Lyudmila Grigorova

Now, after his tragic death, these poems sound like a terrible premonition. And when they were published, the reader hardly perceived them that way. Some may even have thought them premature - such poetry is usually written at the end of life. It is not surprising that others saw in them a kind of coquetry - so many poets demonstrate their maturity even in the infancy of their development! I mentioned maturity. Unusual as it may be, he died at the age of thirty-two as a fully strengthened, formed and, in a sense, completed artist. When I say completed, I do not at all think that there was nothing more to be expected from him. His achievements are well known not only as a poet, but also as a librettist and translator. And if we take into account his confessions to friends that he carried within him plots for novels that could not be realized due to his early death, when he was already psychologically prepared to move on to fiction, only then will we appreciate what misfortune befell Bulgarian literature during those dark November days of 1967.

It is almost impossible to define this book by genre. It is entitled "Philosophical Literary Etudes". Already in the title, Isaac Passy has hinted at its diversity. Because this is a collection composed of philosophical sketches on works from the world literary classics. From Boccaccio to Thomas Mann, from the Early Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century. From "The Decameron" to "Doctor Faustus". The author, and also the artist (in designing the title) had in mind the greater proximity of the book to the philosophical sketch and have emphasized this proximity in order to make it easier for the reader. The difficulty in defining it in terms of genre comes not only from the many focuses of Philosophy and especially aesthetics with literature, but also from the "lack" of unity in the approach of its author. Isaac Passy is not a Literary Critic and he does not approach the works from the positions of a literary scholar-researcher. And yet these are critical studies in which philosophy and literature go hand in hand; they condition each other. Moreover, in the contemporary state of knowledge, there is not and cannot be a precise demarcation between the individual sciences; very often they study the same object - in this case - the Literary Work. And the author is a living person and when he writes, he thinks least of all about which branch lovers of precise classifications and pedants will attribute his work to. However, the given predominance of philosophy is evident not only in the deliberate selection of the works ("The Unknown Masterpiece" by Balzac is a philosophical study, and Voltaire's "Candide" ephilosophical story), but also in the conscious search for philosophical and aesthetic problems, and in works whose authors were never art theorists, nor were they concerned with the fate of the creator of artistic values. Writers such as Cervantes and Shakespeare, for example, consciously or not, have left behind a lot of problems and dilemmas - resolved and unresolved, and perhaps even unsolvable, over which people have been pondering for four centuries. But if they had said clearly and categorically who Hamlet is and who Don Quixote, would these works have attracted generations so strongly? As they are, they give the reader the opportunity to build their own ideas, which they can contrast with others.