Aug 7, 2026 · 26 min · 11 segments
Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinovis widely considered one of the most daring…
Georgi GospodinovGuest
Angela RodelGuest
Mia FunkHost
I think every one of us every day could go back to his or her past, in the room of the past, and could stay there for a hour or two, and after that, it's important to leave this room and not to be locked inside, just to keep the door open.
What's dangerous for the past, I saw it maybe after 2016, the dangerous is that somebody trying to invent our collective past and to pull the whole society into the basement of the invented past, and this could be dangerous.
When nostalgia become part of the societies, when the countries lost the future, when they face the deficit of the future, because that's the problem, they started slowly going back to the happiest time in their past.
And actually, it's a trap, but then I will talk about this in the second part.
First, when we stop tell our stories, when we stop communicate to each other, we start to forget.
I mean, I think you have to think about the lived experience that you're trying to communicate.
I think that's true with music, how I'm gonna have an audience react in an emotional way, the way I would interpret a piece of music or try to play a certain character.
And I think having lived in Bulgaria so long and having lived among Bulgarians so long, I need to think about what kind of language is going to...
It's never one-to-one, and those are where the overall atmosphere of the text hopefully will give that sort of affective structuring, I think the, the philosophers like to call it.
[laughs] And then you fill it in with the actual language itself and the details.
Actually, the novel was finished just before the COVID pandemic, and I didn't know that what will happen.
People were locked into their houses, but they could order the novel via post, that post coming to us like a virus.
Of course, I didn't know what will happen, and you are absolutely right, and I thought about this, that this pandemic actually was a kind of a turning back into the time.
I mean, all these movie and TV programs, all these Beatles songs, all these people just sitting in their rooms and checking their photo albums.
And I remember clearly that there was a kind of, they started to repeat even football games.
And in Time Shelter, I have a football game from 1974, the first one we watched with my father.
And I saw this football game again, and it was like, okay, actually, I wanted to write a novel which could be like a predzenie.
I think every one of us every day could go back to his or her past, in the room of the past, and could stay there for a hour or two, and after that, it's important to leave this room and not to be locked inside, just to keep the door open.
What's dangerous for the past, I saw it maybe after 2016, the dangerous is that somebody trying to invent our collective past and to pull the whole society into the basement of the invented past, and this could be dangerous.
When nostalgia become part of the societies, when the countries lost the future, when they face the deficit of the future, because that's the problem, they started slowly going back to the happiest time in their past.
And actually, it's a trap, but then I will talk about this in the second part.
First, when we stop tell our stories, when we stop communicate to each other, we start to forget.
I mean, I think you have to think about the lived experience that you're trying to communicate.
I think that's true with music, how I'm gonna have an audience react in an emotional way, the way I would interpret a piece of music or try to play a certain character.
And I think having lived in Bulgaria so long and having lived among Bulgarians so long, I need to think about what kind of language is going to...
It's never one-to-one, and those are where the overall atmosphere of the text hopefully will give that sort of affective structuring, I think the, the philosophers like to call it.
[laughs] And then you fill it in with the actual language itself and the details.
Actually, the novel was finished just before the COVID pandemic, and I didn't know that what will happen.
People were locked into their houses, but they could order the novel via post, that post coming to us like a virus.
Of course, I didn't know what will happen, and you are absolutely right, and I thought about this, that this pandemic actually was a kind of a turning back into the time.
I mean, all these movie and TV programs, all these Beatles songs, all these people just sitting in their rooms and checking their photo albums.
And I remember clearly that there was a kind of, they started to repeat even football games.
And in Time Shelter, I have a football game from 1974, the first one we watched with my father.
And I saw this football game again, and it was like, okay, actually, I wanted to write a novel which could be like a predzenie.
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