Fleeting thoughts: The creations of a writer as a philosophical topic: An example by the famous Bulgarian writer Yordan Radichkov

Philosophy can be considered as a kind of literature, but the good literary works always content

some kind of life philosophy. Thus a series of questions arises, from which will be considered the

following two:
How can that specific life philosophy in a literary creation be extracted and explicated? By what

methods and in what terms can one do that?

How should it combine with the properly literary and art criticism?

The methods, terms, and conceptions of the systematic philosophy would hardly suit for they are

adapted to represent the philosophy in the scientific form of objective and impersonal statements

while that of a literary masterpiece is embodied in personages, in their fictional behavior,

thought, feeling, emotional experience, and destiny. Its philosophy is certainly personal. However

just that personality is unconditionally necessary for a philosophy to be life philosophy, to be

understood and accepted by a human being and soul as a guide to the world.

Consequently, the most relevant method is that of philosophical hermeneutics addressing the

understanding and empathy of the creation in its proper “terms”, which are its language, style,

literary characters, plot, and expression. That life philosophy is implicit. It needs a philosopher as

its reader to realize and represent it explicitly.

Some works are intended as an embodiment of philosophical ideas or content them explicitly
being represented in personages’ or author’s speech. They can be reflected and commented just
as philosophical works utilizing philosophical notions and conceptions.
The literary and art criticism and the philosophical criticism are similar, but differently
addressed:
The former suggests the reader to be an educated human being or even another writer who
interpreted the work as literature and fiction while the latter one should understand it and get the
feel as reality represented as a story by another human being rather than philosophy or literature.
Consequently any “hermeneutics of suspicion” is incompatible with the reader a philosopher:
Reality should not be “suspected” as it expresses only itself. The creation is another universe or
ontology, and one can penetrate into it only inside rather than outside. The key is that: getting the
feel of the author, seeing the world by his or her eyes and mind. This is quite possible as the
author is another human being.
The famous Bulgarian writer Yordan Radichkov (1929-2004) created a warm and humane
universe like the pictorial one of Marc Chagall, intimate, naïve, wise and thus wonderful. It
implies a certain life philosophy, which would be ridiculous to be expressed conceptually. The
key for one to penetrate into it is the belief in its reality. The laws, causality and distances in it are
quite different than usual. They are determined by the logic of warmness and emotional
experience. Its ontology is created to be cosy like a home, from whose care the eternal child in us
observes the world and reveals it again. That child only has an access to the writer’s philosophy.

And an example for the example: Radichkov’s Green Tree of Hope
There is a short story named “The green tree” by the famous Bulgarian writer Yordan Radichkov, and there is a character of the same name in his play “Bustle”.
The plot of the story in the first person singular is quite simple: The character tells how his father had planted a green tree every year until his death since it had dried out every time, but he had tried again and again:
‘“But don’t you know”, asked the peasants him, “you don’t manage to plant a green tree?”
“Yes, I do,” he said.
“Well then why do you plant a green tree every year?”
“Well, what other can I do?” asked my father in his turn.
And I tell you the true truth that they couldn’t to answer him anything. Can you tell to anybody not to plant a green tree where it is anybody’s hope?’
Now the character plants a green tree every year again and again though it dries out always.
The story describes a concrete plot in a way to begin sounding as a parable out of space and time avoiding any lesson or moral: The true being of a human is told for anyone to understand that it founds on hope.
The character in “Bustle” named “The green tree” does the same: He carries a green tree to plant it.
Any human being is referred to time and thus to future. Future not being reality allows of situating good expectation in it, not so aiming to its realization only as keeping the soul green as the green tree of hope.
Literature being always concrete can embody philosophical ideas as phenomena “as displaying themselves in themselves and by themselves” (Heidegger). “The green tree” is a splendid example of how a story can be a true and deeper philosophy.