Каролев

There is a motto of Marx, which in Russian sounds like this: "Be yourself and go your own way!" There is no more appropriate motto for a person and an artist with firm and unshakable convictions, for a complete personality that is always organic in its manifestations and does not deviate from the chosen path. Sometimes this striving for fidelity to oneself can cost extraordinary efforts, great moral endurance and readiness for sacrifice. The upheavals of time, surprising tremors and storms can confuse the weaker and break the susceptible to insidious temptations, break his resistance and turn him from a subject into an object of events. However, the stronger will not submit to circumstances and will not give up his essence. For me, this motto radiates nobility unclouded by time, apostolic selflessness and consistency in his convictions. He has no relation to those who play in life as on a stage, and after each intermission they put on a new costume, after each act they take a higher note. We know from history that all revolutions and the eras that followed them had their knights and silent heroes, but also their inevitable grimaces - I think a German poet said this back in the last century.

Stoyan Karolev's new book "In the World of Prose" is one of the most meaningful events in our literary life in recent years. It can be passed over and underestimated only by someone who suffers from congenital aesthetic myopia or is gripped by attacks of progressive professional egocentrism. It reveals with utmost clarity the most joyful trends in the development of contemporary, dialectically enriched aesthetic thinking, capable of penetrating the specific spheres of verbal art, of discerning the uniqueness of various creative talents, of achieving the truth about the artistic completeness and functionality of various stylistic and genre phenomena, about the aesthetic existence of the individual work of art, of the artistic image and suggestion. "In the World of Prose" affirms the legitimate aspiration of today's literary researcher to enter the holy of holies" of authors and books without prejudice and pretense, without aesthetic ecstasy and "artistic exaltation," but with increased intellectual insight into real ideological and aesthetic values, with increased emotional responsiveness to the artistic atmosphere of literary facts. Indicative of the peculiar renaissance that many of the leading representatives of our theory and criticism have experienced in the last decade, this book also represents an event in the author's personal biography: it contains the happy fruits of an inspired creative maturity.