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There is a portrait of him, painted by the artist Nikola Mihaylov, which has always attracted my attention and brought me face to face with the "dilemma" of Petko Todorov. I would not say that it is the most accurate pictorial interpretation of his image. But it achieves a kind of balance between our current assessment and the enthusiastic ideas about him of contemporaries and admirers from the past. On the canvas, Petko Todorov, the "meek" Petko Todorov, sits with his hand resting on the back of his chair, focused, lost in his thoughts. This ascetic profile of a hermit perhaps hides the secrets of a late-born fanatic, whom new circumstances and other character traits have prevented from recognizing the extremes of spirit and thought. Perhaps. But everything else - from the kind, half-hidden gaze, to the long, relaxed, artistic fingers, speak of the soft character of a born intellectual. This is a man who, for all his ambitions, may never have been completely confident in himself, but who has always taken his work seriously - with that seriousness that is more like inner conscientiousness and dedication. Entangled in a web of greenish half-shadows that crawl over his arms and beard, growing into the surrounding landscape, in the painting, he seems to be a spiritualized and civilized Dragon from the world of his own idylls. The warm range of butter-green tones flows over his face, overflowing into the environment as a continuation of his thoughts, as a plastic symbol of his thirst for an eternal connection with his native nature. This is how he remained in the minds of his best connoisseurs from the past - with his eternal striving to penetrate the soul of his people and merge with their nature. This is how we can perceive him today, with all the sobriety and all the reservations that the obvious weaknesses of his work impose on us. The artist himself was apparently not unaware of their awareness, because he found a way to hint at them and balance his image with a few sure strokes: in the upper right corner of the painting, a landscape detail somehow imperceptibly creeps in, like a projection of the writer's thoughts, which irritates, "disturbs" the impression, because it carries something of the bad German taste from the time of the Secession. And this is Petko Todorov again, seen from a different side.

Among all the arts, literature is distinguished by having both a very unlimited and a very limited character. Unlimited, because its intellectual content tends to spread, to go beyond the framework in which it was created, or, conversely, to come from outside - to be assimilated, transformed within the boundaries of a new environment. Limited, because its means of expression, language, is not perceived directly, but presupposes the introduction of a new expression in connection, undoubtedly, with the depicted object, but nevertheless different from it and on another plane of contact. "The shackles of idiom, said one critic (F. Baldensperger) prevent literature, so to speak, from crossing the threshold of its own home." These two opposing aspects, inherent in the literary work, are manifested especially clearly when the literary historian proceeds to make comparisons. Comparative literary studies is actually more a method than a branch. And perhaps that is precisely why it gives us the opportunity to grasp the nature of literary phenomena particularly well. Every work, no matter how comprehensive, no matter how radiant it is, remains the fruit of an era, a country, an environment, as well as of an author. With its content, reflecting the environment, the country, the era, it can represent a document, a testimony, useful both for compatriots and foreigners. It can also be an attempt by the author to break away from his environment and tradition, to become a messenger calling for innovative creativity. The literatures of Southeast Europe give us many examples in this regard, especially if we focus on their development from the end of the 18th century to the present day in relation to other European literatures and, first of all, to those of the West. Thus, to the historical aspect in the study of literatures, the comparative one is added - and here the problems of parallel development are intertwined with those of influence. The reports presented below, written by specialists in each of these literatures, primarily reveal the specific features of the works, as well as the conditions under which they arose, but they also allow us to establish some connection between literary phenomena in different countries.