On July 16 2025 I had the chance to participate at the Memory Studies Association gala event sponsored by de Gruyter: Discussion with the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov led by Prof. Alison Landsberg at the Smetana hall in Prague. The event was attended by more than 1000 participants of the conference.
Gospodinov is one of my favourite writers. His books are most contemporary yet they manage to convey the hidden impacts of the socialist past like no other writer's book.
"You can't make a museum to preserve something that has never left," he writes in "Time shelter". His other novel "The Physics of Sorrow" tries to put into words something that in Bulgarian is described as тъга. It's more than sorrow.
Gospodinov made the audience to utter the Bulgarian word in order to feel how it feels and sounds in the back of your throat. He says: тъга stands for things that you have swallowed, places you never visited, things you never did or stories you were not allowed to tell. These are things you do not want to remember but they are still influencing you.
At the talk he said: "The unhappened things shape us more than happened things."
He also reminded us that the culture of silence that the post-socialist countries have all experienced can and has led to schizophrenic being.
Although being a nostalgic person himself Gospodinov warned about the chronostalgia, the longing for another (better) place. Because the personal past is irreversible (nobody can be 21 again) but the political past unfortunately can be reversed.
Writing is in his words believing in the future. "Literature is an antidote of propaganda. Storytelling postpones the end of the world. It creates empathy."
Next to discussing and making visible the past and the relationship to the past Gospodinov is excellent in drawing attention to the everyday, to the seemingly unimportant. He enjoys the movement between the small and the sublime, like he said. He is an antimonumentalist and that makes his stories most enjoyable. Because he tells the stories of each one of us.
If writing is believing into the future then literature could be a cure against the fear.
