Ismail Kadare: A different dissident

Ismail Kadare, the Albanian author who defied the Communist regime in the small Balkan nation, died on July 1. Although Kadare belongs to the illustrious group of dissidents and critics of an omnipotent State, he also seems to differ from them in his relationship with power and in the way his stories are organised. In the works of famous dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera or Ivan Klima, all from former Communist countries, the stories focus on how the intimate lives of ordinary people are crushed by power. In Kadare’s stories, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Albania’s Enver Hoxha take centre-stage, and the workings of totalitarian power are seen from close quarters.

In his last published novel, A Dictator Calls, Stalin makes a telephone call to Russian author Boris Pasternak and asks him about Osip Mandelstam, a poet and one of the early victims of Stalin’s political persecution. Pasternak answers: “We’re different. Comrade Stalin”. Kadare says, this is often cited as proof that Pasternak abandoned his friend. Kadare also points to a writer who acts as a dissident in public and submits to authority in private.

The call lasted only for three minutes. Kadare was obsessed with this anecdote from Soviet literary history. Mandelstam was arrested for writing The Stalin Epigram or The Kremlin Mountaineer, a poem critical of Stalin.

Kadare asks: “Why did Stalin make a phone call, and why was Pasternak confused... What did the poet and the tyrant expect from each other, did they have something to hide and were they both afraid of what they were hiding?” Stalin never tells Pasternak the reason for Mandelstam’s arrest, but only wants to hear his opinion. The three people involved — Mandelstam, Pasternak and Stalin — become the central figures in his story.

Different versions of the telephone call constitute the core of the narrative. However, what is certain is that Mandelstam was interrogated, and there is also proof of torture before death. Kadare referred to the works of Izzi Vishneversky, Stalin, and Pasternak, which provided him with different versions of the call. Kadare himself provides 13 versions and ponders on the turbulent relation between authority and literature, therein giving insight into defiance and subjugation.

More than the “unknowability” of the truth, the novel’s narrative is about the unreliability of the testimony from the archives of the regime. Totalitarian regimes spread lies in the form of “truthful” versions. The relationship between Kadare and Hoxha is reflected in an interspersed manner. What would the regime in Albania or North Korea have done with Mandelstam? Kadare says they would have put a bullet in his head, and that would have been the end of it. From Hoxha’s point of view, says Kadare, the Soviet state proved that it was cruel, not because it treated the poet badly, but because it was too gentle with him.

The narrator in A Dictator Calls bears a strong resemblance to Kadare. Like him, the narrator leaves Tirana and goes to Moscow to study briefly at the Gorky Institute, returns to Albania and comes to terms with Hoxha’s regime.

In an interview, Kadare explained what it means to be a dissident, and whether he was one. He said, “In the classical sense, a dissident is a person who is openly politically active against a regime and may end up in prison. In this sense, I was not a dissident. I don’t think there were any dissident Albanian writers who openly spoke out against the Communist regime. It was so cruel that they would have been executed on the spot for it.” While he admitted that he was never a dissident like Vaclav Havel or Solzhenitsyn, he talked about silent resistance, i.e., resistance through literature and art.

It is perhaps a Western liberal obsession to see Communist-country writers from a dissident-collaborator binary. In Albania, Kadare was confronted with a different and unique post-war context, not comparable to that of other socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. He was born in 1936 and grew up in affluent circumstances. He was seven years old when the Germans occupied Albania and just nine at the end of World War II. He belonged to the new generation of Albanians who benefited from modernisation after the war. As a teenager, he was inspired by communist ideals, and there were great expectations about Hoxha’s “modernising regime”.

The narrator in A Dictator Calls says that he remembers everything from his Moscow years. But there was one thing he was forbidden to remember. That was Pasternak. Kadare had expected to win a Literature Nobel and identify himself with Pasternak’s eventual fate. A Nobel would have put him in just as dangerous a position as Pasternak’s when his win enraged the Soviet Communist Party. Hoxha’s regime would have tortured him, then. Writers subjugated by power enter the virtual zone of death while those who defy like Mandelstam, become immortals, Kadare had once said.

Damodar Prasad is a media researcher and writer. The views expressed are personal