Book Review: Kadare (2024). A Dictator Calls. Translated by John Hodgson. London: Vintage Digital. ISBN: 9781529920574

On 1 July 2024, Ismail Kadare, one of the most prestigious and successful writers in Albania, died at the age of eighty-eight. Kadare’s long-standing, tense relationship with the Albanian communist government, led by Enver Hoxha, and his severe experiences of political oppression and banning inspired his last book Kur sunduesit grinden (2018), which was translated into English under the title A Dictator Calls (2023; paperback 2024). This book was his final message about his lifelong exploration of the difficult relationship between tyranny and literature. In the book, Kadare attempted to show that “both sides, the state and the writer, [a]re equally deplorable” (p. 31) by focusing on the famous mystery of a three-minute phone call between the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and Russian writer Boris Pasternak in 1934. In the early twentieth century, Pasternak was regarded as one of the greatest poets in Russian literature. However, the rumour that he had surrendered to the notorious dictator by betraying his close friend, Osip Mandelstam, damaged his fame, and the 1957 publication of the dissident novel Doctor Zhivago in Italy ultimately turned him into a traitor. Pasternak was forced to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to him in 1958.

Historically speaking, writing about dictators has an exceedingly long and significant tradition in modern and contemporary literature. The twentieth century can be viewed as the age of dictatorship, from Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to various autocratic military regimes in former colonial states. In fact, the American novelist Sinclair Lewis produced impressive characters modelled upon Hitler in It Can’t Happen Here (1935). Furthermore, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Vladimir Nabokov satirised Stalin by inventing the Number One (Darkness at Noon, 1940), Napoleon (Animal Farm, 1945), Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949), and Paduk (Bend Sinister, 1947). In the history of world literature after World War II, dictators are almost everywhere. Latin American authors, such as Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez, firmly established a literary subgenre called dictator fiction, and numerous English writers from various parts of the world (e.g., John Updike, V. S. Naipaul, Nuruddin Farah, George Steiner, J. G. Ballard, Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, Julian Barnes, and Giles Foden) have also sought to portray both actual and imaginary dictators in their works.

In the historical context of the extensive dictator literature, how should we classify Kadare’s A Dictator Calls? It was sold as a novel (or novella) and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024, but it is not easy to categorise it. Since the book is based mostly on Kadare’s firsthand experiences and thoughts, it can be viewed as a combination of fiction and nonfiction. In other words, A Dictator Calls is a semi-fictional tale that problematises the relationship between literature and dictatorial powers by pondering the mystery of Pasternak’s attitude toward Stalin.

Like Kadare himself, the narrator of the book is an old Albanian writer with an international reputation who once studied at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. In 1976, he was trying to publish a novel about his early days in the Soviet Union, on which he had worked for more than ten years. For the narrator, who thinks that the world can be separated “into two parts, one part suitable for literature and the other not”, Moscow paradoxically became the former “at exactly the time when such a thing was no longer allowed” under the totalitarian rule of the communist party (pp. 12–13). However, he also believed that only the novel could be the “remaining route to Moscow, which even the most terrifying tanks couldn’t reach” (p. 13).

As most of the authors of actual dictator fiction have done, Kadare emphasised the value of literature. But his portrayal of the narrator had nothing to do with simple heroism. In his view, writers were not always brave heroes combating violence or injustice but weak, fragile figures almost overwhelmed by fear. For example, since he was forced to leave Moscow due to the political tension between the Soviet Union and Albania, the narrator had always been obsessed with the nightmarish image of Pasternak in a rally being insulted by his fellow Russians who had once respected and loved him. Moreover, when the narrator suddenly receives a phone call from Hoxha, all he can do is thank the dictator for acclaiming his recently published poem. Even after the publication of his novel, the narrator trembled with fear “[o]ut of an instinct of self-defense”, wanting to turn “the book back into a manuscript and then unwri[te] it” (pp. 42–43). Finally, the narrator candidly asserted that he was, as a writer, “[n]ot like Pasternak or anyone else” (p. 47).

Ironically, that statement is similar to what Pasternak was actually said to have told Stalin when he received an unexpected phone call from the Kremlin on 23 June 1934, after the arrest of fellow poet Osip Mandelstam, who published a piece criticising the Soviet leader. Though the content of the conversation was confidential, it has been rumoured that Stalin asked Pasternak what he thought about Mandelstam, and the writer’s reply was “We’re different, Comrade Stalin” (p. 14). As I mentioned earlier, Pasternak’s reputation was highly damaged by this scandal that he had betrayed his close friend. In 1960, just two years after the incident of being forced to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature due to his publication of the dissident novel Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak died while being “[i]nsulted by one-sixth of the planet” (p. 34).

Although he had no direct connection with Pasternak and was afraid of being criticised as a traitor like him, the narrator strongly thought that it was impossible to avoid this event as a writer, believing that there was “a bond of terror between” them (p. 16). In the latter half of A Dictator Calls, Kadare (or the narrator) shows thirteen different versions of the three-minute phone call between Stalin and Pasternak that closely focus on the details of each conversation. By doing so, Kadare seeks to reveal that different sources present different versions of the conversation. The sources introduced in the book vary from the text said to be from the KGB archive to the testimonies or memoirs by the lovers and wives of both Mandelstam and Pasternak, their friends, and other writers and poets, including Anna Akhmatova. In most versions, Pasternak carefully attempted to keep a distance from Mandelstam and his circle by saying that he “belong[s] to a different group” (p. 75), refused to answer (pp. 83, 173), tried to change the subject (p. 109), declared that he did not know the poet very well (p. 90), or simply denied the friendship (p. 121). Interestingly, only his wife, Zinaida Nikolayevna Pasternak, seemed to defend the writer. She claimed that her husband “asked Stalin to help Mandelstam” (p. 131).

While analysing these contradictory episodes one by one, Kadare admitted that it is almost impossible to solve this mystery, which deepened as he investigated. In his opinion, even the recollection of Isaiah Berlin, the British author who met Pasternak just after the call, was not fully trustworthy. Moreover, the narrator’s attempts to interpret the meanings of Mandelstam’s poem, his repeated arrests and releases, and Pasternak’s reaction to Stalin and moving after the call did not lead to a clear answer. Though the truth is still unclear, Kadare’s exploration of the relationship between the dictator and the writer skilfully keeps readers’ attention by creatively tracing a wide variety of historical examples of literary responses to political powers. For example, he referred not only to Seneca in the ancient period of the Roman Emperor Nero, but also to Russian/Soviet writers from Pushkin to Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Sholokhov.

Literary history certainly depicts completely different approaches to dictatorship or tyranny. While some writers, such as Gorky and Pasternak, decided to compromise with the state, others (including the authors of the so-called dictator novels mentioned earlier) intended to resist by using the magical power of language and fiction. In that sense, Kadare concluded that the tyrant and the poet (or the writer) are two sides of the same coin. He argued:

“The tyrant and the poet, however much they may seem opposites, both held power. The first associations of the word power can only be grim: oppression, violence, dispossession. Yet human language has also thought of gentler usages. Power can be used for bad ends, but an artistic genius has power, and so does a sweet fair-haired woman.”

(p. 203)

In Kadare’s observation, they are also similar in that both the tyrant and poet are weakly obsessed with the great fear of losing their intense power. Hence, they exert their power out of fear. However, while pessimistically pointing out how it is difficult for literature to defeat the dictatorial power existing in the world, Kadare still believed in the possibility of fiction. In the last two versions of the phone conversation between Stalin and Pasternak, for example, Kadare’s own imagination played a more significant role than in the previous ones. In the final thirteenth version, in which he asserts that “[a]rchive sources have not helped to establish a reliable version of the conversation” (p. 215), Kadare no longer tried to show any sources. If this open ending indicates his eventual hope for fiction or literature, we may feel encouraged to believe that we can still imagine the world without tyranny or dictatorship, even after the death of Kadare, our great guiding light.