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OCR
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, leisure, 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. Moreover, 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 intellectuals 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 perceptions 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’ entertainments 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 common utopia, restriction of individualism, neglecting the individual body and sensuality, 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 condemnation of “inappropriate” behaviour and styles of entertainment.
