About Macedonian Contemporary Poetry
by
Georgi Stardelov

Born in Gevgelija. Aesthetician and literary critic. Ethics professor on the University of St. Kiril and Metodij in Skopje. Author of numerous literary works about the history of Macedonian literature, ethics and aesthetics. Member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Among others, published the following books: "Essays", "Worlds", "Antej Seeks for Soil", "The Era of Contradictions"

When the first generation of postwar Macedonian authors created their works immediately after the war, the Macedonian literature at that historic momentum was faced with what simply seemed to be insurmountable literary challenges.
The first of the authors had to do with the creation of literary and linguistically complete and comprehensively standardized language from the Macedonian language. That generation considered the creation of literature and the creation of language for a unique creative act. Since 1945 the Macedonian literature, starting from the literary and language experiences of the generation of authors between the two world wars: Kosta Racin, Kole Nedelkovski, Venko Markovski, Vasil Iljoski, Risto Krle etc. has plunged into the deep well of our ancient language preserved in the hagiographies and apocrypha books, also in the poems, stories, legends from the rich folklore creation, discovering its poetic force and raising it to a fundamental principle in the creation of the new Macedonian literature. The authentic Macedonian words instantly settled the poems, stories, novels and plays of the Macedonian authors, turning the Macedonian language not only into a poetic organon of our literature, but also into one of the most powerful means of our people in its spiritual self-realization. It is the Macedonian literature that takes the greatest credit for the fact that in these five decades the Macedonian language has gained all the dignity of a literary emancipated European language with great poetic expressiveness which reflects the creative treasure of our literature and conveys almost the whole most famous world literary classics; and that language, forbidden and denied for centuries, has reached in that short time the treasure of the developed European languages. If, to that, we have in mind that the profoundness of the spiritual essence of one people is in the profoundness of its language, which, by itself, is indivisible from its literature, then we can see how and how much the Macedonian literature was of an inestimable importance for establishing the Macedonian language and historic identity. Thanks to our literature, the Macedonian language grew into our only complete fatherland, for Macedonia is in its spiritual integral totality only with our language and with our literature. In that way, the language and literature, being one and indivisible, became prevailing and uniting basic principle of the entire Macedonian cultural space. Let us remember Blaze Koneski: "Macedonians, listen to this - he wrote - for us much more than for many other people in the world the language, with everything created in it as oral or written text, represents the closest approach to the ideal fatherland. In fact, it is our only fatherland".
The second challenge that the postwar Macedonian literature faced in the last five decades was from a literary and aesthetic nature. Without more developed literary and aesthetic experiences and procedures, relying on the rich folklore tradition an continuing it, the postwar Macedonian literature - according to the degree, contents and extent of its postwar aesthetic development when all literary genres lived to their renaissance and creating in each of them works with permanent aesthetic values - represents almost a unique phenomenon in the European and among the European literatures. Starting from the autochthonousness of its national sensibility and from the rich existential experiences of its own folklore mythology, in this period of five decades, not long enough for living an entire human life, over a thousand books of poetry have been published in the Macedonian literature.
All that speaks that in this period of five decades from the development of the postwar Macedonian literature (in which more significant works in Albanian and Turkish were created) different epochs of styles, literary procedures and processes, taking place in the course of centuries in the normal evolution of the European literatures, crossed and overlapped. The synchronic going on of the old literary epochs in it, for example of the romanticism and realism in all their poetic invariable, and of the modern European avant-garde efforts, had one almost natural parallel process: to fill in what is left over from the previous literary epochs because of the discontinuity in the literary evolution and to grab and snatch forward in the new modern epoch, accepting one accelerated literary development. In the spirit of openness of the Macedonian culture in its development of many centuries, our people, already at the end of the fifties, took the stand that the spirit was like a parachute: if functions only when it is opened. That openness of the postwar Macedonian literature towards the other Balkan literatures, as well as towards the European and world literature; those organic streams in it of the east and west wind, i.e. of all relevant movements and procedures led to a great aesthetic emancipation of the postwar Macedonian literature and to its fast and complex aesthetic development...
... Two colors are dominant: the red and black. The basic philosophic and aesthetic system and principle of the Macedonian mythology and of the basic metaphoric system of the Macedonian poetry and literature in general have started to be built and developed upon them. From that incident with archetypal basis, the red and black imposed themselves as the two basic symbols of the Macedonian mythology and the Macedonian literature, of the entire Macedonian artistic and folklore creation. Since that tragic turbulence in 1014 until today the Macedonian embroideries have woven embroideries with red and black threads, in the poems red and black cocks have fought in the sky, and the brightness and darkness have fought on the earth. All that is most impressively expressed by Blaze Koneski in his famous poem "The Embroideries":

Two cherishe threads unpick
from the depth of your heart
and weave them into fulfilling sorrow unsaid
A red one to tell of yearning, longing and dread.
And a fate woven by age unbound
will be formed from two threads:
one harmonious sound.
From one a restless darkness is to be born
and the other will give birth to a bloody dawn.

Bringing the Macedonian literature in organic connection to its autochthonous mythology, I see their onto-genetic unity in the uniqueness and autochthonousness of their common and immanent metaphoric basis. Eventually, the metaphor has a mythic status in all language creations. Therefore, it is simply impossible to separate the Macedonian poetry, and wider the Macedonian literature, from its mythology.