Socialism with an Occult Face: Aesthetics, Spirituality, and Utopia in Late Socialist Bulgaria

Abstract

This article explores the unlikely infusion of state-sponsored spiritualism into the materialist ideology of Bulgarian late communism. In the 1970s, Minister of Culture and daughter of party leader Lyudmila Zhivkova initiated grandiose state programs to inject the “occult” into Bulgaria’s national culture, art, science, and even political philosophy. Inspired by her Eastern religious beliefs, she sought to “breed” a nation of “all-round and harmoniously developed individuals,” devoted to spiritual self-perfection, who would ultimately “work, live and create according to the laws of beauty.” How are we to explain such a paradoxical lapse into state-sponsored spiritualism in a milieu dominated by materialism as a philosophy and way of life? How did Zhivkova’s occultism inform and transform Bulgarian late socialism? In pursuit of these questions, the article opens with Zhivkova’s intellectual and political trajectories, especially her spiritual formation, as I see her religiosity as the cornerstone of her cultural theory and praxis. The second part reconstructs Zhivkova’s theoretical apparatus, while the third demonstrates how it was translated into a large-scale aesthetic-spiritual utopia, which posited art, culture, aesthetics, and spirituality as a way to revamp the entire communist project. I contend that as quixotic as Zhivkova’s vision was, her policies contributed to the liberalization of art and culture in a period that has long been associated exclusively with stagnation and decay. In so doing, I demonstrate that impulses to attach “a human face” to the communist project endured even after the Prague Spring of 1968.