Emil Georgiev

In the second half of August of last year, the first international conference on poetics was held in Warsaw, on the initiative of the Institute for Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in which literary scholars, linguists and folklorists from the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, the United States, England, France, the Netherlands, and Israel took part. The conference program included reports by prominent Soviet scholars, academicians and professors V. V. Vinogradov, A. I. Efimov, N. I. Zhinkin, and D. S. Likhachev, but only the latter two took part in the conference. Polish literary scholars and linguists, led by the organizers of the conference S. Zhulkowski, M. R. Mayenova, and K. Vika, took part with reports from all areas of poetics. The world-famous Polish linguist Prof. J. Kurilovich was very active in the work of the conference. The largest was the US delegation, led by the prominent linguist and Slavicist Prof. R. Jacobson, who took part in the discussions on most of the reports. Among the participants in the conference were the well-known Czech Slavicist and Bulgarianist Prof. K. Horalek, the Romanian academician-literary critic T. Vianu, the German Slavicist and folklorist, professor at the University of Jena H. Peukert, the Dutch Slavicist, now professor in California Schonefeld, and many others. Bulgaria was represented by Petar Dinekov, Lyubomir Andreychin, Stoyan Dzhudzhev and Emil Georgiev. Over the course of 10 days, in morning and afternoon sessions, 50 reports were read and about 120 speeches were made on them. The reports were grouped thematically, so that each day reports from a specific area were read and discussed. It is difficult to cover the problems raised at the conference in a report like ours. They were truly numerous and diverse and affected all areas of poetics, as well as being connected to related areas. A suitable atmosphere was created for productive scientific work. The method of persuasion and arguments prevailed. Only rarely did a sharp polemical tone sound, revealing fundamental worldview contradictions and different understandings of the issues raised. Since the term "poetics" is not particularly popular in our country, and some even consider it outdated, including the content of this discipline in the theory of literature, it is not uninteresting for our reader to clarify the very concept and the content of this branch of literary studies. The subject matter of the reports that we outline in our report clarifies this quite fully. The German professor H. Peukert (GDR) in his report formulated the concept of the term that he accepts: the study of the essence, genres and forms of poetic creativity and their inherent content and visual means, which, through comparative observation of individual works, leads to the definition of typological features and genre regularities.

The significant achievements of humanity in the field of culture are not the result of isolated creative processes among individual nations. Nations, even when they built walls like the Chinese, communicated with each other: they used and assimilated values ​​created by other nations, developed their own and borrowed ones further, and themselves offered their conquests in the field of culture to other nations. Thus, with joint efforts, the universal human culture was built and is being built. Nations create their literature in the same way: on the one hand, the tribal, folk, or national genius leaves its mark on it; on the other hand, however, the literary heritage of humanity and numerous manifestations of multilingual modernity are used and developed; creating their literature in this way, a nation makes its contribution to world literature, offering works to foreign readers and influencing foreign authors. We must note that the national peculiarity of individual literatures is not an obstacle to diverse influences in all directions. Literary interactions enrich literatures, contribute to their faster growth, contact with a foreign work is often a contact of flint to flint. Literary interactions are especially characteristic of our modernity due to the increased communication between peoples, the mass translations of literary works from one language to another, the study of foreign languages ​​as a necessary component of modern education. In this situation, literary studies could not and should not be limited to the facts and processes of only one separate literature. Even isolating these facts and processes, it could not present them in a full and truthful light, reach all their original sources and those streams that increase the flow of the general stream, and trace their entire meaning if they also pass into other literatures. The isolated consideration of literatures, their periods, authors and works does not allow for the discovery of a large number of phenomena, processes and patterns, which become apparent only if the phenomena, processes and patterns in several literatures are compared. Phenomena gain brightness, magnitude and relief when compared with similar phenomena.

Paisii Hilendarski rises as a bright beacon among the historical and historical-literary processes that take place at one of the peak moments in our development - at the beginning of the Bulgarian Revival and the new Bulgarian literature. His work collects the light of the past and directs it forward into the future. As the founder of a new era, he has a clear view of its needs and sees deeply into the fate of our people. And the famous Slavo-Bulgarian History is not only a major work of new Bulgarian literature, but presents a program that sets the tasks of the Bulgarian Revival and charts a path for the development of the Bulgarian BO people. The bright figure of the first Bulgarian Revivalist has long attracted the attention of our science. However, the sources for both his activities and his era are scarce and the scientific search is struggling to find its way to his personality and to the processes that brought him to the brink of two eras, as a harbinger of a new moment in the historical and literary development of our people. Our Marxist historiography and literary studies - one might say - have already explained the essence of our Revival, which represents a period of transition from a feudal to a capitalist formation. However, a number of extremely important questions that the development during the era poses have remained unclear; Their solution would reveal to us more specifically the processes that lead to the appearance of the Slavonic-Bulgarian History in 1762 and that follow after this appearance, in order to complete in our country "the Great Engels Revival. 1 of a progressive revolution" - as he called it. Our general and literary historiography of recent times has rightly directed its attention not only to the phenomena that register the offensive movement and acquaint us with the picture of life and the achievements of culture and literature, with a number of personalities and works representing the individual moments and successes of our socio-historical and literary past, but also to the processes and laws of our development. However, in order for these processes and laws that drive our development to become fully apparent, Paisius' work and our Revival must be placed in the light of the general historical and historical-literary development that European peoples have undergone over the centuries.

Defining the concept of "world literature" can hardly be achieved without effort and polemics, as it probably seems to many who are accustomed to it. It is indeed not easy to give a decisive answer to questions such as: which are the literatures that have managed to impose their achievements as conquests of the entire human society; what guides a development that runs through the entire history of mankind; what are the ingredients, criteria and drivers of the process that merges the achievements of folk and national literatures into one and at the same time fertilizes folk and national literatures; and so on.

The 125th anniversary of the birth of Rayko Zhinzifov is a good occasion to look at him again as a poet and to indicate the place of his poetry in our literature, more precisely in our literary history, insofar as this place cannot yet be considered fully established. Our interest in our Revival, a truly important era in the development of our people, on the one hand, and our love for the literary heritage of those who created Bulgarian poetry, on the other, are a constant stimulus to return to his poetic image, to seek a living or historical meaning for his poems, to republish his poetic heritage, despite the voices of denial of his poetic gift that have been heard more than once. Assessments of Zhinzifov's poetry have been very contradictory since its appearance. While Lyuben Karavelov greeted the "New Bulgarian Collection", published in 1863, with a negative review (printed in the newspaper "Bulgarian Bee", issues 7, 8 and 9), Vasil D. Stoyanov pointed to its author as the most gifted among the young poets. This high assessment of Zhinzifov, given in an early critical study on contemporary Bulgarian literature, which remained unknown in our country because it was printed in Czech, in the central organ of Czech science and culture of that time - the Journal of the Czech Museum, is interesting. "Zhinzifov is still very young - writes here the future secretary of the Bulgarian Literary Society, which grew into the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences after the Liberation - and we can hope that in due time he will become a famous Bulgarian poet, and a lyrical poet, if Amor and the Bulgarian Villas do not abandon him. "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.

Having emerged from the dark Middle Ages in the second half of the 18th century, the Bulgarian people entered modern European socio-political life, found ways to the new economic activity of Southeastern, Eastern and Central Europe, and took part in the arena of the struggle for freedom, which was waged by the peoples enslaved by feudalism during the era. And significant figures of European socio-political and cultural life met its representatives on their way. The meetings of European writers with Bulgarians left interesting, and often significant, traces in modern literature. We can start these meetings with one great name - Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. The meeting of the great Russian poet with bright and colorful images of Bulgarians left a certain mark on his creative path, which is why it cannot but arouse the interest of the literary historian. Pushkin met Bulgarians during his exile in Chisinau, Bessarabia. As is known, the Chisinau period of Pushkin's life and work covers the time from the autumn of 1820 to the summer of 1823. Pushkin arrived in Chisinau to take up a clerical position in the office of General I. N. Inzov. The Chisinau period is very important in the development of the poet. He matures, his ideological peace is enriched, his poetic talent flourishes. Exile does not break his freedom-loving nature. His hatred of tyrannical power is tempered.

Events that change life also change people's thinking, change their spiritual peace, change their concepts of the beautiful and the ugly, of the sublime and the low. They also change artistic thinking, which receives verbal and figurative embodiment in literature. Literature is a seismograph for the changes taking place in the lives of peoples. It captures new phenomena and, if they are seeds in the folds of fertile furrows, gives them life. At the same time, it creates an appropriate form to accommodate the new content. The Great October Socialist Revolution is the greatest of these events that change life. It was natural that it would become a turning point in the development of art and literature, especially of those peoples who were most affected by it. Such were the Slavic peoples, not only those in the Soviet Union, but also those outside it. I will not speak here about the Slavic peoples in the Soviet Union - Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. The turning point that occurred in their general and literary development with the Great October Revolution is well known, obvious to everyone. I will focus on the literatures of the Slavic peoples outside the Soviet Union.

Slowly and with difficulty, the Bulgarian people emerge from the medieval darkness of the Ottoman Empire to live in the light of the New Age, which has long since flooded most of the European continent. Of course, the processes unfolding in its own bowels lead it onto the path of new development. In the conditions of its new historical existence, one after another, figures appear who create its new national life, its new national culture, its new national literature. Of essential importance for its further development is its inclusion in the contemporary socio-political and cultural life of the European peoples. Prominent representatives of the cultural life of the related Slavic peoples have special merits for its inclusion in this life. The names of Vuk Karadzic, Konstantin Kalajdovic, Yuri Venelin, Pavel Yosif Safarik are names of discoverers of the people forgotten in the depths of the Ottoman Empire. The Bulgarian images and pictures of Bulgarian life and the Bulgarian fatherland that have come to life in the works of a number of Slavic writers bring him closer to the consciousness and emotional peace of the Slavic peoples, who will live with his fate, will seek ways to help him, to protect him, to lead him out of his servile misery.