Лиляна

Lilyana Grasheva's dissertation "Artistic Peculiarities of Old Bulgarian Literature", defended on 5. VI. 1969, is an aesthetic-theoretical study of the artistic originality and aesthetic essence of medieval literature. Learning creatively from Soviet medievalists (primarily from the school of the prominent Soviet literary scholar D. S. Likhachev), the dissertationist makes the first serious attempt to systematically study and comprehend from contemporary ideological and aesthetic positions the poetics of Old Bulgarian literature. The task set requires a deep penetration into the artistic and ideological world of the Middle Ages, rich scientific-aesthetic and methodological preparation. In the defended work, the dissertationist opposes a number of traditional concepts, which are an expression of prejudices and underestimation of the pictorial merits of Old Bulgarian Literature, considering it as a historically determined type of verbal creativity. At the same time, striving to By illuminating the real ideological and aesthetic values, Grasheva avoids the temptations of the modernizing idealization and modernization of the literary material. For the first time, the dissertationist makes a broader comparison of the aesthetic and creative ideas of the Old Bulgarian writers with those of Russian, Byzantine and Western European medieval writers. She proves that the Old Bulgarian writers are fully included in the main philosophical and aesthetic line of the European Middle Ages. The most significant contribution is contained in the third chapter of the dissertation ("Principles and Achievements of Artistic Image"), which presents the author as a researcher with an independent English thought, a keen sense of the artistic specificity of literary phenomena and a rich literary culture.