A Dictator Calls
-
-
2.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
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?
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.
