Етнографската дейност на Ст. Л. Костов и комедиите му на селска тема
The Ethnographic Activity of St. L. Kostov in His Comedies on the Village Theme

Summary/Abstract: An interesting and only slightly studied feature in the work of Stefan Lazarov Kostov (1879-1939) the outstanding Bulgarian ethnographer and author of comedies, is considered in this article. On the basis of a concrete analysis, of the content, artistic and linguistic features of his comedies, the author reveals their close connection with his scholarly ethnographic interests. Being. as he was, an excellent connoisseur of the people's way of life, and their intricate and contradictory development in the period of capitalism, St. L. Kostov succeeded in recreating it with talent through artistic generalizations in his most striking dramatic works. The keen social purposefulness and profound national character of his comedies is due to this. The influence of his ethnographic activity on St. L. Kostov's work as a playwright is convincingly shown in the concrete analysis of two of his comedies on a village theme, Vrazhalets and Women's Kingdom. Intricate conflicting situations between the characters develop against the background of the truthfully depicted way of life in a Bulgarian village. Capitalistic relations destroyed not only the social bulwarks of the patriarchal way of life, but also considerably changed the mental aspect of the Bulgarian peasant and his criterion of values. That is why the most typical feature in the social and psychological characterization of the dramatic personae in these comedies is the conflict between the gross ethics, founded on personal interest and unscrupulous enrichment, on the one hand, and the patriarchal moral and ethical norms on the other hand. The fruitful combination in St. L. Kostov of the scholar ethnographer and the writer of comedies determines his deep penetration into the social roots of the people's way of life and their mentality which found great artistic and poetic generalization in his remarkable comedies.

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