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Zozas, Swings, Hooligans, and Other Personages of "Inappropriate" Behaviour in Caricatures
their official representative institution—the Comsomol. That makes youngsters
further alienated from the regime and the ideology. All this was strongly catalysed
after the World Festival of Youth and Students, which took place in Sofia in the
summer of 1968, when young Bulgarians were in direct informal contact with
youngsters from abroad, including leftist representatives from Western capitalist
countries (Gruev 2014: 51-57). That is why we could recon the late 1960s as
a turning point of a new page for the youth subcultures in Bulgaria and their visual
representations, which deserve a separate research.
What can we conclude from the development of the representations of leisure
and entertainment? In the first period, which took place in the second half of the
1940s and the very beginning of the 1950s, there was no pure entertainment to
show, but rather an exposure of the stereotypical “sins” of the former elites, which
had to be isolated from the political and economic life. The caricatures, of course,
tune up the negative public opinion against those classes, but also present the “de¬
served” revenge on them—doing hard physical labour. In fact the caricatures sug¬
gest the need for total mobilization of the masses and do not reveal any correct
form of leisure.
In the 1950s, after the marginalization of the remnants of the old elites, the
propaganda emphasized some representatives of a new, young urban generation,
expressive in their entertainment, having nonconformist and sometimes deviant
behaviours, as a result of the mass migration from rural to urban environments,
from tradition to modernity connected with acculturation. Though they appear in
the pictures in the 1950s as hooligans, we could suppose that they have inherited
similar subcultures of earlier times—for example the so called mrikati' ‘dodgers,
crooks’) on the Bulgarian interwar urban landscape, but because of their lower
social origin they weren't in the focus of the new regime’s repression, unlike the
upper class.
At the time of neutralizing the hooligans in the late 1950s and the perceptible
processes of urbanization, there arose the problem of the considerable orientation
of the urban youth towards the products of the popular culture of the West. The
regime starts to give new nationalist arguments against it, realizing the need for
a new modern national form and conformism to its suggestions for entertainment
and culture. The latter has the aim to bring the youth out of the private spaces of
the home parties and to divert its interest in the West. The development of the new
Bulgarian mass culture is a long-lasting process during the 1960s. By the end of the
decade its institutions have already been built. From now on they try to replace the
models of the West with some adapted for the official values.
' A slang for male representatives of the lower and working class in the interwar Bulgarian cities, dodgers,
and crooks, showing off with attributes of the upper classes.
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