popular culture

This paper deals with the humourist periodical “Baraban” (Drum) and two of its active authors and their relationship. Boris Rumenov known by his penname Boryo Zevzeka (Boryo the Joker) was a prolific writer of different types of humourist short stories, pieces for theatre, etc, editor of the periodical, killed by the communists in 1944. Chudomir is famous and author and painter; he became very popular when he left “Baraban” and started to publish in the newspaper “Zora” (Dawn). In his youth Chudomir was close friends with all the other contributors of “Baraban”, they exchange funny letters and deliberately build their public images as bohemians. This paper also offers some less known their works from the 1910s.

This paper presents almost all of the most important travestied histories of Bulgaria written in 20 century. They present the past of the nation in different ways, some of them prefer to make fun with the great figures and events (Rayko Alexiev, Hristo Brazitsov, Nikolay Genchev) and to amuse the public with ethno-physiological reasoning, other (Georgi Konstantinov, Rumen Daskalov) put a strong criticism on the previous historiography, other present their narratives as fictional literature (Asen Hristoforov). The paper discusses to what extent and which of them are part of the popular literature, and what was the intention of the authors; it compares Hristoforov’s text with other texts on the same topic; and also offers some observations on the illustrations drawn by R. Alexiev and H. Brazitsov for their books, and by Alexander Bozhinov for Brazitsov’s book, and Todor Tsonev for Konstantinov’s book.