Hristo Dudevski

Demyan Bedny writes about his poetic work: "What is not directly connected with my agitational and literary work is of no particular interest or significance: everything fundamental by which my life has been meaningful and justified has found its reflection in what - from 1909 to the present day - has been written by me. These words are very obliging."

The past 4th anniversary of the magazine "Questions of Literature", an organ of the Writers' Union and the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, marked new serious successes in efforts to examine and clarify a number of major problems of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, theory and history of literature. For our reader, the magazine "Questions of Literature" is like a large and bright window into the world of literary theory, as the most authoritative organ of Soviet literary thought. The political and spiritual upsurge of the Soviet peoples after the 20th and 21st Congresses of the CPSU is reflected in the pathos of the magazine. The first booklet of "Questions of Literature" from 1961 opens with I. Vinogradov's article "Za beguštim dnem" - notes on the novel by V. Tendryakov. The author dwells on the contradictory statements about the novel made by a number of Soviet critics, rejects some of them and, after a detailed analysis, clarifies some of the author's peculiarities with his tendency to portray an "intellectual hero", in which the main thing is "the struggle of ideas, the persistent search for a living, complex and significant thought". And insofar as this material is "new to the writer, he is not able to relate to it freely enough, to clearly separate it from himself. . . " This partly explains the contradictory perception of Andrei Biryukov, the main character in "For the Running Day". In the article "Poets of the Antilles" E. Galperina traces the stages of emergence, development and the current state of poetry in the Republic of Haiti, in the West Indies (the islands of Jamaica, Trinidad, etc.) and in British Guiana. The desire for national and political freedom, interest in the past and folklore, anger and contempt for the colonizers - 110 these features characterize the poetry of the Antilles. The questions of purity, euphony and creative use of modern literary language attract the attention of writers, critics and readers. E. Khanpira focuses on them in his short remark "Let's talk about our speech". In our attitude to language, breadth, a sober understanding of the peculiarities of artistic speech are obviously necessary, since any extreme purism can lead to the impoverishment of speech. In support of these thoughts, E. Khanpira cites convincing examples from the literary work of M. Gorky, S. Sergeev-Tsensky, Vl. Mayakovsky, V. I. Lenin and others.

In recreating the image of the communist in our country there is a long and rich tradition from the past: in poetry - D. I. Polyanov, Hr. Smirnensky, N. Vaptsarov and the post-1930s; in prose - again Smirnensky, Kr. Velkov, G. Karaslavov and others. New people - new in their social consciousness, in their spiritual appearance - were formed during the years of great battles of our people against capitalism and fascism. And in order to understand the type of person - the type of revolutionary, an active historical figure - literature naturally turns to the image of the communist. Why is this so? Because the communist is not only a politically significant image, but also a bearer of the new in our time in general. What is more - right next to him walks the conscious citizen who does not yet have a party ticket, but to whom the cause of the communist party is close. Today, it is clear to readers and writers that every more substantial, more artistically convincing image of the communist always has a "cover" in socialist reality itself. And he always returns to it, reality, to serve it, but already aesthetically evaluated. This is one of the main advantages of contemporary socialist-realist literature. So far, in articles and speeches, an attempt has been made, sometimes more cursory, sometimes more in-depth, to clarify theoretically and mainly in connection with practice the problem of the communist in literature. For example, it was discussed during the national review of contemporary Bulgarian drama in 1959. And in 1960, the Writers' Union organized a three-day theoretical conference on the topic "The Image of the Communist in Literature". The purpose of this article is to dwell on some unexamined questions and, in particular, on individual literary works. Limiting the topic hides some inconveniences, and perhaps even dangers. But it also has some advantages: we will keep our focus on today, on contemporary problems.

There is almost no researcher of the work of Hristo Smirnensky who would not point out the importance of the October Socialist Revolution and the young Soviet poetry in the ideological and creative evolution of the poet. Moreover, usually the question of influence is connected with the question of the genesis and development of Smirnensky's artistic method. Recently, efforts have been directed precisely at such a wider range of problems. This, of course, does not mean that all questions have been exhausted. At least the lack of a comprehensive monograph on the poet so far does not convince us of the opposite. In these brief notes I would like to draw attention to some facts from our literary life in 1919-1923 - the time when Hristo Smirnensky created his most mature works. I am referring to the articles that appeared on the pages of the party periodicals - the newspapers "Mladezh" and "Narodna armiya", the magazine "Novo vreme", advocating the issues of the construction of proletarian culture. B .. Let's mentally travel back forty-three years. The first years of Soviet power, the interventionists have just been expelled. The first steps are being taken in the construction of the new system. The construction of a new culture, a new literature is being started. Everyone is convinced that they must be truly new, just like the new revolutionary fighter and winner of the civil war. In order to embody this new hero in art, new forms, new means of expression are needed. Sometimes new artistic forms are presented as adequate to the revolution. These are forms that set millions of hearts in motion.

Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov is one of the undisputed peaks of Russian and world revolutionary-romantic poetry. His ideological and artistic formation entirely refers to the period after the defeat of the Decembrist uprising of 1825. It is precisely the period between 1828 and 1837 that is unusually rich both in the poet's personal life and in events that changed the face of Russian society at that time. The reactionary policy that Nicholas I established towards all democratic strata remained unchanged almost until his death. It is significant that for thirty years (1825-1855) 674 uprisings took place in Russia according to official data, but in reality there must have been much more. Characterizing this historical period, V. I. Lenin wrote: "This is the era from the Decembrists to Herzen. Serfdom Russia is oppressed and immobile. An insignificant minority of the nobles protested, powerless without the support of the people. But the best people of the nobles helped to awaken the people." At the same time, the class struggle intensified in the West - in England the Chartist movement was developing, in France the July Revolution broke out, in Italy the Young Italy society was developing revolutionary and liberation activities. To a certain extent, these events found an echo in the highly sensitive Lermontov, helping to build him as a poet of the post-Decembrist era. This is even a whole line that was outlined in Lermontov's development as early as his entry into Moscow University.

The idea that there is no true literary historian who is not also a critic does not originate from yesterday, and yet it is very often neglected, left in the shadows. This attitude is especially to the taste of those who like to return to the "eternal dispute - is literary criticism a science or an art, or does it happily unite these two spiritual human activities. In fact, literary history does not know and does not recognize the separation of the theorist from the historian - we are talking about the historian-creator and the critic-creator - each of them in different aspects does the same thing: aesthetically evaluates the works of verbal art; one deals mainly with works from the present, the other is oriented towards the past. Another question is to what extent and how each achieves this. A wonderful, extremely useful example in this regard is the literary heritage of Professor Dr. Ivan D. Shishmanov. Getting acquainted with this heritage, our contemporary enters an ideological world where true service to science is combined in an unusual way with active social activity - the latter is the basis for the proper conduct of the former. Ivan Shishmanov is equally original and significant as a researcher of the Revival, as a folklorist, and as a historian of Western European literatures, and as a critic. Perhaps this is facilitated by the fact that his accumulation of diverse and rich knowledge is based on an original, innate talent as a writer. That is why the publication of a literary-critical essay about this great scholar of ours in "Bulgarian Writer" should be noted as very timely and useful.

Freed from the postulates of comparativity, the problem of the reception of a particular literary work in one or several national literatures naturally took one of the leading places in the interests of contemporary Marxist literary scholars. It could not be otherwise. After Marxism-Leninism permeated and enriched literary studies with its methodology and thereby turned it into an objective science, it became clear that the history of any national literature can be scientifically correctly presented and aesthetically truthfully revealed only when it is studied in connection with the history of other countries and peoples and their literatures, when the mutual connections and influences are clarified. Why? Because nothing else but the general, similar laws of historical development, which for each people (and each historical period) have their own, specific features, are the basis on which a given literary trend and influence grows and develops. This dependence was established by G. V. Plekhanov, who wrote that the influence of a given literature from one country on the literature of another is directly proportional to the similarity of the social relations of these countries.

In the sharp disputes that are being waged today about socialist realism and its relationship with modernism and critical realism, the problem of the formation of the new hero acquires special significance in those authors who come to socialist realism from modernism through critical realism. The correct solution of this question makes it possible to give a more complete and true picture of the contemporary literary process - on the one hand, and on the other - to overcome as dogmatic a number of concepts and opinions that objectively diminish the role of the writer as a creative personality, detach the problem of the formation of the new hero from the ability to assimilate the great example of the classics, from questions of innovation, artistic form, etc.

On September 12, 2001, at Kiev University, Pavel Andreevich Bugaenko, a professor at Saratov University, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic "A. V. Lunacharsky and the Literary Movement of the 20s", published in a separate book. I begin with these preliminary clarifications, because not only the general readership, but also specialists in Bulgaria learn very little about what is published in the Soviet Union outside of Moscow and Leningrad. Perhaps this applies more to literary critics, because, as far as I know, every physicist or biologist must, in principle, be informed about all the novelties in his field, otherwise he risks starting to work on a problem that others have already solved. For specialists in the humanities, this rule does not always seem to be mandatory. And recently, a number of phenomena in the development of literary literature have been radically reassessed, and separate trends, styles, and aesthetic categories are being clarified in a different way; there are attempts to read the classics in a new way, etc.

Vitaly Ozerov's new book has a clearly defined addressee - the mass reader, and an even more specific task - to show how Soviet writers depicted in their works the main stages of the half-century development of Soviet society. As a rule, the critic's attention is focused on novels, and by Russian Soviet authors; representatives of other nationalities are present more as "decor", from the posts only V. Mayakovsky, S. Yesenin, N. Dementiev, A. Surkov, P. Antokolsky, M. Aliger, A. Kuleshov, A. Akhmatova and others are mentioned with individual works. Through chronologically arranged essays, V. Ozerov achieves his goal: by analyzing individual works, he at the same time strives to reveal their place and significance in both literary and social life. Of course, as the critic emphasizes, in a small book it is hardly possible to cover the huge, multinational process in the history of Soviet literature. Here, it is necessary to bring individual authors and works to the forefront in order to highlight even more clearly what is an undoubted contribution.

The problem of the connections of Bulgarian writers with the world masters of the artistic word and more specifically with the Russian ones is of important methodological and practical importance. Today everyone agrees that in the development of Bulgarian literature - classical and contemporary - bright examples of typological and contact phenomena are found. That is why it is especially necessary to indicate the nature of this influence and it is with each individual author, since this will shed additional light on the literary process as a whole. In this sense, the legacy of Aleko Konstantinov hides very interesting, still incompletely studied literary material. His work shows its own specific features, and along with them also carries the common: close acquaintance with the works of Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol and Turgenev, Nekrasov and Shchedrin, as well as some basic principles in the aesthetics of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov - help our author to grow as a significant national writer. But they only guide him! Because, as I said, Aleko Konstantinov is an original Bulgarian satirist and feuilletonist. First and foremost, he relies on our national literature, no matter how scarce it was in terms of works and traditions at that time. All his works grow on our soil, they are an exciting echo of the social quests of our people in the 80s and 90s of the last century.

The impact of the October Socialist Revolution and Soviet fiction does not only imply the dissemination of ideas, the translation and reading of books. This is perhaps the purely external side of this complex and deeply contradictory process. But as an "external side" it also has its place and significance. However, it is no less important to see the ideological and aesthetic changes that occurred in the creative development of individual our writers and in literature as a whole after October. A new aspect in this regard is the way in which we responded to the first October events. Because new art, new production means, first of all, the discovery of a new form, on the one hand, and, on the other - the rejection of the "old" rules in order to manifest the new ones. And not only that. The new is never born suddenly, on the contrary - the elements from which it will "crystallize" accumulate for a long time. The new inherits and simultaneously elevates to a higher level that which prepared its appearance.

Recently, the publishing house "Narodna Kultura" released a monograph on Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. The publication is a jubilee one - in August of this year, the entire cultural humanity solemnly celebrated the one hundred and fortieth anniversary of the writer's birth. Numerous articles and notes - original and translated - have been published in Bulgarian so far, starting from 1898, when the seventieth anniversary of Tolstoy's birth and fifty years of his literary activity were celebrated. I will recall the most significant of them - Dimitar Blagoev's review of the treatise "What is Art?" on the occasion of its Bulgarian edition in 1900, Petko Todorov's preface to Lev Tolstoy's brochure "The Times are Near", individual works by Vasil Kolarov, Vela Blagoeva, Georgi Bakalov, confessions and assessments by Ivan Vazov, Aleko Konstantinov, Stoyan Mihaylovski and others. All this and additional material collected by the author formed the basis of the monograph "L. N. Tolstoy and His Influence in Bulgaria". There is no doubt - this is the first comprehensive study by a Bulgarian literary critic on the life, literary work and philosophical-ethical ideas of the great sage from Yasnaya Polyana. Among the vast - both in size and in thought - critical literature on Tolstoy, Georgi Konstantinov's book will rank not least. Above all, it captivates and excites with the researcher's personal attitude to the many and often mutually exclusive problems and ideas that Tolstoy himself advocated during more than half a century of his most active and fruitful creative activity, and under whose pen so many amazing works of art were born.