Младен Енчев

The article deals with the attempts of Bulgarian children's literature to preserve its entertaining function after the end of the Second World War. The means of expression and mechanisms of retaining the playfulness in this literature, the ideological education of children being turned into a cult, are analyzed in Lachezar Stanchev's poetry, published at the end of the 1940s and the 1950s. The paper focuses on the methods and forms of disguising the game, a politically necessitated literary practice at a time characterized by extreme pedagogical strictness. Genre mutations of the fairy tale, domination of then topical issues in the riddles and structural adaptation of the nonsense poem are part of the mimicry of the game, allowing children's poetry at that time to communicate with its readers on the basis of their own values in spite of the difficulties.

The paper offers an attempt to analyze the meaning of the notion 'anti-totalitarian literature' per se and in its Bulgarian context. This is a complex phenomenon embracing several different trends, different types of writing, different political affiliations and aesthetic views. Also, there were writers that are still difficult to classify in the main types of 'anti-totalitarian literature': political emigrants, dissidents, communists that opposed the status quo, etc. One such author was Asen Christoforov (1910-1970). A graduate of London University, a young Bulgarian professor of economics in the first post-war years, he was dismissed from the University of Sofia, later accused of being a British spy and sent to the concentration camp in Belene. Christoforov lived a lonely life for many years near the village of Govedartsi, at the foot of Rila mountain. Nevertheless, in the late 1950s and later Chistoforov published several books. Almost all of them described the mountain and its inhabitants and especially the people of Govedartci. The paper traces the author's percecution for political reasons discretely mentioned in his work, claiming that their literary merits are greater than their 'anti-totalitarian' criticism.