Redirecting National Identification by the Communist Regime in Bulgaria 1944–1950
Redirecting National Identification by the Communist Regime in Bulgaria 1944–1950

Summary/Abstract: The scope of the research I will be presenting here today includes a survey of the functioning of the National Theater up to 1952. I used such a chronological restriction for several reasons. First, because this was the time of brutal institutional terror, both ideological and physical. Second, because following the institutional strengthening of the communist regime, which was completed by the end of 1947, and the enactment of the so-called Dimitrov constitution, mechanisms for institutional control over the theater were fully in place. Third, because circa 1952 the “socialist patriotism” doctrine was already being formulated. So I am interested in how the notion of the national identity and cause was changed and shifted in the very period up to 1952. Therefore the study is not intended to offer an interpretation of performances from the period or of the plays written and performed within it. Neither does it intend to propose a history of theatre from the beginning of communism. Its focus will be the research and analysis of changes in theatrical discourse at the moment when there was a break in the strategies of representation of the nation in the period between the two world wars, and transforming them along new lines, images and paradigms that then enter and participate in social communication. Thus, the aim of the study is to understand the structural changes in the social world of early communism through the aesthetic strategies and collective life of the theatre.

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