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Zozas, Swings, Hooligans, and Other Personages of "Inappropriate" Behaviour in Caricatures In comparison to the first two decades of the regime, during the second 20 years, Bulgarian society was already primarily urbanized, and a specific form of mutual negotiation between the institutions and social practice took place (Znepolski 2009: 395—480). Ihe representation of the Other in this new situation reguires a separate research, observing its specificities in the relations between the authorities, intelligentsia, and society. The object of this research is to describe the official vision of those kinds of entertainment that were incompatible with the criteria of the regime. For this purpose, published images from the satirical issues of the time will be applied and analysed. As a main source of images we chose Starshel (“The Hornet’)—a new illustrated satirical newspaper, published since 1946, supporting the official positions of the government of every aspect in its internal and international policy. Its pages were taken up mostly with caricatures, representing in a humoristic manner the dominant discourse on different social and political problems of the day. Through the years, among the pictures on the new changing political, economic, and social reality, some images present “inappropriate” behaviour, lifestyle, and entertainment. Though hyperbolized and manipulative, these pictures can be used as evidence of trends in the social development in the years after 1945. Since the late 50s, the daily Narodna mladezh (‘People’s Youth’), the monthly magazine Mladezh (‘Youth’), and the weekly Puss (‘Pulse’) also started to publish such satirical pictures concerning entertainment, and they were also used for this research. The representations of “inappropriate” entertainment in the years until the early 1950s satirize the lifestyle of the former urban elites, accused for relations with or participation in the pre-1944 governments, often qualified as “fascist” by the new authorities, due to its collaboration with the Third Reich. Often appearing in the caricatures are the so-called zozi and suingi (zozas and swings)—stereotype personages of urban youngsters with an emphatic interest in leisure, consumption, fashion, Western jazz music, and so forth. In the Bulgarian context, the word zoza comes from Zazou—the French youth subculture during the time of the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. Those boys and girls preferred American fashion and jazzy music, which was punishable in those days. “Swing” derives from a similar subculture in Nazi Germany (Gadzhev 2010: 94). In Bulgaria of the late 1940s, both words appear to represent the fashionable urban youth—zoza for a girl and swing for a boy. In the images from the second half of the 1940s, these personages are obviously tich—hypothetically, children of influential capitalists and bourgeois. In fact the artists much prefer to depict zozas. Most of them are wearing provocative expensive dresses, uncovering their crossed legs, with enormous gingerbread hats and highheel shoes. They have some coffee or tea, indignantly commenting on the end of the old status quo. These scenes usually take place in wealthy interiors with cushioned armchairs and sofas and heavy curtains (Fig. 1). Some caricatures suggest that these spaces separate and hide the old elites from the masses, the latter mani425
