Unified personalities?

‘The good,’ ‘the bad,’ and ‘the evil’ in the socialist novel: A case study of two Bulgarian novels

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Abstract

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1420207/

 

This paper argues that during a period of severe ideological repression in Bulgaria,namely the Stalinisation between 1948 and 1953, two novels were published that to agreat extent successfully overturned totalitarian normative narratives. I claim thattheir success was due to the fact the authors depicted their characters on two levels.On the one hand, there was clear unity with the officialdom and its Marxist-Leninistproclamations, on the other hand, the authors expressed an open disunity with theregime by separating their characters from the norms of political reality. On this basisI present my main argument: that the authors of these novels, by effacing thedifferences between ‘the good,’ ‘the bad,’ and ‘the evil,’ actually redefined communistprinciples concerning the role of the individual within the political realm. I use aninterdisciplinary methodology that consists of historical and literary analysis and aimsto bring together the communist regime’s ideological construction of the role of theindividual with the positioning of the characters from these novels.

Keywords: Stalinism, Escapism, Individual, Political reality, Characterisation

How to Cite:

Metodiev, M., (2014) “‘The good,’ ‘the bad,’ and ‘the evil’ in the socialist novel: A case study of two Bulgarian novels”, Tropos 1(1).