Radoslav Bimbalov's novel "Wall", published by Ciela, came to Burgas this week, when the author met readers at the Peyo K. Yavorov Regional Library. Burgas council and the library organised the event, which drew a full house with no seats left.
There are no separate European, traditional or Orthodox values, only human ones, Bimbalov told the audience. For him, life comes first, freedom second, and a return to both would end division.
The novel is set in a made-up Balkan town whose residents build a wall and split themselves apart. The wall stands for division as a whole, the author said: not a border between two places, but one people raise themselves. The small town turns against itself through social media, and its museum splits in two, so visitors see two different versions of the same events. The book gives no easy answer to the question "which side are you on?"
Bimbalov said what drove him to write the novel was watching how fear of those who are different, of other opinions and of disagreement, pushes people into small groups where they hear nothing but confirmation of their own beliefs. The phrase "social bubble" sounds harmless, he said, but behind these bubbles sit cages, where everyone around a person tells them they're right.
The danger starts not when the wall goes up, but when it becomes the most important thing, he warned. That's when people forget what came before, stop caring who's on the other side, and start treating division as normal.
"Social media has become our virtual village gathering," Bimbalov said. Online, he said, people turn aggressive more easily because of the sense of distance and anonymity, and social networks also turn into a kind of scaffold, where people act as both judge and executioner. False information can breed hatred, he said, because once a false claim is taken as real, the blame falls on the other side and new walls go up.
The author believes that for every topic that unites us, at least three divide us. That's why talking matters, he said: it helps us see where our views differ without turning that difference into an unbridgeable divide — and when people actually talk, it turns out they're not so different after all.
"Wall" is also about memory, Bimbalov said. When different versions of the same past exist side by side, decisions about the present and the future end up diverging too, and history becomes a tool for division. That's exactly why questions, comparison and fact-checking are needed, he said, instead of simply accepting a ready-made version of events.
The author urged young people not to just go with the flow, and, when school fails to make them think, to seek out answers and ask questions on their own. "Right now we badly need young people. They're our only hope, because they haven't lived with our fears," he said.
Bimbalov called his novel a serious confession. He admits he's part of the machinery of division himself: he takes sides, gets angry, gets drawn into sharp arguments. Since writing the book, he said, he makes a conscious effort to find something good and human in people he publicly disagrees with.
An artist shouldn't stay locked in an ivory tower while society changes around them, the author believes. He feels bound to take a stand, well aware that some readers will disagree. He draws a line between his writing and his public statements: a reader can reject his views and still find something of their own in his books. He doesn't write what readers expect, he said, but what he himself wants to say — his aim is to hold up a mirror.
Bimbalov said he'd asked himself whether the book was a dystopia or a utopia. Splitting into two groups would be a utopia if people simply stayed within their communities, he said, but new differences and new grounds for conflict keep emerging inside the groups themselves. He didn't want to take sides, and he sees people on both sides of the wall as alike.
The author admitted there's self-irony in the idea that a wall could be a kind of positive balance, and pointed to the word "measure" as central to the Bulgarian and Balkan character. Lose that sense of measure, he said, and differences turn into extremes. A wall doesn't necessarily mean rejecting one side, he said — it can be a boundary that lets different people exist without denying each other.
On the wall between generations, Bimbalov pushed back against the charge that young people are addicted to screens, pointing out that it was adults who gave them the devices in the first place. Fear of the young comes from older people not understanding their world, he said. Overcoming it depends on younger generations staying curious about what lies beyond, how others live, and realising that everyone breathes the same air.
At the event, Bimbalov also spoke about his personal ties to the Strandzha region and the village of Fakiya, where his family comes from. Among those present was Radko Binbelov, the current mayor of Fakiya.