партийна

Issue 153 of "RLF" opens with a cartoon by Alexander Zhendov "The Path of Above-Class Art". The cartoon depicts an armchair on which Al. Tsankov is sitting with a bloody axe in his relaxed hand. An artist is crouching next to him, licking the bloodsucker's shoes with the tip of his tongue. This is the entire content of the cartoon. I don't know why, but this cartoon seems to me very characteristic of "RLF" - both with its definite attitude towards bourgeois writers, and with its hatred and sarcasm towards those who hide their cowardly desertion behind noisy and lush abstract-noble phraseology. This caricature also speaks of an artistic consciousness that judges the depicted fact as something foreign, from the other, "other" world, is proud of its assessment, of its ability to deny the servility, the pitiful conformism, the servility of the bourgeois priests of art.

Hristo Smirnenski lived and worked in a turbulent and majestic era, saturated with revolutionary dynamics and mass heroism, with a premonition of the rising revolution. These were the heroic and crucial post-war years, years of a powerful revolutionary upsurge, of an unprecedented drive of the proletariat to win a free and happy life, years illuminated by the greatest event in the history of mankind - the October Revolution. The entire era was saturated with heroic flame, with rallies and demonstrations, with mass unrest, with an open and determined struggle against oppression and exploitation. The authority and influence of the Bulgarian Communist Party during this period were constantly growing, it was rapidly becoming mass and expanding, establishing itself as a leading factor in the socio-political life of the country.