A Dictator Calls

by Ismail Kadare, John Hodgson (Translator)

Overview

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
The Wall Street Journal, A Best Book of the Year

Using a sophisticated and literary version of the ever-popular game of telephone to examine the relationship of writers with tyranny, Ismail Kadare reflects on three particular minutes in a long moment of time when the dark shadow of Joseph Stalin passed over the world

In June 1934, Stalin allegedly called Boris Pasternak and they spoke about the arrest of Osip Mandelstam. A telephone call from the dictator was not something necessarily relished, and in the complicated world of literary politics it would have provided opportunities for potential misunderstanding and profound trouble. But this was a call one could not ignore. Stalin wanted to know what Pasternak thought of the idea that Mandelstam had been arrested.

Ismail Kadare explores the afterlife of this phone call using accounts of witnesses, reporters, writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, wives, mistresses, biographers, and even archivists of the KGB. The results offer a meditation on power and political structure, and how literature and authoritarianism construct themselves in plain sight of one another. Kadare’s reconstruction becomes a gripping mystery, as if true crime is being presented in mosaic.

A little time ago the poet Mandelstam was arrested. What have you to say to that, Comrade Pasternak?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640096080
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	09/19/2023
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	169,007
Product dimensions:	5.01(w) x 7.98(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

ISMAIL KADARE is Albania’s best-known novelist and poet. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. He was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, the Jerusalem Prize in 2015, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2020.

JOHN HODGSON studied at Cambridge and Newcastle and has taught at the universities of Prishtina and Tirana. This is the seventh book by Ismail Kadare that he has translated.

Editorial Reviews

07/24/2023

Why did Joseph Stalin call novelist Boris Pasternak in 1934 to ask him about Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam’s recent arrest? That obscure historical mystery animates this enigmatic outing from Kadare (The Doll: A Portrait of My Mother), who presents 13 different versions of the three-minute conversation between Stalin and Pasternak, including the official account of the phone call from the KGB archives. According to those records, after being asked about the incarceration of his fellow writer, Pasternak attempted to distance himself from the situation by claiming he “knew only slightly,” a response that led Stalin to label Pasternak “a very poor comrade.” Other sections imagine different versions of the conversation, most of them rooted in historical research: for example, philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that, in 1945, Pasternak told him that Stalin pressed him on whether he’d been present when Mandelstam recited his anti-Stalin verses, and whether Mandelstam was “a fine poet.” While Kadare doesn’t presume to know what truly happened, this multifaceted examination amounts to a fascinating consideration of the relationship between totalitarianism and freedom of expression. Admirers of Kadare’s previous meldings of fact and fiction will be mesmerized. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
The Wall Street Journal, A Best Book of the Year

"A brilliantly probing novel about the power play between art and politics . . . Both personal and philosophical, A Dictator Calls is, finally, about the inescapable 'mutual dependency' between literature and the state. Of the two, however, it’s only the artist who is bound to try to make meaning from the relationship, 'because art, unlike a tyrant,' writes Mr. Kadare, 'receives no mercy, but only gives it.'" —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"[This] exceptional English translation also considers Kadare’s legacy and the legacies of anyone forced to toil in the shadow of a political system that seeks to dictate their voice and determine their fate. There are moments of real brilliance . . . The powerful words encapsulate not just the course of the novel and the arc of Kadare’s career, but also the purpose, as he sees it, of art in general." —Cory Oldweiler, Los Angeles Review of Books

"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." —Bronwyn Scott-McCharen, Review31

"An interior, prismatic tale of writerly defiance." —Kirkus Reviews

"This multifaceted examination amounts to a fascinating consideration of the relationship between totalitarianism and freedom of expression. Admirers of Kadare’s previous meldings of fact and fiction will be mesmerized." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2023-07-26
A poet's collision with a tyrant, from 13 points of view.

Kadare, Albania’s preeminent poet and novelist, often makes the short list of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and this slim, melancholy tale is in part about the perils of international acclaim in the shadow of repressive regimes. The core of the story concerns a 1934 phone call Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made to Boris Pasternak, who had lifelong battles with Soviet leadership. (His most famous work, the 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago, was published in the West against the state’s wishes, propelling him to the Nobel.) Stalin called to ask about the dissident poet Osip Mandelstam, who’d been arrested for writing a poem criticizing Stalin. But what exactly was Stalin asking? How did Pasternak respond? And what was Mandelstam critiquing, exactly? The narrator—a Kadare manqué who’s had his own troubles with state censorship—considers the question by exploring the multiple variations of the story of the call. Pasternak’s wife recalls her husband as poised on the phone, requesting Mandelstam’s release; his lover suggests he was more fearful and equivocating. Other versions characterize Pasternak as alternately more timid or defiant, Stalin as more opaque or threatening. “Anybody who takes the plunge in search of the truth, who thinks at first that thirteen versions are too many, may by the end of the case think that these are insufficient!” the narrator writes. But 13 are enough to convey the sense that a writer under totalitarianism has reasons to cloak emotions and massage details, and the variety of stories speaks to how widely Stalin’s intimidation spread. Kadare’s novel is an appealingly plainspoken lament, and Hodgson’s translation captures a somber mood. The run-through of variations leaves the story without an arc, but delivers a strong case against dictatorial meddling in art.

An interior, prismatic tale of writerly defiance.

Kirkus Reviews