Serious, terminal sickness that leads to isolation in a hospital constituted a forced break from everyday mundane life and in consequence brought a recapitulation of so far undertaken decisions and actions. In Bogomil Raynov’s literary interpretation presented in 1966, “Пътища за никъде,” it became an excuse to begin some reckoning with the attitudes of Bulgarian intelligentsia of the BRL period. The text, autobiographical to some extent (and adapted to fi lm in 1968), fits perfectly in a momentary thaw in the Bulgarian culture that was characteristic for the first half of the 1960s in Bulgaria, the period of widening the margin of freedom of speech and critical thought directed at past attitudes and actions.