Érzelmek és vágyak az érett szocializmus idején: Kalin Janakiev bolgár költő és női rajongói
Feelings and Desires under the Mature Socialism: The Case of the Female Admirers of the Young Bulgarian Poet Kalin Yanakiev

Summary/Abstract: The development of the idea of ‘sentimental education’ and the concept of ‘socialist versatile personality’ in the end of the 1960s and in the beginning of the 1970s in Bulgaria triggered a kind of expressivist turn in the local ideological discourse of mature socialism. The latter was embodied in the vast institutional network of ‘the culture of consumption’ of the citizenship – literary workshops and clubs associated with schools, youth and women’s newspapers and magazines, fantasy-reading clubs, etc. Designed as a facade for the socialist way of life under the control of party cultural managers, this network was uncontrollably inhabited and used by individuals for self-discovery and projections of multiple desires and feelings. The proposed paper discusses at length the case of the female admirers of the young Bulgarian Poet Kalin Yanakiev, who were part of the above-described network and who experienced the expressivist turn in an unpredictable and original manner. I analyse 90 letters, addressed to Kalyn Yanakiev, a promising author of the Rodna rech (Native Speech, a young literary journal), written in 1973–74 by girls aged 16 to 18 from different Bulgarian towns and villages. A series of letters is brought under special focus, where girls revealed their feelings to Yanakiev, providing access to a complex intimate world, where interiorized versions of the socialist moral and aesthetic virtues overlap with and merge into individual original discoveries of erotic and sexual desires.

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