Сирак Скитник и художествената критика от първата петилетка (1948-1953)
Sirak Skitnik and the Art Criticism of the First Five-year Plan (1949-1953)

Summary/Abstract: The article gives to an extent the parameters within which the name of Sirak Skitnik has been widely used and relevant in the earliest years of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria in relation to the so-called five-year plan. The interest in such a marginal, both to Sirak Skitnik and the reviewers, issue is stirred up by the assumption that in that period ‘socialist realism’ has been formulated as a ‘negative’ to Bulgarian modernism of the preceding period. This process, on the one hand, was triggered by purely opportunistic requirements and was related to the establishing of arts as a functional link of the machinery of government, which has been a conceptually new phenomenon in Bulgarian culture. The process, on the other hand, necessarily operates with inherited values and criteria. Criticism received by Sirak Skitnik is only one among many manifestations of the historic ‘third generation’, of whom much later many of their representatives would speak as of treading the line of the ‘third way’. The ‘third way’ is suggestive of an attempt to survive physically in conditions unimaginable to contemporary generations, a fact that makes difficult any attempt to evaluate the events in terms of their moral values. So, the article just broaches the methods of historization, of dealing with the recent past and placing it in the new ideological scheme of a strong and united society that knows where they are heading for.

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