проза

In the creative circles of Poland, two completely contradictory phenomena emerged after the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the 8th Plenum of the Polish United Workers' Party. One was expressed in a criticism of dogmatism and in the revelation to writers of new creative socialist perspectives. On the other hand, however, under the influence of sometimes unprincipled criticism, a process of ideological regression took place in some circles. In the midst of the criticism, revisionist voices spoke out, placing political issues at the center of their attacks: the attitude of the authorities towards the masses, the role of the party in society, the importance of socialist ideology in practical state and public life. Even individual authors came to the conclusion that in order to avoid mistakes, one must act without relying on any ideology, on the basis of a technologically practical attitude towards social issues. These revisionist views found their most vivid expression in Leszek Kolakowski's essay "The Priest and the Fool", in which the author tries to prove that man is faced with only one basic alternative: to adopt the attitude towards life of a priest or a fool. And Kolakowski proved all the advantages of the fool's attitude. All kinds of systems and ideologies limited freedom and conscience with dogmas, stiffened the mind - the only expressor of human dignity. The main mistake in the past was to put history in the role of the former god, to replace facts with assessments, while only the mind, unconstrained by any systems and dogmas, ready to mock the accepted order, could judge the facts. For Kolakowski, the "fool's attitude" meant a technological attitude towards problems, it was a revisionist transition to the positions of bourgeois neopositivism. I will dwell in detail on this "revelation" of revisionism, to understand the essence of the revisionist manifestations in Poland during the years 1956-57 and so that we can also grasp those positive phenomena that have been observed in Polish cultural life for the past three years.

It is customary to say that the main questions that we should address when examining our contemporary literature are whether the writer is firmly connected to life, whether he stands on sincere party positions, whether he reflects in his work the problems and characters characteristic of our era, whether he transforms into an exciting work of art those incredible changes that have taken place in socio-political life, in the psychology of the people, in the landscape of the country. These should really be not only the main questions, but also the starting points in all discussions of our contemporary literature. But the more books are published, the more names of young poets, fiction writers or playwrights appear on the literary horizon, the more it becomes customary to raise alarming cries that the writer stands far behind life, that he is moving aside from the general victorious course of our communist times. We have a considerable annual production - an average of fifty books of short stories, novels, essays. Among them we will meet convincing works and inept attempts, works written with a sure pen and literary blunders, which in most cases delight with their unfeigned sincerity, inner excitement and noble ambition, rather than with their literary qualities. We will also meet with the incarnations of the scheme, with soulless and artisanal written books, with tedious repetitions that bring nothing new to our literature. But what we can safely say is that all these books recreate plots drawn from the time in which we live, they concern the problems of socialist man, the struggles of our people for the construction of the new society. Another question is what artistic power, internal scale, aesthetic suggestion these books possess. If we want to get to know this "united and multifaceted" world, about which we so often speak, we will not find it in just one author, nor in just one book. On the contrary, we will establish that in the problematics of our contemporary prose there are many gaps, many more and different aspects of life have not found artistic reflection in our literature. First of all, we will mention that there are no books about the life and way of life of people from socialist structures. We will constantly have to talk about these gaps, to direct our writer to the key themes of the time, to demand a full and deep artistic transformation of reality in literature.

Literary historians have not yet studied sufficiently the rich material on the traditional interest of the cultural community in the small Slavic nation - the Slovenes (numbering 1,600,000 inhabitants today) in our people, in their fate and their culture. There is evidence of this interest as early as the sixteenth century. Several prominent Slovenes of that time - the travel writer Benedikt Kuripečić, the diplomat Žiga Višnegorski, the first Slovene grammarian Adam Bohorič and one of the giants in Slovene literary and political life, the great Slovene enlightener Primož Trubar (1508-1586) - not only mention the name of the Bulgarians, but also speak with a certain sympathy for them. In later times, the interest intensified, acquired a more problematic character, the Bulgarian language and culture became the subject of study and research in the works of several notable people from small Slovenia: the figure of the Slovenian Renaissance Žiga Zojs, the scholar Jernej Kopitar and the continuer of his work Franz Miklošić, etc. And the most prominent poets of the late 19th century - Anton Askerc, Simon Gregorčić and Josip Stritar, as well as Matija Majar-Zilski, Josipina Turnogradska, Anton Slomšek, L. Klinar wrote works with Bulgarian themes.