Doina Ruști on Radio Romania Iași, in the programme “People and Ideas”, hosted by Ioana Soreanu.
Doina Ruști was a guest on “People and Ideas”, a programme broadcast by Radio Romania Iași, in an extended conversation about her novel Nas de bulgar, published by Humanitas in 2026. The interview was aired on May 13 and is also available online on the Radio Iași website.
The dialogue begins with the writer’s relationship with the city of Iași and moves toward the central themes of the novel: love as a form of knowledge, memory, identity, freedom, and the way in which the experiences of youth are transformed into literature. The love story at the heart of the book thus becomes a starting point for introspection, as well as for a re-evaluation of social life in the 1970s and 1980s.
During the interview, Doina Ruști speaks about the Iași School, its philological principles, the theses of Alexandru Philippide, and several of the novel’s sources. Nas de bulgar contains eleven stories about national identity, connected to personal identity. The experiences gathered in Iași during her school years stand at the foundation of the writer’s intellectual formation, as well as of her map of otherness — of her relationships with others, of the way in which identity is defined through encounter, difference, and memory.
Throughout the interview, Doina Ruști discusses literature, her own aesthetic principles, and the relationship between individual life and recent history. The conversation also touches on the tension between national identity and cosmopolitan openness, two directions which, when taken to extremes, can become forms of estrangement. Nas de bulgarproposes a living, critical, and affective return to national history, seen as part of personal identity.
An autobiographical novel, Nas de bulgar traces a path of memory, love, and personal becoming, in a narrative form in which the intimate story opens toward history, language, and identity.
The host of “People and Ideas” is Ioana Soreanu.
The full interview can be watched here: Radio Romania Iași — “Doina Ruști: To Love Means to Discover Who You Are.”
