историческа

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.

1967 is a special year in the life of Soviet society, of Soviet literature. For us, the fiftieth anniversary of the October Socialist Revolution is both a solemn holiday, and a business review of our work, and a determination of its further prospects. Broad opportunities have opened up before researchers of literature for solving all the problems of artistic creativity in the historical projection of the half-century development of the new art, from the tested positions of Marxist-Leninist scientific thought. This fully applies to the journal "Questions of Literature", which in April enters the eleventh anniversary of its existence. Each issue of our journal in 1967 will open a large section "Before the 50th anniversary of October". But all other materials are also connected in one way or another with the fifty-year experience of social and cultural construction, of the struggle for socialist realism.

At the end of last year, the book "From the Life and Work of Ivan Vazov" by Iliya Boyadzhiev and Tsocho Delev was published, State Publishing House "Narodna Prosveta", Sofia, 1968. The exposition of the life and work of Ivan Vazov is based on carefully collected and well-arranged documentation (photographs, portraits, memories, quotes, diagrams and tables). Some of the elements of this Documentation have been known since earlier, and there are some that were discovered later. But it is interesting that now both of them are placed and examined in a new light - something that is one of the merits of the book.