A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson, was longlisted for the 2024 Man Booker International Prize.
“History is usually reticent regarding what happens between poets and tyrants. The truth gives way to inventions, some memorable, others forgettable,” Ismail Kadare
Ismail Kadare, the renowned Albanian novelist and poet, navigated the oppressive environment of communist Albania under dictator Enver Hoxha. By means of allegory and myth, he criticised the regime in his works, leading to his obtaining political asylum in France in 1990. In his later years, Kadare returned to Albania where he died in July 2024. He was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 for his entire body of work.
Who better than Kadare to write about the three-minute telephone call between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and poet and writer, Boris Pasternak, in June 1934?
The background to the telephone call was the arrest one month earlier, in May 1934, of Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet, essayist and literary critic, widely regarded as one of the most significant figures of Russian modernism. He had recited his Stalin Epigram to Boris Pasternak who warned him: “I didn’t hear this, you didn’t recite it to me, because, you know, very strange and terrible things are happening now: they’ve begun to pick people up . . .”
The three-minute telephone conversation ends with the dictator hanging up as he chides Pasternak for not sticking up for a Comrade. The incident sparked a polemic that continues to this day among historians and literary scholars. The exact content of the conversation remains disputed as no recording or transcript exists.
In A Dictator Calls, not only does Kadare analyse the thirteen different versions of the conversation, but the readers gets a strong sense of the grim atmosphere of the time, as Stalin’s grip tightened on Soviet culture and the intellectual sphere, heralding the Great Purge. The reader also gets a very real sense of the psychological manipulation, confusion and fear employed by the Soviet regime as tools of mind control.
The polemic over Pasternak’s silence also feeds into broader questions about the complicity vs. courage of Soviet intellectuals under totalitarianism. On the one hand, writers like Pasternak balanced their creative freedom with state demands, while on the other writers such as Mandelstam were imprisoned and generally ended up dying of neglect, hunger and cold in a transit camp or the gulag, becoming symbols of artistic integrity and resistance in the face of tyranny.
A Dictator Calls also opens a window on to the literature of dissent citing writers Yevgeny Zamyatin, Anna Akhmatova and others. And it has had me scanning my bookshelves for Isaiah Berlin’s The Power of Ideas, The Soviet Mind, Freedom and its Betrayal and Against the Current.
Why is the incident still relevant today?
Censorship is a subject very much in the news right now. The words of Ismail Kadare give (some) hope all the same: “For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature, otherwise writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship – Shakespeare, Cervantes. The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. In the west, the problem is not freedom. There are other servitudes – lack of talent, thousands of mediocre books published every year.”
The incident epitomizes the ethical and moral dilemmas faced by writers and artists under oppressive regimes. It raises questions about courage, loyalty, and the limits of dissent. Autocracies are resurgent in the world today and would-be strongmen coming to power in the West are using a new set of tools to create confusion and fear in a bid to consolidate total power and control. Digital dictators have been using technology to strengthens autocracy for a while now, but now with recent political changes Stateside, what will happen next . . . ?
We look forward to seeing you at the BookBlast® Translation Book Club at Hatchards, Piccadilly, on 09 December 2024 at 6pm to discuss A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, and all the questions it raises.
So grab your tickets and see you there!
Warm wishes, Georgia & Hatchards Booksellers
