Kadare reveals one of the most sensational socio-literary mysteries of the last century
The selection of the prestigious newspaper Wall Street Journal for the best books of 2023 has also listed the book of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare “When rulers quarrel”, which in English comes with the adapted title “A Dictator Calls”.
As the writer Kadare himself writes; in this book, he uncovers one of the most sensational socioliterary mysteries of the last century that took place in Stalin’s Soviet Russia. It is a telephone conversation that for decades has been shrouded in mystery, between the bloodiest communist dictator Stalin and the poet of the most famous Russian writer, Boris Pasternak, author of the novel “Doctor Zhivago” with which he also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958.
The telephone conversation between Stalin and Pasternak took place on June 23, 1934, and this is a fact of history. The conversation between them has never been revealed, but it is known that the subject of the conversation was the poet Osip Mandelstam, a friend of Pasternak, who had been arrested and sent to the Lubyanka prison after the publication of an insulting poem about Stalin, which he he had recited to a circle of friends.
Kadare’s work in Albanian and the English edition
Now Stalin wanted to know what Pasternak thought of the arrest. Shocked, Pasternak stammered that he barely knew Mandelstam and could not comment on his misfortune. “As far as I can tell you are a very poor fellow, Comrade Pasternak,” Stalin replied jokingly, before hanging up.
At least that’s how the conversation went according to KGB archives, but as Ismail Kadare illustrates in When Rulers Quarrel, his brilliant investigative novel about the power play between art and politics, there were actually 13 different accounts of the phone call from short. Kadare highlights the 13th, expanding the nuances of each to explore issues of cooperation and responsibility, creating a mysterious, prismatic picture of the confrontation between the tyrant and the poet.
What exactly the dictator said and what Pasternak said in that 3-minute phone conversation is still shrouded in mystery, but dozens of books have been written speculating on that phone call. Mandelstam’s fate is known, he was arrested twice and died in prison.