Димов

Every personal contact I have had with Dimitar Dimov has evoked in me the feeling that his whole life is a constant dichotomy between logic and imagination, between science and his vocation as an artist. At the same time a professor of veterinary anatomy and a writer, he seems to have no other dedication than the measured, methodical work of a scientist. Sometimes I have been amazed at the logic of his reasoning, devoid of the spontaneity characteristic of some other writers I know, and at the same time at his subtle observations on morals and human weaknesses, his insight into the dialectics of the human soul, his attachment to bright, colorful characters, with a personal modesty and strictness towards himself.

According to the unanimous opinion of critics, Dimitar Dimov failed to build an antipodal world to "Nicotiana", to depict the heroic and bright beginning of our time, which could be contrasted with the dark forces of the bourgeois world. The images of workers and communists in his remarkable novel "Tobacco", with few exceptions, are far inferior in brightness and vitality to the other images in the novel. In itself, this mishap is an unhappy phenomenon in our literature, but it is too eloquent and instructive, contains too many interesting problems for us to easily pass it by, to simply register it, without making an effort to examine and explain it, to discover the mysteries and truths embedded in it, to reveal its true significance for our literature. Because often the failures of talent turn out to be more fruitful and more valuable for history than any mediocre success. They bring us closer to more truths, they reveal to us a deeper and more interesting picture of the world, there is more life, more drama and power in them than in all mediocre "achievements", in all talentless straightforwardness and innocence. Or, to paraphrase a sentence of Guizot, we can say that talent enjoys this wonderful and deserved privilege of having its errors fertilize truths.

"I am afraid of those comrades who, as soon as they start writing or speaking, see only the clear scheme of the external world and hostilely avoid the labyrinth of the soul." This is how the hero-narrator of the unfinished, recently published novel "Achilles' Heel" confesses to us. In these words, as well as in the entire first chapter - a kind of reflection, a philosophical-psychological essay, we clearly perceive the own voice and gaze of the writer, Dimitar Dimov. "Is it," the communist narrator further asks, "the richness, diversity, subtlety and depth of thoughts and feelings that the immense complexity and beauty of the external world awaken in us, some kind of heresy?" No, of course not. After all, it is precisely from this wealth of the soul that the fruits of material and spiritual labor spring.... Indeed, it is precisely in it that the possibilities of the new man who builds socialism lie hidden! The greatness in the soul of modern man is not in some steel (according to the famous expression) monolithicity and hardness, in the absence of shortcomings and contradictions. It comes not from some "guild decency" in his morality, but from the courage with which he faces the truth, from the heroic firmness with which he overcomes the difficulties around him and within himself. That is why we should not hide his weaknesses, his vices, we should not decorate his character with "trinkets."

In Bulgarian literary and historical science after 1944, the question of the development of our literary theory and criticism is not new, it has not just arisen. As a research task, this question has been raised more than once and not by one or two Bulgarian literary historians. For various reasons, however, no work has been done in this direction. There are too few researchers who have occasionally paid attention to one or another moment in the history of Bulgarian literary criticism, theory and science. The only more systematic and comprehensive studies that have been published so far belong to Georgi Dimov, who works mainly in this scientific field.