Wide Format is a series of exhibitions in which SOCMUS presents a single poster from its collection, along with the stories surrounding it. The series opens with the production of Communists, written by Georgi Markov and directed by Asen Shopov. The poster is the work of the artist Dimitar Tassev – but neither the poster nor the play would ever reach the public.
In the summer of 1968, hopes for political and economic reform in Czechoslovakia were finally crushed by the invasion of some of the Warsaw Pact troops, including those from Bulgaria. At the same time, the Bulgarian authorities—watchful for any “diversion” on home soil—were preparing for another anniversary: the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9 September 1944. It was in this context that the Committee for Art and Culture commissioned Georgi Markov to write a play dedicated to the partisan movement of the Second World War.
The commission called for a documentary play – a genre that had only tentatively entered the repertoire of Bulgarian theatres since the mid-1960s, through the work of Peter Weiss and Rolf Hochhuth. For the purpose, Markov was given access to Ministry of the Interior archives holding the interrogation files of communist operatives who, having worked underground during the war, would posthumously be elevated to resistance heroes by the regime that followed. In 1969, however, the writer would not be present at the dress rehearsal at the New Drama Theatre Tears and Laughter, having left shortly before to visit his brother in Italy. The play’s stark documentary quality, and its policeman character—modelled on the legendary Nikola Geshev—unsettled the authorities. Markov refused to make the requested edits to the text; as a result, Communists was pulled before its premiere. The episode would take its place among the litany of grievances that eventually drove the writer into permanent exile.
Over the years, the artist Dimitar Tassev developed a habit of keeping a few copies of each freshly printed poster for his personal archive. In time, this would become more than an expression of attachment to his own work. The poster on display is likely one of the few surviving copies from the premature termination of Communists. No file on the production survives in the theatre’s archives; the poster is absent even from the National Library’s collection. Georgi Markov’s own recollection of ‘posters plastered across the country’ is unconvincing, given how uncertain the production’s future already was before the dress rehearsal.
About Dimitar Tassev:
In 1964, Dimitar Tassev (1937–2022) graduated in Applied Graphic Arts from the Nikolai Pavlovich Higher Institute of Fine Arts, in one of the first graduating classes under Professor Alexander Poplilov. Shortly after graduating, he was appointed staff artist at the National Youth Theatre, where he worked for the next twenty years, becoming one of the most recognisable poster artists in Bulgaria. His work has been shown at major European biennials of applied graphic art and featured in leading design publications such as the Swiss magazine Graphis.
Besides his work in theatre, Tassev also worked in film and political posters, trademarks, illustration, philatelic graphics and spatial design. He created the trademark for the Golden Orpheus festival and for ASSITEJ, the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People. A few years before Communists, he produced the poster for the film Men (1966), also scripted by Georgi Markov.
About the SOCMUS Archive:
SOCMUS preserves, researches and promotes Bulgarian graphic design from the socialist era. Founded in 2011 as a “virtual museum”, the project has gradually grown into a physical collection, enriched through donations and the purchase of individual works and entire collections. The archive comprises more than 2,000 posters, as well as children’s books, periodicals, philatelic graphics and other examples of applied graphic art. SOCMUS is an independent, non-commercial project founded by Nikola Mihov, Valeri Gyurov and Martin Angelov. Michaël Bordat, Jenny Decheva and Nikol Decheva later joined them.
General media partner: Bulgarian National Radio.
