Oldal 426 [426]
424
Anton Angelov
Zozas, Swings, Hooligans, and Other
Personages of "Inappropriate" Behaviour
in Caricatures—Bulgaria, 1940s—1960s
Studies of entertainment under the socialist regime in Bulgaria suggest a particular
point of view of the time, related to the concepts of popular culture, subculture, lei¬
sure, and consumption. The intensive social development after the Second World
War resulted in the disappearance of the old sociocultural stratification (Elenkov
2013: 135-136) and the appearance of a new urban society, which, although it
pretended to be “socialist” and therefore egalitarian, constructed new hierarchies
of power and prestige (Znepolski 2008: 395-402). In this new situation, cultural
trends from the old “bourgeois” reality become suspicious and punishable. Moreo¬
ver, some deviating phenomena, derived from the new status quo in Bulgarian
cities, also stirred authorities’ attention (Gruev 2014: 59-60). The sensitivity of the
authorities towards informal entertainment can be understood through Gramscis
concept of “cultural hegemony’—the rise of a leading social group based on the
control of economics and the presence of an attachment to the group of intellectu¬
als that “convince” the society of its ideas (Gramsci 1976: 33-41). In the role of
convincing intellectuals in this case would be newspaper editors and caricaturists
suggesting the image of “normality”. Following this paradigm, the questions this
research aims to answer are: What were the visual projections of the official percep¬
tions of inappropriate styles of behaviour? and What were the concrete symbols of
improper entertainment and how did they change through the years? The answers
would show the means by which mass propaganda could shape the behaviour of
the new citizen and would suggest implicitly the regime’s own concept of leisure.
The text lays emphasis on the visual representations of the Others’ entertain¬
ments in the first two decades of socialist development in Bulgaria. The period was
characterized with the initial coming to power of the new regime and intensive
social changes—nationalization, forced land cooperation, fast industrialization and
urbanization. All these were accompanied by new official requirements of morality
and behaviour—a spirit of collectivism and devotion to the construction of a com¬
mon utopia, restriction of individualism, neglecting the individual body and sen¬
suality, and so forth. The pages of the print mass media from those days are good
indicators of the attempt to shape people’s behaviour, the perception of ethics and
etiquette. One of the main techniques for this was the satirization and condemna¬
tion of “inappropriate” behaviour and styles of entertainment.