A Dictator Calls (2023) by Ismail Kadare: Milan Kundera wrote in his seminal work ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ that ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Treading on this dangerous lane, Ismail Kadare, the leading novelist of Albania, draws a fine line between the treacherous historical truth shared by a tyrant and a poet, belonging to the same locale. Kadare had defected from Enver Hoxha’s Maoist regime in 1990, after which he went on to seek asylum in France. With international success came ruinous destruction, as Kadare confessed in a 2009 interview with The Guardian – ‘On the one hand, it secured protection for me in relation to the regime, on the other hand I was constantly under observation.’ The author, in his latest work, speaks of this dilemma in poets and renowned faces, perceiving his own fate to be similar to Osip Mandelstam. The latter was exiled after he wrote ‘The Kremlin Highlander’ or ‘The Stalin Epigram’, a satirical poem on the fear psychosis prevalent during the Stalinist reign. Drawing on the various versions of the phone call between Boris Pasternak and Stalin, Kadare sketches an algorithm of historical inquiry, a reality overturned into a fictional project. Nevertheless, Kadare insists on the fact that, when it comes to literature, ‘there is no such thing as a political writer.’
A Dictator Calls (2023)
Muscovite Wonderings and the Unwritten Novel
The text begins with confusion, a toppling of the memory to form a polyphony. The author no longer holds the ultimate authoritative realm of his text. Unlike monologism, where one conscious voice cohesively holds the integrated signifying ideologies together, it is the ‘dialogue’ of truth, obtained from various different sources, that interacts objectively. With its realistic counterparts, the style of language in each version of the phone call keeps altering. Each statement is followed by an anticipation of a completely distinct counter-statement, a signature of modernist writing. The narrator (not necessarily the author) speaks through the voice of a collector. The phraseological ambiguity of each version takes away the truth quite far from the original or ‘authentic’ form, making it impossible to come to a conclusion regarding its validity. This is also a political commentary on the dictatorship of Stalinist rule, in tandem with the incommensurable voices and the various standpoints of the leadership that distorted the common man’s reality.
Kadare begins with a playful yet ‘timely’ remembrance:
“‘But everyone in the world knows about it: exegi monumentum . . .’
‘As you said, I raised a monument not made by human hands – a nerukotvorniy monument. You fell into the trap yourself. A monument raised not by human hands, but by the spirit, as the poet says. A statue that nobody can see, apart from the insane, like you students at the Gorky Institute.’
‘We weren’t insane.’
‘You were worse. Each of you dreamed of toppling each other’s statue, in order to raise your own.’
‘Like the Pasternak rally? No, that was different.’
‘Were you at that rally? Did you howl against him?’
‘Never.’
‘Then what did you do while the others howled?’
‘I looked at a girl in tears. I thought she was his niece.’”
For the author, Moscow was out of reach. The chaos of the city after the downfall of the Union required a distance edified with a longing which nobody could fulfill. His writing ends up as a jumble of desires, sickness and ruins. The Nobel Prize, which put Pasternak on the map, is portrayed as a necessary evil for all writers. He compares the dichotomy with the question in ‘Hamlet’ – to take it or not to take it.
Relating the Tyrant to the Poet
The interaction between the two was not a simple ‘bullet in the head, and the matter is over.’ It’s the precarious nature of human partiality that is questioned by the poet within the text. A stance against the Soviet state is not an easy pro-Pasternak indulgence. The quandary is inevitable, as Kadare shows:
‘Opposed to both. With one against the other. With both. With neither. All positions seemed crazy. The possibility of impartiality flickered and then died. I was a foreigner, and had found myself in this mess by chance.’
The break with the socialist camp ruptured many dreams. But the narrator encapsulates this by comparing his novel with the ‘initial silence’ in ‘Doctor Zhivago’. Literature fades away dangers and worries making them act as ‘impersonal silhouettes’. Thus, this dimension forms a fourth wall, the ever-going debate between fact and fiction. The narrator, through the traces of the Turkish Sultan, the KGB, and the Ottoman Empire’s dictats turned his novel into a facet of ‘shared anxiety’.
The poem in question is a direct recourse to Stalin as we see from this stanza of the poem, telling the readers that the leader’s grandfather was an ethnic Ossetian:
‘He is forging his rules and decrees like horseshoes –
Into groins, into foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.
Every killing for him is delight,
And Ossetian torso is wide.’
Why Read Ismail Kadare?
The author very painstakingly, creates a text that represents the grief and lineaments of misery that is faced by a political prisoner. Calling it the ‘intoxication of your own downfall,’ the poet lingers on in his rage, stubbornly engaging in scandals in order to clear his conscience. The book eludes its readers, perplexing them with the query of Pasternak’s loyalty to his contemporary, Mandelstam. Does he go on to request Stalin to release Mandelstam from prison? Or is Pasternak too snobbish about his engagement with the unfortunate situation, handling the fragility of his reputation with care? Is the sole aim of Pasternak to save his name when Stalin calls him (as a surprise)?
Kadare reveals the incapacity (or unwillingness) of the Soviet regime to document its own history, except when it showcased a zealous sight. There is always an archival awkwardness that persists in the writings of the author. Even though Mandelstam had revealed the names of all the people who had read his questionable poem, Pasternak’s name was not mentioned. Was Stalin trying to find out whether Pasternak was in solidarity with Mandelstam, provided he was gaslighting the former into acknowledging his friendship with the arrested poet? It is a question only History can answer. Or not.
Also, Read: Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection (2023)
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