Климент

After Stambolov came to power, the former head of the liberal government, Petko Karavelov, who had been expelled from the political arena, was forced to engage in cultural and educational activities. He founded a society in Sofia for the dissemination of useful knowledge among the people and the development of their taste, which began publishing in 1888 the magazine "St. Clement Library", named in honor of the oldest enlightener, Kliment Ohridski. During the period of acute book famine in Bulgaria and the flooding of the book market with low-quality literature, the magazine sought to provide the general reader with exemplary works of world literature. Russian writers occupied a predominant place in the magazine. Its pages were dotted with the names of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Lermontov, Tolstoy. Readers get acquainted with little-known or completely unknown authors: with the poems of Batyushkov, Koltsov, Pleshcheev, I. Kozlov, with the stories of Shchedrin, Korolenko, Garshin, Karonin-Petropavlovsky. "The St. Kliment Library managed to become a conduit of Russian socio-literary influence in Bulgaria during the developing Stambolov reaction, when the official newspaper Svoboda carried out unbridled Russophobic propaganda and insisted on selecting special literature by Western authors for the younger generation. The populist writer T. G. Vlaikov, in his memoirs of the 1980s and 1990s, spoke of the magazine as very good and valuable for its time. "1

The image of the writer Clement of Ohrid still remains incompletely outlined. Clement's literary work has not been collected, has not been published in a more complete scientific edition. There is no unity on the issue of what this work includes, there is no complete list of Clement's "words". Clement's literary heritage has not been evaluated either from a literary-historical point of view or from an ideological-aesthetic one. The study of this heritage, which began in the last decades of the first millennium after his death, was not continued in the first decades of the next millennium. Perhaps a more significant impetus for research work on this heritage will be given by the 1050th anniversary of his death, celebrated this year. Clement fully deserves such research work.

On June 2, the Scientific Council of the Institute of Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences discussed and approved for publication a collection of studies that the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia State University prepared on the occasion of the 1050th anniversary of the death of the outstanding Bulgarian and Slavic educator, teacher and man of letters Kliment Ohridski. It includes 24 studies by Bulgarian authors-historians, literary critics, linguists, specialists in the history of Bulgarian fine arts and music, as well as a bibliography of Bulgarian literature on Kliment Ohridski for the period 1945-1966.

During the solemn scientific session for the 1050th anniversary of the death of Clement of Ohrid, achieving its jubilee purpose with the greatest accuracy, the cleverly and interestingly written book by Nadezhda Dragova about the outstanding Bulgarian and Slavic enlightener was published. Without a doubt, in the bibliographies of those dedicated to Clement 1 N. Dragova, Kliment Ohridski. A Story about Him and His Enemies. S., Publishing House of the National Council of the Fatherland Front, 1966, 266 p. Works it will find its place in the section "popular scientific literature". It is not excluded that it will be passed over negligently by both individual representatives of strict academic thought and some of the creators of contemporary historical fiction, if they a priori attribute to it the known shortcomings of books of its kind. And it is neither elementary, nor dry and lifeless. From its first to its last page, we are greeted by the results of a perfectly clear, meticulously thought out and precisely executed plan, and we are delighted by the qualities of a high-class popularizer.