възрожденски

Dimitar and Konstantin Miladinov, as teachers, writers and public figures, were the first advocates for preserving and strengthening the national self-consciousness of the population of Macedonia, threatened during the Turkish rule by the assimilationist offensive of the Phanariotes. The Hellenizing policy of the Greek Patriarchate caused D. Miladinov, as early as 1852, when he himself was leading school education in Greek, to turn anxiously to Alexander the Exarch: "The six-eighths of Macedonia, which are populated by monolingual Bulgarians - he wrote to him - are all learning the Hellenic script and are called Hellenes by the Hellenes, except for the northern Slovenes, who are advancing in the Slovenian (language)", 1 Therefore, after the Crimean War, when the movement for the political and spiritual liberation of the Bulgarian people entered its decisive stage, Miladinov became one of the pioneers of the national awakening of Macedonia. As a teacher, with the active assistance of his younger brother Konstantin, Rayko Zhinzifov and other of his students and followers, he was the first to lead the struggle for the introduction of the Bulgarian language, which had been overthrown by the Phanariotes, into the school and the church, and with his exceptional activity against the denationalizing advances of the patriarchate, he established himself as a universally recognized figure in the Bulgarian revival. That is why, when in the January days of 1862 the news of the martyrdom of the two brothers was brought from Constantinople, it disturbed their compatriots from all corners of Bulgaria, and a number of Slavic periodicals, appreciating the value of their great work, widely popularized their names. Having received a solid education for their time in Greek educational institutions, which Konstantin subsequently enriched at the Faculty of Philology in Moscow, the Miladinovs perceptively understood the role of culture for the national revival of every nation. The rich literature of Greece, which excitingly reflected the life of ancient Hellas and the flowering of its civilization, not only does not disturb their national consciousness, but makes them look at the preserved material and spiritual values ​​of their people in order to document through them their historical past, the stability of their way of life and character. And if the Bulgarian literature of that time, whose development was hindered by the conditions of political and spiritual oppression, could only partially respond to this patriotic need, in the folk poetic work of Dimitar Konstantin Miladinovi discovered both the past, the present, and the future of his people. The collection of samples of folklore and their publication in the collection “Bulgarian Folk Songs” strengthened, enriched, and exalted their patriotic and democratic work.

The periodicals from the era of our national revival often surprise us with the insight and sober ideological and aesthetic sense of the first Bulgarian Literary Critics. In them, next to the angry correspondence against the centuries-old slave system or the naive poetic work of some teacher, we often come across reviews of original and translated works of art or articles of a theoretical nature. Sometimes they are laconic and informative, sometimes detailed and categorical. Their authors are not always original. In most cases, they even popularize ideas and beliefs created and adopted in other countries dozens of years earlier. But even when they paraphrase or borrow textually, our literary pioneers do so not in order to be proclaimed by the ignorance of their compatriots as talented thinkers or as founders of movements and schools, but because of the utilitarian spirit of the time and for tactical considerations before the official political authorities. However, both as popularizers and as original The Bulgarian Renaissance writers and literary figures always lived with the problems and creative pathos of our literature. The influence of Russian realistic thought on their literary-critical views is undeniable. However, we do not set ourselves the task of tracing how and to what extent it was realized, we will limit ourselves to pointing out that almost all Bulgarian Renaissance writers were able to soberly use what they had learned both as writers and as literary critics. This is evident above all from their articles and notes, in which some of the problems of realism as a creative method in fiction are raised and examined. The literary-critical views of Karavelov, Botev, Nesho Bonchev, which reflect a relatively more mature stage in Bulgarian criticism, will not concern us in this case. By referring only at certain moments to some articles by our established literary critics, we will try to trace the concepts of Other Renaissance writers on our literary development, in order to see that the struggle for realism in Bulgarian literature until the Liberation was a struggle not only of individual, albeit great, writers, but a collective work of an entire literary generation. And since realism finds its fullest expression in literary prose, we will limit ourselves to indicating how literary criticism then greeted the first attempts in the field of "Bulgarianized" and original fiction, how some of our writers understood their tasks, what tasks they assigned to narrative creativity.