Ботевият

Not even those who have studied our literary history know that Botev was an innovator for his time, a unique poet with an original spiritual view of the world. And more. That, despite the great power and originality of his talent, he follows a tradition characteristic of our pre-liberation literature: his lyrics carry something of the atmosphere of the magnificent and emotional images of folk art. But isn't this a very stable phenomenon for the time? Don't we recognize traces of the poetic world of folk song in the works of many others? Already in Nayden Gerov's poem "Stoyan and Rada", in Kozlev's heroic epic "Haidut Sider and the Black Arab", in the early lyrics and the first poems of P. R. Slaveykov, traces of coexistence between personal and folk art are visible. It is as if the poet could not spread his wings under the horizon of the Bulgarian sky without listening to the song born of the people, without drinking from its source, without perceiving its imagery, rhythm, style. No matter how much our literature has been in contact with foreign poetic worlds, the great and original art of great creative individuals is still little known. Both the content and the form carry within themselves the atmosphere of folk poetry, even in works written on a new, original, personal theme. Botev could not escape this regularity of time. And where will he escape, since he himself feels the lyric as a song, since he himself is deeply fascinated by the motifs in the poetry of the people. His contemporaries recall with excitement how he - the poet, the publicist, the thinker, who stood high above the people around him - responded enthusiastically to our folk song. He is always moved and captivated by it. And this was so, despite his self-awareness as a person who creates a new, his own art. His inspired worship of folk song comes very deeply. He has been under the influence and power since his childhood, those years of independence, when, imitating the heroes of the folk epic, he terrified the neighborhoods of the town with the games of "outlaws". It is known that his mother, a woman with a wonderful memory and a personal gift of a singer, often sang haidush songs about folk protectors who roamed the fields, mountains. She took the child's imagination from everyday life to the heights of the Balkans, to the beauty of a world filled with heroic thoughts. A person with a strong character, inclined to say things outright, in winter, she probably reinforced the idea of ​​the heroism of the C e C 16 Outlaws.

The feuilleton work of Hristo Botev is not large in volume - only seven works and covers a relatively short period of time - about two years. But it gave expression to characteristic trends in the development of satirical prose during the Revival and finally established the feuilleton as a full-fledged form in our fiction. Botev's feuilleton appears on the pages of the newspaper "Budilniki". Obviously, these are not the writer's first attempts at journalistic satire, nor his initial searches in the field of the feuilleton genre. Botev's humorous newspaper reflects the capabilities of a mature satirist and the individual handwriting of a master of the feuilleton. When issue 1 of "Budilniki" was published, Hristo Botev had already been working for ten months in the editorial office of the newspaper "Nezavisimost" as Karavelov's assistant. His idea of ​​publishing a satirical newspaper was not detached from the tasks that faced the organ of the revolutionary party. The intensification of socio-political struggles, the activation of anti-revolutionary elements, especially after the capture and death of V. Levski, forced the satirical denunciation from the positions of the revolution to seek a wider field of action. During the period 1869-1876, numerous attempts were made in the country and among the emigration to publish satirical newspapers. And in the organ of the revolutionary party itself, we observe, along with the maintenance of a permanent satirical column, the invasion of the satirical element in almost all journalistic forms, up to the editorial notes of the newspaper. Botev's "Alarm Clock" undoubtedly arose as an assistant to the revolutionary organ, in order to raise the exposing pathos of the column "Do you know who we are?"