Review by Booklist Review
A 1934 phone call between Josef Stalin and poet Boris Pasternak prompts a literary inquiry into the relationship between authorship and authoritarianism. The relevant historical sources are numerous and inconsistent. Supposedly, Stalin rang Pasternak (best known internationally for Dr. Zhivago) to ask, probably in a thuggish way, what should be done about Osip Mandelstam, a fellow poet who had publicly blamed the dictator, in verse, for the Russian famines of the 1930s. Pasternak's careful response, it is said, saved his reputation and maybe his life. Kadare (The Traitor's Niche, 2018), whose own literary trajectory has been defined by its dangerous dance with Communist censors in Albania, plays detective? Was it really Stalin who called? Was he just playing mind games? Did Pasternak's response actually influence Stalin's actions? But Kadare's purportedly earnest investigation also offers dream-state musings, metafictional digressions, and, one suspects, a few outright fabrications. The result is a house of mirrors in which the significance of the Stalin-Pasternak call is both amplified and distorted and a reminder of Kadare's unparalleled talent for conveying the cruel ironies forced upon artists under a dictatorship.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Why did Joseph Stalin call novelist Boris Pasternak in 1934 to ask him about Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam's recent arrest? That obscure historical mystery animates this enigmatic outing from Kadare (The Doll: A Portrait of My Mother), who presents 13 different versions of the three-minute conversation between Stalin and Pasternak, including the official account of the phone call from the KGB archives. According to those records, after being asked about the incarceration of his fellow writer, Pasternak attempted to distance himself from the situation by claiming he "knew only slightly," a response that led Stalin to label Pasternak "a very poor comrade." Other sections imagine different versions of the conversation, most of them rooted in historical research: for example, philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that, in 1945, Pasternak told him that Stalin pressed him on whether he'd been present when Mandelstam recited his anti-Stalin verses, and whether Mandelstam was "a fine poet." While Kadare doesn't presume to know what truly happened, this multifaceted examination amounts to a fascinating consideration of the relationship between totalitarianism and freedom of expression. Admirers of Kadare's previous meldings of fact and fiction will be mesmerized. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A poet's collision with a tyrant, from 13 points of view. Kadare, Albania's preeminent poet and novelist, often makes the short list of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and this slim, melancholy tale is in part about the perils of international acclaim in the shadow of repressive regimes. The core of the story concerns a 1934 phone call Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made to Boris Pasternak, who had lifelong battles with Soviet leadership. (His most famous work, the 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago, was published in the West against the state's wishes, propelling him to the Nobel.) Stalin called to ask about the dissident poet Osip Mandelstam, who'd been arrested for writing a poem criticizing Stalin. But what exactly was Stalin asking? How did Pasternak respond? And what was Mandelstam critiquing, exactly? The narrator--a Kadare manqué who's had his own troubles with state censorship--considers the question by exploring the multiple variations of the story of the call. Pasternak's wife recalls her husband as poised on the phone, requesting Mandelstam's release; his lover suggests he was more fearful and equivocating. Other versions characterize Pasternak as alternately more timid or defiant, Stalin as more opaque or threatening. "Anybody who takes the plunge in search of the truth, who thinks at first that thirteen versions are too many, may by the end of the case think that these are insufficient!" the narrator writes. But 13 are enough to convey the sense that a writer under totalitarianism has reasons to cloak emotions and massage details, and the variety of stories speaks to how widely Stalin's intimidation spread. Kadare's novel is an appealingly plainspoken lament, and Hodgson's translation captures a somber mood. The run-through of variations leaves the story without an arc, but delivers a strong case against dictatorial meddling in art. An interior, prismatic tale of writerly defiance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
