Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, both writers, are also friends, colleagues and rivals. One day, at a chance meeting on the street, Mandelstam reads a poem which is supposedly disrespectful of Stalin. Pasternak, in his own testimony given later, interrupts to say, “Forget you ever read me that…verse. That’s not art, it’s suicide. I’m not getting involved with it.” (p. 135)
You can imagine Pasternak’s consternation, then, when Stalin personally calls him after Mandelstam is arrested. What does Stalin want from this phone call? Will Pasternak also be condemned as Mandelstam was? The meaning of their three minute conversation, on Saturday, June 23, 1934, is the focus of A Dictator Calls.
Why such interest on the part of Kadare, author of this book? “Whether by accident or not, this phone call was so close to me, and I was compelled to analyze each moment of those fatal 200 seconds, when the laws of tragedy had brought the poet and the tyrant together.
It was a grim collision, which should not have taken place, and yet it did, to our fellow artist’s misfortune.” p. 177
What interested me the most, in this novel, is how Ismail Kadare points out the relationship between a writer and a tyrant: “Could the tyrant bring the poet to his knees? Could he overthrow him? The same question might be asked of the poet, confronted with the tyrant.” p. 216
The power of the written word cannot be overestimated, as Kadare so eloquently shows us. One of my greatest fears is that governments can, and have, taken it away.
Dolce Bellezza 