A Dictator Calls
Publisher,Counterpoint
Publication Date,
Format, Paperback
Weight,
No. of Pages, 240
Shelf: Fiction / Adult Fiction / Literary Fiction
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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?
About the Author
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.
- Dimensions : 4.96 x 0.71 x 8.03 inches
