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?
