The principal aim of cultural policy since 1944 has been to popularize the arts and sciences by making them accessible to all segments of the population and to utilize those mediums for the promotion of communist values. Popularization of the arts has been accomplished by greatly expanding the facilities that present the arts to the public and by supporting these facilities with state funds. Many new orchestras, theater companies, publishers, and art galleries have come into existence since World War II. Touring exhibits and road companies take the arts into small towns and villages. Radio and television have been extensively utilized to promote the arts and learning. Through state support, the prices of books and admission tickets have been kept extremely low in order to bring them within the reach of as many persons as possible. The traditional library clubs have been reinforced by a network of "houses of culture," which serve as cultural centers in villages and in urban neighborhoods.
LITERATURE
The origins of Bulgarian literature date back to A.D. 855 when the Greek priests Cyril and Methodius designed an alphabet—Cyrillic—suitable for the Slavic languages in order to facilitate the Christianization of the Slavs (see ch. 2). At first the alphabet was used to translate the Bible and other Christian religious texts, but in the Golden Age of the First Bulgarian Kingdom several original religious and secular tests were written by Bulgarians in their own language. In the late Middle Ages a substantial literature in Bulgarian was created. Although the authors were all churchmen, much of the literature was secular. A whole body of apocryphal literature—so-called heretical tales and legends—came into being at that time.
During five centuries of Turkish rule, no literature was produced except the orally transmitted folksongs and ballads. Not until the second half of the eighteenth century, when Turkish rule began to degenerate, did Bulgarian literature revive itself as part of the awakening national consciousness of the people. The first book to appear was Father Paisi's Slav-Bulgarian History, a highly nationalistic book published in 1762 that played a major role in the struggle for liberation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, several Bulgarian texts were published in neighboring countries. These were extremely influential in developing the modern Bulgarian language as their publication coincided with the establishment of schools and the spread of education among the Bulgarian people. A number of periodicals were also started by Bulgarians abroad, but most of them were irregular and short lived. Of considerable significance, however, was the collection and publication, first in periodicals and later in book form, of the folksongs and ballads that had kept alive the language and culture of the Bulgarians during the five centuries of Turkish rule. Much of the interest in folk literature came from outside the country from other Slavs in Serbia, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, and Russia, who were going through their own national awakening and had a kindred feeling for the Bulgarians.
The early modern literature was nationalistic and didactic. Its authors were educators involved in the spread of education and in the modernization of the language and revolutionaries fighting for an independent Bulgaria. Modernization and social reform were other strong currents permeating the literature of that time and later. Such poets as Petko Slaveikov, Lyuben Karavelov, and Khristo Botev were strongly influenced by the Russian social reformers and revolutionaries of the second half of the nineteenth century. Botev was the most outstanding poet of this era. His short, intense, and fiery poems continue to arouse patriotic feelings of Bulgarians everywhere. Botev's revolutionary fervor and heroism have been identified by the present-day regime with its own revolutionary movement, and he has been accorded great honor.
In the postindependence period the dominant literary figure was Ivan Vazov, whose influence on subsequent generations of writers has been tremendous. Known as the national poet and father of modern Bulgarian literature, Vazov was primarily a writer and not a crusader or revolutionary as were his predecessors. He was steeped in the great literature of Europe and Russia and used the Bulgarian setting and traditions to write about universal ideas. Vazov's greatest novel, Under the Yoke, describing Bulgarian life under the Turks, has been widely translated.
Vazov and his contemporaries Yordan Yovkov and Pencho Slaveikov (son of Petko Slaveikov) sought to direct Bulgarian literature away from its confines of national politics and reform into a more general artistic and philosophical outlook. They were joined in this effort by the somewhat younger Elin Pelin, whose stories have also been widely translated. Although these writers continued to draw much of their inspiration from native scenery, folk themes, and village life, they were writers of universal quality and appeal.
Later, rival literary groups, each with its journal, laid the basis for marked development in poetry, the short story, and the novel between the two world wars. No outstanding literary figure emerged, but writers continued to experiment with a variety of themes and forms.
Realism had always been a strong theme in Bulgarian literature, and in the decade after 1944 the Communists sought to utilize this tradition in imposing Soviet-style Socialist Realism as the desired form of expression. Writers who conformed to the prescribed style were generously rewarded with stipends and special privileges that encouraged a volume of writing heretofore unknown. The novel became the main literary form as it lends itself particularly well to the prerequisites of the prescribed literary style. Nikola Vaptsarov and Khristo Smyrnenski have been singled out by the government as outstanding writers in the style of Socialist Realism.
Most of the literature produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s has been classed at best as mediocre, even by Bulgarians themselves. Several works of that period, however, have been recognized as outstanding. The most acclaimed of these has been Dimitur Dimov's Tobacco, dealing with the revolutionary movement among tobacco workers before and during World War II. The novel was strongly condemned when first published in 1951 but, after the relaxation of cultural controls in the mid-1950s, it was hailed as the best novel since Vazov's Under the Yoke.