Родът срещу народа
The Big Family vs. the People

(The Conservative Revolution in the Texts of Toncho Zhechev and Krastyo Kouyoumdzhiev)

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores the semantic shifts in the use of the key notions in the discourse of national ideology – rod [big family] and narod [people]. The focus is on the writings of Toncho Zhechev and Krastyo Kouyoumdzhiev – key figures of the intellectual movement in the 1960s and the 1970s, which could be described as a paradoxical kind of “conservative revolution”. The positive evaluation of rod [big family] and even pleme [tribe] as signifiers of the Bulgarian ethnic community reverses the grand narrative of the Bulgarian Revival – the transition from “sleep” to “awareness” as rhetorical figures, representing the progress from “belated”, uneducated pre-modern times to more developed and enlightened present. The reversal of the connotations of rod and narod undermines the dominant progressivist discourse of the official Marxist ideology and the narrative about the National Revival in particular. The paper tries to shed light on the multi-layered problematization and reversal of the regimes of historicity in the late socialist period.

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