Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the place of newly composed "folk" songs in socialist Bulgaria. Created initially by ordinary citizens, shaped in form by Party editors, and published as new national "folk" songs, various layers of "authenticity" characterize these texts and the contexts in which they appear.

Paper long abstract:

This paper problematizes the position of newly composed "folk" songs in the national imagination of socialist Bulgaria. These works appear to have been created initially by ordinary socialist citizens, but, at the same time, their textual content was shaped and their curation was carefully managed by political elites. Published in books describing the daily lives of Partisan soldiers and memoirs of youth brigade workers, and catalogued alongside pre-industrial texts in volumes of national "folk songs," these texts were implicitly presented as a new part of Bulgaria's national folklore canon.

But while these songs are typically disregarded by contemporary scholars as worthless propaganda, I find particular value in their potential to illuminate notions of what makes something "folkloric." First of all, by exploring the ostensible process of collection of these songs along with the casting of the soldiers and laborers who supposedly sang them as the nations' new "folk," we can see how socialist governments undertook a Herderian process of constructing a new national identity using folklore. Furthermore, I show how the language of these songs was used to reify the concept of a linguistic "folklore" register, one that combined common motifs from older South Slavic lyrical works with uniquely Bulgarian features. Finally, I demonstrate how the position of these songs in socialist Bulgaria points to the need for a nuanced exploration of the concept of "authenticity." Informed by contemporary theories surrounding this term, I show how these songs nonetheless became "authentic" reflections of Bulgarian socialist identity.