Знаменосец

At the end of this September, our living memory called us to a meeting with a beloved child of Bulgaria, with a young and modest, close and worthy fighter from the front row of the Bulgarian Communist Party, with the standard-bearer of our revolutionary socialist realist literature, who still holds, as befits him, the banner of its artistic victories. Hristo Smirnenski! Six and a half decades since his birth and four decades since his death have already passed, and the time enclosed in them has no power to reach out to destroy or sprinkle with oblivion the monument of his artistic creativity. Of course, this does not surprise anyone and would not surprise anyone - only what we call perishable and temporary is subject to the irrevocable blows of days and nights. The marble of nature can be destroyed, but nothing can destroy the marble of the soul and heart. Any, even the most massive, material monuments and colonnades can collapse - nothing can knock down monuments made without hands. And the artistic work of Hristo Smirnenski is precisely such a monument made without hands. Because Smirnenski created literature, bloodily connected with the fate of our party and our people, saturated with enormous social content, with the brilliance and power of the communist ideal and at the same time embodying in the most artistic way the most important problems, reflecting the most diverse and broad aspects of reality. He was tasked with launching a new stage in Bulgarian literature and he brilliantly fulfilled it. It should not be forgotten that this task was not easy, that its scale was determined by the era and its solution had and has historical consequences. This is precisely the essence of his innovative poetic work. In the annals of Bulgarian fiction, Smirnenski was that stonemason with a faded blouse, a dark gray cap and a bold look, who could confidently say: ... A road will be paved, friend, here, a new road in these rocks! Such living witnesses as we are, now see how necessary, important and unending this road is. We have been walking on it for years and will walk in the centuries to come, because this is the true and saving path for the literature and art of socialism and communism.

In recent years, there has been no conversation between our contemporaries - builders of socialism and communism - that has not touched on the prevailing thought of the time, that has not turned into reflections on that turbulent and rapid movement forward that began after 1953-1956. Now we ourselves are amazed at the frozen kingdom of dogmas and ideas, at the cold majesty with which the cult had enveloped the most human, the most earthly, the ideal of social order that radiated so much light and warmth. The most democratic, the most mass teaching was threatened with becoming an inaccessible codex of once-for-all truths that inspired more trembling and fear and less subjugating with the charm hidden in them. The words of the young Marx were forgotten, that communism and humanism were synonymous, that at the center of our teaching lies the noblest idea of ​​human happiness and well-being, of the abolition of all violence, of everything ugly and inhuman, inherited from the bourgeoisie. The harsh revolutionary spirit, the awareness that history is made without mercy, that the laws of the class struggle are something inexorable and determine the choice of means, the line of behavior of revolutionaries, was exploited, brought to a one-sidedness that began to have the opposite effect. The ideology and practice of the cult of personality repelled with its brutality, brought turmoil into souls, hindered the true revolutionary education of the masses, instilled obedience and servility - the external grimace of indifference and cynicism, of wordless obedience.