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Simeone, John B.
1967.
1967 Annual Supplement.
p.
1.
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Politics and the Arts in Communist Bulgaria
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Abstract
The Arts of Bulgaria since World War II are of considerable interest for the history of art largely because they so directly demonstrate what happens to the arts of a previously non-Communist country under Soviet dominance. Since the Communist take-over, not only has Bulgarian art directly reflected the Soviet political line but it has done this even more thoroughly than the art of the Soviet Union itself. For beautiful Bulgaria is such a compact and homogeneous little country—about 325 miles long and 215 miles wide, with a population of only 8 million people, about 90 percent of whom are of specifically Bulgarian stock—that its Communist government can control the arts with far greater ease than can the regime of so enormous and racially diversified a nation as the Soviet Union. Even long before World War II, Slavic Bulgaria had closer cultural links with Slavic Russia than did any of the other countries that fell under Soviet political domination as a consequence of the war. As might therefore have been expected, its arts have reflected the influence of the Soviet aesthetic of “socialist realism”—and the distinct but related and highly relevant Stalinist formula of an art “national in form and socialist in content”—more directly than have those of the other “satellites.”
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1967
References
1 See the Bulgarian Guide Book 1963 (Sofia, 1963), p. 62. The city was begun by merging three villages in 1947 (ibid., p. 287). However, the general urban plan was made in 1950 by architect P. Tashev and his co-workers. It is illustrated in Liuben Tonev, Arkhitekturata v Bulgariia, 1044-1960 (Sofia, 1962), p. 31.
2 For a plan of Dimitrov's tomb see Tonev, p. 52. It was designed by the architects Ovcharov and Ribarov.
3 Plans and additional illustrations of the hotel at Turnovo can be found ibid., pp. 133- 35. The architects were Dimchev, Kolandzhiev, and Pavlov.
4 For this speech, delivered on December 7, see Pravda, Dec. 28, 1954. An English translation is in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, VI (Feb. 9, 1955), 7-14, 33.
5 Pravda, Feb. 15, 1956, p. 5
6 There is an outside staircase in reinforced concrete on the Hotel Sirena at Golden Sands, and I noticed another, then still under construction, at a third Bulgarian Black Sea resort, Druzhba (Friendship). Le Corbusier had used an outside staircase of somewhat different type on his famous reinforced-concrete Uniti d'Habitation at Marseilles, completed in 1952.
7 This picture, by Zlatiu Boyadzhiev, was painted with a semi-expressionist freedom of brushwork recalling the style of Van Gogh, who was something of a social radical. Yet a year earlier Boyadzhiev had been cited among painters “of unusual talent” in the official Bulgarian Guide Book 196), pp. 59-60.
8 Quoted in The New York Times, Oct. 31, 1966, p. 16.
9 Ibid., June 20, 1966, pp. 1 and 8.
10 See the report of Zhivkov's speech by Eric Bourne, “Sofia Still Clings to Moscow,” Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 16, 1966, p. 10.
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