Window to a world beyond: Göran Schildt’s journey to Bulgaria and Romania in 1963 and some multilingual and multicultural strategies

Abstract

International traveller and acclaimed Swedish-language author Göran Schildt sailed in the Black Sea in the summer of 1963. He was a well-read scholar with a deep interest in the Antiquity and a seasoned traveller with a vast experience of multilingual and multicultural situations. This was the first and last visit of his yacht Daphne to the Black Sea and the Eastern Bloc. Through the eyes of this keen observer, a small aperture can be detected among the bricks in the walls dividing Europe. A window had been opened by world politicians in the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1950s. Although there were periods of high global tension, new possibilities for travel and tourism were created in some Eastern Bloc countries, among them Bulgaria and Romania. Visits by dozens of journalists, writers and artists and thousands of charter tourists from the Western Bloc over the next few decades opened up new windows to the world beyond the Iron Curtain. Göran Schildt stands out among the Nordic cultural visitors to Bulgaria and Romania in the post-war period. His desire to get acquainted with everyday life and ordinary people, capability to see behind facades and analysing experiences could be defined as journalistic, but his travel writing went deeper. In comparison with some other writers from Finland, who visited Bulgaria or Romania during the Cold War, such as the poet Lassi Nummi or comic fiction writer Arto Paasilinna, and the Bulgarian author Yordan Radichkov who visited Sweden, Schildt’s background, interests and multilingual and multicultural strategies supported the discovery and collection of extensive information and the processing of it into a multidimensional travel book. This article discusses the journey and travel narrative of Göran Schildt from the perspective of multilingual and multicultural strategies for encountering other languages, societies and cultures, and the processing of experiences as recorded in his diary and his popular travel narrative.