Apocalyptic Liberation: Music, Memory, and the Senses in Georgi Gospodinov’s 'Time Shelter' and Vladimir Sharov’s 'Before and During'

• In Event: Music and Liberation I: Music and Narratives

Abstract

This paper examines how the novels ""Time Shelter"" by Georgi Gospodinov (2020) and ""Before and During"" by Vladimir Sharov (1993) grapple with the past and manipulate time to interrogate the very possibility of liberation in post-socialist Bulgaria and post-Soviet Russia. In both novels, liberation leads the characters back into the past in elaborate musical and sensory recreations. But can the past liberate us? In their reenactments and rewritings of history, Gospodinov and Sharov envision the impending Apocalypse, captured in the works of two composers-synaesthetes: Skriabin’s incomplete multimedia ""Mysterium"" in Sharov and Messiaen’s ""Quartet for the End of the World"" in Gospodinov. Sharov’s novel literally ends in the Apocalypse as a diluvian snowfall. Gospodinov’s text concludes with the reenactment of World War II. Significantly, both authors explore music’s relation to memory by situating their novels in psychiatric clinics. Sharov’s clinic shelters mentally ill patients who recollect Soviet history while losing their memory. They obsessively return to the past, tracing an alternative history of the Revolution with Scriabin as its prophet. Gospodinov’s “clinic for the past” treats Alzheimer’s patients by recreating the soundtracks and sensory textures of the twentieth century. European nations follow suit trying to recover their glorious pasts in historical reenactments. In Gospodinov’s and Sharov’s nostalgic and pessimistic reimagining of history, the promise of post-1989 liberation fails as characters and nations become entrapped in past musical apocalyptic visions that cannot but prefigure the future apocalypse."

Author

• Polina Dimcheva Dimova, U of Denver