Literature of the No

We live in the most comfortable world we have ever known. One might think that, in such circumstances, there is no reason to rebel. Nothing could be further from the truth. Disobedience is both our privilege and our duty.

Kraków, 28 April 2026

To those who wish to read dangerously,

as I began programming this year’s edition of the Conrad Festival, I returned to the collection of essays Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, written by Azar Nafisi as a series of letters to her dearest – now deceased – father. The Iranian writer and activist has preserved her father’s daily bedtime storytelling as her most precious, almost sacred memory. Now it is she who tells the world through literature – to him and to us. And in this very act, she already questions the preordained order; literature is immortal, and as such, it allows us to remain with the dead.

An invitation for Nafisi to speak in Kraków was among the first I sent. The author of Reading Lolita in Tehran is a rebel – someone who has long embodied an idea close to my heart: that literature can be a tool for change, both in the world and within ourselves. And although, due to the war launched by the United States against Iran, she declined to take part in our festival, her thought continues to accompany me as I move forward with the preparations. It is also for this reason that I have decided to write another letter – this time to you.

We, modern people, often avoid conflict out of convenience; we readily retreat into bubbles with those who think like us and surround ourselves with art that reflects our beliefs or reinforces our prejudices. Yet reading dangerously does not have to mean choosing books whose protagonists challenge the world as it is. What can be truly stimulating is immersing ourselves in any story – especially a polyphonic one – as long as we remain willing to be confronted with views different from our own.

According to Nafisi, it is novels that train us best in the art of rebellion – the power of imagination, strengthened by literature – because they allow us to trace possible turns of events and to understand our opponents. Fictional patterns resemble life more than any other form: as events unfold, characters grow through conflict. Dissent – political, personal, literary – takes on a concrete shape, and that shape can shift our perspective. Such a revision is neither easy nor obvious – something literature exposes with remarkable clarity, while offering a laboratory safer than life itself; a space in which dangerous questions can be asked.

What matters, then, is the way we engage with a text – the way we draw out literature’s subversive potential. Literature alone will not change the world or the course of human lives; it requires an act. There is no reading list which, even if completed, will make us better, wiser, or braver people. Reading by itself does not guarantee that peace will prevail in the world, nor that we will make the right choice when the moment of trial comes. And yet the written word can inspire actions that overturn the existing social order; it can also be – and sometimes indeed is – a tool of resistance. Finally, it can bring about transformation within ourselves, which is equally important, though by no means easier.

*

Fully aware of all this, authoritarian power has always sought to pacify people of the pen – something we continue to witness today in various parts of the world. The situation of writers is precarious in every respect: existentially, in terms of freedom, and materially.

This absolutist mentality is also present within democracies – we are increasingly losing both the opportunity and the willingness to engage in dialogue; changing one’s mind is met more with stigma than with praise for maturity, and anyone who thinks differently is treated as an opponent. In totalitarian states, writers, poets, journalists, columnists, publishers, and booksellers are intimidated, sentenced to prison, and even murdered. Democracies, in turn, tend to treat people of letters with indifference and disregard, as though reading were something inconsequential.

A society that does not read is a society of shallow thought, lost memory, and a collapsing culture. History makes this painfully clear. Books have been capable of igniting revolutions – every authoritarian regime has known this. In 1933, Nazi students marched with torches through German cities. They burned 25,000 volumes – they were not burning paper, they were burning memory. Heinrich Heine, whose works were among those burned on the pyres, had written a century earlier: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.” Even if no longer literally, books – and with them ideas and imagination – continue to be set on fire. Writers find themselves blacklisted; inconvenient titles are censored. And when literature is under threat, the whole world is under threat.

Today, we abandon books also voluntarily. We trade nourishing reading for endless fragments of content. We scroll instead of studying. We choose distraction over deep reading. The consequences look familiar: lower concentration, distortion of truth, a sense of uprootedness, the reduction of public debate to slogans. Our susceptibility to manipulation grows, as does our tendency to fall for conspiracy theories and fake news. This is why reading has always served something more than individual benefit. Our future will be written not only by what we create, but also by what we choose to read.

“I rebel, therefore we exist,” wrote Albert Camus in The Rebel, to emphasize that disobedience, beginning with a single movement of thought, gains meaning as an act directed towards a community. Although rebellion in social isolation is possible, it is more often paid for with frustration, and it stalls at anger. A community built around literature, by contrast, allows people to meet across social, political, gender, generational, and all other divides. Nafisi knew it when, in 1995 – expelled from the University of Tehran for opposing the obligation to wear a veil – she opened her own home to students, turning it into a foothold of free thought.

*

Similar footholds are scattered across the world. And although their existence is also under threat, they remain open to each and every one of us. They are libraries and bookstores. Tahar Djaout wrote about the role of one such place in The Last Summer of Reason. His protagonist, Boualem Yekker (from Kabyle: the one who stood up, who resisted), is a bookseller who takes part in spreading rebellion and beauty. The plot is set in Algiers, overtaken by the Vigilant Brothers, a radical conservative party that subordinates citizens’ lives to theological laws. It is a world where books (and art in general) are threatened by the Book, freedom by dogma, and independent thought by indoctrination.

Boualem sacrifices everything, including his family – his children, infected with Islamism through sectarian schooling, pull their mother to the “only right side” and leave – in order to resist the regime on his own. Threatened by the new inquisition, he confronts the militant groups peacefully. He is placed at the very end of the list of individuals marked for elimination. Perhaps he is not even worthy of that; perhaps he is so weak that the regime does not take him seriously, and his punishment for straying is to remain utterly alone in a world saturated with terror – the protagonist begins to question his very existence.

Running the bookstore – even as the fear‑stricken shadows of his fellow citizens visit it less and less often – he risks his life to obtain “secular” publications from abroad. He stands firm against fanatical violence. He endures, despite moments of doubt, when even for him books cease to offer comfort.

From one day to the next, Yekker’s bookstore is shut down and his books burned. What remains for him – though not without effort – is dreaming: he replaces the living with spirits, and history with a poetic myth steeped in pathos. Since childhood, he has been accompanied by the words of books that built the kingdom of imagination. The word of the Book can only enslave and crush. The horizon disappears; neither the eye nor the mind ventures beyond the imposed boundary. And yet, as long as we have imagination, we are free – as one of the lessons of Read Dangerously reminds us.

“Will spring come?” The novel’s open ending is brutally closed by life itself. In 1992, civil war breaks out in Algeria, waged by the National Liberation Front and the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front. It is then that Tahar Djaout – a journalist, poet and mathematician of Kabyle origin, an uncompromising intellectual – establishes the “Ruptures” weekly, breaking with the Islamic Ba’athist ideology.

For using a dangerous pen – as one of the assassins put it – Djaout is shot twice in the head by Islamic fundamentalists on 26 May 1993 in Algiers. He falls into a coma from which he never wakes up – he dies at the age of thirty‑nine. One of his final notes has survived: Silence means death, if you speak up, you will die, if you choose silence, you will die, so speak up and die.

The story of “the one who resisted” was found after the author’s death and delivered to his French publisher, who took its title from the text itself. That last summer coincides with the end of Djaout’s life. Between his death and 1995, more journalists were killed in Algeria than in the rest of the world combined. In response to the murder of Camus’s compatriot, more than 300 writers from around the globe signed an appeal that became the seed of the International Parliament of Writers, created to protect authors under threat.

*

In one of Łódź’s antiquarian bookshops, every day – even in the rain – literature for a penny is laid out on the outer windowsill. That is how an inconspicuous, slightly damp copy of Bartleby & Co. found its way into my hands. In this experimental essay, Enrique Vila‑Matas explores the question of deliberately opting out of the established social order.

This opting out can be understood in two ways in the Spanish writer’s work. The nameless author of the peculiar journal – and at the same time of footnotes to an invisible text – has not written a word for twenty‑five years. One day, upon “hearing” in the office that “Mr Bartleby is at a meeting,” he realises the absurdity of the misinterpreted message. After all, the scrivener Bartleby from Herman Melville’s short story never attended any meetings, at least not after the day he ostentatiously declared that he would prefer not to.

The author of the journal decides to trace the literature of the No, because, as he claims, only from a negative impulse, only from the labyrinth of the No can the literature of tomorrow emerge. The result of this investigation – or rather fixation – is eighty-six footnotes gathering the stories of Bartlebys like himself. The unsettling inclination to reject the world has been shared by authors without books and writers without texts, as well as by those who abandoned writing, interrupted it, began new fragments, circled around them, tormented by the immanent impossibility of literary matter – all those who turned not/writing into their life’s vocation.

On the other hand, the scrivener Bartleby is a total rebel. He not only lays down his pen but also questions every other obligation. Armed with the courage to be himself, he could not care less about anything or anyone. Vila‑Matas repeats several times that invisible is not the same as non-existent. This very thought is the crux of the matter. The declaration “I would prefer not to” is a decision; refusal is an act of agency, far more nuanced than the resignation usually attributed to it. Stopping allows one to grasp the moment of exhaustion, of crisis, to reach a turning point. One may remain in that state, or one may challenge the status quo in order to establish a new one.

Perhaps today, in the era of late capitalism, adopting the stance of a rebel, an outsider, a protester consists above all in abandoning the pressure to act for the sake of acting and in stepping off the treadmill of productivity.

It is hard to resist the impression that this productivity is sometimes a reaction to the fear of an uncertain future. With the development of technology – and especially artificial intelligence – many processes have been transformed, making life more comfortable than ever before. Reality expands in terms of possibilities and contracts in terms of human participation in it. Technological conveniences offer unprecedented optimization of numerous activities. And yet, within this ease, I sense a certain absence.

I wonder what the catalogue of Bartlebys would be like if Vila‑Matas were to write it today? In footnote no. 7 of the journal published in 2000, he mentions Daniele Del Giudice, who builds a literary work on the foundation of nothingness and who believes that a text – if it is to matter and possess any kind of morality – must chart new paths and reveal the untold. It is then immoral to reduce the horizon of a text to mere impressions and to safely reproduce a stylistic effect. Del Giudice proclaims an ethical search for new forms, with full awareness that a writer attempting to expand the boundaries of the human may well fail. All of this makes writing an act of high risk, where safety is nothing but a semblance.

To put it plainly: can texts – already generated on a mass scale – belong to the literature of the No? If grammar, style, and vocabulary can be copied so easily, can the creation of literature be replaced by its simulation without any loss? In other words: can the scrivener Bartleby be a machine, a non‑human without qualities, a non‑human for all purposes whatsoever? And if not/writing is a way of surviving, and literature a form of resistance, then who, in this case, would prefer not to?

Paulina Frankiewicz

Programme Director of the Conrad Festival