site.btaNovelist Elena Aleksieva at Romania's Bookfest: Every Generation Lives Through Its Own Illusion of Freedom

Every generation experiences its own illusion of freedom, Bulgarian writer Elena Aleksieva said at the international book fair Bookfest in Bucharest, where she presented her novel Volcano, recently translated into Romanian. She was joined on the Arena stage at the Romexpo exhibition centre by the book's translator, Mariana Mangiulea Jatop.

Bulgaria is the guest of honour at the 2026 Bookfest in the Romanian capital.

Aleksieva told the audience: "In the 1990s there was an abundance of everything. The drama of the 1990s was not the decade itself, but what emerged from it – and even more so what never came into being. But since there are 30 years between the 1960s and the 1990s, and another 30 years between the 1990s and today, perhaps we will have the rare privilege of experiencing yet another illusion of freedom while we are still alive.”

Asked which character from the novel is her favourite, the author said she feels particularly close to Dounyo, one of the two businessmen featured in the story.

"I like him because he seems to be the most firmly grounded character, but also because he is capable of such a classic, powerful and pure friendship that he accepts every act of madness by his best friend simply to avoid losing him. Dounyo is the most rationally mad person in the entire book. And I love rational madness because I find it natural and because it does not need any abuse of substances or medical conditions in order to manifest itself. It is simply there," the author of Volcano explained.

The Romanian translator, Mariana Mangiulea Jatop, read an excerpt from the novel and shared her perspective. "The lexical richness of this book is phenomenal. When translating, you have to be extremely attentive to the writer's virtuosity, to Elena's virtuosity. Elena's sentences are full and richly detailed." Jatop said.

Asked how she made the transition from translating Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov to Volcano by Elena Aleksieva, she replied: "Death and the Gardener is a confession, and at a certain point you need a brief pause. The novel Volcano arrived at exactly the right moment to pull me out of a particular state of mind and plunge me into a whirlpool, a mosaic of worlds. The wave that washed over me did not make me forget Gospodinov, but it led me into a different universe and prompted me to devote myself to it entirely."

During the discussion, Aleksieva named several writers who have influenced her, including Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Graham Greene and William Faulkner. "I have enduring literary loves that have never left me, and from which I hope I have learned something," she said.