Georgi Konstantinov

Recently, the book by Vitaly Zlidnev "Russian-Bulgarian Literary Relations of the 20th Century" was printed in Moscow as a publication of the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Academy of Sciences, 220 pages. Vitaly Zlidnev is one of the talented students of the unforgettable N. S. Derzhavin, who continue and deepen the tradition he created for active and comprehensive research into issues of history, literature and in general the spiritual activity of the Bulgarian people, illuminating them very often and depending on the development of Russian history and literature, with which the Bulgarian people have been firmly connected since time immemorial. At the Institute of Slavic Studies, and not only there, there are about a dozen relatively young researchers who know in detail individual eras of Bulgarian history and individual our historical figures and writers... It seems to me that I will not be exaggerating at all if I say that the Institute of Slavic Studies occupies a high, honorable place in the process of mutual acquaintance of the two peoples, where its activists often participate with the unique breadth and depth of Russian and Soviet researchers, with the unique humanistic pathos characteristic of them, with the nobility of true brothers and internationalists.

I don't know if it's true now, but once upon a time, high school students had albums, on the colorful covers of which was printed Poesie, or Pour souvenir, or simply Album, and inside were all sorts of wishes, thoughts of great people, sometimes transcribed without indicating the author and directly signed by someone who liked them; they also wrote poems, most often prose poems" and all sorts of confessions or just: "my signature is modest, keep it as a souvenir... The graduates of the Svishtov Commercial High School were businesslike young men. The serious practical work for which they were preparing perhaps protected them from the sentimental passions inherent in their youth. Many of them, as is known, including the sons of wealthy parents, were already thinking about the imperfections of the social order, reading socialist books and newspapers, dreaming about the future, preparing for the struggle that was to come in order to reorganize society. Nikolay Liliev ended up at the commercial high school by chance and by a misunderstanding, which remained fateful in his life, because he was weak to remove it, and it was imposed on him with power later on. In Svishtov he already stood out among his classmates with his penchant for poetry, they remembered him as a reciter of Botev and Polyanov. But he studied his lessons diligently and read not only poetry, but also philosophical and political-economic literature in Bulgarian, Russian and German. We cannot know what part he took in the disputes on the then vexed political issues, especially on the disagreements between narrow and broad socialists. How much he was withdrawn may or may not have manifested himself in them. But it is very indicative that when in January 1903 his friend and classmate Tsonyu Stoyanov Gerganov from the Dryanovo village of Kereka presented him with his album with a request to write something as a souvenir, Nikolay Mihaylov did not use the nice paper to leave some of his own work there, nor did he copy other people's poems, but shared thoughts that really moved him and which it was very appropriate to point out to a student, obviously dedicated to his preparation to become a business activist:

In the spiritual biography of Pencho Slaveykov presented here, the most important and most often emphasized thought is that he grew up and prepared himself for life and art under the influence of his father - a Bulgarian folk poet and democrat-fighter, an exponent of a wisdom and an ideal that once inspired the Bulgarian guildsmen, peasants, and workers as a rallying revolutionary slogan: "Everything that is done for the people without the people is not righteous, is not legal." The son wrote a wonderful essay about his father; the main character in "Bloody Song," Mladen, is a bearer of the ideas of the old democrat:

Kostenets, July 30, 1951 Georgi Konstantinov In Moscow, where he was sent for treatment, Assen Raztsvetnikov died of blood cancer... Last year he lived here, near me, for a whole month. From here, Kamen Zidarov, then director of the National Theater, took him to the "Dr. Racho Angelov" hospital to the famous Dr. Tsonchev... (Kamen Zidarov was born in Draganovo and he and Assen loved each other very much.) I had known Assen Raztsvetnikov since 1922. He had completed several semesters of Slavic philology and literature when I enrolled, and he was already threatening to leave philology because he found it boringly dry and transfer to the Faculty of Law. He wrote and published poems that did not stand out with any special qualities. I knew him better as a student - Assen Kolarov - and as a passionate communist. For a long time, we both sat on the same bench.