Октомврийската

The October Revolution is not just a picturesque moment in the turbulent history of mankind. With a certain set of actions, thoughts and attitudes, it radically changed the entire worldview of the man of our time. What it accomplished once again confirmed the basic principle: one moves forward by rejecting what is obsolete, by perceiving the past through new perspectives: moral, political and artistic. With its grandiose innovation, the October Revolution erased the "greatness" of the ideas, philosophical views and moral theses proclaimed by the bourgeois revolutions that preceded it. With the brightness and fury of lightning, it illuminated the backward content of philosophical concepts, layered, processed and systematized for almost a century and a half.

We are talking about the first decade after the victory of the October Revolution. Because, if it is a question of its influence at all - with all the new things that it brought to social and cultural life - this influence continues in our country, as everywhere in the world, to this day. But, it seems to me, the most interesting, historically innovative is the impact that the October Revolution - as an epochal phenomenon, as the beginning of a new era in the history of mankind - had on us in the first years after its triumph. It was then that the new ideas and solutions to problems that it suggested to Bulgarian literature, the new impulses with which it strengthened its development in the moment after the First World War - a moment of crisis and the search for new paths for artistic activity - had a turning point.

The ideas of socialism were reflected in literature long before the Great October Revolution. Their general character, social sources, and forms of influence on artistic creativity were not only diverse, but often heterogeneous. If we talk about the literature of the 19th century, socialist ideas received one or another expression in the works of Heine and G. Weert, of Hugo and Potier, Herzen and Chernyshevsky, Shchedrin and L. Tolstoy. A little later, these ideas attracted the deep attention of R. Rolland, A. France, W. Morris, B. Shaw, and many other writers. At the end of the century, at the beginning of his creative activity (1895), Romain Rolland confidently expressed the thought of the historical purpose of socialism. "If there is still - he wrote in his diary - hope to avoid the destruction that threatens present-day Europe, its society, and its art, then this hope lies in socialism." Rolland's conviction was not an isolated phenomenon - other artists of the word have expressed similar thoughts.