Ismail Kadare’s House of Mirrors
Ismail Kadare, trans. John Hodgson, A Dictator Calls
Harvill Secker, 240pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781787303638
reviewed by Bronwyn Scott-McCharen
Ismail Kadare’s latest offering in English is a cross between a game of telephone and a crime scene investigation. The crime: an alleged phone call between the feared Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the famed Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, in which Pasternak either bravely stands up for or cowardly denies any connection to his friend and fellow writer, beleaguered poet Osip Mandelstam. In A Dictator Calls, Kadare serves as chief investigator, continually dissecting and revisiting these three minutes that seemingly exemplify the millennia-long struggle between the artist and the tyrannical power he must serve.
The phone call, rendered near-mythical by Kadare, takes place in 1934. The seminal events of Pasternak’s life – the imprisonment of his mistress and muse Olga Ivinskaya, the fraught publication journey of Doctor Zhivago and its use as a weapon in the cultural Cold War – were still years in the future. This part of his biography has previously been explored in fiction (Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept) and non-fiction alike (Peter Finn and Petra Couvée’s The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book; Anna Pasternak’s Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago), but Kadare’s take lies between fiction and non-fiction. In the Albanian-speaking world, Kur sunduesit grinden (When Rulers Quarrel) was published in 2018 as an essay, while its English translation is now retitled and released as a work of fiction. What is real and what is fabrication is a constant question provoked by life under totalitarianism, but perhaps the linguistic switch from non-fiction to fiction is less a matter of metaphor and more a matter of marketing (outside of Albania and Kosovo, Kadare is primarily known as a novelist). But the more Kadare talks about Pasternak, Stalin, and Mandelstam, the more he appears to talk about himself and his own position within the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha in his native Albania.
Long considered a Cold War oddity, bizarre even by the standards of both global Communism and dictatorships more broadly, Albania under Hoxha isolated itself from both the capitalist West and the rest of the state socialist East. Albania first split with Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1948 — Tito, unlike Pasternak, was alleged not to have minced words in his own correspondence with Stalin — then with Khrushchev’s Soviet Union in 1961, having deemed the land of Lenin insufficiently Marxist, and finally with the People’s Republic of China after the latter began its slow burning flirtation with the United States in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, Albania stood alone, an exemplary island of Marxism-Leninism in a sea of bourgeois decadence and revisionist treachery.
Hoxha’s regime was also marked by its cartoonish yet lethal paranoia, exemplified by the mysterious death of Hoxha’s right-hand man, Mehmet Shehu, thinly fictionalised by Kadare in The Successor (2003). In a land where even the dictator’s closest confidant wasn’t safe from being suicided by the state, how could art and culture thrive? How could this mid-century hermit kingdom produce writers and poets? How did Kadare produce some of his best work — The General of the Dead Army (1963), Chronicle in StoneThe Palace of Dreams (1981) among others — under such conditions?
With Kadare, who remains known around the world as the Albanian writer, it is near-impossible to separate life from art. As such, the transition from non-fiction to fiction A Dictator Calls makes in translation is obvious, expected, perhaps even welcomed; any discussion of the book will and should inevitably include details from the author’s own biography. In Hoxha’s time, biography — the class background of one’s family as either exploiters or the exploited under the old order — was the bedrock of the classless society. A good biography, coupled with Party membership, afforded one the privilege of a high status job, a university degree, and residence in the capital city of Tirana, while a bad biography meant a life on the margins, if not one of perpetual imprisonment or banishment to internal exile in some remote locale. But how does Kadare’s biography, in both the Hoxhaist sense and the contemporary understanding of the word, inform his view of the Soviet Union in 1934? And what does it tell us about A Dictator Calls?
20th-century Central and East European Communism tended to produce and export a very particular writer: male in gender and masculine in literary style and outlook whose status within the system was never as clear-cut as Western audiences would like. Writers who were neither dissidents drunk on moralism nor regime cultural mouthpieces. This pantheon of leading literary men of the Iron Curtained East with complex biographies and impressive bibliographies includes the recently-deceased Milan Kundera, Boris Pasternak, and Kadare himself. Perennial Nobel candidature is another shared characteristic of this group, though unlike Kundera and Kadare, Pasternak was, in fact, awarded the grand prize in 1958. Victory was short-lived, however, as Pasternak was famously pressured by the Soviet Union to refuse the prize; only in 1989 did his son finally accept it on his behalf. Reflecting on the reaction to Pasternak’s Nobel from his fellow students at Moscow’s Gorky Institute, Kadare writes:
The question wasn’t about them, but about myself. The same can be said for A Dictator Calls. In print as in life, Kadare is both the Albanian Pasternak and the Albanian Mandelstam, simultaneously protected and punished by Hoxha’s regime. Stalin and Pasternak’s three-minute phone call reveals a side of this relationship between these ‘double monarchs’, as Kadare says, that both contradicts and complements the pressure and persecution Pasternak faced throughout his career. A phone call from Stalin himself instead of a surprise visit from the NKVD signifies a certain degree of acceptance — or at the very least, tolerance — for Pasternak by the Soviet authorities, a leniency that, fifteen years later, would see Olga Ivinskaya sent to the gulag in his place. Kadare, too, admits to receiving at least one laudatory phone call from Hoxha; perhaps this explains his decades-long fixation on the book’s titular subject. ‘Rarely has so much been said and written about a phone conversation,’ Kadare writes: indeed.
The 13 versions of the call — variations on a theme — reveal just as much about Pasternak, Stalin, and Mandelstam as they do about Kadare and Hoxha. For Kadare, this call is more than just a call but rather a battle of equals. ‘An artistic genius has power,’ he says while musing on the sources and use of this power before asking of readers and of himself: ‘Who was in the hand of whom?’ Tyrants rise and fall but poets live eternally may perhaps be the message A Dictator Calls wishes to convey, but it’s one that’s far too pat and cliché to explain the relationship between the artist and the totalitarian state in all of its complexity. We get the occasional glimpse of this complexity when Kadare states that Pasternak was ‘himself… the real tyranos’. Is this merely an empty statement of feigned bravado in the face of oppression? Or does it hint at certain Faustian bargains that all people, artists included, must make with the state to ensure their continued survival? Not only was Kadare a working writer under Europe’s most hardline Communist regime, but he was a celebrated one at that, raised up to literary heights from which he has never fallen since. Perhaps Kadare’s talent as a writer softened Hoxha’s hard heart, but artistic talent alone cannot explain his survival both as a public figure and a private citizen under Communism.
‘Could the tyrant bring the poet to his knees?’ Kadare asks, both of Stalin and, implicitly, of Hoxha. ‘Could he overthrow him?’ At 87, Kadare has outlived Hoxha in more ways than one; the victor in their fight is clear. Still, Kadare’s transition from the cautiously celebrated writer on a precarious footing during Hoxha’s time to today’s titan of international literature is a fraught one, full of questions that perhaps will never be answered, secrets that will outlive Kadare himself. Though there is the occasional direct glimpse into Kadare’s inner self — ‘I would also endure that frightening journey through light and darkness, intermingled as in all great misunderstandings’ — for the most part Kadare prefers to speak through the trinity of Pasternak, Stalin, and Mandelstam, much as he would any character of his own creation.
‘Human memory,’ Kadare writes, ‘even when not defamatory, has not treated great poets with tenderness.’ Missing Nobel aside, it seems both Albania and the world has treated Kadare well and ensured his place in the global pantheon of great writers. But insecurity attacks even those at the very top. A Dictator Calls is, then, an expression of the existential anxieties of an ageing literary titan, a work that seeks to contextualise, albeit indirectly, his artistic and political legacy.
The phone call, rendered near-mythical by Kadare, takes place in 1934. The seminal events of Pasternak’s life – the imprisonment of his mistress and muse Olga Ivinskaya, the fraught publication journey of Doctor Zhivago and its use as a weapon in the cultural Cold War – were still years in the future. This part of his biography has previously been explored in fiction (Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept) and non-fiction alike (Peter Finn and Petra Couvée’s The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book; Anna Pasternak’s Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago), but Kadare’s take lies between fiction and non-fiction. In the Albanian-speaking world, Kur sunduesit grinden (When Rulers Quarrel) was published in 2018 as an essay, while its English translation is now retitled and released as a work of fiction. What is real and what is fabrication is a constant question provoked by life under totalitarianism, but perhaps the linguistic switch from non-fiction to fiction is less a matter of metaphor and more a matter of marketing (outside of Albania and Kosovo, Kadare is primarily known as a novelist). But the more Kadare talks about Pasternak, Stalin, and Mandelstam, the more he appears to talk about himself and his own position within the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha in his native Albania.
Long considered a Cold War oddity, bizarre even by the standards of both global Communism and dictatorships more broadly, Albania under Hoxha isolated itself from both the capitalist West and the rest of the state socialist East. Albania first split with Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1948 — Tito, unlike Pasternak, was alleged not to have minced words in his own correspondence with Stalin — then with Khrushchev’s Soviet Union in 1961, having deemed the land of Lenin insufficiently Marxist, and finally with the People’s Republic of China after the latter began its slow burning flirtation with the United States in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, Albania stood alone, an exemplary island of Marxism-Leninism in a sea of bourgeois decadence and revisionist treachery.
Hoxha’s regime was also marked by its cartoonish yet lethal paranoia, exemplified by the mysterious death of Hoxha’s right-hand man, Mehmet Shehu, thinly fictionalised by Kadare in The Successor (2003). In a land where even the dictator’s closest confidant wasn’t safe from being suicided by the state, how could art and culture thrive? How could this mid-century hermit kingdom produce writers and poets? How did Kadare produce some of his best work — The General of the Dead Army (1963), Chronicle in StoneThe Palace of Dreams (1981) among others — under such conditions?
With Kadare, who remains known around the world as the Albanian writer, it is near-impossible to separate life from art. As such, the transition from non-fiction to fiction A Dictator Calls makes in translation is obvious, expected, perhaps even welcomed; any discussion of the book will and should inevitably include details from the author’s own biography. In Hoxha’s time, biography — the class background of one’s family as either exploiters or the exploited under the old order — was the bedrock of the classless society. A good biography, coupled with Party membership, afforded one the privilege of a high status job, a university degree, and residence in the capital city of Tirana, while a bad biography meant a life on the margins, if not one of perpetual imprisonment or banishment to internal exile in some remote locale. But how does Kadare’s biography, in both the Hoxhaist sense and the contemporary understanding of the word, inform his view of the Soviet Union in 1934? And what does it tell us about A Dictator Calls?
20th-century Central and East European Communism tended to produce and export a very particular writer: male in gender and masculine in literary style and outlook whose status within the system was never as clear-cut as Western audiences would like. Writers who were neither dissidents drunk on moralism nor regime cultural mouthpieces. This pantheon of leading literary men of the Iron Curtained East with complex biographies and impressive bibliographies includes the recently-deceased Milan Kundera, Boris Pasternak, and Kadare himself. Perennial Nobel candidature is another shared characteristic of this group, though unlike Kundera and Kadare, Pasternak was, in fact, awarded the grand prize in 1958. Victory was short-lived, however, as Pasternak was famously pressured by the Soviet Union to refuse the prize; only in 1989 did his son finally accept it on his behalf. Reflecting on the reaction to Pasternak’s Nobel from his fellow students at Moscow’s Gorky Institute, Kadare writes:
Most of the students, as they howled in chorus to denounce the prize, dreamed of nothing else but winning it. However, the question wasn’t about them, but about myself. Should I say that the Nobel Prize had never crossed my mind? Of course not. I’d thought of it often, but especially years later when it was whispered that I myself. . . might be on that list.
The question wasn’t about them, but about myself. The same can be said for A Dictator Calls. In print as in life, Kadare is both the Albanian Pasternak and the Albanian Mandelstam, simultaneously protected and punished by Hoxha’s regime. Stalin and Pasternak’s three-minute phone call reveals a side of this relationship between these ‘double monarchs’, as Kadare says, that both contradicts and complements the pressure and persecution Pasternak faced throughout his career. A phone call from Stalin himself instead of a surprise visit from the NKVD signifies a certain degree of acceptance — or at the very least, tolerance — for Pasternak by the Soviet authorities, a leniency that, fifteen years later, would see Olga Ivinskaya sent to the gulag in his place. Kadare, too, admits to receiving at least one laudatory phone call from Hoxha; perhaps this explains his decades-long fixation on the book’s titular subject. ‘Rarely has so much been said and written about a phone conversation,’ Kadare writes: indeed.
The 13 versions of the call — variations on a theme — reveal just as much about Pasternak, Stalin, and Mandelstam as they do about Kadare and Hoxha. For Kadare, this call is more than just a call but rather a battle of equals. ‘An artistic genius has power,’ he says while musing on the sources and use of this power before asking of readers and of himself: ‘Who was in the hand of whom?’ Tyrants rise and fall but poets live eternally may perhaps be the message A Dictator Calls wishes to convey, but it’s one that’s far too pat and cliché to explain the relationship between the artist and the totalitarian state in all of its complexity. We get the occasional glimpse of this complexity when Kadare states that Pasternak was ‘himself… the real tyranos’. Is this merely an empty statement of feigned bravado in the face of oppression? Or does it hint at certain Faustian bargains that all people, artists included, must make with the state to ensure their continued survival? Not only was Kadare a working writer under Europe’s most hardline Communist regime, but he was a celebrated one at that, raised up to literary heights from which he has never fallen since. Perhaps Kadare’s talent as a writer softened Hoxha’s hard heart, but artistic talent alone cannot explain his survival both as a public figure and a private citizen under Communism.
‘Could the tyrant bring the poet to his knees?’ Kadare asks, both of Stalin and, implicitly, of Hoxha. ‘Could he overthrow him?’ At 87, Kadare has outlived Hoxha in more ways than one; the victor in their fight is clear. Still, Kadare’s transition from the cautiously celebrated writer on a precarious footing during Hoxha’s time to today’s titan of international literature is a fraught one, full of questions that perhaps will never be answered, secrets that will outlive Kadare himself. Though there is the occasional direct glimpse into Kadare’s inner self — ‘I would also endure that frightening journey through light and darkness, intermingled as in all great misunderstandings’ — for the most part Kadare prefers to speak through the trinity of Pasternak, Stalin, and Mandelstam, much as he would any character of his own creation.
‘Human memory,’ Kadare writes, ‘even when not defamatory, has not treated great poets with tenderness.’ Missing Nobel aside, it seems both Albania and the world has treated Kadare well and ensured his place in the global pantheon of great writers. But insecurity attacks even those at the very top. A Dictator Calls is, then, an expression of the existential anxieties of an ageing literary titan, a work that seeks to contextualise, albeit indirectly, his artistic and political legacy.