Simeon Hadzhikosev

One of the most interesting problems of contemporary art - its relationship with science - is imposed on today's aesthetics. The old functional relationship between art and society is no longer a mystery to anyone, but in the second half of the twentieth century the socio-social factor of science acquired a relative weight that it had never had before. The past century was a time of remarkable upsurge in the field of social and natural sciences. The genius of Marx and Engels transformed philosophy, political economy and history, placing them on a truly scientific basis. Archaeology also became a science. Darwin's epochal discoveries in the field of geology, Mendeleev's in chemistry, gave a strong impetus to the development of natural sciences. After experiencing Romanticism in the second half of the century, several aspects of rapprochement between artistic creativity and science began to emerge. What these aspects had in common was the use of scientific procedures in the preparatory stage preceding the creation of a work (primarily fiction). Naturally, this process was in organic harmony with the growing credit of the aforementioned sciences.

Symbolism still remains one of the most unexplored areas of our literary history. The reasons for this are many and of the most diverse nature. Bourgeois science cannot embrace this phenomenon in perspective and retrospectively - it lacked the historical distance, and its very approach could hardly ensure the desired success. In the period of the cult of personality, the inertia of crude sociological simplistic thinking for a long time kept our literary science captive to the setting, the essence of which was reduced to the statement that symbolism was one of the ideological disguises of the reactionary bourgeoisie. Alleged vices were exposed, real and undeniable virtues were kept silent. And since there was a time when exposing the openly reactionary in science and art was considered almost an outdated taste, and the arrows in our criticism were aimed at "disguised" idealism, "disguised" fideism, etc., then it seemed fashionable to criticize symbolism as well.

A necessity for our literary science is the combination of the sociological, psychological and aesthetic-philosophical principles in the literary-theoretical problematic, so that it can emerge from the role of a simple companion of the literary process and take its rightful place as a generalizing and guiding force. In this sense, the relapses from journalism and the template in literary-theoretical and critical work must be condemned, the danger of essayism as a scientific approach and the risk associated with modern formalistic and experimental methods must be highlighted. An illustration of these thoughts, expressed by Acad. Pantelei Zarev in his speech before the First Congress of Bulgarian Writers, is the theoretical-historical model of our literature from before the Liberation to the First World War, proposed by him in his book "Panorama of Bulgarian Literature". Through it, he not only makes a deeply justified characterization of the concepts of "national destiny" and "national character", as well as of their dialectical interrelation and unity with our literature, but also brings out his thought about the originality of our historical national existence and the literature associated with it. "The decisive thing in our ideological existence - writes P. Zarev - were not the influences, strong and even stimulating in themselves, but the pressure of hidden forces, moral, psychological and socio-historical. The grain grows on its soil, draws its juices from it, leaves its fruit in it. Such is the original fate of the writer. Naturally, our national destiny weighs on him, even when the separation from the generic begins, when the phenomena contrasting with the past and the raging forces of individualism are already emerging. This is precisely what provides the grounds for a literary-historical logic, for a national