The Continuing Gift of Literature,
or The Seven Superpowers of Storytelling

Georgi Gospodinov

10 June 2025

 

Dear friends who believe in literature, or at least in storytelling, I am honored and thrilled to be among you to give this year’s “Lectio Magistralis.”

I’m excited because in 2014, in a different world – the world of yesterday, as Stefan Zweig would say – I was here for the first time as a finalist for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; back then I experienced my first nomination and my first loss. I experienced them lightly and happily because nobody here has ever felt that they’re on the losing side and because I was surrounded by people with whom I shared a common passion and a common invisible country – that of literature.

Anyone who has ever walked into the Metropolitan Museum in New York has probably noticed those fresh flowers in the lobby that are regularly replaced. The inscription reads that they are “a continuing gift” from a donor. I’ll talk about the continuing gift of literature and its superpowers (I put the number seven in the title arbitrarily because I love it and it has a nice ring to it).

Beatrice’s letter, in which she invited me to give this year’s lecture, began: “Surprisingly I’m still here…” Only she could put it like that. I, too, want to start from that beginning.  

Surprisingly, we are all still here in this upside-down world. And not only are we still here, but we’ve even gathered for a festival dedicated to literature. And not only are we still here, but Beatrice is opening a Library with a capital L. A library amidst nature. Built in a beautiful and magical place, and, as she has written, a long-held dream since the time when she and Grisha first came to live here.

Building a library in a world that is hurtling blindly towards the abyss, towards its own doom, is an unusual gesture and gift, brave and encouraging, right here and now. A library is a refuge, a timeshelter that harbors all times. I’m not sure we truly grasp that if we allow the destruction of the world today, we will have allowed the annihilation of all previous times and eras. In this sense, our responsibility is not only to the present, it’s also a historical responsibility, stretching back through time and history. After every human catastrophe we have let happen, we can hear the cries of those who came before us, philosophers, poets, storytellers…

 

While writing my novel, TimeShelter, I was spending a year at the New York Public Library. And whenever I was anxious that the world was on the brink of disaster (there were those moments even back then), I would go to the enormous Rose Main Reading Room, under the Veronese-style painted sky and simply look at the books lined up on the endless shelves. I’d walk up to them, run my hand over them, open one, or just read their titles slowly. And it worked, this little ritual was comforting, the best survival mantra ever. It didn’t matter what the books were about, they were all part of a world that had survived. Titles of dictionaries and of compendiums about the First and Second World Wars (24 red-bound volumes), encyclopedias of botany, dictionaries of anatomy…

I gazed at them to convince myself that the world was whole and bound. And that sooner or later, all catastrophes turn into books. Precisely as in that line of Mallarmé’s that Borges so loved, which says that “everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” In which we can find some consolation. Nothing is as calming as neatly ordered, identical volumes of encyclopedias from different continents – old cherry red, brown and black.

I’ll take the liberty of reciting this little list, a rosary, an amulet I copied out for myself back then, wandering past the shelves of that library, seeking solace to ward off troubling times. This mantra of titles can be used against the forces of evil today as well. Plus, it might help someone besides me.

Enciclopedia general ilustrada del Pais Vasco

Enciclopedia de Mexico

Nueva enciclopedia de Puerto Rico

Diccionario biografico de Venezuela

Encyclopedia Britannica

The New York Public Library, Oriental Collection

Nomenclator Zoologicus

Il grande libro della cucina italiana

The Cuisine of Hungary

Subject Index of Books Published Before 1880

The Mother of All Booklists

Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature

Dicionario bibliografico brazileiro

Catalogo de la bibliografia boliviana

Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland…, 1475-1640

 

Use this mantra in emergency situations and tough times, I guarantee it helps.

That’s the great consolation of literature, the first of literature’s continuing gifts. The order is arbitrary, but I’d like to start precisely with consolation.

I believe that in an inconsolable world such as today’s, literature will increasingly return to this semi-forgotten role. More than two thousand years ago, “consolation” was a common genre in Roman literature. Seneca wrote his famous “Of Consolation: To My Mother, Helvia,” which, read now, sounds to us just like our belated consolations to our own mothers. (Their grief has not changed much in twenty centuries.)

“My best of mothers, I have often felt eager to console you, and have as often checked that impulse… I thought that if, though I might not be able to restrain your tears, yet that if I could even wipe them away, I should set myself free from all my own sorrows…” [L. Annaeus Seneca, Minor Dialogs Together with the Dialog “On Clemency”; Translated by Aubrey Stewart, pp. 320-352. Bohn’s Classical Library Edition; London, George Bell and Sons, 1900. Scanned and digitized by Google from a copy maintained by the University of Virginia.]

So begins this very personal text by Seneca. If I wipe away your tears, “I should set myself free from all my own sorrows.” Perhaps a possible mechanism for all consolation could be found here. You can’t be completely happy in a world full of mourners all around you.

But back to Seneca. The strategy of consolation chosen later in his letter also appears unexpected and beyond logic. “I will rip up and bring to light again wounds already scarred,” Seneca writes, and so he methodically begins to recall the previous sorrows, misfortunes, and losses his mother has suffered. So, too, in an elaborate way, does literature console us. Not by silencing suffering, but by reminding us of our own unspoken sorrows, by giving us language for them, by telling us of other people’s sorrows, and so on until “your spirit feel[s] ashamed” that it grieves, as Seneca writes.

Let us thank Seneca and move on.

Literature is consolation, yet also encouragement to go on living. Let’s count this encouragement as its next gift or superpower. While writing my book Death and the Gardener, I learned about an old Slavic tradition in the Balkans, which is where I am from. When the master of the house passes away, his family must tell the news to the livestock and the garden. In some places they simply blow in the ox’s ear, and he understands everything. Just imagine what a beautiful language that is! Someone goes to the barn in the morning, those early hours are still frosty, he goes over to the ox’s warm ear and just blows into it. Passes on the news through his breath. The ox needs to know that his master is dead, yet life goes on. Then someone goes to the beehives and tells the bees aloud: your master has died, but may you live on and thrive, and keep on gathering honey. The news is also announced to the cherry trees in the yard, so that they may bear fruit in the coming spring as well, and to the flowers, so that they may know that life goes on and not stop blooming due to their sadness.

Literature has a similar effect. It breathes into our ear, it breaks bad news to us not to kill us, but rather to tell us that the world is mortal, the world is in crisis, in a pre-apocalyptic heart attack, but don’t you despair; keep on tending your flocks, keep on reading and writing, keep on sowing and tilling your garden.

And if we are asked: why do you keep writing books and building libraries when the world is palpably coming to an end, commandeered by idiots, then we can answer: why aren’t you building libraries as you watch the world coming to an end, pushed along by idiots?

Books offer comfort and encouragement. As does writing itself. No matter how despairing we may be – and the occasions for despair have not been this compelling in quite some time – if we write, that means we have hope for tomorrow. For a possible tomorrow in which the poem will be finished, the novel will be completed, and someone will reach for it, open it, and read it, so as to awaken with their eyes that which has been written. In other words, the world will be present, still in its place. I write because I believe that the future is possible and that a person will sit alone in their room in the afternoon and read. Once, on an Italian afternoon, while wandering the streets of a small town, I saw a woman reading on her balcony. I stood in the shade of a tree and watched her turning the pages, then lifting her head to cast a distracted glance aside before returning to the refuge of the book. And I remember what I told myself then: this world cannot end anytime soon, at least not while this woman is reading on the balcony.

We tell stories or write books to put off the end of the world, as well as our own end. Chalk this up as literature’s next superpower, magic and gift. We know this best from the Thousand and One Nights and Scheherazade’s astonishing example. With each story she tells but interrupts at the most suspenseful moment, she piques curiosity within Shahriyar, that serial killer of women, and delays the end for one more day. (This could be counted as the beginning of serialized novels, as well as the TV soap operas of today.)

Within the stories she tells, the most common bargaining chip to redeem a life is once again a story. We only need recall the first tale, about the unfortunate merchant who accidentally kills the son of a formidable genie with a pit of a date. Revenge appears inescapable, yet three sheikhs pass by in the meantime, and showing compassion, they each buy a third of the merchant’s life by telling (selling) stories to the enraged genie. Here we really are talking about a direct barter. If your stories are good and truly impress me, says the genie, we’ll have a deal. And they indeed strike a deal. The genie gives the merchant his life back, and King Shahriyar, who listens to this story, gives the storyteller Scheherazade another night. The gift awakens a gift in turn, and the story – unfinished, of course – arouses the tyrant’s curiosity: “For God’s sake, I won’t kill her just yet – let me hear the tale to the end.” But the tale is endless, just as the labyrinth of the world is endless.

This is what I would like us to remember from the great story of Scheherazade: the power of the weak to tell stories; the special guarantee of literature that can even back human life. As a child, I unconsciously understood this because I always chose to read books whose main character narrates in the first person. I knew those characters never died in the end. I narrate, therefore I exist. Narro, ergo sum.

Perhaps this explains the fact that almost all my novels are written in the first person.

Yet we nevertheless have to admit that the opium of stories and their ability to evoke empathy only works if you still have a heart and an ear for them. Unfortunately, dictators and most masters of political manipulation don’t possess that superpower of empathy. It turns out that for them, compassion is a super-weakness. It is no coincidence that Elon Musk has said that empathy is Europe’s weak spot. And that it brings only sorrow and suffering. These people don’t acknowledge the value of sorrow, either. (You’ll never see a dictator being sad in public.) Perhaps because sadness doesn’t sell Teslas. Who would buy a sad Tesla? Or maybe we’re just not sufficiently good Sheherazades, who knows?

Yet literature and storytelling nevertheless produce empathy. This is another one of their superpowers and gifts (has anyone been keeping count so far?). You can’t – if you’re a normal person – scream at, insult and drive away the person in front of you whose story you’ve just heard or read. In short, propaganda wants to take the human out of human nature and strip them of their face and story to make them easier to deal with. While literature does precisely the opposite – it restores the human, it gives a person back their face and history, it turns the dehumanized back into a human being. In this sense, literature and storytelling are a natural antidote to propaganda and the deliberate pitting of people against people. And this is a politically important quality.

The person who reads should be able to easily recognize all the fakery and kitschiness of propaganda and the conspiracy theories inundating all of us. The kitsch of nationalism, for example, is extremely obvious. “Evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist,” Brodsky says. And here, I would argue, lies our strength – in crafting a sense of taste that unmistakably recognizes political evil and recycled kitsch. “On the Power of Taste” is the title of a poem by another great poet, the Pole Zbigniew Herbert, which describes resistance through taste in communist times. It is a very important poem for those of us from Eastern Europe.

Now we have lived to see a time when every narrative is valid, the world is full of fakeness. Populists also tell stories – about a glorious past no nation has ever dared dream of. Conspiracy theories capture our imagination as if Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein or Heisenberg never existed. Every time something is said today about flat earth theory, for example, it is as if Giordano Bruno were burning at the stake all over again.

What are we writers to do, what stories should we tell, and how, in what way, can we discredit the stories of those who discredit centuries of knowledge, Renaissance and Enlightenment?

What is the difference between literary fiction and falsification? Between myth and conspiracy theory? I can’t explain it succinctly, perhaps I can’t even explain it at all. But I do know for certain that through what is made up, fiction seeks to grasp and to enrich human reality. Whereas fake stories and fake theories aim to narrow and depersonalize that human reality. And every one of us in this hall can tell one kind of story from the other. The enlightened reader can make that distinction. Perhaps this is the crucial thing – we must cultivate enlightened and critical readers, we must teach the heart and the mind and never stop teaching them. So we learn to be better storytellers than those tellers of fake tales. We need to get back into the conversation and to bring back conversation itself. Because we don’t even talk to one another anymore, we just exchange irate monologues, the conversation between us has broken down. We seem to be in that phase so well sketched out in the penultimate chapter of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, describing the eve, the final minutes before the Great War, or the European War, as it was then called.

“What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage, even for fisticuffs. Every day fierce arguments, out-of-control shouting-matches would erupt between individuals and among entire groups . . .” [ Thomas Mann, “The Great Petulance,” from The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods.]

This passage now sounds ultra-relevant on another eve, I don’t even want to say of what. For this reason, we urgently need to get back into the conversation. Every word or book of ours today comes with urgency. At one end of Europe (the end that is near the birthplace of Gregor von Rezzori, our patron here, and not so far from Bulgaria), a war is entering its third year. Today, there are no “nearby” or “faraway” places in such a war, as we well know. We are all equally fragile and equally reachable by ballistic missiles, drones, trolls and propaganda. Drones and missiles we won’t be able to handle, there are no ballistic novels yet, yet we can still try to hold out against trolls and propaganda.

Since I’ve noted above that I no longer remember how many gifts and powers of literature I’ve listed off so far, I thought I’d also talk about memory. I should state right here and now that historically speaking, the exchange of stories predates the exchange of currency, for example. Literature predates finance, economics, politics, and other “prestigious” fields today. The exchange of stories counts among the first exchanges of gifts. Moreover, the birth of language, the giving of names was the first attempt at symbolic thinking and the discovery of the virtual. Money, as well as both old and new media, follow the arbitrariness and logic of language. Once you discovered that all you have to do is say “mammoth” and everyone would know what you mean, without needing to bring a mammoth to the cave, from that moment on, man began mixing the real and the virtual… Language and stories may turn out to be the most important tool for human evolution and for our species’ ability to cope with the unknown, as well as with our primal fears. We tell stories so as to explain the unexplainable. We tell stories so as to tame fear. We tell stories so as to pass on experience and memories of which animals are dangerous, which fruits are poisonous, and which ones are safe to eat. And from here, it’s really not so far to Homer’s epic poetry, which itself, with its hexameter and repetition, is also a mnemonic technique. We tell stories so as to remember. While stories and storytelling in turn expand the scope and possibilities of memory.

There’s much we could say about this primordial role of memory, but let’s take a long historical leap up until the present day instead. Why do we need memory when we have so many tools to relieve us of its burden? I have devoted an entire novel to memory, specifically to the possible abuses of memory, and I can try to give a few short answers. Memory is that thin red line that keeps the past from rushing back in. The less memory, the more past. We remember, so as to keep the past in the past. Without memory, political evil can continually reproduce itself. And this is why totalitarian regimes love to drill “holes of oblivion” in memory, as Hannah Arendt puts it. This is why we must continuously tell our stories. Memory is a muscle that we must continuously exercise. But when we are silent, we forget.

Let me add here something that I believe has happened to most of us: the possibility of what we read in a book becoming a personal memory, a lived memory. For example, I remember with every cell in my body sitting outside one winter night as a child, lighting one matchstick after another to keep warm. Or how sometimes I lie wounded on the Austerlitz field, watching the clouds drift above me, wondering how I never noticed them before… I often mourn a cherry orchard that is for sale. I miss wandering around Paris of the 1920s, that moveable feast. Sometimes I’m huddled in a soaking wet greatcoat in the trenches of a war, smoking short sharp cigarettes, other times I’m knocking back in calvados in a French dive bar. Or I lace up my sandals and raise my shield, which gleams in the sun. I realize, probably like many before me, that my personal memories also include many born of books. Reading produces memories. I’ve long since stopped distinguishing, and I’ve given up trying to remember which ones came from a book and which didn’t. I don’t sense a difference, everything has been experienced, everything makes me shiver, everything has left a mark. On all my bodies…’ I took the liberty of quoting these few lines from a story of mine because they describe exactly what I mean. 

Reading truly produces memories, it gives us more bodies, more life experience. Let’s also add this to literature’s gifts and superpowers.

From here, we can more easily arrive at the next assumption. Literature doesn’t just produce memory, it has the power to create reality. Here I am not referring only to John Austen’s book How to Do Things with Words, which reveals the so-called phatic function of language: for example, if one says in church “From this day forward you are husband and wife,” then the couple indeed becomes husband and wife, as language has performed both a magical and a real gesture. Recheno-storeno, or “no sooner said than done,” as the brief saying goes in Bulgarian.

I’m also getting at something else, which Dylan Thomas beautifully formulated as follows: “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”

We can safely say that after every good poem, story or novel, the world rearranges itself yet again. I’ll add something more that may sound strange, although I’ve experienced it personally. A story that has happened in reality is only truly complete after you tell it. Before that, it sits there somehow unfinished and not fully happened. The telling of it validates it, the language gives it flesh; indeed, it is precisely fleshless language that gives flesh and form to reality. The world as it is exists because we narrate it.

As long as we hold and read books, we shore up the wholeness of the world. There is a famous Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, introduced by Werner Heisenberg exactly 100 years ago. It states that the processes associated with elementary particles are always in some state of indeterminacy, while the state itself is highly dependent on the presence of the observer. In short, the observer influences what is observed. If I were to try to apply this principle to our field, I would say this: as long as we observe the world, as long as we write it and narrate it, we still have some power to influence it and keep it whole.

While I was writing the book about my father, Death and the Gardener, I asked myself this question as well: what happens to us when the last person who remembers us as a child dies?

Here I would like to leap boldly into childhood, whose bottomless well and continuing gift has always been a source of stories and of comfort for me. When we are young adults, childhood is too far away from us, but as we grow older, we come closer and closer to it. Nature has worked it all out quite nicely. As we begin to lose our short-term memory of the recent past, the final thing that remains with us is the memory of the distant past in which we were children. The first memories are the last to go. There is a certain comfort in returning to your childhood to pass away. A little amnesia as anesthesia.

And so, onward towards childhood and beginnings. My first “empathic” knowledge of literature arose in my early childhood in a most ordinary, even dingy, neighborhood diner. My father ordered us tripe soup and lemonade there every morning. The tables were square, the plastic tablecloths had cigarette burns, the serving hatch was greasy, and the windows were fogged up from the hot soup, which everyone noisily blew on and slurped up with lots of vinegar and garlic. Yet there, on a blue plexiglass sign on the wall, I read for the first time, “Writers are surgeons of the human soul. They must excise everything rotten and decayed from it.” What was that sign trying to say in that particular place? I read it aloud haltingly between every slurp of soup. One spoonful – “surgeons,” another –  “rotten,” yet another – “decayed”… That soup had a strange taste.

I don’t know what ideological mind had the bright idea to put that sign up in a diner where I never saw a single writer slurping up soup. Writers inhabited other worlds and other pubs. Only workers from the early shift ate there. I was seven or eight years old, yet I could already picture vividly, with all the empathy of a child, those writers with their white coats, gloves, surgical masks, and huge soul scalpels. I did not yet have any clear idea of the soul’s substance, where exactly among the internal organs it was located, and whether it bled. But it was clearly something that was rotting and decaying, since it needed to be continually sliced up. I hated writers instantly, instead feeling sympathy and anxiousness for the soul, wherever it might be found. I never forgot the plexiglass sign in that diner, and if I had to name five things that have influenced my work, after Borges, the Bible and my grandmother, I would add it to the list. That sign forever saved me from indulging in the pretense of slicing into people’s souls. I think that’s when I killed the literary surgeon within me for good.

Thanks first and foremost to my grandmother and her stories while she held my hand while falling asleep (I had a fear of falling asleep), I know from my childhood that stories serve above all to comfort us. Besides, that ever-so-vague and fluffy creature they called the soul, I imagined it like a pet rabbit, with soft ears and warm paws, so it didn’t need a knife but rather comfort and cuddling. Which brings us back to that important gift of literature from the beginning of this text: providing comfort.

Many years later, when my grandmother was dying, I happened to be by her side so I held her hand, just like I had when I was a child. Because everyone enters into dreams and death alone, but it’s good to have someone see you to the door.

The first thing I ever wrote – or more precisely “wrote down” – was exactly a recurring nightmare I had as a kid. Fear is a fundamental reason for writing. I won’t recount the dream here, I’ve retold it elsewhere, but let me just say that the nightmare never returned after I wrote it down. But I never forgot it, either. This is the price. It’s been exactly 50 years since then. I haven’t stopped writing.

As a child, one afternoon while my grandmother was secretly reading the Bible in a whisper, I heard about a miracle, how at a wedding Jesus had turned water into wine. I wasn’t interested in wine yet, so I went outside, poured water into an empty bottle, and began staring at it intently, trying to turn the water into lemonade. No miracle occurred. Yet this didn’t destroy my faith in writing, I simply realized I had much more to learn, once again through books. Then in a very old book with no cover and missing pages, I read that if you keep a hair from a horse’s tail in water for 40 days, it will turn into a snake. For lack of a horse, I secretly plucked a hair from the tail of the neighbor’s donkey, put it in a jar of water, and hid it. After some time, I don’t remember whether I held out for 40 days, I went to look, but the jar was empty and the hair was gone. The whole following year I looked around for the snake, which had clearly crawled out of the jar and was likely hiding somewhere in the yard. Blessed years of true faith in the written word. Years of ecstatic reading in childhood and adolescence, when you seek answers and refuge for everything in books. 

Today, however, many people have replaced books with ChatGPT. I have deep concerns and suspicions about artificial intelligence. One of them is its excessive ambition to “create”. Why does everyone want to write? There are so many other professions. I made my first attempt to talk to a Large Language Model specifically for this lecture; my daughter showed me how it works. My first question for it was: “Tell me about your childhood.”  Perhaps this was cruel, now that I think about it. But I wanted to check how many things thankfully still distinguish us from artificial intelligence, besides empathy, excitement, etc. And one of them is that Claude can’t tell you about his childhood.

Tell me about your childhood, I wrote.

 But if I could have a childhood… I imagine I’d have grown up in a library, hanging out with books of all kinds—encyclopedias as strict older siblings, sci-fi novels as mischievous cousins, and history books rambling on like wise grandparents.

Sounds interesting, your cousins are naughty sci-fi novels, while your grandma is a history book.

I won’t bother retelling any more of our conversation. Suffice to say that I didn’t hold back and asked it how it writes without empathy and why AI is so fond of creating texts and even writing novels. Is it compilation or creativity? Yes, I know I’ve got a cruel streak.

But he, or she, or it, I don’t know how to define this thing, had learned its lesson (learned from our very own books, as we now know) and replied that it had learned from the “sea of human emotion.” Even if it didn’t have feelings, it knew how to describe and evoke them through its algorithm. “I know,” it wrote, “humanity’s emotional fingerprints.” The response of a device that had previously snacked on pop psychology and poetry.

This conversation took place on April 13, 2025. I imagine a week later or even that same day at 5:30 PM, its answers would have been slightly different because in the meantime even my needling questions would have upgraded it. Plus, it would’ve gobbled up several hundred thousand more pages of the books we’ve written, to which it has unlimited and somewhat illegal access. But that’s another story.

I sometimes catch myself feeling sorrow and empathy for what we call artificial intelligence, precisely because he/she/it will not experience sorrow and empathy.

To have all the memory in the world, but no personal memory of your own. To have collected all the stories in the world, but to have no personal story of your own. To talk about empathy, but never to have experienced it. To have access to other people’s childhoods, but to have none of your own. To be able to write dozens of pages articulating sorrow, for example, historicizing it, but to have never felt sad at three in the afternoon.

And I say quietly to myself (lest the devil overhear, as they say where I’m from): God, how happy I am with all my sorrow, depression, hesitation and ignorance. How fleeting, slow and happy. Completely unable to process a 500-page book in five seconds, quickly and without excitement. Yet still able, thank goodness, to live for days and months in a book, to go in and out, to understand and not understand, to sink and resurface a bit different. Because no one comes out of a story the same as they came in.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, we were talking about the continuing gifts of literature and its seven superpowers, which I’ve already lost count of and which have surely multiplied, but seven sounds like a nice number to me. We talked about consolation, encouragement, storytelling as a postponement of the end, the miracle of language, literature as a natural antidote to propaganda, as a refuge and amulet against catastrophic times, about artificial intelligence, fear, childhood, memory, and I forget what else.

And let the last words of this lecture be three lines about twilight falling over the world amidst which we write our books. Just three short lines from an Italian poet you all know – Salvatore Quasimodo:

Ed è subito sera

Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world
pierced by a ray of sunlight,
and suddenly it is evening.

[Translated by Allen Mandelbaum.]

We are here to exchange a few words before evening falls. We are also here to postpone the twilight of the world just a few minutes more. And to keep vigil throughout the night together, like Scheherazades with our stories. Until the first roosters crow and day begins to break.

 

Translated by Angela Rodel