Georgi Gospodinov and taking refuge in time

“The past is not just what happened to you, but also what you imagined”

Iancu C. BERCEANU

Review

Here is a detailed summary of the reading notes by Iancu C. Berceanu on Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Refugiul timpului:

Literary and Cultural Context

The author highlights the importance of Georgi Gospodinov (winner of the 2023 Booker Prize) as a cultural bridge between Romania and Bulgaria. After a long period of literary isolation following 1980, Georgi Gospodinov has become “unmissable” for the Romanian reader, his prose marked by a distinctive poetic sensibility. The text mentions the writer’s presence at the 2026 Bookfest Fair, where Bulgaria is the guest of honor.

The Novel’s Premise: The Clinic of the Past

The narrative core revolves around the idea of a psychiatrist, Gaustin, who opens a clinic for Alzheimer’s patients. Here, each floor faithfully recreates a specific decade from the past to provide patients with a familiar environment. However, the clinic’s success also attracts healthy people seeking refuge from the painful present.

Points of Convergence Between Romania and Bulgaria

The reviewer identifies numerous parallels between the historical experiences of the two neighboring nations:

• Life under communism: The settings of apartment blocks, the absence of freedom, and the fascination with Western symbols (the Neckermann catalog) are evoked.
• Symbolism: The forget-me-not flower (nezabravka) and European mythologies about memory and fidelity are seen as elements that unite the two cultures.
• The Balkan Spirit: The author notes a kinship through humor and self-irony, the ability to “brighten the gray of the day” with a lighthearted attitude toward serious problems.

The Political Dimension: The Referendum on the Past

In the second part of the book, the clinical experiment expands to a continental level. European nations hold referendums to choose which decade of the past they wish to “retreat” to collectively. The results are dictated by the nostalgia of older generations (who vote for the period of their youth), leading to absurd situations, such as a return to a world without modern technology.

Conclusions: The Danger of Nostalgia

Berceanu emphasizes Georgi Gospodinov’s warning: nostalgia, viewed as an individual refuge, may be a form of happiness, but when transformed into a collective project, it becomes an “Apocalypse.” A return to an idealized past inevitably leads to reliving the moments that triggered major historical catastrophes (symbolized by September 1, 1939). The final message is a bitter one: humanity does not necessarily seek healing or justice by appealing to the past, but only the subjective comfort of “being right” in an imagined world.

Book review

Awarded the “Booker Prize” in 2023, Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov’s novel, Refuge in Time, was published by Editura Trei last year, in 2025. It is not his first publication north of the Danube. He is one of the few Bulgarian authors who have managed to cross the formal border between his country and ours.

Long ago, in the 1950s through 1970s, the brotherhood among the peoples of Moscow’s satellite republics left behind many translations of literature from neighboring countries. After 1980, however, this good practice was abandoned, likely as a result of a statement made by the ruling comrade in Bucharest, who stipulated in the most modern Romanian that it was proper for us to translate from others as much as others translate from us. This unfortunate idea referred not only to our smaller socialist neighbors, but also to the “class enemies” in Western Europe.

Several decades have passed since then, and things have not moved much in the direction of cross-border literary dialogue. It is only in the last few years that a series of books written by Poles, Hungarians, and Bulgarians have begun to appear on bookstore shelves. Albanian literature has always been present, through Ismail Kadare, an author who has established himself universally and become unavoidable.

Bucharest has invested heavily in the Romanian Cultural Institute and in translations of our authors into various languages. For example, Cărtărescu was very well received by readers in Bulgaria. In return, Romanians have translated four novels, a volume of short stories, and a poetry collection by the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov (who has also become indispensable). In fact, Georgi Gospodinov made his literary debut as a poet. This is evident in his prose as well, in the delicacy of his metaphors, which retain their charm even when translated into Romanian.

This author has been successful in Romania, just as other Bulgarian authors have been.

At the Bookfest Fair in Bucharest on June 3–7, 2026, Bulgaria will be the guest of honor and represented by Georgi Gospodinov.

In the spirit of the Romanian saying “what’s his is his,” it is worth noting that Bulgarians are great storytellers, as evidenced by the works of Vazov (the founder of modern Bulgarian literature).

The novel The Refuge of Time captures the reader’s attention from the very first pages with an original idea: a psychiatrist has established a unique clinic for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease in the form of rooms where the past in which the patients live is recreated. The clinic was so successful that healthy people began to come to take refuge from the pains caused by daily life.

The theme of the outcast is a recurring one in world literature, but as I turned the pages, Michel Foucault’s historical approach to the “madman” in Western Europe came to mind. In the medieval past of the Old Continent, society’s attitude toward this category of outcasts, afflicted by a disease that was incurable at the time (and only treatable today), was one of isolation. Then, during the Industrial Revolution, institutions for these patients were not much different from leper colonies. In postmodernity, the spirit of integration gives them the chance to live together, and therapy is oriented toward an existentialist approach: it helps the sick live with their illness and the healthy live alongside the sick: “It is clear that there could be no talk of a cure, but a person has the right to happiness even when they are sick”.

A passage from the book’s first chapter catches the Romanian reader’s attention by depicting a room in a communist-era apartment block. It was similar to what Romanians had 40–50 years ago, including the television that sat heavily on the stand, but on which the Bulgarians did not place our eternal glass fish, and from the screen did not pour forth the eternal “Oak of the Carpathians” (Ceaușescu) with the “World-Renowned Scientist” (Elena Ceaușescu). In those days, the mundane “Nekermann” mail-order catalog functioned as a magic window through which the working people and intellectuals could escape into the forbidden world of the West.

References to the communist era appear repeatedly. In the context of socialist demagoguery with an ethnocentric flavor, which did not spare them either, I saw the association of the feared Georgi Dimitrov with Khan Asparuh. Other references also appear, to Bulgaria’s deep past, accompanied by the bitter taste of the Ottoman period. The bagpipe, or “gaida,” so dear to Bulgarians, swells to weep.

A recurring motif in the pages of the novel is involuntary memory. Smell is a stimulus that guides our journey through the past like a torch. Nostalgia is not a flaw, but a dimension of existence.

Another theme that catches the eye is the symbol of the forget-me-not flower (nezabravka), so dear to Bulgarians, but also to us, Romanians. Delving into the mythology of the Old Continent, I found references to the Legend of the knight who bent down to pick this blue wonder (intending to give it to his beloved) and fell into the turbulent waters of the river. His heavy armor dragged him to the bottom, and he drowned. In other mythologies, the flower appears as a symbol of the hope of reunion, of the reunion of souls that love one another. This perennial flower reminds people that fidelity dissolves physical and temporal distances, and that what people ardently desire comes to pass, at least in their imagination. In this case, amnesia appears as a state of catharsis, which burns through the fabric of the present to make room for subjective, ideal time.

Time is fluid; it could be graphically represented as a Möbius strip. Its landmarks, though clear, are held together by a personal, subjective adhesive. History is not about facts, but about experiences: “the past is not just what happened to you, but also what you imagined”.

The book also features “the museum,” presented as a clinic of the past, and Georgi Gospodinov’s sharp pen portrays it as a clinic of our past, a place where reality has been styled, and our ancestors’ clothes washed and ironed. Bulgarians have a literary tradition of subtle irony rooted in their earliest modern writings; they have been and remain masters of contextual humor. Compared to the customs of our neighbors north of the Danube, there’s nothing new under the sun! The ethos that shines through the lines, in different contexts, points to a deep cultural kinship between Romanians and Bulgarians. We aren’t great problem-solvers, but here’s how we know how to brighten the gray of the day with a tall tale or an unexpected, obviously lighthearted reaction to a topic that would have Germans standing at attention!

After the tour of Dr. Gaustin’s clinic, the writer throws open the gates of reality, and amnesia is addressed as an existential theme of the contemporary world. People who do not understand the present or do not understand what is happening to their world have no future. So, they choose to retreat into the past.

A political initiative expanded to a European scale, as befits our times, was to organize a referendum, following which people would vote to choose the era to which their country would retreat. Western states settled in the 1990s. In fact, depending on the degree of demographic aging of the electorate, countries settled on different decades. The reason: people voted for the era in which they were young.

Nostalgia, that personal refuge of every human being, has a devastating effect when it manifests at the group level. Recreating the past inevitably leads to recreating the moments that trigger catastrophes. Ironically, Georgi Gospodinov also notes the colossal surprise of the nations that chose, via referendum, to return to their idealized past: in the years they chose, there were no cell phones and no social media! Now that’s a catastrophe! What charm is there in returning to the past if you can’t share photos with friends of the places you’ve always wanted to see?

Returning to the first chapter, I recall that Alzheimer’s patients would recover if they relived the past, which was ideal because it was the only time they were still aware of or the only time they were conscious. Extended to a national and even continental scale, Gaustin’s past-oriented psychiatric methodology becomes an Apocalypse. Individual well-being cannot be extended to the group level, just as collective well-being is not always experienced at the individual level. This is something even the communists, whom Gospodinov often evokes in the book, failed to understand!

Allegorically, the novel concludes with a reference to September 1, 1939 (when World War II broke out), perceived as the zero hour of all the evils that torment us today. If it weren’t for …

Other “zero points” would surely have followed, other epicenters of evil, in which, if we take refuge, we only cause ourselves even greater suffering. Probably, it won’t be any different in the future anyway. It doesn’t matter! We don’t want to heal anything; we turn to the past because we simply want to experience something that gives us pleasure. We don’t want justice, we don’t want redress—we just want to be right!

Photo: (source: Radio Romania)

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