Опит

Georgi Gachev's book with the unattractive title "Accelerated Development of Literature" is, for me, the most attractive fruit of Bulgarian studies outside our borders. In it, Gachev demonstrates great advantages over his colleagues at home and abroad, his efforts are intertwined with some of the latest searches in contemporary literary studies. Relying on the brilliant tradition of Russian comparative literary studies and the contemporary achievements of Marxist literary theory, he makes almost the first attempt at a theoretical history of Bulgarian literature in one of the important periods of its development. Despite the complex, abstract-theoretical formulation of the questions and the purely rationalistic pathos in resolving them, the book bears a clear imprint of the researcher's personality, his spiritual searches and problems. You have to be Bulgarian for the tragic vicissitudes of our national cultural development, the fate of these figures distant in history, the weaknesses and discontinuities to arouse such fascination in you. of tradition. In general, to feel within oneself this thirst and longing for tradition, for supporting and stable forms. You have to be a foreigner to be able to look from the side, to have lived with other cultures, to be blinded by the astonishing paradoxes of a literature, the unexpected combinations, the tragicomic anachronisms and even more unexpected appropriations. Gachev has taken a voluntary and noble risk - to find the laws of a delayed and therefore accelerated cultural development, to discover the motives driving it, natural tendencies in an unnatural development. He undertakes his risky experiment on a period in the history of our literature - the end of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century - which as much complicates as it eases his task. The difficulty comes from the fact that, due to its nature, this literature knows nothing about itself, in it criticism, programs, aesthetic platforms are absent. In many respects this is not literature itself, but culture in the broadest sense of the word. With rare exceptions, its written monuments are far less interesting than the vital and spiritual adventures of their creators. In these written monuments, the creators are reflected palely and sluggishly. The difficulties are also increased by the fact that until now this period of our literary development has aroused and arouses factual, empirical interest in researchers. In our country, there is no theoretical interest in key periods, genres, trends and problems of literary development, and Gachev's work was prepared only from the factual side. Perhaps that is why for many it was a surprise, almost an unauthorized attempt and unnecessary complication.

The science of artistic thinking (the creative process) has recently been increasingly insistently dealing with the issues of aesthetic impact, aesthetic experiences, aesthetic pleasure - in an aspect in which they have not been considered so far. What is it about?