село

Between the two world wars, the idea became widespread that modern analytical prose, expressing an observation of complex human phenomena, was incompatible with the rural world, limited to traditional manifestations, incapable of renewal and entering the higher zones of the spiritual. The evolution of modern literature has been a process from the village to the city, from the simple to the complex. Such an opinion was once substantiated by Eugene Lovinescu, with the corresponding aesthetic motivations, and later Camil Petrescu formulated it in a decisive way. He wrote that an epic of the Proustian type, such as he would have desired and which is necessary in the era of philosophical relativism and rapid progress in the field of psychology, could not be created by depicting individuals whose manifestations are known in advance according to the laws of an extremely banal mechanism. George Calinescu gave an answer to this question, which is still very relevant today. The peasants, the critic said, have a certain attitude to the problems of existence and even to the universe, they have their own philosophy, expressed, however, in specific forms, interesting for literature that is interested in human destinies. The analogy seems distant and perhaps exaggerated. From here, however, it is important to remember that a modern epic, which walks with the progress of art and is interested in the inner peace of man, who passes from one type of civilization to another and separates, sometimes dramatically, from old inertias, cannot ignore the peasant world, whatever its means of studying the material.

When more than three decades ago, the unknown village teacher Krum Grigorov made his literary debut with his story "The Border", few could have guessed that these were the first sprouts of the future storyteller of the Bulgarian village. The small stories that soon appeared on the pages of the progressive periodical, written with a vivid sense of life's injustices, began to attract more and more attention from the reader. In them, the persistent efforts of the village teacher towards an artistic expression of his ideological anxieties and social aspirations stand out more and more clearly. And quite naturally, he soon found his place among progressive writing circles, joining the ranks of the anti-fascist literary front, which in the 1930s was rapidly growing and setting the tone for artistic life.