Андрей

In October 1962, the Institute of Literature was visited by the prominent French Slavist Prof. André Mazon. A guest of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, during his two-week stay in Sofia, Prof. Mazon had set himself the task not only of conducting some scientific research, but also of getting acquainted with the work of our Slavic scientific institutes, of meeting with representatives of Bulgarian Slavic studies and of informing our public about the achievements of French Slavic studies - with this aim, he also read a report on the topic "Slavic studies in France". Prof. Mazon spoke with the director of the institute, Prof. G. Tsanev, and a number of scientific associates, showing a keen interest in their work. He became acquainted with the structure of the institute and its publications and expressed his admiration for the broad opportunities and the great material support that the Bulgarian People's Democratic State provides for the development and progress of science.

The editorial board of the magazine addressed the fiction writers Andrey Gulyashki, Georgi Markov and Milcho Radev with the following questions: What paths did our socialist fiction travel during the 1920s? What main moments do you see in its development (respectively in the development of the novel, the short story or the short story)? What main problems and conflicts of our time are you particularly interested in? Which phenomena of socialist restructuring, which problems of the urban and rural man, of the intelligentsia and the youth occupy you in your work? Which obsessions do you consider harmful in contemporary fiction? What kind of foreign influences is it freed from in order to develop more fruitfully? What unfulfilled duty does our fiction have to the reader? What unsolved tasks do you see before it? What aspects of the tradition do you think can be fruitfully developed by the contemporary fiction writer? In what direction do you see the innovative searches of the contemporary fiction writer? In what direction are your own searches for new ways of expression? What new elements of fiction technique, genre enrichment, and genre blending do you think are part of the concept of contemporary fiction? How are they reflected in your own work as your own preferences?

After his first stories, printed in the newspapers "Struya" and "Trud" in the period 1933-1935, Andrei Gulyashki published several more significant works of fiction: the novels "Don Quixote of Sylvester", "Death Sentence" and the sketches "Women". These works are without particular artistic value. They are youthful experiments. The author is still a young man - he has just turned 25, an age that is too early for a fiction writer. Usually at such an age literary influences are strongest. They can be difficult to overcome. The direct life observations, impressions, all that huge life material that a fiction writer needs to build his works, has not been collected. The originality of the artist almost always depends on the depth with which his gaze penetrates reality. Early fiction works are in most cases either autobiographical on intimate themes, or to one degree or another imitative. Exceptions like Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks" are few.