Stoyan Iliev

There are poets who suddenly shine with a violent red flame and with their first call, with their first impulses, they go beyond the boundaries of the ordinary and conquer readers. Even the coldest, simplest words shine with the fiery rhythm of their feelings. It is not ambition, not imitation that directs them to poetic art. Unnoticed, like flowers in the field, their thoughts burst forth and one day we discover that a poet has been born. It is as if some higher power, that earthly-unearthly power, has gifted them with the ability to create their own world of thoughts and ideas. Their vital existence seems to transform itself into poetry. They sink into the spoken words and their poems, like a smile, naturally and effortlessly blossom on their lips. They think, they sigh, they dream in verses. What is expressed in acute life conflicts, or what passes away with chance, they transform into melodic flutter, into poetry. For them, poetry is not a craft. It is an organic breakthrough of their spiritual world. It is a tearing of the crust of everyday life by the inner boiling of experiences. It is a cry of a victor or a lament of victory. A joyful impulse of a discoverer or a suffering anguish of one broken by life. These poets may quickly go out, but the sparks they have scattered around them excite the imagination for centuries. "Fools" and crazy heads, they often draw upon themselves the wrath and curses of prudent grayness. Legends grow around them, the evil rumor of offensive mediocrity follows them, but they turn into myth.

If we now start to claim that poetry lags behind life, it is like repeating something that has often been said. The idea that it lags behind modern life is not new - this idea, it seems to me, has existed since. as poetry itself has existed. We simply need to understand that the coefficient of selectivity in poetry is incomparably higher than, say, in prose. It is not by chance that Anatole France ironized the readers of poetry - with songs, he says, the case is the same as with women: the most beloved is always the best of all the others.

In recent years, some literary theorists in the West have begun to suggest that we should abandon the method of socialist realism because it has already exhausted its possibilities. They have created their own theories and schemes for socialist realism, which, of course, have easily been exhausted because these theorists ignore the history of the emergence and development of socialist realism. Art in slave society has been created over millennia, in bourgeois society over centuries, and in proletarian society over barely a century. Indeed, the pace of the construction of socialism is unheard of in comparison with the construction of other societies. But socialism is constantly under pressure from capitalism, and we are still forced to wage a fierce class struggle in the international arena. This, of course, cannot but affect the pace of the development of the new, socialist art.