Павел

Although it is risky to guess, it seems to me that if Pavel Matev had not been nurtured by the socialist revolution, he would hardly have linked his fate with fiction. That grain of poetic talent that he carried within him would have frozen out amidst the cold whirlwinds of life. The socialist revolution created him - both as a citizen and as a poet. It made a fighter and a person out of the "timid peasant" who steals sunflower cakes from the yards and throws slingshots at the windows, who searches for bird nests in the thorns and wades through puddles with punctured shoes. It instilled in him responsibility before the class and the people, drew him into the ranks of the resistance, and he became a fighter, a fighter of the Communist Party, inspired by the idea of ​​human superiority. When victory came, he chose the weapon of poetic speech to fulfill his duty before those with whom he walked shoulder to shoulder. The heroic time has passed. The memory of the thousands who died remained. A grandiose construction began. Pavel Matev was inspired by the beauty of socialism and it inspired him to create. It and the memory of the dead. Thus, the revolution nursed the poet through its two different phases, and he became its singer. One unchanging commandment follows Pavel Matev - to serve it faithfully and honestly. Its path is also his, its manhood and his creative maturation. Today we would easily find a number of false tones in his first poems. But we should not forget that they were born from his aspiration to be a soldier of the party, of the revolution, of that "devotion to loyalty" that only the unworthy do not respect.

Already in the "RLF", during the fourth and fifth anniversaries, Vezhinov contributed stories that are distinguished by their freshness, originality, and the search for his own style. Most of them, in terms of motives and ideological tasks, do not differ from stories with agitational issues on the most ominous political topics. What is special about them, despite the fact that the author is still searching, has not yet found his topic, is the writer's style, his vital observation, which breaks the narrow plot framework. Even in these stories, a writer is visible who, like St. Minkov, struggles with the routine in the artistic form, with the artistic print, with the outdated artistic vision. The tendencies that bring him closer to St. Minkov, are felt in the widespread use of episodic, lightly shaded images, in the author's already emerging ability to create picturesque images with bright distinctive features and their own artistic atmosphere, in the constant smile, in the search for the artistically original, in the ability to build an atmosphere using insignificant but vivid everyday needs.

What, in fact, does Vezhinov write about? About the anti-fascist movement, which has its historical coordinates, its documentary basis and its heroes, immersed in its everyday life? Or about man in the infinity of the world, the longevity of history? Doesn't the writer shake off the concrete excitements of the struggle too energetically? Doesn't he leave the heroes of the battles in the shadows, carried away by the desire to encompass the great contours of the human spirit? How many authors have begun and ended by showing shootings, by describing actions, by the picture of the September 9th rally? Why isn't Vezhinov absorbed in the visible? Why didn't his grandfather Shtilyan stay with his medical bag, and we hear him persistently say: "Surely something remains of us in this world - a frog, a nightingale... Otherwise, what would be the point?" Why didn't Viktor die heroically in battle, but fell ridiculously, uselessly? Why don't we hear in his dying sigh that historic "Death to fascism. Long live...", but rather the feverish: "Can you imagine a sky without stars?... You can't, of course... The stars are within us, our destiny."