Rafaela Prifti/
Vaysha, vajza që në tregimin e shkrimtarit bullgar Georgi Gospodinov njihet si Vajsha e Verbër, sheh të shkuarën me syrin e majtë dhe të ardhmen me të djathtin, por kurrë të tashmen. Dhuntia e saj e pazakontë ngërthen një dilemë intime: e shkuara është e gjallë, e ardhmja e dukshme, ndërsa momenti ku ajo jeton i pakapshëm. Po të ishe ti në vend të saj, çfarë do zgjidhje, të shohësh të shkuarën apo të ardhmen? Dhe çfarë do të mungonte nga tjetra?
Vaysha, the girl known as Blind Vaysha in Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s story, sees the past through her left eye and the future through her right—but never the present. Her strange gift turns questions of memory and longing into an intimate dilemma: the past is vivid, the future visible, and the moment she inhabits remains out of reach. If you could chose to look back or ahead, which would you choose, and what might you miss by choosing one over the other?
Nostalgia, not simply a longing for what has gone, but a force that shapes how we perceive the present and imagine the future, was at the center of today’s presentation at NYU’s Eastern European Workshop. Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize, discussed how his novel Time Shelter explores personal and collective memory. The event was hosted by Professor of European History Larry Wolff and Professor Cristina Vatulescu of NYU’s Comparative Literature Department and Center for the Humanities. The conversation suggested how society’s memories can become both a refuge and a trap.
One of Gospodinov’s wry observations stayed with me. It is easier now, he suggested, to be a Bulgarian writer. When he first encountered audiences outside Bulgaria in the 1990s, readers often approached him through stereotypes about what a Bulgarian writer should be. Those expectations may have changed, but his position has not become simple.
That sense of estrangement gives his reflections on nationalism particular force. National identity can offer people a sense of belonging, but it can also narrow the space for disagreement. Gospodinov’s account of alienation in Bulgaria felt larger than any one country: the pressure to conform to a national story, and the loneliness of resisting it, are recognizable far beyond Bulgaria. This may be one reason Time Shelter speaks to readers across borders. Its concern with nostalgia is not sentimental. The past can comfort us, but it can also be curated and idealized, used to promise a reassuring version of who we are. Georgi Gospodinov’s works ask what happens when the desire to return—to a remembered home, an imagined era, a supposedly simpler identity—begins to crowd out the uncertainties of the present.
His short-story collection The Man with Many Faces offers another point of entry into his writing. But the talk’s central question lingered beyond any single book: How do we live with the past without letting it dictate the present? Gospodinov’s answer, as I heard it, is not to abandon memory, personal or collective. It is to remain alert to the stories memory tells us and to ask who gets to belong within them.