From Being Deprived to Bestowing Privileges – Artistic Reflections of the Wrestlers /Mutri/ Subculture in The Novels by Georgi Stoev
From Being Deprived to Bestowing Privileges – Artistic Reflections of the Wrestlers /Mutri/ Subculture in The Novels by Georgi Stoev

Summary/Abstract: One of the most characteristic phenomena of the Transition in Bulgaria in the 1990s were the socalled Wrestlers’ brigades. Their emergence and rise left a lasting imprint on the social fabric and provided the initial impetus for the formation of the so-called ‘Wrestlers/ Mutri’ subculture. In a situation of rapidly changing public, economic and social environments in Bulgaria after the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1989, the Wrestlers’ brigades gave young men with modest family backgrounds the opportunity to become part of a set enjoying a progressively privileged economic and social circumstance. In the aftermath of the state's abdication of its regulatory and adjudicative functions, these groups and their individual members gained access to various power levers and transformed from privileged to privileging — granting privileges — both to in-group members (family, friends, etc.) and outsiders such as politicians, business people, artists, etc. This process of transformation from disadvantaged to privileged in this context has not yet been fully explored. The available documentary and archival information is currently limited and difficult to access. Fiction as a parallel source allows us to consider these processes from a different angle. The purpose of the proposed paper is to analyse the novels of Georgi Stoev – admittedly a former member of a Wrestler’s group, as a source of information about the process of transformation from disadvantage to privilege and of specific subcultural traits. By comparing the information in the eight books in the ‘Witnesses of the Times’ and ‘BG Godfather’ series with publicly available documents, studies and publications, a deeper understanding is obtained of the values and dynamics of the Wrestlers/ Mutri subculture in Bulgaria at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.

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