особености

Populist ideas penetrated Bulgarian literature in the late 1980s and mainly in the 1990s. Under the influence of the populist ideology, adopted by Russian public figures and populist writers, some writers created works that make up our populist literature. This literature is limited in scope and not particularly rich in the variety of genres, ideas and images. There are not always strictly defined "pure" populist frameworks. And with the gradual experience of populist ideas in the first decade of the new century, it ceases to be a topical issue in our literary reality. Therefore, the term "populist literature" should be accepted and understood quite conditionally and with reservations. The important thing is that the works of populist writers excited contemporaries. Created in that era when the overall national appearance of our post-liberation realistic literature was taking shape, they diversified its ideological and aesthetic wealth, contributing to the strengthening of democracy and humanism within it.

In recent years, significant differences have emerged in the assessment of the creative method of individual Renaissance writers, opposing opinions have been expressed about the beginning of critical realism, and the question of romanticism and realism in our Renaissance literature has been raised. In his study "The Problem of Romanticism and Bulgarian Literature" 1 P. Dinekov examines, along with romanticism, some other questions: the relationship between sentimentalism and romanticism, revolutionary romance and romanticism, etc. Characterizing romanticism, the author makes a number of general observations about realism, which is the only one to take shape as a literary school with its own lasting traditions", but whose "first manifestations can only be separated with great difficulty from the strongly mixed elements of sentimentalism and romanticism". In our literary science, the prevailing view is that critical realism was first established as a specific direction in the creative work of L. Karazelov, who was its founder. P. R. Slaveykov does not reach the critical realism. P. Zarev dwells on this issue in more detail. Slaveykov's work, in Zarev's words, is in principle, in character and in pictorial system a work of pre-critical realism and a transition to it. 2 The opposite thesis is advocated by G. Tsanev in his article "The Beginning of Critical Realism in Bulgarian Literature." 33 He claims that almost all Bulgarian writers, with the exception of the representatives of proletarian literature and socialist realism, as well as the predecessor of socialist realism in our country - Hr. Botev (naturally, and the representatives of decadent literary movements) are critical realists, with all their work or with a part of it. The gaze of Bulgarian writers is turned towards society, the critical-accusatory tone is inherent in Bulgarian literature. Further, the author disputes the prevailing view that L. Karavelov is the founder of Bulgarian critical realism and comes to the conclusion that the first representative of critical realism in our literature is P. R. Slaveykov. To prove this statement, the author of the essay refers to two poems - Boy, gather your wits", written in 1857 and Song for my coin - from 1861 - poems that reflect a critical satirical attitude towards "the robber and reveal the power of money, on which everything in the emerging bourgeois society depends. Critical realism before the Liberation is a reflection of reality, in which a struggle is waged not only against bourgeois social relations, but also against the national and social oppression of Turkish feudalism. "Critical realism in our country is directly, organically connected with the national liberation struggle of our people". "The object of artistic reflection also includes moments of national character and feudal nature." The above-mentioned views on realism before the Liberation are far from exhausting everything written on the subject. Our task is only to outline some basic theses and fundamental differences.

Lyuben Karavelov wrote in three languages ​​- Russian, Serbian and Bulgarian - and this is a unique phenomenon in the history of world literature. Lyuben Karavelov's literary works - novels, short stories, poems and feuilletons - are permeated by the tendency to critically expose not only the plagues of the Turkish feudal system, but also the collusion between the treacherous Bulgarian bourgeoisie and the clergy; drawing bright images of revolutionaries - fighters for the liberation of the homeland - Karavelov strives to awaken the consciousness of the masses from centuries-old backwardness, to raise them to active struggle (Doncho, "Bulgarians of Old Time", "Hadji Nicho", "Martyr", etc.). A huge influence on Karavelov was exerted by the revolutionary-democratic literature and aesthetics of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov Pisarev. In the story "Is Fate Crooked?" (1869), written in Serbian, he applied the ideological and creative techniques of the novel "What is to be done?" by N. G. Chernyshevsky. In his writing, L. Karavelov comprehensively used the creative experience of the classics of Russian and Ukrainian literature, learned from them critical-realist techniques in depicting reality, and propagated the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Chernyshevsky, Herzen, Shevchenko, Marko Vovchok, Serbia and Bulgaria. All this makes the philosophical and artistic work of Lyuben Karavelov particularly interesting and close to us. B Lyuben Karavelov adopted the basic ideas of revolutionary-democratic criticism and aesthetics during the years of his stay in Russia (1857-1866), and this is reflected primarily in his artistic works and in their sharp critical focus. But he also tried to make sense of the principles of realism and revolutionary tendentiousness in a theoretical sense. "Poetry - we read in his Manuscript Notes - as well as everything else in the mental activity of man should serve the serious goals of life, and not be art for the sake of art." 1 In his articles from this period, L. Karavelov calls for the depiction of living folk life, for the rapprochement of writing with folklore, and calls for the liquidation of the archanization of the literary language. And in Serbia (1867-1869) L. Karavelov appears as an already formed literary critic, who gave a well-founded and firm assessment of the tendencies of abstract romanticism and sentimentalism, which had distanced Serbian literature from the truthful depiction of the social struggle in the sphere of intimate experiences. Lyuben Karavelov contributed to a great extent to the turn of Serbian literature from the late 60s-70s from the blind imitation of foreign models to national originality.

Tradition and innovation is a problem that has been discussed the most in the history of literature. This problem is infinitely broad and connected with the very essence of literature. When talking about it, one must take into account the questions of the national and cosmopolitan character of a literature, the traditions in this literature, the mutual influences between individual writers and individual literatures, schools and creative individualities, literary fashions and snobbery, the contemporary sensibility and worldview of the writer, the changes in the consciousness of the contemporary in view of social changes, the nationality and party affiliation, the role of social ideals, etc. In our country, this question is often understood narrowly and is limited mainly within the form of the means of expression.

Bulgarian historical folk songs, in the broad sense of the word, encompass, in addition to works directly related to historical events, the heroic and haidush epics. Despite the fact that in Bulgarian science there are already well-known traditions on the issue of the main division of this type of folk songs, namely: heroic, historical and haidush, when considering the poetics of folk poetry, the unification of these three groups is simply necessary in order to show the development of the genre, the epic hero, etc. The task of this article is to examine some aspects of the artistic features of the Bulgarian heroic folk epic, starting with the heroic epic and ending with the partisan songs. First of all, we will try to characterize the epic hero of these songs, who in this long period of time (14th-20th centuries) changed depending on the political, social and economic conditions of Bulgaria.

Lilyana Grasheva's dissertation "Artistic Peculiarities of Old Bulgarian Literature", defended on 5. VI. 1969, is an aesthetic-theoretical study of the artistic originality and aesthetic essence of medieval literature. Learning creatively from Soviet medievalists (primarily from the school of the prominent Soviet literary scholar D. S. Likhachev), the dissertationist makes the first serious attempt to systematically study and comprehend from contemporary ideological and aesthetic positions the poetics of Old Bulgarian literature. The task set requires a deep penetration into the artistic and ideological world of the Middle Ages, rich scientific-aesthetic and methodological preparation. In the defended work, the dissertationist opposes a number of traditional concepts, which are an expression of prejudices and underestimation of the pictorial merits of Old Bulgarian Literature, considering it as a historically determined type of verbal creativity. At the same time, striving to By illuminating the real ideological and aesthetic values, Grasheva avoids the temptations of the modernizing idealization and modernization of the literary material. For the first time, the dissertationist makes a broader comparison of the aesthetic and creative ideas of the Old Bulgarian writers with those of Russian, Byzantine and Western European medieval writers. She proves that the Old Bulgarian writers are fully included in the main philosophical and aesthetic line of the European Middle Ages. The most significant contribution is contained in the third chapter of the dissertation ("Principles and Achievements of Artistic Image"), which presents the author as a researcher with an independent English thought, a keen sense of the artistic specificity of literary phenomena and a rich literary culture.