We are what is reflected on our retina. Our towns and cities grow through us. Our habitats become facts of our biographies – and our inner world, too. Still, culture also lives and functions in the same way. And literature as well.

Thinking of the conceptual frame of the literary stage, it seems reasonable – and even necessary – to supplement and deepen the theme of the whole festival: The City of Masters. Because not only people sculpt faces and create the spirit of a certain city – the city, in its turn, also influences its artists and creators in an utterly intense way. Moreover, it often happens, that the city itself, its atmosphere and a special composition of the cultural and historical air, its individual character start writing through their authors. They begin to stand out between the words and directly in the text, generating the "urban text" as a phenomenon. The phenomenon of the national and world literature.

This is why we are so interested in how genius loci – or "spirit of place" generates artistic geniuses or artifex loci: those artists, suffused by the city and embodying the essence of the territory which gave birth to them in the most precise and powerful way in their artistic practices.

And this is worth talking about: in dialogues with writers and intellectuals, reviewers and translators, in heated discussions and intense public interviews. Not forgetting of poetry readings. It's time for us already to talk about how cities and places create their artists and the latter glorify them by presenting and reflecting them in their own books.

And so culture continues, and literary works are written, and nothing disappears without a trace.