A Failed Ideology: About Bulgarian Skepticism toward Socialism

(Research on two works from 1941 – “Failed Revolutionaries” by Slavcho Krasinski and “In the Pub of Bai Tanasa” by Delcho Delchev)

Viktoria Viktorova

Sofia University

https://doi.org/10.53656/bel2025-6-5V

Abstract. This text examines the collection of short stories[1] “Failed Revolutionaries” by Slavcho Krasinski and “In the Pub of Bai Tanasa. Letters from the City to the Village on Contemporary Topics” by Delcho Delchev, which were published in the same year (1941) and subsequently entered the List of Fascist Literature Subject to Seizureaccording to the XII Decree of the Council of Ministers of October 6, 1944. The purpose of the study is to trace the public mood towards communist ideology – the new force on the political scene a few years before it took power. The idea is not simply to compare two texts from the same year of publication, but to explicate two different views that are united by their common anti-communist intuitions and have the courage to openly expose the falsehood behind the ideological clichés that have already begun to dominate. Krasinski, through the classical narrative genre of the story, and Delchev, through the fictionalization of the paraliterary epistolary genre, equally convincingly expose the “believers in miracles” – those who carry foreign ideological and political systems, not particularly suitable for our way of life, language and morality. Both authors believe that the Bulgarian at his core is not an ideological person, but a practical, common-sense person, turned to the “here” and the “now”, to his everyday life. The present text is motivated by an unexplored possibility – to see how, through the means of humor, irony and vernacular language, the two authors formulate an open criticism of the pseudo-revolutionary pathos, socialist rhetoric and faith in the bright future, immediately before it was formalized as the correct, and a little later as the only method of socialist realism. Thus, the present analysis will seek an answer to the question of how the two works from 1941. they dispel ideological clichés even before they become all-powerful and proclaim the right to think and create, regardless of the specific socio-political conjunctures, which, however, doomed them to total oblivion after 1944, continuing to this day.

Keywords: oblivion; prohibition; ideology; socialism; skepticism

Свързани статии:

Pedagogical Competence in Bulgarian Higher Education in the Middle of the Twentieth Century The Teaching of Bulgarian Literature as Distantly Own History and Ideology (The Theme of Revolution in Two 10th Grade Literature Textbooks) Life Story and Literary Interpretation. Atanas Dalchev’s Work in Literature Textbooks for Secondary Education