Съвременна

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.

There is too much work and talk about the exact methods of describing artistic phenomena in our time. It is quite natural that people talk mainly about their present and even more about their future, while groundlessly self-confident statements about their efficiency are often met with extreme skepticism, with positions that are essentially nihilistic: exact methods will never be able to cope with this or that problem... However, in conversations and polemics, the fact is constantly ignored that the vigorous modern development of exact methods is not a unique phenomenon in the history of aesthetics, as some of its advocates try to suggest. Aesthetics experienced, and not so long ago, a hardly less vigorous fascination with the search for exact methods for describing the work of art, the creative and perceptual process, and the development of art. And although the two periods differ from each other in a number of essential features, interesting analogies with useful, orienting conclusions can be drawn between them.

In the minds of the Bulgarian reader, the idea of ​​contemporary Swedish literature is almost exhausted by the works of August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf, who are known to the relatively older generation in our country. In recent years, the names of several more authors, representatives of different periods and trends in Swedish literature, have also been added to the two classic masters, whose individual works have been shown very limitedly, mostly with short stories and novellas. But Swedish literature as a whole, with its problems and tasks, with its main directions and tendencies, with its new names and works, still stands as undiscovered land not only for the ordinary reader, but also for our literary science.