характер

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.