A Dictator Calls
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Publisher Description
**LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024**
'Comrade Stalin wishes to speak with you.'
A fascinating exploration of the relationship between writers and tyranny, from the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize.
In June 1934, Joseph Stalin allegedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. In a fascinating combination of dreams and dossier facts, Ismail Kadare reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history.
Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters and writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny. The telling brings to light uncanny parallels with Kadare's experience writing under dictatorship, when he received an unexpected phone call of his own.
Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson
‘One of Europe's most decorated authors... Seasoned fans [of Kadare] will be enthralled’ Sunday Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
