Georgi Gospodinov’s Speech at the Vilenica Award Ceremony 2025

What Can Literature Do?

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and companions, fellow cavers,

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this award. It means a great deal to me personally, because Vilenica was one of the first literary festivals I ever attended. I still hold vivid memories of it as one of the most beautiful gatherings I’ve experienced. It was many years ago—perhaps around twenty—in a world that no longer exists, in that “world of yesterday,” as Stefan Zweig would have called it. Awards are valuable for two reasons: who gives them, and who received them before you. In both respects, I see here the names of people from whom I have learned. I’ll mention only this: that at the beginning of this award’s history stand colossi such as Zbigniew Herbert and Milan Kundera—writers and poets, some of whom are no longer with us, but whose words have echoed in this cave and in the greater cave of literature. What does it mean to be a writer in today’s world? What can we, who have only our words, truly do? What can we do with our literature? Can we do anything at all? Especially now, when words themselves—language itself—and our stories are vulnerable, when they are being struck hard by the missiles of propaganda and hatred. We live in a world where anyone can twist history and our stories, turn them against us, or use them to incite others against us. We are made of flesh and words—and our bodies depend on words just as much as words depend on our bodies. So, in short—what do I still believe in?

Literature, or more simply, the stories we tell, have life-saving power.
Above all, they have the power to preserve what is human.
The stories we tell continually renew what we have achieved as human beings over the centuries. When we stop telling stories, we begin to forget. And memory, among all else, is also a moral category. If no one remembers, everything is permitted, all boundaries can be crossed. But crossing those boundaries will push us far back in evolution—will undo the entire “ascent of man” we remember from that chart in biology class, or from the beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.Another power our stories have is that they generate empathy.
When we hear someone else’s story about their children and parents, it becomes harder to see them as enemies—to humiliate them, strike them, or kill them. Stories delay the end.
We can remember this from Scheherazade. They bring another dawn, a rescue of the victim—sometimes even redemption for the executioner. Stories offer comfort and confront the inexplicable. That’s why parents tell fairy tales to their children at bedtime. That’s why ancient people created myths—to put terrifying things like lightning, fire, and floods into stories, to trap the terrifying in the invisible cage of narrative. Fear, once told, becomes less frightening. Literature is a great tamer of fears.

And now, what is most important in this moment, in these times:
Our words, our stories, and the literature we write are the natural antidote, the counterweight to propaganda and aggressive populism.

And here is the place to say: thank you for these forty years in which this festival has been a refuge for stories, and in that sense, a refuge for humanity.
That is no small thing.
In fact, it is everything—in a world leaning toward decline.