The appearance of the literary dictionary in Bulgaria was registered between the two world wars, when the concept of literary history was already a fact. Literary history literary history seeks to cover the whole literary life and process, or to approach conceptually, selectively, taking into account the diversity of ideas, aesthetics and stylistics.

In contrast, the dictionary strives for a smaller or larger scale, comprehensiveness of names and phenomena, completeness of literary-historical knowledge, although it uses the means of analytical-synthetic exposition. In the history of Bulgarian literary dictionaries, the dictionary either continued the literary-historical narrative by other means, or supplemented and compensated the lack of adequate literary-historical knowledge, or used new possibilities for structuring this knowledge in its special format.