Bulgarians and Serbs. 2. Translated and Bulgarianized works. Character and significance. 3. The creative path of P. R. Slaveykov and Serbian literature. 4. Serbian teachers in Bulgaria. Literary and cultural and educational activity. The second part, which is called "In support of realism in literature", includes the following chapters: 1. Encounters with drama. 2. Lyuben Karavelov in the development of the Serbian realistic short story. 3. Before the dawn of freedom.

Two years ago, when the various sections of the First International Congress of Balkan Studies were being outlined and a general outline of their issues was being drawn up, one could only assume the great interest that some of the planned reports would arouse. At that time, there was still no clear idea of ​​the wide boundaries of the issues that the individual branches of Balkan studies have - a complex science of the history, culture, literature, language, art and folklore of the Balkan peoples, of the historically created and increasingly intensively enriched relationships between them, of their lasting ties with other peoples and other national cultures. Now, when the congress has successfully concluded its work, we understand well how many more significant problems and questions (some of them only raised in the reports or discussions) are yet to be resolved and illuminated from modern scientific positions, in order to correctly outline all the common moments in the centuries-old development of the Balkan peoples, by overcoming the erroneous concepts and findings accumulated in the past. One of the undoubted positive results of the First International Congress of Balkan Studies is that it gave a serious impetus in this direction. And one more thing: in the days from August 26 to September 1, 1966, the congress turned the mutual collegial respect between the individual delegates into a tradition that should be strengthened by all as the main necessary condition for our further research and creative meetings. For if now, when we are at the very beginning of the more intensive and joint study of the problems of Balkan Studies, this atmosphere has ensured a calm and businesslike discussion of various, sometimes very specific, issues, tomorrow it will certainly give us the opportunity for unprecedented mutual acquaintance and study of the individual Balkan literatures and cultures.

Although it has long traditions, comparative literary studies has attracted in recent years an increasingly wide circle of representatives of historical-literary, critical and theoretical-aesthetic thought. In the efforts to study the general and specific laws of literary development, to illuminate artistic phenomena from more sides, both as a result of national, concrete-historical conditions, and as phenomena in the fabric of which we find much similarity, resulting from the constant relationships with what was conquered by other peoples, comparative interpretation is proving to be increasingly effective. An indisputable contribution to this direction is made by Marxist literary studies, which, overcoming the limitations of bourgeois comparative studies in the past, in dispute with contemporary idealistic concepts and methods, places the comparative consideration of artistic processes and works on a broad socio-historical, cultural-sociological, philosophical-aesthetic basis. In this way, not only are the prerequisites and driving forces for the development of national literatures revealed, but on the basis of their study, a more complete illumination of the general processes characterizing the literary life of many countries and peoples is achieved.

Two recent international congresses - the Belgrade Congress of the (international) Association for the Comparative History of Literature (ASIL), 1967, and the Prague Sixth International Congress of Slavists, 1968, updated the issues of comparative literary studies, confronted us with the need to clarify our attitude to this science unequivocally. At the Belgrade Congress, a proposal was adopted to prepare a collective work on the comparative history of European literatures, the Literary Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences received powers from ASIL and the obligation to coordinate the work scientifically and administratively, and in Budapest the first volume of a series of collections that examine preliminary problems is already being prepared for publication. At the Prague Congress, the Soviet delegation launched the idea of ​​writing a collective history of Slavic literatures, it seems to me, without achieving much success. Although each of the undertakings is independent in organizational terms, there is an internal connection between them. The success of the first undertaking should prompt us to develop the second: how Slavic literatures will be represented in the comparative history of European literatures will depend on the objectivity and scientific merits of Slavic literary history.