Oldal 431 [431]
OCR
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 “deserved” revenge on them—doing hard physical labour. In fact the caricatures suggest 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. 429
