новаторството

During the time of the cult of personality, quite a few significant works were written, which are the pride of contemporary Bulgarian literature. And the senseless nihilism that existed among a certain part of the youth in relation to the previous period must be resolutely rejected. At the same time, it cannot be ignored that these successes could have been even greater if it were not for the conditions of the cult, which instilled dogmatism, stereotyped thinking, and hindered the normal development of literature. According to the words of Todor Zhivkov, "dogmatism as a theory and practice introduced stiffness, schematism, patterning, and stagnation into creative work."

Tradition and innovation is a problem that has been discussed the most in the history of literature. This problem is infinitely broad and connected with the very essence of literature. When talking about it, one must take into account the questions of the national and cosmopolitan character of a literature, the traditions in this literature, the mutual influences between individual writers and individual literatures, schools and creative individualities, literary fashions and snobbery, the contemporary sensibility and worldview of the writer, the changes in the consciousness of the contemporary in view of social changes, the nationality and party affiliation, the role of social ideals, etc. In our country, this question is often understood narrowly and is limited mainly within the form of the means of expression.

I want to start with the not-so-stunning paradox that the most beautiful tradition is innovation. It is in the very essence of Marxism as a doctrine, it is the most permanent and most rejuvenating tradition of our society and of our art. The history of humanity and of human thought, the history of art have always been the history of innovators and never the history of epigones, of frozen traditionalists. The first are movement, the urge towards the unknown future, the second are stagnation, attachment to the proven and comfortably furnished present. The first are flights, the second - crawling. The first beat their chests and make revolutions - in science, art, society and open the way for all of humanity or for their people; the second keep their peace, their goods and welcome or carry out the return. They are the knights of inertia. In their fear of the new, they are ready to banish any innovation and theoretically justify its uselessness. That is why we say that communists are the greatest innovators, the most convinced opponents of stagnation, routine, mold, rust. Because let us not forget that in addition to pseudo-innovation, which discredits true innovation, there is also pseudo-tradition, which is already a buried tradition. To break recklessly with the established tradition and to adhere blindly to it - is the same thing. The second is no less harmful than the first. To write henriads and petriads in the 18th century is indeed pseudo-tradition, but to write an epic about Krali Marko in the middle of the 20th century is simply a curiosity. No one is able to restore that artistic consciousness that created the folk epic and the needs that made it necessary.

In recent years, some literary theorists in the West have begun to suggest that we should abandon the method of socialist realism because it has already exhausted its possibilities. They have created their own theories and schemes for socialist realism, which, of course, have easily been exhausted because these theorists ignore the history of the emergence and development of socialist realism. Art in slave society has been created over millennia, in bourgeois society over centuries, and in proletarian society over barely a century. Indeed, the pace of the construction of socialism is unheard of in comparison with the construction of other societies. But socialism is constantly under pressure from capitalism, and we are still forced to wage a fierce class struggle in the international arena. This, of course, cannot but affect the pace of the development of the new, socialist art.