Georgi Germanov

At the 18th International Congress of Slavists, the issues of Russian classical literature were widely discussed in accordance with its role and significance among other Slavic and non-Slavic literatures. The reports were numerous, with a different range of problems and appearance, written from different ideological and methodological positions. They nevertheless lend themselves to a certain degree of classification and grading. The first group of reports includes those that treated the most general problems of Russian classical literature (D. D. Blagoi, Dr. Nedelkovich). Their main task was to reveal the reasons that conditioned the emergence of this very important stage in the general centuries-old life of Russian literature, to establish some of its basic regularities, the main lines of its development, its appearance, place and significance. A central place is occupied by the clarification of the reasons for the emergence, development and demise of literary trends in their complex interrelation. Comparison with the corresponding moments and features of Western literatures is an important feature of these reports, which contributes to their greater completeness and justification of the theses. The authors of another group of reports (F. Seely, V. Velchev, B. Kreft, L. Niro, D. Grishin, E. Krag, I. Blankoff) have focused their attention on the study of very specific issues in the work of individual Russian writers or their mutual influences. Their goal in principle is to bring new moments into the clarification of the creative physiognomy of one or another writer, to shed light on controversial or insufficiently clear problems of his individual works, to show in a new aspect some aspects of his ideological and aesthetic concepts, to focus attention on some features of his style. The existence of such reports is justified by the need to develop specific problems, without which large generalizations are impossible. The presentation of a fairly large number of such reports, however, led in this case to a certain deviation from the main problems that should have been discussed in depth at the congress. A significant number of reports dealt in detail with the relations of Russian literature with other literatures (N. Krutikova, G. Dimov, T. Gane, V. Edgerton, Alb. Kovacs, etc.). Here, an important place is occupied not by the study of direct, immediate borrowings, but by the fundamental questions of the exchange and assimilation of artistic and theoretical experience between Russian literature and a number of Slavic and some non-Slavic literatures.

The appearance of the book "Images and Problems" is a positive phenomenon in our literary science. Its author Ivan Tsvetkov is known as one of the few best experts on Soviet literature in our country. 176 As early as 1964, the publishing house of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences released his book "Maxim Gorky and Bulgarian Literature", a solid study of some aspects of the great writer's work and of a number of problems of its penetration, distribution and creative perception in Bulgaria. Written with erudition, with a temperamental and lively pen, this work contributed a lot to the overall clarification of the issues of Bulgarian-Russian literary relations. In his first book, Tsvetkov is alien to the narrow setting and solution of problems. He does not mechanically transfer the results of one national literary development to another, does not turn the regularities in the development of one literature into a mandatory norm for another, but seeks the true creative interpenetrations, conditioned by a complex complex of social, political and cultural factors. The subject of the study is the literary-critical perception and stage adaptation of Gorky in our country, with the task of interaction with our poets and writers being set out in perspective. It has now been partially fulfilled.