/ world today news/ Georgi Gospodinov became the first Bulgarian writer to win the prestigious “Booker” award for his novel “Time Asylum”.
To understand the philosophy laid down by the author in his book, a starting point gives us the following he said in a publication in the English “Guardian” of April 6 of this year:
“What we are in today is a battle for the past, for the redistribution of the past. For my generation and that of our parents, such an alibi was the future, the communist future. It could at one time justify and explain all the woes of the present. Today, as the future has run out of raw material, populists and nationalists have begun to promise the past. In this sense, it is understandable why Putin chose to return there in the early 1940s. Today’s misery and isolation of Russia makes it go back to the “happy” and great times of the Soviet Union. But there is already desolate and empty, there is no one to think of as an enemy, a threat. The only move is to drag into this past first your closest country, then the next ones, then Europe, and why not the world. With this war, Putin says “let’s fight on my territory, excuse my time, in the 1940s”.
So, the central theme of the book is the battle for the past. Some people tend to forget about it, due to dementia, but also due to nostalgia and to idealize it. These people suffer from an “acute deficit” of meaning, experience melancholy, indifference, a strong experience of the past and often resort to an alternative fictional everyday life.
Gospodinov, like Kafka, with whom he is compared, creates a fictional world in which there are special clinics that can send a person decades back to the past to experience it anew.
Gospodinov’s thinking is interesting, but later on in his book we learn that for many people the real past is different from what is in their imagination.
So far so good. Indeed, the past we remember may be different from reality. Memory is individual, it can seal some things and experiences in the mind, and erase others. This is known to science. But Gospodinov puts a political element in this regard, he persistently suggests in his book, as far as Bulgaria is concerned, that that past, for which segments of the society feel nostalgia, is defective, “prepared” there is nothing good but false and dark. And he presents a childhood memory, how the students brought them by night train to Sofia – to save money for a hotel – to visit the mausoleum of “Georgi Dimitrov” in the morning. It brings us back to a memory of a dentist’s office (at that time, he writes, dental services were a nightmare), in which the photos of the entire Politburo but the BKP were arranged. In the buses, pictures of Stalin did not come down from the driver’s cabins (before and after the cult).
And Gospodinov advises: “Never visit a place you left as children. It is replaced, ghostly, empty. There. There is no. Nothing.”
Gospodinov in his book once again returns to the Mausoleum and Georgi Dimitrov. It paints an imaginary, mystical manifestation in the capital. In front of the demonstrators, the roof of the mausoleum suddenly dissolves, the “sarcophagus” rises into the air, and the “mummy” waves its hand and the voice of Georgi Dimitrov is heard.
To tell us the horrors of the past, Gospodinov does not miss the story of citizen “K”, about his father who was imprisoned in Belene and how the son was called the son of an “enemy of the people” at school. The assassination of 1925 is not missing either. took the lives of innocent people, an attack carried out by the “radical wing” of the social party. But it misses the “white terror” that followed this attack, in which farmers and communists were killed without trial and sentence and a large part of the Bulgarian intelligentsia was exterminated.
In the illusory world described by Gospodinov, there is a battle for the past. A referendum was organized for a new type of socio-political government – on one side is the “Movement of Reason”, led by intellectuals and university professors, its political opponents are the “Social Movement” (DS), which ranked first, and the nationalist movement of “Heroes”, which becomes his coalition partner. And there is a return to the past, a restoration of the former system. Borders are being closed, international passports are being taken away, sanitary pads and condoms are running out of shops, those who voted for DS get a free subscription to “Labor Affairs”, there is no freedom of speech and access to information from the free world, those who illegally listen to “Free Europe ” are beaten with fists and kicks. The media is controlled by the DS and “the ghost of communism roams the web”. In this now new world, there is “collective amnesia and memory production”
The allegories described above are unfortunately inspired by ideology and have a noticeable flavor of sham.
Georgi Gospodinov is not a social writer. In his entire oeuvre, he does not deal with the ills of primitive capitalism that replaced the social and caused and continues to cause severe damage to society and the suffering of the common man, the one who has lost his job, barely making ends meet, who has barricaded his front door to defended himself from robbers, whose daughter was kidnapped and forced to become a prostitute somewhere, the pensioner, who built Bulgaria’s economy with ten years of work, but today is miserable, the young man, with a university degree, who is forced to realize himself as an emigrant abroad. He is fixated on that past and of his life, which he detests, but to which many people return in their memory, not because of some false nostalgia, but because they have the ability to objectively compare their present with their former existence. He is a man on a mission, which is a reflection of his political being, which is associated with the New Bulgarian University, created with Soros’s finances, with the right-wing “Literaturen Vestnik” and “Dnevnik” and normally among his works stand out such works as “I Lived socialism. 171 Personal Stories’ (2006), ‘Socialism Inventory Book’ (2006) and ‘Socialism Inventory Book – 500 Everyday Objects’ (2006). But therein lies his big problem as a writer, regardless of his many literary awards, because a true creator is not a prisoner of ideology, but an objective observer of life and society, it is impossible for him to look at the world and historical events, putting on pink glasses or those showing them as through curved mirrors.
But Georgi Gospodinov is an ideal candidate for a prestigious European award, he is titled as a postmodernist, a representative of progressive liberalism, the new James Orwell, who warns the world about the danger of forgetting the dominant ideologies of communism and socialism in the past, which example he gives with Bulgaria . He is also warmly received in the West because of his undisguised hostility to Russian President Putin, of whom he says in the Guardian that “his aim is not to win the war, but … to bomb and incinerate the present (and the future) with all its infrastructure and everyday life – no water, heat, light. To destroy life, and hence also being, to literally break-not-break the Ukrainian country”.
In his analysis in the newspaper “Trud”, the literary critic Vladislav Apostolov wrote about “Vremeubezhishte” and about Georgi Gospodinov:
“In today’s strange and surreal politically correct environment, it proves to be a perfect vehicle for the ideas and images that the specific postmodern literary nomenclature wishes to create and disseminate.”
To this apt definition, there is nothing more to add.
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