сатирика

In the first serious article for "Selected Essays and Stories" Dr. Krastev (V. Mirolyubov), after almost completely denying Stamatov as an artist, emphasizes: "The satirical attitude to life is his element. He owes his narrow horizons to it." ("Young and Old" - p. 149). Since then, almost all notable Bulgarian critics have written about Stamatov. And they have always determined his place among the satirists. The literary critic Simeon Sultanov included his vivid and carefully crafted portrait of the writer in a book entitled "Satirists." And this is correct. Stamatov is undoubtedly a satirist. One of the most vividly expressed satirists in our literature. The main pathos in the work of this so original and lonely artist is the angry scourging of the vices that swarm in the human soul, and the angry tearing of the masks behind which these vices like to hide. Stamatov's literary work is filled with greedy, unscrupulous, lustful men and prostitutes who are ostensibly disguised behind the holiest bourgeois virtues. Let us recall all these Lili, Lina, Lida, Shurochka, the Countess, etc. Don't they smell "of taverns and men"? For the writer, "Man is the worst animal because he is smart. More predatory than a wolf, more cunning than a fox, more nasty than a hyena." He views the bourgeois reality in which he is forced to live with vigilant hatred, always ready to erupt in satire. And he lives in the most vulgar period of the bourgeoisie, its apparent flourishing and triumph, when the ideals of the Revival have been forgotten and when the vulgar optimism of "the worm in the cheese" has not yet evolved into the tragic optimism of "the mouse in the trap in front of the cheese from the bait."