The book “Labour, Joy, Leisure and Culture” contains two studies by Prof. Ivan Elenkov that were elaborated during his work under the Advanced Academia Programme. The first study follows the activities of state-run Labour and Joy Unit between 1941 and 1944, and the metamorphoses of its successor in 1945 – Recreation and Culture for the Workers Unit, established within the Fatherland Front political coition, and subsequently closed down at the beginning of 1948. The study analyzes the period preceding and immediately after 1944 when the first state-run projects were launched to organize the leisure time of the working class and the social mobilization of broad marginalized social layers. Prof. Elenkov also offers a critical analysis on the deconstruction of the social structure and the obliteration of the principles of social policy in the first half of the twentieth century. The second study focuses on a cultural phenomenon of the same era – the so called Cultural Calendar – considering its main function to centralize processes of cultural exchange in socialist Bulgaria. A common thread linking the two studies is the ideological modelling of everyday life in the Communist era in Bulgaria.