Лъчезар Станчев. Мимикриите на играта

The article deals with the attempts of Bulgarian children's literature to preserve its entertaining function after the end of the Second World War. The means of expression and mechanisms of retaining the playfulness in this literature, the ideological education of children being turned into a cult, are analyzed in Lachezar Stanchev's poetry, published at the end of the 1940s and the 1950s. The paper focuses on the methods and forms of disguising the game, a politically necessitated literary practice at a time characterized by extreme pedagogical strictness. Genre mutations of the fairy tale, domination of then topical issues in the riddles and structural adaptation of the nonsense poem are part of the mimicry of the game, allowing children's poetry at that time to communicate with its readers on the basis of their own values in spite of the difficulties.