Oldal 429 [429]
Zozas, Swings, Hooligans, and Other Personages of "Inappropriate" Behaviour in Caricatures
gani (‘hooligans’). One of the first caricatures of hooligans represents such a singing
and playing group of boys surrounding and alluring a girl on a bench in a park. In
the background a businessman from the old regime and his wife comment approv¬
ingly that the boys’ behaviour resembles that of their own children. However, these
are not their children. They are just personages from the urbanized environment,
though not predicted to appear in the socialist urban landscape (Fig. 4).
‘The stereotype for a hooligan’s outfit is a shirt and tight trousers with rolled up
sleeves and leggings, specific sneakers with thick flat soles; the hair has been styled.
The hooligan is always wearing an acoustic guitar on his back, and sometimes is
holding an accordion. The hooligans’ expressiveness with gestures, speech, noises,
music, and dressing style is obviously outside the prescriptive standards for mod¬
est personal behaviour of the time. As a result, they are often compared to exotic
animals and birds for their eccentricity, noisiness, and “primitivism” (Fig. 5). The
female hooligans are presented mostly as young girls with a specific hairstyle called
“pony tail”, which was regarded as a kind of revolt against modesty and collectiv¬
ism (Fig. 6). Sometimes the hooligans’ repertoire compete for the official cultural
and propaganda channels—for example in one of the pictures, the nonworking
radio loudspeakers at the central swimming pool in Sofia redirect the attention of
the public to the songs and anecdotes of the hooligans (Fig. 7). This is a case that
reveals the striving of the regime for minimizing the intimate, informal cultural
exchange in public and to replace it with the official and institutionalized cultural
values.
In the second half of the 1950s the hooligans’ representation focuses on their
antisocial and criminal activities. Beatings in the streets, aggression at dance par¬
ties, destroying public property, noisy strolls in the night, and so forth are the
context of the caricatures. This trend in the images is a reflection of real events
in the big cities, an unexpected result of the great urbanization process following
the mid-1950s (Fig. 8). In January 1958, the “Campaign against the hooligans” is
initiated by the authorities. The direct occasion for the campaign was an assassina¬
tion committed by a hooligan in a Sofia tram in late 1957. Then over a thousand
persons, who were accused of hooliganism in its quite broad meaning (acts of van¬
dalism, wandering, laziness, moral corruption, alcoholism, provocative outfit, and
dancing new Western dances) were arrested and most of them sent to the newly
open labour camp near the town of Lovech. The campaign was not hidden from
society—on the contrary, it was demonstrated as a necessary measure in maintain¬
ing public security by the authorities.
‘The images in this second period from 1952 to 1958 represent only the Bulgar¬
ian folk music and dances as an appropriate kind of entertainment (Fig. 9). Bulgar¬
ian folklore at that time was perceived as the culture of the crowd (in fact at that
time Bulgarian society was still a prevailingly rural society). Folklore was opposed
to the products of the old bourgeois cosmopolitan urban culture—the so called
urban folklore and jazz, accused now of being perverse and kitschy.
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