съдба

"Readers will notice that among my heroes, neither learned heads, nor important merchants, nor influential rich men appear very often; but simple and ordinary people, all from the lower ranks. These do not appear precisely because the work I describe is foreign to them." And so as not to leave any doubt about the purpose of his book, Zahari Stoyanov confesses: "Finally, I turn to you, brothers, simple poor people. For you I have worked hard to write this book, to show you that the most ardent fighters and defenders of our fatherland were not proud rich men and puffed-up scholars, but simple and uneducated brothers of yours, who knew no more than you. It will be enough to remind you only of the names of Levski, Benkovski, Kocho Chistemenski, the Zhekovi brothers, Bai Ivan Arabadzhiata, Ivan Vorcho, etc., all the guildsmen and workers. These, and no one else, washed the face of Bulgaria and defended our disgraced glory. With these words, Zahari Stoyanov turns to the readers of his "Notes", to explicitly remind them of whom he had in mind when he wrote them. The only and main character in them is the people, and he wants the people to be their first reader.

The historical fate of the Bulgarian people has not been particularly favorable for the free and full expression of its intellectual and creative potential. Nevertheless, the national conquests in various fields of knowledge, of spiritual life in general, give us every reason to be proud, to present ourselves with dignity to the outside world. In less than a hundred years of independent national and political life, scientific thought has developed with rare intensity and today we can already compete with other advanced nations with dignity. Therefore, all the greater are the merits of those pioneers of scientific research who had to plow virgin lands, to blaze trails, especially in the field of Bulgarian studies. They were destined to overcome innumerable obstacles of every nature, to overthrow layered prejudices, to dispel the fog with which some wanted to veil our nationality. The primary task of the people of humanitarian scientific thought was to bring our centuries-old cultural heritage out of oblivion, to reveal the cultural-historical, moral-aesthetic riches of previous eras, to study and make known the spiritual conquests of new generations, to clear the way and create the necessary prerequisites for further advancement. And considering that the ruling circles in Newly Liberated Bulgaria, caught up in political disputes, in a race to get rich, did not care about the fate of people possessed by higher spiritual impulses, of the creative intelligentsia, the feat of those who, striving for new spiritual horizons, devoted themselves to scientific research activities in order to shed light on the diverse problems related to the past, present and future of our people, will stand out even more clearly. That is why our gratitude to these builders of a new cultural Bulgaria, who went through many trials, but remained faithful to their calling, to their national duty - to elevate our national scientific thought to the level of advanced cultural nations, is today all the greater and historically justified.

Despite the "conspiracy of silence" towards Marxism on the part of official bourgeois science, in the middle of the last century it was already a respectable reality. But his aesthetic theory was "rediscovered" only in the 1930s-1940s by Soviet scientists. This temporarily limited the perimeter of its impact on world aesthetic thought; slowed down the formation of Marxist aesthetics; exacerbated the international controversy over the theoretical significance of Marx's aesthetic concept. And the prejudices towards it, the doubts about its very existence and even about the possibility of building aesthetics on the principles of historical materialism, are more peripheral than the traditional bourgeois skepticism towards Marxism as a whole. At first glance, the late discovery of Marx's aesthetic heritage is a simple anomaly. In fact, a complex of reasons of a scientific, social, ideological, aesthetic and bibliographic nature intersect here. Together, they determine the unique fate of this heritage. Their study is the subject of this article.

I think that many Bulgarian poets could rightly take part in this conversation. With the wealth of their literary experience, they would enrich our conversation. I will try to answer the questions posed, based not so much on my personal creative practice as on some observations on our poetry.