Maya Angelova
New Bulgarian University
[maiangelova@abv.bg], ORCID: 0000-0002-5973-3212
Outsiders and Runaways around 1965: Approaches to the Problem in the Context of Bulgarian Literature and Culture
Abstract: The article analyses the figure of the outsider within the cultural and literary context of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria in the year 1965, tracing the mechanisms through which the socialist system shaped, regulated, and selectively admitted representations of social marginality within the boundaries sanctioned by ideology. The study encompasses both comparative readings of foreign literary and cinematic examples and close analyses of Bulgarian texts, seeking to understand how difference was represented, managed, and ultimately absorbed into the normative cultural order. The article also considers how Bulgarian ideological discourse reconfigures the outsider as socially acceptable only when presented as young, redeemable, and ideologically correctable. Specific literary and cinematic examples such as Chico in Gencho Stoev’s novel A Bad Day, Ana in Rangel Valchanov’s film The She-Wolf (script by Chaim Oliver), and Rayna in Blaga Dimitrova’s novel Journey to Oneself are examined in detail, with attention to the stylistic, biographical, and behavioral mechanisms by which these characters either conform to or resist normative expectations. The article concludes by arguing that the figure of the outsider in Bulgaria in 1965 is both constrained by ideological containment and charged with critical potential, functioning as a prism through which literature registers the unassimilated zones of social reality and ethical consciousness.
Keywords: communist Bulgaria; 1960s, socialist realism; outsiders; juvenile re-education institutions; ideological infantilization; moral guilt; ethical narration.
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