The central problem of the project is what a Bulgarian historian termed “lyudmilism” – a reference to the period when Lyudmila Zhivkova managed Bulgaria's cultural policy with extraordinary powers over education, publishing, public television and radio, and international cultural relations. The project investigates how the infusion of Bulgaria's cultural politics with Zhivkova’s idiosyncratic occultism informed and transformed Bulgarian socialism. The improbable Bulgarian merging of communism and occultism will be traced both on the abstract level of the relationship between culture, religion, nationalism and communism, and at the level of material culture, focusing on cultural production, as well as its dissemination and consumption. Bulgarian late socialism is explored from three perspectives: Zhivkova's idiosyncratic brand of “occult communism,” the state's utopian project of building socialism through high culture, and the regime's intense cultural nationalism. The cultural activity of intellectuals and their relationship to power, the nation, the state, and society is explored, as are questions about how the public received, interpreted, and negotiated the state's utopian impulse.