This project is designed to study the Bulgarian public scandals in the 1992–2019 period related to education in history and literature. After the end of communist rule, education had to undergo institutional depoliticization until the development of new curricula; such were elaborated in 1999–2000, and then in 2016. The five major scandals to be studied under this project erupted consecutively in three stages and bound, in a different way, history and literature together into a common field of national mythology where public opinion formulated its notions of “truth” and “manipulation”, values, national ideals, and so on. Those symptomatic scandals have not been studied in their own right to date, and, besides, public opinion surveys on education issues are a recent phenomenon not only in Bulgaria.
Using interdisciplinary research methods and main concepts such as public space of history, conceptual history, national mythology, and text figuratives to analyse the public language of the scandals in question, the project aims to reconstruct the plots of those scandals with a view to their concrete political contexts; to observe the viewpoints of the institutions involved and the public reactions, and the specific points of their intersections and correspondence; to identify their impact on institutional policies; to take into consideration their long-term resonance in the statements of public opinion in Bulgaria.
The project is an attempt to problematize the political and scientific routes of one of the most prominent figures among the Bulgarian intelligentsia in the period of communist rule – Nikolai Genchev (1931-2000). The published commemorative volumes (2002, 2012), memoirs, documentaries (2011) as well as Iv. Znepolski research (2016) do not cancel the growing need to speak about N. Genchev's heritage critically and analytically, with the tools and horizons of modern historiographical analysis. That is why in this project I will try to answer many questions that were not answered in the mentioned publications, including some important issues that were just sketched in some previous studies. The first group of questions concerns Genchev’s political and intellectual formations in 1950s and 1960s. Special attention will be put to Genchev and his role for the legitimization of a sacred national narrative. One of the main focuses of the project will be the very specific and often self-restrained dissident thinking of Genchev. Special module of my project will be the analysis of highly debatable and contestable N. Genchev’s memoires. The Genchev’s break up with the Faculty of History and the journey to the Faculty of Philosophy will be the final step in my analysis.