Емануил

Emanuil Popdimitrov, the symbolist and romantic poet, was one of those who first responded to the thunder of the October Revolution, one of the first to burn down his knightly castle and in poems and articles to deny symbolist art, despite the new contradictions and hesitations that arose later. But how did it happen that the October Revolution and the subsequent events in our country broke the armor of alienation and cosmopolitanism? What emotional strings did the events strike to make the music of revolutionary ecstasy sound? What were the ideological and psychological prerequisites for this? Was it due to psychological hopelessness brought to an end, to fatigue from fruitless wanderings in the above-ground heights of dreams and empty daydreaming? Or was there in the poetry itself, in the poet's very mental structure, a predisposition to dissolve into a wider world, into a more immediate and emphasized ethics? It seems to me that some contemporary critics, in their desire to deny the legacy of symbolism in our poetry, have reached a certain simplification and impoverishment of the essential part of the poet's work. They have not sufficiently understood his creative specificity. Indeed, Em. Popdimitrov is a "poet of dream visions and mystical dreams", and the imprint of symbolism weighs heavily on him, and in some of his poems there is an unenlightened sadness. But is pessimism a basic feature of his poetry and does the influence of symbolism exhaust the question of it? In his study of Em. Popdimitrov, Hr. Dudevski (On realism in the literary heritage of Em. Popdimitrov until 1923, Proceedings of the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, vol. V, 1957) speaks of realism in the poet's literary heritage, highlighting those poems in which a connection with reality is more directly felt (such as "Summer", "The Gruyn River" and many others with a love motif), regardless of the purely revolutionary poems that mark an indisputable literary turning point. Dudevski felt the vitality of these poems, although we would hardly agree to call realistic poems such as "Laura", "Clara", "Emma", "Efrosina", etc. The question, however, is whether the poems listed exhaust the essentials of Em. Popdimitrov's image. Is the absolute boundary that is thus set between them and the remaining significant part of his poetry justified; is the absolute distinction between poems of a realistic and anti-realistic nature justified?

The First World War had already ended when, in mid-1919, I took off the epaulette of a hastily made second lieutenant. Then, during this unfortunate war, which brought so much suffering and deprivation to the people, from the so-called "school for reserve second lieutenants" in Knyazhevo, after a few months of training, candidate officers emerged, who were immediately sent to the fronts and to the rearguard. From Ruse, where I was demobilized, in semi-civilian clothes, I found myself in Sofia to enroll in university. In Sofia, the aftereffects of the war that ended catastrophically for Bulgaria were keenly felt. Poverty in material life, heartbreak and despair in spiritual life! The people reacted strongly, possessed by anger against those responsible for the catastrophe. Foreign troops were marching through the streets of the capital, the French general Chrétien was in charge of the country... The national poet Ivan Vazov had published a small collection of poems under the title "It Will Not Perish!" to encourage his people, to bring serenity to their deeply troubled souls, to restore their faith in more glorious days: